One of the (many) curses of the Trump era is that he keeps us fixated, hour by hour, on his latest stupidity or fraud, a constant swirling game of three-card monte that ends only when he robs some more of our attention and money. So I will try valiantly for a moment to escape his asteroid belt of provocation (it’s not easy—did you know that America decided this week to sink a few billion into promoting…coal) and try to think a little more broadly.

This step back is occasioned by Thomas Piketty and his team at the World Inequality Lab in Paris, who last week released the Global Justice Report, subtitled “A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries.” Piketty, you will recall, is the London-born economist who in 2013 released his book Capital, in many ways launching the ongoing critique of global inequality and the generalized scorn for the billionaire class. (At one point, remember, America and the world generally admired these people).

Now he and his team has enlarged their analysis to include the 21st century’s novel dilemma—that we are steadily and rapidly overheating the planet—and the result is this report, which I read in certain ways as the data-rich companion to Naomi Klein’s 2014 classic This Changes Everything, an investigation of whether it is possible to imagine prosperity without ruinous growth. Much has changed in the years since those volumes—most importantly, the plummeting price of solar and wind energy and of batteries to store that power has opened up a much larger escape hatch. And it’s from that premise that Piketty’s new work really proceeds.

The Global Justice Project says that rapid decarbonization is a must, and that it needs to be paid for by the rich, and that that payment should come in the form of a global wealth tax and a global income tax, which funnel fairly large sums of money from the north to the south. They aim for a “sufficiency” world, in which all have enough and where the share of wealth owned by the richest one percent drops dramatically—a kind of globalized Sweden, I’d say, in which people work half the hours we do at present, and consume more education and health care and less stuff. They view it as an alternative to “degrowth” scenarios, and also to our current unrestrained growth model, and say that it leaves the world with lower temperatures than either of those schemes.

To avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency is required: a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems is also necessary, as is the sharp compression of income and wealth inequality. This compression is both a social justice objective and a condition for financing necessary climate investment and human capital expenditure and for sustaining political support from bottom- and middle-income classes in both the North and the South.

Here’s a little diagram they provide of the basic outline

I have a certain sympathy for the argument—expressed most pithily by David Roberts on Bluesky—that this kind of sky-castle architecture doesn’t amount to much; I too am more fascinated by the daily drumbeat of technological innovation. And I think that the accumulation of that innovation may undermine part of Piketty’s argument; I have a feeling that the investment required for decarbonization is going to be easier to come by, as the price for good stuff just keeps falling, and the economic logic of paying for fossil fuel becomes ever smaller.

But I also think that the climate crisis is not the only ecological threat we face, nor indeed the only threat period. I think it’s pretty clear that democracy can’t survive inequality; there’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground. One possibility is that the mega-rich will succeed in their current project of deliberalizing the planet, and we’ll all get to live in our own nasty little sovereignties; another is that the Bernie Sanderses resident in most parts of the world will figure out how to combine their efforts and that over time we’ll get something that looks a bit like what Piketty (or for that matter Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future) imagines. One tell for me that this team is not entirely politically detached came in this paragraph about what would happen if America (or China) predictably refused to join in such a scheme:

If necessary, the Global Justice Platform can be implemented with an incomplete coalition of countries, including the absence of the US and/or China. According to our projections, the climate damages imposed by the US on other countries would be about 3% of world GDP per year, on average, over the 2026-2100 period if the US does not participate in the GJP. Under simplifying assumptions, other countries should impose a corrective tax of approximately 80% on all US exports to collect tax revenues approximately equivalent to the damage. Given the projected decline of the US share in world GDP – from 30% in 1945 to 15% in 2025 and 5-10% by 2100 – it is likely that such tariffs would induce the US to join the GJP. The same conclusion applies to the case of China, but with a higher tariff (180% or more).

The report concludes that

“A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible. What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.”

I think that’s a worthy goal to keep in the back of our minds as we proceed with the daily work of building the infrastructure for this new world; every election is a chance to get us a little closer, by electing the kind of people who understand the need for this kind of compression of wealth.

But the infrastructure is the part we can do something about right now, and on that score there’s some equal mix of encouraging maddening news, all of it again on a large scale.

On the one hand, our farcical war in the Gulf continues to serve as the recruiting sergeant for the renewable revolution. As a Bloomberg team reports in a long and important essay, the Gulf War has been “Asia’s Ukraine.”

About two hours from Manila there’s a solar power plant capable of powering 60,000 homes. Surrounded by fields growing okra and eggplant, it had been sitting idle since August, waiting for a connection to the grid — stuck in a queue just like many other renewable energy facilities around the world as power networks struggle to catch up with rising electricity demand.

Then the Iran war cut off the Philippines’ supply of imported liquefied natural gas. Immediately, the government cut fuel taxes and offered free bus rides to the public. Then a few weeks later, as the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked, officials began deploying policies toward a deeper, more structural plan to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.

One strategy was to fast track more than 30 renewable plants by the end of April. One of those was that 125-megawatt solar plant, built by Citicore Renewable Energy Corp, which is now supplying clean energy to the grid. It is “good timing,” said Joselito Ernst Cañete, operations manager at Citicore, just as electricity demand increases to power air conditioners during the peak summer months.

What happened in the Philppines isn’t an isolated example. With their energy supplies threatened, countries across Asia and Europe have chosen to speed up deployment of renewables and electrification.

Meanwhile, the cheerful solar guru Danny Kennedy chimed in from a conference in Singapore where he found the western politicians and analysts way behind the Asian curve. I will quote from his account at some length because it’s important

Philippines. After declaring a national energy emergency in March, the government activated a whole-of-government mandate for energy security. Regulatory bottlenecks for renewables are being dismantled. Rooftop solar inquiries are up 500% since the crisis began. This is not a green ambition. This is a survival response.³

Vietnam. The country has revised its power development plan, targeting a minimum of 47% renewable electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam is already the region’s largest EV market, and its government has expanded EV tax incentives in direct response to the Iran War’s impact on fuel prices.³ HSBC recently extended $4 billion in clean-tech financing to Chinese firms, much of it flowing into EV and solar exports to Vietnam and ASEAN.⁴

Indonesia. Beyond the factory I visited in Batam, the government is engineering a broad fiscal shift — expanding EV incentives with a target of 2 million electric cars and 12 million electric two-wheelers on the road by 2030. With the world’s largest nickel reserves, Indonesia is positioning itself to replace diesel imports with a domestic battery ecosystem. The logic is national sovereignty as much as climate policy.³ We’ve also talked about their 100GW solar archipelago plans.

Thailand. Advanced its net zero target by 15 full years, to 2050. Solar generation surged 72% in 2025. The country is adding 50 GW of renewables and 14 GW of energy storage by 2037. A major 1 GW module supply deal between China’s GCL-SI and Thailand’s Getz Energy was just signed to support that buildout.⁵ ⁶

Singapore itself. Already scaled solar to 1.7 GW and is executing multi-gigawatt cross-border subsea clean electricity cables from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam — with a requirement that developers bundle storage at origin for 24/7 firm power delivery. Singapore, to its credit, is acting. The conference, perhaps, just needed a bigger window.³

We already know China and India — the two largest energy consumers in Asia — reached a historic tipping point together in 2025. For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%.³ These are not small numbers. These are inflection points.

And yet even as this good news is happening, the Chinese are also beginning to shutter many of the solar panel factories that are at the heart of this revolution, because they’re not making enough money. This is, on the hand, understandable, and on the other entirely maddening—these factories are the single most important industrial asset on earth—they are factories for lowering the temperature of the earth. As readers are doubtless painfully aware, I’ve been beating this drum for a good long while, but I’m glad to see others joining in. Adam Tooze, the interesting bricoleur in charge of the Chartbook newsletter, wrote in the FT this week, it would be understandable if we were talking about some mundane commodity like cement.

But solar panels? Since when were solar panels just another commodity? They are a technological miracle. They make us into farmers of the sun. For the past half century, research labs around the world, starting in the 1970s with Nasa spin-offs and the big US energy research push under Jimmy Carter, have been straining to reach this point. Together with batteries, which are also rapidly approaching the point of excess supply, they are the key to a sustainable future.

As Tooze points out, it cost China very little in subsidies ($18 billion) to build this behemoth (though one should probably add in the subsidies that, say, Germany provided to its citizens to buy the early models, underwriting the startup of China’s engineering miracle).

I’ve long argued that on a rational world, trying everything it could to head off the worst of global warming, we would “globalize” these factories, running them 24/7 and then piling up the panels on every railroad siding and wharf on the planet so that people could come take them away. This would be, I think, a backdoor way of achieving a fair amount of what Piketty has in mind, far messier than his global scheme but somewhat more plausible. By some calculations, ten years production from those plants would produce enough panels to provide all the power the world currently uses.

If my sense that the coming El Niño will revive the world’s focus on the climate crisis—well, this is the easiest possible route forward. And it comes not just with more power, but with different power. Elon Musk may be rushing his IPO for data centers in space or whatever the heck he’s currently selling, but some of us will hole up here on earth, quite sufficient with the solar panels in our yards.

Share

In other energy and climate news:

+Along somewhat these lines, very worth reading the Volts interview with James McGinniss, an entrepreneur pushing small battery systems to tenants and small holders—in the case of his company, mostly business like laundromats and small groceries. He argues that cumulatively they’re going to be…very important

What we’ve found is — this is another mind-blown moment for me — when you look at the National Electric Code and UL certification and how, outside of whatever jurisdiction that you’re in, just what is safe physically to do, you can do hundreds of kilowatt-hours in buildings because there’ll be multiple 200- to 400-amp panels. Each of those — there’s the 120 rule — and you can push a lot more power into them than you think, not just these little batteries. We’re keeping things small because of the current environment that we live in.

The physical, safe way to do it — I see paths to having, imagine in every panel on a commercial building you have a stack of these batteries like a server rack, and they are all plug-in based. You are not just doing one giant system on the roof, which has totally different safety and weight considerations and needs permits, etc. When you think about these metropolitan areas, you could imagine solar on every balcony, solar on the roof, storage on every panel, and they are all plugged in.

You’re talking about megawatt-scale deployments.

+I’ve spent what seems like months of my life trying to dispel the notion lodged in American minds that China is undercutting the climate by endlessly building coal plants; as it happens, China is decreasing its coal use. But not the U.S. (see above); indeed, new data shows that America is now investing more in fossil fuel than the vastly larger People’s Republic. From Josh Gabbatiss:

High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.

This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.

As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.

Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.

Happily, as Haley Zaremba points out, the solar boom in the U.S. is also continuing despite Trump’s best efforts

Newly released data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) shows that at the close of last year, solar energy additions were the single largest form of new energy capacity installations for the 28th straight month, starting in September of 2023. In fact, in spite of a broad rollback of Biden-era clean energy incentives since Trump resumed office in January of last year, renewables represented a whopping 88 percent of energy additions in 2025, with utility-scale solar alone counting for 72.6 percent of U.S. electricity additions.

This massive growth trend has caused solar power’s share of the United States energy mix to surpass that of wind power, nuclear power, and hydropower. And while many if not most of these renewable projects were greenlit and funded before Trump took office and rolled back tax cuts and subsidies for solar and wind projects, experts say not to expect a major cooldown any time soon.

In fact, FERC projections show that solar energy installations will continue to grow by 86 gigawatts over the next three years, at which point the sector will surpass coal as well, Trump’s $700 million plan to revive coal production notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, out in Trump’s favorite parts of the world, solar spending in Africa is also outpacing fossil fuels. As Allan Olingo chronicles

Of the 322 energy projects announced across Africa in 2025, 173 were solar projects, followed by hydropower at 46, wind at 34, gas at 22 and hybrid energy projects at 14, according to the energy research firm Electron Intelligence.

“Africa is not on the periphery of the global energy transition, it is sitting at its center,” said Mugwe Manga, climate finance lead at FSD Kenya. “The continent holds the world’s best renewable resources, and the economics have now decisively turned in favor of clean energy.”

According to Olamide Niyi-Afuye, CEO of the Africa Minigrid Developers Association (AMDA), the continent is undergoing a broader strategic shift in how energy infrastructure is being developed, with an emphasis on systems that can be deployed faster and expanded gradually with flexible financing.

+Thanks in no small part to James Talarico (and that Leo fellow), it’s a good season for rethinking the basics of Christian theology. Talarico has reminded us that kindness is somewhat more Scriptural than cruelty; now a California pastor, Jeff Spencer, has written a nifty sermon arguing that the creation story in Genesis was really the first incarnation. And he quotes that California mystic (who knew, thanks to his fundamentalist father, every word of the Bible by heart), John Muir.

“The earth, he said, is a divine ‘incarnation.’ Here, Muir uses a word that most of Western Christianity has reserved exclusively for Jesus. Muir applies it not just to Jesus, not even just to humanity and the creatures, but to the matter of earth itself. Even earth’s geological formations, he says are ‘heaven incarnate’; the rocks can be called ‘instonations’ of God. Everything is in essence spirit, incarnated in flesh, in leaves, in rocks. All these varied forms of matter ‘are simply portions of God,’ wrote Muir. They are all of ‘the God essence.’”

I can’t help but wonder if this long thread of Christian thought, typically suppressed and condemned by the gatekeepers in the church, influenced Father Richard Rohr when he wrote much more recently, “When Christians hear the word ‘incarnation,’ most of us think about the birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated God’s radical unity with humanity. But I want to suggest that the first Incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything.”

+Annals of divestment: Quebec’s pension fund reports that getting out of fossil energy and into the clean stuff made it a lot of the green stuff.

La Caisse — the Quebec pension fund managing the retirement savings of six million Quebecers — confirmed this month that its exit from oil has paid off financially.

Since launching its climate strategy, its energy investments returned 10 per cent annually, compared to 8 per cent from a global oil index — a gap that amounts to almost $4 billion above what investing in oil companies would have generated.

+You’ve heard about urban legends, but one rural legend—fanned by the same fossil fuel disinfo experts that have been hard at work for decades—is that farmers should reject solar panels because they might shed glass that would somehow end up in future crops. As Austyn Gaffney reports:

In January, Michigan Republican state Rep. Cam Cavitt posted a 51-second clip to Facebook labeled ​“Solar Farm SECRET.” In the segment, he claimed that farmers in his district couldn’t grow potatoes on land where solar developments were sited.

“Frito [Frito-Lay] did the same with the potato growers up by us,” fellow Michigan Republican Rep. Dave Prestin told Cavitt in the clip. ​“Any field that had solar panels installed on it will never be allowed to grow potatoes for human consumption due to the leaching.”

Shockingly, this isn’t true.

PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, told Canary Media that the company ​“has not issued blanket guidance to growers that fields with solar installations will not be accepted.”

Nor is there any published evidence that solar farms have a negative impact on potato farming, according to experts consulted for this story. On the contrary, there is agrivoltaics research showing that potatoes—and many other crops—can benefit from growing alongside shade-making solar panels.

+Denmark is out with its new climate policy, and where others (New York!) are in cowardly retreat, they have decided that they will go to 110% emissions reductions by 2050 (funding work elsewhere to make up for past emissions). I predict that this will end up making them richer, not poorer. They’re also introducing a tax on private jets and cruise ships. Creeping Pikettyism!

Meanwhile in Scandinavia, the Finns are putting huge storage batteries outside a new Microsoft data center that will allow them to capture the excess heat from the facility and use it to warm almost half the house in a large district. As Patrick Jowett writes,

Peter Strannegård, Fortum’s Executive Vice President, Renewables and Decarbonisation, said that once fully implemented, data centre waste heat is expected to cover approximately 40% of the total 2 TWh annual district heating demand of the 250,000 heat users in the area.

The recovery of waste heat from Microsoft’s data centre sites is scheduled to begin step by step next year, Fortum’s update adds, in line with Microsoft’s construction and commissioning schedule.

“As new phases of the data centres are completed, increasing volumes of waste heat will be available for the district heating customers,” the company said. “Waste heat recovery increases local heat production capacity, reduces exposure to fuel price volatility and helps maintain predictable district heating prices.”

Fortum also explained that the set-up of the plants allows heat production to respond flexibly to varying demand, strengthening reliability and price competitiveness of heat production for district heating customers in the area. “For the wider energy system, flexible heat production helps balance electricity demand, particularly during fluctuating renewable generation,” it said.

Meanwhile, as I noted above, the U.S. energy secretary has decided to invest in…coal

+New Zealand’s conservative government has not been particularly planet-friendly, but they are investing in putting solar panels on hundreds of schools

“Early modelling by Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) shows that solar panels are estimated to pay for themselves within five to seven years and a 30kW system - the standard size for a school - could save a school up to $8000 a year in electricity bills,” Energy Minister Simeon Brown said.

“Schools will also have options to sell energy back to the grid, generating an estimated $6.7m in revenue over 10 years.”

+Chelsea Harvey reports that municipal heat preparedness campaigns across the country are suffering from federal funding cuts

The federal government doesn’t define heat waves as a disaster, even as events with fewer victims, like hurricanes and floods, qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance. So money is short, no matter who’s president. But they said it’s gotten worse under the Trump administration, which has canceled grants ranging from long-term resilience funding from FEMA to tree-planting support from the Forest Service.

Those challenges roared to life at a disaster planning conference in Boston earlier this month. Heat officers from around the country were asked to respond to a fictional scenario in Phoenix, where an imaginary blackout silenced the thrum of air conditioners citywide as temperatures soared to 111 degrees.

Funding lapses were an urgent undercurrent, even as participants dreamed of expanding heat emergency plans and urban cooling projects.

“You can identify those big budget items, and you can advocate for them, but you’re not necessarily going to get them,” Jane Gilbert, a veteran official who has overseen heat programs in Miami, said at the two-day workshop attended by nearly two dozen officials from across the country.

But, did I note, we’ve got plenty of money to subsidize new coal power?

+Very good to see blue states suing the federal government over its dispersal of billions to buy back offshore wind rights. As Ella Nilsen writes,

New York Attorney General Letitia James called the March announcement an “illegal agreement.”

“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” James said.

The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. State attorneys general from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island argued on Tuesday the administration had violated the law when executing the March deal — failing to hold a hearing required by law to determine that keeping the offshore wind leases “would likely cause serious harm to life, property, national security, or the environment.”

+Finally some good news. The Trump administration is desperately trying to sell off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, but it’s almost impossible to find buyers. Only two companies put in bids on small corners of the acreage. Partly this is because campaigners—mostly native Alaskans—have made it toxic: not even Exxon wants to go dig up a wildlife refuge. And partly its because—can you imagine, in the 21st century, making money by digging up oil in the farthest corners of the earth, refining it, shipping it, and then selling it to…who exactly? As Dan McCarthy reported the other day, EVs are taking over the world

Nearly 60% of cars sold in China this year will be electrified.

EV sales are growing rapidly across the rest of Asia, too. This year, sales are expected to leap by over 50% across Asian countries other than China, IEA found, driven in large part by the availability of super affordable Chinese EV models.

In Europe, which has strong emissions standards that push consumers toward EVs, sales are growing especially fast. This year, EVs will make up one-third of new cars sold in the region, powered not only by EV-adoption poster child Norway but also by rapid uptake in Germany, the U.K., and Turkey.

There are moments when it feels like the president’s attention (as occasionally happens when we age) just keeps getting narrower and narrower—the things he really cares about (arch, reflecting pool, Kennedy Center, gilded horse statues) are all within a few miles of his home. He can barely be bothered to stay interested in the war he started in Iran; he’s more concerned with giving pretend tours of his imaginary ballroom. (“You come in, you have cocktails,” he explained to his daughter in law, interviewing him for Fox in true dear-leader fashion. “They they go through the door, in for dinner.”)

But the momentum behind the truly dangerous Project 2025 reordering of our society continues apace, even if—without Elon Musk to give it a face—we aren’t noticing. Late last week the White House announced plans for a major tightening of political control over research grants. Instead of relying on the advice of expert panels as to which research should be funded, as Kevin Bogardus explains

One or more senior political appointees designated by their agency head must conduct “a pre-issuance review” of all discretionary grants, making sure they follow several principles, including to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”

Since I enjoy making up new words (though surely someone has beaten me to this?) I’m going to call it “scilencing.”

The danger inherent in this should be entirely obvious. Jeff Mervis at Science interviewed a number of observers:

“What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management,” Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), writes in a Substack post. “It is a vehicle for complete political control of science … over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.” Representative Zoe Lofgren (D—CA), a leading critic of the Trump administration’s research policies, calls the proposal “a dystopian move that would destroy what remains of merit-based review.”

This would be a bad idea in a reason-based administration. In one that believes medieval nonsense about public health and that is eager to deregulate chemicals and end efforts to clean the air, it’s downright lethal.

And there is no doubt where the impulse really originated. The science the Trump administration really hates is climate science, because it threatens the “energy dominance” that the White House has made its basic foreign and economic policy, not to mention the profits of the fossil fuel industry that has been such an attentive donor. It’s not the first time that GOP administrations have tried to stymie climate science. Everyone remembers James Hansen’s crucial 1988 congressional testimony that global warming was underway; fewer recall that when he returned to Congress the next year the White House tried to rewrite and soften the conclusions in his testimony. That was under George H.W. Bush; under his son, in 2006, the White House tried again to rein him in. As he told Andy Revkin, NASA officials

ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. “They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” he said.

Hansen was crucial enough—the Paul Revere of climate change—and senior enough that he was able to keep working and speaking. And the scientific research money kept more or less flowing. But now, in this new bureaucratic play, the Office of Management and Budget is trying to make sure that such independence (the single most obvious requirement for scientific advance) is a thing of the past. As John Timmer wrote at Ars Technica

The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the “national interest.” The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.

It is, in short, a recipe for how the government can finish the job of crippling American science.

This is not yet a done deal. There is a 45-day comment period for letting the government know what you think of their plan, and 42 of those days remain. Here’s the place to have your say.

I’m not, I must say, convinced they’ll pay great attention to the comments, so it’s also crucial to be letting your congress people know what you think about this attack on science. The congress has so far been able to save at least some of the things Russell Vought has sought to kill: indeed, word came this week that the NOAA budget will include money to keep the carbon dioxide observatory at Mauna Loa (aka the world’s most important scientific instrument) up and running. That’s a direct result of Congress hearing outcry, so let’s keep it up.

Remind them that real leaders actually want to know what science can tell them—case in point, the remarkable new movie, Pressure, which tells the story of how General Eisenhower listened to the new and unorthodox science of meteorology to guide his D-Day decision making. (95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, for those of you who like numbers).

The good news, I suppose, is that on climate and energy the cat has largely escaped the bag. We do know what the problem is, even if the ramifications become more dire with each passing week. (Here’s a somewhat terrifying update on the prospects for this year’s wildfire season; meanwhile, Tom Harris has the new numbers on Antarctic melt.). And we know where the solution lies. Indeed, it too comes into clearer focus with each passing week. As I wrote earlier this year, the action in the next few years is going to be about batteries, and boy is that proving true. Bloomberg confirmed this week that 2025 was the first year the world installed more than a hundred gigawatts of battery storage, up 48 percent from the year before, and expected to grow another 46 percent this year.

South Australia held a big auction last week for “firm supply” across the territory’s electric grid. This is supposed to be the last place where fossil fuel is superior: always-on power. But all the low bids came from companies that wanted to (and now will) install big batteries. As Giles Parkinson reported

It is yet another sign of the growing dominance of battery storage technology in Australia’s main grids (and off grid).

Big batteries have dominated other long duration storage tenders, particularly in NSW, were it has sidelined pumped hydro projects, and battery storage has been steadily sending gas peakers to the sidelines, particularly in the demand peaks they used to dominate.

Indeed, Australia is emerging as the test case for just how fast and furiously you can switch a grid to clean renewables. Even as its government continues to mine huge amounts of coal to send abroad, it’s providing a generous domestic subsidy for Aussies who want to put smaller batteries in their homes. And that, in turn, is underwriting a revolution on the grid. As Adam Morton and Petra Stock wrote this past week

Nearly 60% of the household-scale battery capacity installed across almost 200 other countries this financial year will be in the southern continent, according to a recent analysis. Since July, about 415,000 have been connected – roughly one unit for every 25 Australian homes.

Previously, power prices would rocket in the evenings as gas-fired power – the most expensive form of energy generation on the Australian grid – was turned on to meet peak demand. With solar and wind now providing nearly half the electricity, and coal-fired power plants gradually closing, gas has been used to fill gaps after the sun sets.

But batteries are increasingly taking over that role. Total gas-fired generation was 24% lower across three months this summer compared with the year before. Tennant Reed, the climate change and energy director with the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says it has “completely changed how electricity prices are formed”.

I hope you’ll go back and read the sentence I italicized in the last paragraph: the use of gas to create electricity dropped 23 percent in a year. This is much like what’s happened in California, where Mark Jacobson reports that the world’s fourth largest economy is using 60% less gas to produce electricity than it did three years ago. That changes on this scale are possible is precisely what terrifies the fossil fuel industry, and in turn the Trump administration.

And the possibilities are everywhere. Canary Media’s Julian Spector wrote last week, a new global report shows that these so-called “firm renewables” (wind and sun coupled with batteries)

“has crossed the threshold of cost competitiveness with new fossil fuel generation,” in areas with plenty of sun or wind. ​“The central question is no longer whether firm renewables can compete on cost, but how quickly the structural conditions needed to realise their potential can be put in place across the diversity of markets and institutional contexts prevailing globally.”

China sets the bar with its shockingly low cost of firm renewables today.

IRENA looked at 252 solar projects that went online there in 2024 and found that many of them could be augmented with extra solar capacity and batteries to deliver power cheaper than the $100-per-megawatt-hour benchmark for new gas-fired plants. Almost all the modeled solar-battery plants could beat that cost for firm clean power 90% of the time; even at the higher reliability threshold of 99%, nearly half the projects remained competitive, and the lowest cost was $46 per megawatt-hour.

And would any of this be, I don’t know, politically popular?

Beginning one month from tomorrow, Australians, whether they have solar panels or batteries or none of the above will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon from noon to three. If you want to know why our government needs to shut up scientists and ward off engineers, that’s why.

Oh, they’re also trying to shut down the world’s central archive of disasters, which lets us learn from the past. I predict that will not slow the pace of trouble.

Share

In other energy and climate news:

+Science is constantly self-correcting, and now the big climate assessments will drop the RCP 8.5 “high emissions” scenario, because…we’re moving quickly towards lower emissions (see above). But that’s not “good news”—the current trajectory still has the planet warming 3.5 degrees Celsius before the century is out, which is more than enough to turn our civilizations upside down. In fact—as recent data about the great Atlantic currents has made clear—it’s becoming clear that we can do far more systemic damage to the earth at lower temperatures than we once thought; the earth is finely balance.

From the remarkable Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues, a new paper on the situation in the north Atlantic:

A region of the northern Atlantic–sometimes called the “cold blob”–has cooled since the 19th Century while the rest of the world has warmed. It is particularly the ocean which has cooled there. Scientists have been discussing whether this is because ocean currents bring less heat into this region, or because more heat is being lost through the sea surface there. An analysis of temperature data sets based on measurements show it is the former–changing ocean heat transport–which dominates heat content changes in the “cold blob.”

This is a sign that those great currents are slowing—not good news.

+Great reporting from Amy Westervelt and Geoff Dembicki about the “shadowy global network of right wing think tanks” that, among other things, works to make climate protest illegal

With more than 500 member think tanks globally, the network remains robust. Atlas members are in regular contact with each other, sharing ideas, tips, and strategies. (The network has even bragged about being an early adopter of the internet.) Representatives from member think tanks meet up at annual right-wing events in the U.S. and elsewhere. Ideas are shared between member think tanks via various publications, including the quarterly Freedom’s Champion magazine, a Latin America podcast, and various books in both English and Spanish (even a cookbook!).

Alejandro Chafuen, an Argentine American businessman who took over the Atlas Network presidency in 1991 and remained in charge until 2018, once described the network’s audience in one word: elites.

“To answer the question ‘Who is the real customer of a think tank?’” he said,” I will refer to the often ignored passage of Ludwig von Mises, in his book Bureaucracy. In it he describes a type of person—elite—who I believe is not only the real customer of Atlas and many think tanks, but also our ideal customer, who benefits us and is served by us.”

+A new study published this week estimates mortality from the growing number of savage heatwaves in India, and the news is… not good

We estimate that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally; a five-day heatwave causes nearly 30,000.

These findings have implications not only for India but also for other countries in South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa facing similar heat vulnerabilities, highlighting the global urgency of heat adaptation measures. With respect to heatwave frequency and temperature thresholds, these estimates are conservative lower bounds.

+Jan Rosenow offers a cheery update on just how fast we’re learning to use electricity to power industrial processes—that’s about a third of emissions, and even a couple of years ago we were thinking of those as “hard to abate.” No longer

Today, electricity meets only about a fifth of industry’s final energy. Across the full set of scenarios, the median rises to 35% by 2050. But that average hides the more interesting story. In the scenarios built around strong climate ambition, fast power-sector decarbonisation and supportive industrial policy, electrification reaches a median of 51% by 2050, with the upper tail going as high as 85%.

Electrification is a structural fossil fuel phase-out and decarbonisation lever, not a marginal one. Swapping an industrial gas boiler for a heat pump cuts emissions on day one, and then keeps cutting them automatically as the grid gets cleaner. Industrial heat pumps, electric boilers, electro-thermal storage and resistance heating can already replace large shares of low and medium-temperature heat.

A case in point: Carly Leonida, writing from this year’s Electric Mine conference in Lisbon, Portugal, has a compelling account of the way that electricity is coming to the world’s mines.

Miners presenting in Lisbon weren’t discussing pilot vehicles in isolated trial environments. Instead, they were talking about ventilation bottlenecks, charging strategies, battery swap logistics, productivity metrics and operational redesign.

At Eldorado Gold’s Lamaque Complex in Québec, for example, battery-electric equipment is no longer viewed primarily as a decarbonisation initiative. Instead, it has become a practical solution to a mine-planning challenge.

Speaking during the underground mining stream, Eldorado Gold’s Martin Pichette explained that the company’s electrification strategy was driven initially by the realities of deeper mining. As haul distances increase and mines extend further underground, ventilation infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to expand.

+A delegation of Texas community leaders has gone to Japan to ask them to stop financing a big new LNG terminal in Freeport. From Oil Change International:

This is the first time a community harmed by a Japanese-funded LNG project has filed a series of coordinated complaints against the whole chain of project financiers —targeting both Japanese public institutions JBIC and NEXI, private megabanks MUFG, Mizuho, and SMBC, and the Japanese power company JERA.

The complaints come as Japan faces mounting scrutiny of its fossil fuel dependency, with the soaring oil and gas prices due to the Hormuz crisis exposing the vulnerability of Japan’s long-term LNG strategy. In October 2025, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signed a $550 billion US investment commitment in a desperate attempt to mitigate tariffs and appease President Trump. Prime Minister Takaichi announced the first tranche with a $36 billion commitment to US oil and gas investments.

+Here’s a shocker. That good neighbor Elon Musk is adding a bunch more gas turbines to his AI factory in Mississippi.

Meanwhile, just in case you’re wondering if renewable energy is really cheaper, new data shows that the cost of natural gas power plants has gone up 68% in this country since 2023, largely thanks to the data center rush. As Josh Saul writes, this is

adding to customer and political concerns about rising power bills.

The average project expense for a gas power plant with combined-cycle turbines, the more efficient type, rose to $2,157 per kilowatt last year from less than $1,500 in 2023, according to a report from BloombergNEF.

+Florida is spending a lot of money on “beach renourishment”—but not enough to keep up with rising sea levels and growing storms. As Jack Randall reports:

On the Treasure Coast, renourishments have cost about $75.6 million in St. Lucie County, $40.5 million in Indian River County and $39.3 million in Martin County, according to TCPalm’s analysis of data that ends in 2025.

Dumping new sand on diminishing beaches is the prominent method federal, state and local governing authorities use to shore up erosion. It’s a strategy that has been criticized by researchers and environmentalists, who question its long-term efficacy as sea levels continue to rise.

Harold Wanless, a professor and researcher at the University of Miami, called the continued use of beach renourishment “ridiculous.”

“They never last,” Wanless said. “They don’t protect well, partly because of sea level rise.”

+Much of Europe just suffered through its greatest May heatwave ever. Among the casualties, competitors at the French Open tennis tournament. From Tumaini Carayol:

The 26th seed, Jakub Mensik, described the conditions as “insane to play in” after collapsing with cramps and having to be escorted towards the locker room in a wheelchair after his five-set second-round win over Mariano Navone on Wednesday.

Despite being well known for his durability, the two-time French Open finalist Casper Ruud completely overheated in the first round and looked on his way out before recovering in the fifth set to defeat Roman Safiullin. “I felt at times really dizzy and just really tired and walking around like a zombie almost,” Ruud said.

As Bob Henson reports, there’s nothing natural about the heat

“This is an unprecedented event with a one in 1,000 chance of happening at this time of year in the climate of 1979 to 2025,” climate scientist Christophe Cassou told Le Monde, referring to the heat wave in France. “It would have been virtually impossible in the preindustrial era.”

Many European schools were built in a much cooler era, and are paying the price. As Chico Harlan and Leontine Gallois write

Traditionally in Europe, schools were built to withstand cold, not heat, and air-conditioning was rarely necessary. But now the temperature extremes once associated with summer vacation are pushing into the academic year, creating stifling conditions and leading to criticism that Europe’s schools have been slow to contend with the shifting patterns of climate change.

This week, as May heat records tumbled across England and parts of France, a French teachers union shared an internal survey showing that temperatures had eclipsed 82 degrees Fahrenheit in 90 percent of middle and high schools. They accused some administrative districts of putting off investments to reduce heat exposure.

Meanwhile, as Joe Lo writes from the UK

In my neighbourhood, people are struggling to cope. The fish and chip shop has shut. My child’s teachers are battling to keep them in front of the air conditioner. And my evening football match was conducted at walking pace, with red-faced players hogging the shady side of the pitch.

And remember: this is May.

Meanwhile, a new report from the World Meteorological Organization on what to expect globally in the next five years. Not just that we’ll shatter global temperature records but also that

an overheating Arctic will warm nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.66 degrees Celsius) between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defenses to lessen human-caused climate change.

+Not surprising, but nonetheless grim: a new study finds that air pollution devastates young lungs. Gary Fuller describes the research:

They found that breathing more air pollution during pregnancy, infancy and early childhood can slow lung development all the way up to early adulthood. The greatest impact was during adolescence, which is the time when lung growth accelerates.

An earlier study found that air pollution was reducing the growth of children’s lungs in east London. Here, the average nine-year-old’s lungs were between 90 and 100 millilitres smaller than they should be. This is approximately the volume of two hen’s eggs.

+Interesting data from UMass Amherst finds that most big solar projects in the U.S. don’t meet much opposition at all

The study, published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, looked at 686 utility-scale solar projects that came online between January 2022 and November 2023. Researchers found that 56% of the projects fell into “no” or “low” conflict categories, while just 19% experienced high levels of conflict.

Larger solar projects were more likely to generate opposition, but one finding stood out: The political makeup of the surrounding community didn’t appear to make much difference. The study found no statistically significant link between the share of Democratic voters near projects and levels of opposition.

+And finally, good news from China about the return of bike culture.

When I first visited China many decades ago, it was predominartly a bike country. Even in Beijing, great waves of bicyclists silently crossed the city. In subsequent visits, it was painful to watch the rise of car traffic, and with it great traffic jams, not to mention crazy quantities of air pollution. When I’d meet with mayors, I’d say: don’t copy Houston. Copy Copenhagen. I think I had exactly zero influence, but now officials are making a concerted effort to push cycling. As the folks at the Dutch Cycle Network report

When the master plan for the brand new District of Tongzhou was being developed, the directive from the Beijing Mayor—who had just returned from a trip to the Netherlands—was clear: it must put cycling front and centre. At its spine: a 2.7 km corridor connecting its commercial and residential hubs.

In order to fulfil this vision of a world-class sustainable infrastructure project, they went to the Dutch Cycling Embassy; selecting the engineers at Haskoning (including Jasper Homrighausen and Wim van der Wijk) for their extensive experience with regional doorfiets (“non-stop cycling”) routes, to partner with a Beijing-based consultant.

Designed using best practice and principles straight out of the CROW Manual for Bicycle Traffic, the route features a five-metre width for safety, underpasses for directness, shade trees for comfort, and a series of bespoke light fixtures (inscribed with the words “all roads are connected”) for attractiveness.”

I’ll leave you with a picture of the new Beijing “cycle highway,” and a reminder to write your public comments to the Trump administration about the folly of scilencing, especially if we even want to compete with the Chinese…

But sometimes, the combatants in that fierce battle can forget that most people aren’t engaged in it at all, and that there are ways to open their minds to new possibilities. It’s why, for instance, Sun Day last year featured not just great art and music, but also many people opening their doors—front, and driver’s side—to let others see their heat pumps or their solar arrays or their EVs, demystifying and then in some good sense remystifying the choices suddenly available to everyone. That’s one reason that there was such a surge of legislative action in Sun Day’s wake, and why we’re now closing in on ten states that will let their citizens employ plug-in solar units. (New York’s legislature is oh so close at this writing—if you’re in the Empire State, remind your Rep or Senator to pass the SUNNY Act).

In a small essay a couple of weeks ago on the trouble that Honda is having coping with the changing American politics around EVs, I thought Zachary Shahan made this point about imagination pretty well:

I actually see a lot of ads for electric vehicles. Many or perhaps even most of the car ads I see are for EVs, and not just on the internet where they are tracking my activity. I see ads for all kinds of electric vehicles on TV. However, they all seem to follow a similar formula — run a normal car ad, and maybe show the car plugged in for a second or two. I don’t recall ever seeing an auto ad highlight in an eye-opening or funny way how convenient home charging is, or how nice it is to never have to visit a gas station. I never see an ad highlight the unusual, fun, and useful benefit of instant torque. I don’t see them showing how much more relaxing and enjoyable one-pedal driving is. I don’t even see them making a point of the HUGE potential fuel savings!

That strikes me as a fairly important idea. Something like 16 million new cars will be sold in the U.S. this year, and the percentage of them that run on gas really matters; among other things, it’s key to breaking the political power of the fossil fuel industry. And this should be a great moment, with gas prices going Strait up. And yet if you watch a baseball game, the car ads are mostly the same as they always have been, with chevroned squads of cars tracking across a desert or bounding up a snowy road. (I have dear friends whose house in Castle Valley Utah is closest to the butte where carmakers helicopter in their latest models for those ads, which always struck me as particularly funny—displaying automobiles in pretty much the one place on our continent you can’t actually drive them).

What if, instead, you had an ad where somebody just looked at the camera and explained that they’d had theirs for a year and never visited a gas station because the gas station was in their garage. What if you had, say, a mechanic who was sad that EVs never needed fixing because they had so few moving parts? (Yes, I’m old enough to remember the Maytag repairman ads, which debuted in 1967, describing the sorry life of a man whose job it was to repair an appliance that refused to break. Those ads were good enough that I can remember them sixty years later). You could do worse than having this telegenic Stanford professor simply explain that driving an EV would save you somewhere between $20k and $40k over the life of a car.

In an ideal world, of course, you’d also be seeing ads reminding you to take the train, and pitching the virtues of an e-bike. And it’s not as if consumer choices alone are going to bend the curves that need bending steeply enough. But it’s more about changing peoples’s cognitive map (to borrow a phrase from Kim Stanley Robinson’s commencement talk), because that map is now outdated. In a world where ads made fun of gas guzzlers, it would be easier to elect politicians who upheld mandates.

Which, I suspect, is the reason we don’t see such ads. Most of the big EV makers also produce gas cars; they’re disinclined to cannibalize their sales. (And they know that car dealers generally hate EVs, precisely because they’re low-maintenance, to the point that they actively sabotage sales). It is a genuine stroke of bad luck that the main guy who just made EVs turned out to be a Nazi-saluting nutjob whose obituary will feature prominently the fact that he managed to kill a few million people in a weekend by shutting down USAID.

So we’re probably not going to see a slew of great ads. Instead, we’ll fight ongoing battles to ban Big Oil’s pitches (Amsterdam just put city-owned buildings and vehicles off limits, and Miranda Green argues the idea should spread). We’ll need Laura Ranzato to keep up her fight at Clean Creatives, pressuring ad agencies to stop collaborating with fossil fuel. But there are always glimmers. Here’s a brand new electric truck, no larger than a Mini-Cooper but which through some design legerdemain not only carries eight people but also your stuff. I’d watch an ad about that. Here’s the first electric Ferrari, designed by Jony Ive of iPhone fame and revealed this week to the, um, masses. But hey, the simple fact that the badge most associated with speed now comes in silent electric, with the Apple seal of cool, is something.

Politics is the place where the lack of imagination is most important, of course. The Canadian analyst Seth Klein, whose substack Emergency Measures crosses the 49th parallel in style, had some observations on this topic last week, timely in the face of sad retrograde action like Kathy Hochul’s in New York or (again in Klein’s telling) Mark Carney’s north of the border. As he points out,

even when governments are prepared to spend billions of dollars, these expenditures almost always take the form of tax credits, loan guarantees or even more wonky ideas like “carbon contracts for difference” – all efforts to incentivize private sector actors to make climate-oriented investments – rather than a willingness to spend big on public infrastructure.

This, in a way, was Joe Biden’s failure—the IRA was the right policy, but hidden behind such a welter of obscurities that the public never connected it with much of anything. Not surprisingly, Klein praises Kim Stanley Robinson, but also Molly Crabapple, whose 2019 animated portrayal of a working future—narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—helped build the support for a Green New Deal that eventually got the IRA passed, albeit in badly amputated form. (Klein’s brother-in-law Avi Lewis wrote the script for that video; he is the newly crowned head of Canada’s left-wing party the NDP, not to mention the husband of Seth’s sister Naomi, who’s always had the deep imaginative gift for figuring out what the moment demands).

Climate communications guru Jamie Henn and former Rhode Island state rep Aaron Regunberg, writing in Jacobin, says making this kind of connection is absolutely necessary.

Fox News and the Koch network and the fossil fuel industry, flush with war profiteering cash that can be funneled into lobbying campaigns to further rig the game against renewables, will keep spreading disinformation and polarizing against climate action. And in the absence of a potent social demand for that action, the political will for real decarbonization — in the face of obstacles, trade-offs, and entrenched opposition interests — risks collapsing.

There are lots of important questions and debates we can and should be having about how to rebuild an explicit popular climate discourse over time. But the argument that we shouldn’t be trying to do that at all contradicts the polling data and is an argument for accepting climate catastrophe — something all of us should resist.

And here in fact is a government official making the case—David Hochschild, California’s energy czar, speaking on David Fenton’s podcast. It’s powerful stuff—after all, his state is using 60 percent less natural gas to make electricity than it was three years ago. (Oh, and for Californians, Leah Stokes making the correct case not to cut back on the state’s “demand-side grid support program.” Gavin Newsom is going to be running for a president with a lot of enviros asking questions).

More of this please. As Klein says,

Dire as things are, we all need to be alive to the hopeful trends: China looks to have peaked its GHG emissions, years ahead of schedule, and is producing a coal-power plant’s worth of solar panels every day; Europe is driving down emissions much faster than Canada; in Norway, 97 per cent of new vehicle sales are now zero-emission; in the UK, emissions are now lower than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution in the late 1800’s; Pakistan, Vietnam, and the Philippines are all cancelling plans to import LNG, turning instead to solar; and around the world, the adoption of renewable energy is exploding.

These, of course, are the stories I try to tell here, and for just the reason that Klein describes: we need to

bust open our collective imagination, so we can resolve to meet the emergencies we face, and mobilize around solutions as big as the crises we confront.

I confess that I, like the Pope (and that’s a fun phrase to write) have great faith in the powers of the particularly human imagination. Climate change, to me, has always seemed like a test of whether or not the big brain was a sound adaptation: obviously it can get us in a lot of trouble, but can it get us out of that trouble? The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that the answer to that question has mostly to do with the size of the heart that brain is attached to. In the end, “imagination” is about enlarging that heart.

We are ruled for the moment by a man with no discernible heart at all. (I mean, he skipped his own son’s wedding last weekend, doubtless annoyed at the thought of two hours where the focus was not on him). As a result, his “imagination” is confined to building every-bigger memorials to himself. May our revulsion take the form of building monuments to something much bigger: a working human future.

The day may come when imagination is no longer so necessary in this fight. David Roberts interviewed my old friend Pier Lafarge on his podcast last week, and they argued that the rapid spread of batteries may someday reduce electricity to the status of “cheap, abundant, and boring.” But getting there is going to mean more imagination, not less. It’s our job now.

Share

In other energy and climate news:

+The climate world lost a key figure last week with the death of Rafe Pomerance, deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and development from 1993 to 1999 and an author of the Kyoto Accords. There have been many good obituaries, but I’d rather quote from his last essay, published a month ago from his Florida home, which argues that policy makers should set an “upper limit” on sea level rise in order to guide their planning.

Last week, the Upper Limit Project submitted a recommendation to the United Nations as part of its global consultation on a forthcoming Declaration on Sea Level Rise. The goal of that declaration is to strengthen international cooperation around one of the most immediate and irreversible consequences of climate change.

Our message was simple: The world needs a clear, measurable “upper limit” on sea-level rise to protect our communities and economies.

For years, global climate efforts have rallied around the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as outlined in the Paris Agreement. That benchmark has helped focus policy and stimulate investment. But when it comes to communicating the necessary urgency, temperature rise alone misses the mark. It does not tell people what climate change will mean for their homes, their communities or their coastlines.

Sea-level rise does.

It translates abstract warming into visible, lived consequences: flooded streets, collapsed homes and infrastructure, eroding shorelines, disappearing wetlands and forced migration. Without a defined upper limit, we are navigating toward increasingly dangerous outcomes without a shared understanding of where the danger lies — or how to avoid it.

We measure what we value. If we value the survival of coastal communities, we must define the limits of what they can endure.

Establishing an upper limit on sea-level rise — a metric set to achieve the lowest possible rate of increase — would complement existing temperature goals and provide a tangible benchmark to guide decisions. It would help governments, businesses and communities better assess risk, plan infrastructure, and determine when adaptation is no longer enough and relocation becomes necessary.

+If you have a balcony solar system in Europe, you can now go to Lidl and put down 299 euros for a battery that will titrate the flow of electrons from your panel and supply your home through the night. This is not much money. Meanwhile, in Germany a virtual power plant comprised of hooked-together home batteries in just one company’s network this spring surpassed a gigawatt, making it as big as a nuclear power plant.

This allows us to use electricity exactly when it is available in abundance or feed it back into the grid when prices are high and supply is scarce," says Philipp Schröder, CEO and Co-Founder of 1KOMMA5°. "While politics continue to debate the construction of new gas-fired power plants as a reserve for times with little wind and sun, we at 1KOMMA5° see the enormous, existing potential in millions of private households."

+A state of emergency declared in Utah after their “no-pack” (as opposed to snow pack) winter.

“For much of the state,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Tom Kines explained, “It’s been since October that they had a month of precipitation above the historical average.”

The forecast isn’t good. While the weather pattern over the summer might lead to more numerous thundershowers, especially during July and into August, it probably won’t be enough to end the drought since the rainfall deficit is large, Kines said

+The invaluable Jeff Masters reports on the latest findings in hurricane research, just as this year’s Atlantic season officially gets underway. In essence, we’re likely to see a bifurcation between years with little hurricane activity (as more wind shear in a warmer world knocks the tops off storms) and years with skeins of monstrous storms.

A 2025 study led by Avantika Gori of Rice University, Sensitivity of tropical cyclone risk across the US to changes in storm climatology and socioeconomic growth, looked at how damages from wind, rainfall, and storm surge would change under a moderate global warming scenario. The study found that the fraction of increased hurricane damages because of climate change would grow by the end of the century to be roughly equal to the increased damages from higher exposure (assuming a 2% annual growth in GDP). The combined increased costs for hurricane damage for the future (2070-2100) period compared to the historical (1980-2005) period would be truly extraordinary, if no additional adaptation measures are taken: a 633% increase, the paper said.

Gori’s prediction is by no means a worst-case outcome, because the study assumed a moderate global warming scenario. Even in a best-case scenario — which I’ll explore in a future post — development is going to continue in flood-prone places. And there are at least four ways that hurricane scientists are very confident that climate change will make hurricanes worse:

• The strongest hurricanes will get stronger.

• Hurricanes will rapidly intensify more quickly and more often.

• Hurricanes will dump more rain.

• Storm surge damage will rise because of rising sea levels.

+As northeastern governors falter in their efforts to bolster clean energy, they’re increasingly allowing new natural gas pipelines to be built—the kind of penny wise and pound idiotic step that will leave ratepayers stuck for decades to come. Enbridge’s Project Beacon would expand the size of existing pipelines in New England, for instance, as Miriam Wasser reports

" New England's energy challenges are not going be solved by increasing the supply of fossil fuels," said Caitlin Peale Sloan of the Conservation Law Foundation. "We fundamentally need to be looking at decreasing peak need for gas overall, and we need to be really carefully reckoning with the cost that these resources put on to customers and people who have to breathe air when fuels are being burned."

Opposition is forming to the plans as well. In New York, the once-rejected Constitution Pipeline is back on the books, and if you want to send a letter protesting the idea, here’s the address. If you’d rather hike, there’s plans for a 113-mile “Women’s Water Walk” later this summer but I am reliably informed that men will be welcome as well. As the organizers say

The pipeline would cut through 125 miles of forests, wetlands, wild habitats and rural farm communities and provide a corridor of power for AI data centers, fracked gas power plants and deafening compressor stations.

We refuse to allow these projects that put profit over life. We choose thriving communities, rich soil, productive farms, abundant fish, waterfalls, wildlife, clean water, healthy air, a stable climate, and the rich biodiversity of our forests.

+Coal plants not only fill the air with co2, they also fill the air with pollution that makes solar panels less effective. A new study spearheaded by Rui Song attempts to quantify the damage

A global, facility-level dataset shows that aerosols reduced global PV generation by 5.8% in 2023 (111 TWh). From 2017 to 2023, annual aerosol-induced PV energy losses from existing systems were, on average, equivalent to one-third of the energy added by new PV installations. In China, aerosols caused the largest PV energy losses worldwide, reducing national PV generation by 7.7% in 2023.

+From the excellent minds at the Pacific Northwest’s Sightline Institute, an argument that the climate solution “hiding in plain sight” is…apartments.

Erecting an abundance of apartment buildings, along with duplexes and other so-called middle housing, in cities and towns across America, is an impressively effective way to trim emissions of greenhouse gases. That’s largely because apartments are overwhelmingly more electrically powered than standalone houses, they use less land and building materials, and their residents require less transportation energy to go about their daily lives. Helpfully, too, there’s already a growing movement fighting for and winning the right to build more of these much-needed apartment homes: the pro-housing movement.

Climate leaders, dispirited by watching so many of their dreams dashed, could log gratifying victories for the climate in the immediate future by joining this swelling, bipartisan pro-homes progress. Indeed, they can reap large emissions reductions by shifting even slivers of their time and money toward pro-homes advocacy.

+Those radicals at the Wall Street Journal have decreed that the best and cheapest car deal in America is…used EVs.

With rising oil prices and more used EVs coming off leases every month, the total cost of ownership equation has flipped. A recent analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan found this holds true across a variety of vehicle types, U.S. cities and charging patterns.

“The reason why we’re seeing sales of used EVs grow so much is that they hit the right price points,” says Kevin Roberts, director of economic and market intelligence at the car-search site CarGurus.

“In an expensive, affordability-constrained environment, used EVs represent the best value for consumers now,” says Roberts.

+Speaking of cheap, as Jan Rosenow explains, Spain’s massive buildout of sun and windpower is producing some of the cheapest electricity in Europe for its citizens.

In a wholesale electricity market, the price in any given hour is set by the most expensive plant that needs to run to meet demand. For most of Europe, for most of the last decade, that has been a gas plant. The merit-order link from gas prices to power prices is the reason European households got an electricity bill shock when Russian pipeline gas collapsed in 2022.

What has quietly happened in Spain is that gas now sets the price far less often. In 2022, gas was the marginal plant in roughly 55% of all hours. In 2024 it had fallen to 27%. By the first four months of 2026, it was just 9%.

+The good folks at Faith in Place have been handing out test equipment to more than a hundred Chicago households, so they can monitor the air inside their homes—and if you ever wanted a reason to spend $60 on an induction hot plate, here’s what they found.

The majority of Chicago households are unknowingly living with and breathing unhealthy pollution (especially Carbon Monoxide and Nitrogen Dioxide) inside their homes that in some cases far exceeds health-protective standards for outdoor air.

They listed five key findings:

1. Carbon monoxide found in 8 in 10 homes; half of the homes exceeded outdoor standard.

2. ​It’s not the food. It’s the fuel. Stove use increased indoor pollution within minutes—quickly exceeding levels set for outdoor air quality standards.​

3. In some homes, pollution was detected beyond the kitchen after stove use.​

4. Kitchen ventilation was often limited or weak.​

5. Testing changed how residents understood their homes.

+Climate activism—a potent force among the young for the last decade—is producing a remarkable set of leaders. Will Lawrence, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement that brought us the Green New Deal, is in a tight congressional primary in Michigan, and this week won the endorsement of fellow climate champ Bernie Sanders.

“Will is running an energizing, people-powered campaign and building a strong grassroots coalition that is prepared to stand up to Big Money interests,” Sanders said. “Will is exactly the kind of leader we need in Congress, and I’m proud to support his campaign.”

This is how it’s supposed to work, us old guys pushing forward the next generation.

+Finally, since we’ve been talking about imagination, here’s a quite wonderful stop motion animation from Sophie Davis and Luke Fatora, entitled Light.

One way to think about the climate crisis is that we are systematically reducing the margin on which we live on this planet. There were always places where humans couldn’t live: the Antarctic, the centers of the great deserts, the high mountains. But now we’re systematically adding to that list, as places become dangerously combustible, or overrun by rising seas, or just plain too hot. We’re shrinking the board on which we play the sublime game of being human. I was thinking of this today because I read a truly remarkable piece in the New York Times, the kind of reporting that justifies a subscription despite all the endless disappointments. It was written by Peter Goodman, with powerful photographs from Finbarr O’Reilly.

The two of them traveled widely in recent weeks across Somalia, and what they found—well, you need to read the whole thing. But climate change and war are making life there almost impossible, and now that the U.S. has shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development the “almost” is disappearing.

For nine days, they trudged across the parched soil of southern Somalia, taking turns carrying their 3-year-old daughter on their shoulders. Abdullahi Abdi Abdirahman, his wife and their seven children sought escape from a landscape drained of life.

Another drought had killed their goats and sheep, turning their life savings to dust. So they pressed on for 140 miles toward Dollow, a dusty outpost on the Ethiopian border. They were drawn by the same things that had already attracted more than 100,000 other people: International relief organizations were clustered there, offering food, water and health care.

Yet when they arrived in late January at a camp on the fringes of town, they were horrified to learn that aid groups had abandoned the area. President Trump had dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., eliminating Somalia’s primary source of assistance. From London to Berlin, governments had reduced funding for humanitarian aid. Relief organizations had been forced to choose where to focus their remaining money.

Let me get my anger out of the way first. Elon Musk, in particular, shut down US AID—boasted about “feeding it to the woodchipper” in the first weekend of his DOGE assault on the federal government. That is to say, the richest man in the world did this, under the auspices of our government. His cruelty and his self-regard—and his abject racism—know no bounds.

And then the most piggish and self-involved man in the world, Donald Trump, started a war in Iran, and now the price of fertilizer is through the roof, making life much harder for the people who grow food in Africa (and those who eat it). And an El Niño is now bearing down on the planet, riding on the highest temperatures in human history, which were caused mostly by us in the western world. All of it taken together is too much

Drought ravaged the most recent harvest. Some 6.5 million people — roughly one third of the population — were suffering hunger at levels deemed an emergency, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warned in February. That included more than 1.8 million children under 5 facing acute malnutrition.

Those numbers have almost certainly increased given the war. Yet the World Food Program, the largest source of aid in Somalia, has only enough funding to support 300,000 people a month through July, a fraction of the nearly 2 million people a month it was reaching in early 2025.

Humanitarian relief organizations now contemplate a surreal hierarchy of suffering.

“There are different categories of starvation,” said Hameed Nuru, the World Food Program’s Somalia director. “We are only able to reach those who are really on the verge of, if you don’t give them something now, they will not be there tomorrow.”

In some areas, children are still getting food, but not pregnant mothers. “Literally, it’s who dies first,” he said, “and who dies next.”

Somalia is, of course, a particularly apt place to do this reporting. Trump has referred to its citizens as “garbage people,” and he and Stephen Miller dispatched ICE to Minneapolis to hunt Somalis. As it happens, it’s on the fairly short list of places I’ve never been, but one of my closest colleagues is Somali, and she is as fine a human being as I know, so I thought of her as I read and re-read this piece. But as Goodman points out in his reporting, Somalia is by no means unique.

Indeed, the news this week of a new Ebola outbreak elsewhere in Africa reminds us of another way we keep shrinking the world: there are places it’s too dangerous to go because we’ve unleashed diabolical illnesses. As Kat Lay reports:

The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) said in a report published on Monday that “as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent they are also becoming more damaging”, warning that pandemic risk is outpacing investments in preparedness and “the world is not yet meaningfully safer”.

Disease outbreaks are becoming more likely due to the climate crisis and armed conflict, while collective action is being undermined by geopolitical fragmentation and commercial self-interest, the report said.

In fact, it’s more or less Musk again—he made a joke at a presidential cabinet meeting about “accidentally” cutting Ebola funding, but insisted it had been restored, something that—and this will shock you—seems not to be entirely true.

In Geneva, Prof Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, said aid cuts may have played a role in leaving the world “playing catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen”.

He said: “Because early tests looked for the wrong strain of Ebola, we got false negatives and lost weeks of response time. By the time the alarm was raised, the virus had already moved along major transport routes and crossed borders.

“This crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline USAID programmes, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early. We are seeing the direct, deadly consequences of treating global health security as an optional expense.”

That margin is thinner all the time. Consider this report from Laura Paddison about the heatwave that shook India last week: there was a day when all the fifty hottest cities on our planet were in that country.

On April 27, average peak temperatures across all 50 Indian cities on the list hit 112.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Top of AQI’s list was the city of Banda in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a harsh, sub-tropical climate which often delivers brutal summers.

Even before what are typically hottest summer months, the heat has ratcheted up. On April 27, temperatures in Banda reached 115.16 degrees, according to AQI, the highest temperature recorded anywhere on the planet that day. The coolest Banda got, in the early hours of that morning, was 94.5 degrees…

Experts have warned heat in India is becoming so extreme, it may “cross the survivability limit” for healthy humans by 2050.

Across the border in Pakistan, as Asad Mumtaz Rid reports, it’s at least as bad.

In southern Pakistan throughout April and May, temperatures have risen far above seasonal norms. In Sindh, daytime temperatures have frequently crossed 44C to 46C, forcing residents indoors during peak afternoon hours and severely affecting outdoor labourers, transport workers and farming communities.

The impact has been particularly severe in Karachi’s coastal settlements, where prolonged electricity outages and water shortages have compounded the effects of extreme heat. In Ibrahim Hyderi, one of the city’s largest fishing communities, residents say survival is becoming increasingly difficult.

Abdul Sattar, a fisherman with more than three decades of experience, recalled how one of his colleagues collapsed from heat exhaustion during the recent heatwave. “We gave him lemon water and rushed him to a doctor,” he said. “He regained consciousness after receiving intravenous fluids.”

There are things we can and must do to make a short-term difference. One is to provide cooling—air-conditioning—to much of the planet. As a study last week from the Rocky Mountain Institute described,

Between now and 2030, the increase in electricity demand for air conditioning systems alone will exceed that for data centers, one of the fastest-growing energy uses globally. By 2050, cooling electricity demand is expected to match the combined annual electricity consumption of the United States, China, India, Germany, and Japan today.

That’s not optional—at this point, it’s medicine. In those kinds of heatwaves cool air is as important to the human body as water, or food. But, obviously it will drive up demand for energy, which is why, as the RMI experts point out, we need to

Reduce energy use and emissions through super-efficient technologies, improved system design, and better refrigerant management, while scaling next-gen, innovative solutions that lower life-cycle costs and emissions.

All of this is possible—new heat pumps are far far more efficient at cooling air than old AC units, and we can paint roofs, plant trees, and do lots more.

But at the most basic level we have no more important task than converting absolutely everything we can, right away, to sun and wind and batteries, so that we stop pouring carbon into the air and making the problem ever worse. And the horrible part is that we can do this, which makes the fact that we’re not doing it as fast as we can deeply and profoundly immoral. Hell, no one is even asking Americans to do with less, because that is clearly impossible. We’re just asking them to do with slightly different, and save money in the process. Here, for instance, is the latest update from Biden’s key energy deployment expert, Jigar Shah, talking about a new method for coaxing more juice through existing transmission lines, which experts call

reconductoring with advanced conductors. Reconductoring replaces the wire on an existing line with advanced conductor technology that carries 50 to 110 percent more current through the same towers, on the same right-of-way, in 18 to 36 months. No new permitting. No land acquisition. Montana-Dakota Utilities reconductored a 15-mile 230 kV line, increased ampacity by 77 percent, finished a full year ahead of schedule, and came in 40 percent under cost estimate. The Berkeley and GridLab 2035 study found a national reconductoring program could quadruple the rate of transmission capacity expansion at only 20 percent higher total system cost — saving $85 billion by 2035 and $180 billion by 2050.

But we have to do it. We have to force our leaders, state by state at the moment since DC is such a disaster area, to actually make these relatively small changes.

A way to look at the work we’re doing together is that we’re trying to build some margin back in. Every gas car that becomes an EV buys us back an inch or two, every furnace that becomes a heat pump, every solar panel and wind turbine that sprouts takes the tiniest bit of pressure off the system.

We were born onto a world with lots of margin, especially those of us who are older. The size of the game board was expanding back then, as we learned new ways to grow and store food and the like. But through short-sightedness and greed we began to shrink that buffer, and now greed and short-sightedness have become the cornerstones of government policy, along with pure and undiluted racism. It’s not like anyone is fooled. Goodman again:

As he sat beneath the shade of a mango tree, its branches sloping toward the river dividing Somalia from Ethiopia, Adan Bare Ali, deputy mayor of Dollow, said his community was suffering from troubles that had been concocted far away. The drought was worsened by climate change — primarily the result of industrial polluters in larger, more powerful nations. The war was the handiwork of foreign actors.

“The situation has become unbearable,” he said. “The American regime is led by a person who really doesn’t care about anything happening outside his gates. The Americans are not honoring their commitment to the world.”

He is right, and we are very very wrong.

Share

In other energy and climate news:

+Two of the country’s really great environmentalists, Vanessa Fajans-Turner and Ayana Johnson, teamed up for a crackerjack essay about the ways that NY Governor Hochul is undercutting the state’s climate law.

The proposed changes would extend the deadline for greenhouse gas regulations from 2024 to 2028. It would also replace the binding 2030 emissions target with a softer 2040 commitment and adopt a methane accounting method that makes fossil-fuel emissions look smaller without actually reducing them. The 2050 target remains, but the deal weakens the pressure to act now, allowing dangerous greenhouse gas pollution to amass in the intervening quarter-century.New York is one of 10 states with binding, economy-wide climate targets, alongside California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. All face similar affordability pressures, strained grids, and federal headwinds. None has walked back its targets. If lawmakers, who are deliberating now, agree to water down the law with the imminent budget vote, New York would be first.

+Corbin Hiar reports that a small company that wants to inject sun-reflecting particles into the atmosphere has revealed a bit more of what they have in mind

Stardust Solutions has raised $75 million since 2023 from investors who are betting that global warming could get so out of control that governments might decide to pay the Israeli-U.S. startup to spray millions of tons of sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the stratosphere. Its plans were so guarded that it required scientists to sign nondisclosure agreements before they could study its potentially planet-altering technologies.

On Thursday, the company revealed the makeup of its proprietary particles. They are made of what’s known as amorphous silica and are 0.5 microns in size — only visible with a microscope. The startup also shared information about the systems it could use to disperse the spherical silica particles some 11 miles above the ground and monitor them as they fall back to the Earth…

“This announcement is a clear example of why self governance led by for-profit entities does not work,” said Shuchi Talati, the executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that seeks to include marginalized countries and communities in debates over sunlight-reflecting technologies.

Stardust, she said, “cannot create their own principles and then applaud themselves for following them. They cannot define safety according to their own standards and then self-certify that they meet them. The field requires coordinated, legitimate, and independent research governance.”

+Perhaps you’re in the mood for listening to some guys talking about the El Niño that appears poised to come crashing out of the Pacific in the months ahead. Here’s the estimable David Wallace-Wells and, um, me, on KQED’s Forum the other day. David, anyway, was great—and I got in a pitch for California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer; the primary is two weeks out now.

Meanwhile, the crucially important meteorologist Jeff Masters has a new account of the rapid heating of the water in the Gulf of Mexico and why that matters.

In 2012, the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico began rising along a shocking upward trajectory.

Climate change is causing oceans worldwide to warm. But that year, summertime sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico began heating up at about twice the rate seen in the global oceans. The trend has continued into the 2020s, with sea surface temperatures hitting record highs in both 2024 and 2025. The shift has huge implications for the hurricanes that form in the Gulf – and the people who live along its shores and on the islands that dot its waters.

Hurricanes are heat engines that take heat energy out of the ocean and convert it to the kinetic energy of wind. The maximum intensity that a hurricane can reach increases by about 5-7% per degree Celsius of sea surface temperature increase. So the rise of about half a degree per decade in Gulf sea surface temperatures per decade since 2012 may be causing a 3% per decade increase in the winds of the strongest hurricanes. Because stronger winds cause more destruction, this equates to about a 30% increase in hurricane damage per decade for these strongest storms.

+Some good news. A big new study found that Americans are littering less, with a 34 percent reduction in trash along roadsides. Now if we could just stop tossing carbon into the air…

+New Mexico Attorney General Raùl Torrez, in the Santa Fe newspaper, calls on the state’s Oil Conservation Commission to hold drillers responsible for cleaning up their messes.

Across New Mexico, there are already hundreds of abandoned wells, with thousands more at risk. Some leak methane or contaminate groundwater, threatening public health and the land our communities depend on. When companies fail to clean them up, the cost does not disappear. It falls on the public.

That is not fair to New Mexico families.

The rules under consideration would move New Mexico closer to a simple standard: Companies should set aside funds that reflect the real cost of cleanup so they can plan ahead and follow through on their responsibilities.

In other words, if you drill it, you clean it.

It’s amazing that this even has to be said, but I’m glad someone is saying it.

+Finally, I’d like you to meet Burrito, who according to Warren van der Sandt, has become the crucial employee at a big solar farm in Tennessee. Apparently the 9.5 megawatt facility owned by Volkswagen brought in 65 sheep to keep the vegetation trimmed between the panels, and they were doing a good job, but they became the object of carnivorous affection for local coyotes. Enter Burrito, who when he came on board quickly began to patrol the perimeter of the site (which powers the production of VW’s EVs)

If unfamiliar animals approached, he reacted immediately. Donkeys naturally protect herd animals from threats. It’s in their nature, despite their “dozy” reputation.

Burrito acts as a scout, clearing “paddocks” for safety before the sheep enter to feed. Workers said the donkey even inspected areas before the sheep moved through them.

Once a stray without a home, he is now the most essential “worker” on the property.

Those of us who came up in a different age still occasionally harbor the belief that facts, truth, science matters; that it hasn’t all just vanished into a tweeting flash of nonsense. In service of this delusion, I’m dedicating this newsletter to the topic of wind, because I think it distills the corruption and irrationality of our sad moment into its purest essence—190-proof Trumpism, the stuff that blinds you if you guzzle it.

My rant is occasioned by the news that the administration has stopped all approvals on wind farms across the country. As Katherine Krawczyk explains, for 15 years wind farms have applied to the Defense Department where

they’re supposed to undergo a ​“timely, transparent, and repeatable process to evaluate potential impacts” to national security and military operations. It’s a routine that has spanned presidencies, including the first Trump administration, and that typically revolves around making sure turbines don’t interfere with radars or federal airspace.

This has always been routine, until last summer when it became…impossible. Pete Hegseth’s DOD simply stopped replying, and didn’t explain why till last month when it sent a letter to developers saying it was “reevaluating how it reviews wind projects national security impacts.” Somewhere between 165 and 250 big projects are in limbo, and that’s obviously the point: not only does it screw up their financing, it means they may not get done in time to qualify for what tax credits are left from the Biden IRA.

To say that the national security grounds are bogus is to give them too much credit. As those radicals at the Financial Times explained, the security review used to take a “few days” to complete. These installations are on private land, far away from military bases. The government has used the same argument to try and block offshore wind farms, and the courts have overruled their objections. I imagine that in time judges will find in favor of these blocked onshore projects too, but the damage will have been done: no one in their right mind would invest in new wind power now, not when the president has declared quite frankly that his “goal is to not let any windmill be built.”

That this is stupid goes without saying. Those blocked projects constitute, the FT says, about 30 gigawatts of cheap clean energy at a time when we desperately need it. But it also goes without saying that the blockage serves two purposes. One is to artificially increase demand for fossil fuel (and the other Trump-favored power sources, like the expensive array of nuclear reactors whose development the government is currently generously funding). The other is to serve his febrile rage at the wind farm built off his Scottish golf course all those years ago. A policy that feeds both his appetite for corruption and supplies his narcissistic hunger—well, that’s a twofer that can’t be missed. Hegseth may have no idea how to win the war in Iran, but he knows how to win favor from dear leader.

Of course, it means indulging in a huge number of lies, from Trump’s claim that windpower is the most expensive energy on earth (actually, second-cheapest, right behind solar) to his claim that it causes cancer (one death in five on this planet comes from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel) to his claim that though the Chinese build and sell wind turbines they don’t actually use them. If he glances out the window of Qatar Force One on this week’s trip to China he’ll be forced to recant that one: the Chinese actually lead the world in producing not just wind turbines but wind energy. As Keith Bradsher reported last week

Across China, hilltops are dotted with wind turbines, and long rows of them span many miles in western deserts. Ultrahigh-voltage power lines carry electricity thousands of miles to the energy-hungry factories along China’s coast.

Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.

In fact, perhaps his Chinese hosts could arrange a field trip to their newest wind turbine, installed this week off the shore from Yangjiang. It’s, what do you know, the largest single-unit floating wind platform ever installed on planet earth, a single windmill that will supply enough power for 24,000 homes. As Adriana Buljan reports at that must-read site OffShoreWindBiz,

The project incorporates several new technologies, including a novel mooring system, an active ballast system, a smart monitoring system, and a 66 kV dynamic subsea cable, the developer said.

The floater is secured by nine suction anchors, using a combination of anchor chains and high-performance polyester mooring lines, marking the first application of such polyester cables in China’s offshore wind sector.

It’s not just China, of course. A few weeks ago, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 3 in the North Sea, sent its first power back to the UK. When it’s fully finished at the end of next year, reports Evelyn Hart, it will “generate enough power to meet the average daily needs of a population larger than Greater Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds combined.” Earlier today the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi announced a big investment in the project, reflecting what the fund’s head called its “approach of investing alongside experienced partners in high-quality infrastructure assets that support energy transition and deliver long-term value.”

What might the Trump administration offer them as an alternative? Well, the administration has ordered the restart of fossil fuel drilling operations off Santa Barbara despite local and state opposition. Yesterday an old platform in the area caught fire and burned—26 people were evacuated, and thankfully none were killed, though two were injured. Here’s what America’s technological prowess looks like today

I think that sometimes wind gets shorter shrift than it should when we talk about renewable energy. It’s not quite as simple as a photovoltaic array—there’s still a moving part, that windmill blade. But of course this is just another form of solar energy (the wind rises when the sun heats the earth more in some places than others) and it is a miracle. In fact, it’s a perfectly complementary miracle. Along a coast, for instance, because it takes a while for the sun to heat the air molecules that produce the breeze, wind tends to build in power later in the afternoon, as the photovoltaic effect begins to ebb. And the farther north you go, the stronger the wind gets, which is useful since Greece has more sunshine than Norway. And wind speeds tend to be higher in the winter than the summer, thanks to sharper temperature gradients.

If you want an in-depth technical explanation of this miracle, Mark Jacobson provides one in this 2021 study. Among many other things, he points out that

In some locations, e.g. Europe, wind energy output follows heat load remarkably well on a diurnal basis. This is not only due to the day versus night wind speed peaks just discussed, but also due to the fact that low temperatures, which create heat loads, often occur behind cold fronts, where pressure gradients are strong, thus winds are fast. Low temperatures over land also often occur in the presence of strong temperature gradients, which produce strong pressure gradients and strong winds.

One irony of Trump’s anti-wind crusade is that this miracle was born here. Humans have long used wind, of course—to push boats, to grind grain. But we first put it to use to produce electricity on an industrial scale in the early 1940s at Grandpa’s Knob, about fifty miles south of my home in the Vermont mountains above the town of Castleton. An MIT grad named Palmer Putnam (and I was at MIT last week, and saw many impressive young people following in his wake) convinced the local utility to give him a shot at harnessing the Vermont winds (blowing eight miles an hour in Castleton when I drove by this afternoon). Vannevar Bush—more irony here—was in charge of the nation’s scientific enterprises during World War II, and he thought it would be a good idea to see if we could produce power this way; Putnam’s design used two blades, each 66 feet long and weighing eight tons. It worked just fine from 1942 to 1943, when a shaft bearing failed, and wartime shortages meant no one could scroung the part until 1945.

A study that year found that a block of six similar turbines similar to the prototype, producing 9 MW, could be installed in Vermont for around US$190 per kilowatt. But in those days it was cheaper to get power other ways, and so the project was never replicated. In 2012 a new project was proposed for the area, but like all Vermont wind projects in recent years, local opposition doomed it, reminding us that Trump is not the only person who doesn’t like to look at windmills.

I do, though. I’ve always thought they were remarkably beautiful, Calder mobiles come to life. And they keep getting better. The first big American installation was on Altamont Pass, near Livermore California—6,700 small turbines lined either side of I-580. They produced lots of clean electrons, but because of their size and where they were sited, their fast-moving blades were a bit of a bird Cuisinart. To be clear, wind turbines never come within an order of magnitude of avian destruction compared with tall buildings and power lines, not to mention domestic cats, not to mention the effects of climate change now setting off a generalized extinction crisis on this earth. But if bird mortality is not a reason to delay the move to clean energy, it’s also not something to be simply ignored. So here’s some good news: a recent “repowering project” on the pass replaced 569 of the old small turbines with just 23 newer and bigger ones, while still generating the same amount of electricity. Oh, and

Fewer turbines, spaced further apart, and equipped with modern bird-detection technology such as IndentiFlight, should reduce bird mortality in the Altamont Pass going forward.

“Brookfield Renewables has designed the [Mulqueeney Ranch] site and implemented state of the art technology to mitigate impacts to local and migratory avian species,” according to the MCE staff report.

“Turbines will be equipped with individual AI paired cameras to detect the presence of avian species which would trigger feathering/shut-off of specific turbines.”

And as Justin Gerdes reports, this kind of repowering could happen at every wind farm across the country.

“By replacing aging turbines with modern technology at existing sites, the United States could more than double its current onshore wind capacity and electricity generation without requiring new land,” write the authors of a Stanford University study published in March.

The study finds that repowering could increase the U.S.’ onshore wind nameplate generating capacity from 153 gigawatts (GW) (as of 2024) to 314 GW at existing wind farms.

“Repowering is a key, yet overlooked, strategy to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy future in the United States,” the authors conclude.

Data from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie confirms the near-term repowering opportunity in the U.S.

“The repowering market remains strong, as Wood Mackenzie projects that 18 projects will drive 2.5 GW of capacity additions in the next three years,” according to a December 2025 WoodMac press release.

I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of my line that though sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. Similarly, there is no drone on earth that can shoot the breeze. This is where the planet desperately wants to go. Our job is to change our nation’s politics so the wind can blow free.

Share

In other energy and climate news:

+It’s not too late to run for something in the upcoming elections, and Lead Locally is great at training up candidates. Here’s the application form!

+The world is a big place, so no one noticed for a while when a climate-weakened rock wall slid into an Alaskan fjord last summer, triggering a…300-foot tall wave. (Cruise ships frequent these fjords, and several were actually nearby, but thank heaven none sailed in that day). Now scientists have scoured the area. As Christian Elliott explains,

The Tracy Arm landslide was preceded by an unusually rapid retreat of the South Sawyer Glacier, leaving the rock slope that ultimately collapsed bare and unsupported. That same rearrangement of land elements is increasingly occurring throughout Alaskan fjords and around the world. As glaciers retreat and thawing permafrost lubricates slopes, these giant landslides may become more frequent.

+The great Jacqui Patterson continues her work chronicling Big Oil’s outreach to Black America. Her first Fossil-Fueled Foolery report came when she was still at the NAACP; now at the helm of the Shirley Chisholm Legacy Project she published round three this spring, with a video contest coming. As she documents

The fossil fuel industry has learned to weaponize the language of our own movements and take heartless advantage of the vulnerability wrought by the extractive economy for which they are primary purveyors. By co-opting the nomenclature and even the values of civil rights, equity, and economic justice, these corporations attempt to manufacture consent for their continued violence against our communities

+That inspired EV salesman Donald Trump is running up some big numbers for his friends in China by blockading the Strait of Hormuz

China exported more electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles than gas or diesel cars for the first time in April. Automakers expanded aggressively overseas, the China Passenger Car Association said Monday.

New-energy vehicles made up 52.7% of China’s 769,000 total auto exports in April. NEV exports more than doubled from a year earlier, reaching 406,000 units.

+Gary Ferguson is one the country’s great authorities on one of the country’s great trees, the Ponderosa Pine, and he has a fine essay in the Times summarizing the threat to those forests, and with it the western landscape

After about 26 years of exceptionally high heat and drought, hundreds of millions of these trees in lands stretching from New Mexico and Colorado to the southern Sierra Nevada of California have died. And in many places, something even more startling is happening: The trees aren’t coming back.

Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate change landscape in America.

One of the biggest consequences is the loss of shade. Without the forest canopy overhead, snow can evaporate quickly instead of trickling into rivers, streams and aquifers. In the mountainous parts of the West, where roughly 70 percent of freshwater runoff originates as snowpack, that’s a huge deal, a sign of a catastrophic feedback loop beginning to form.

+I keep saying that if the last few years were about solar panels and wind turbines, batteries will be the star in the next couple. A new report from Australia says that the boom in home batteries is so intense that it’s pulled the country back within striking distance of its goal to run on 82% renewables by 2030.

Carl Binning, Clean Energy Regulator, says the surge in rooftop installs and home batteries, boosted by the federal rebate, has stunned everyone, including the industry itself, and offered a new avenue to that 82 per cent target.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan assumes another 28 gigawatts of large scale renewables is needed to meet the federal target, a little under 10 GW of additional rooftop solar, and about 5 gigawatt hours (GWh) of home storage.

Binning says home battery storage is already at 11 GWh, and heading for 40 GWh, eight times the ISP assumptions. And the record 441 megawatts (MW) of rooftop solar applications in the month of April points to an annual run rate of around 4 GW. Even if it were 3 GW, that still would beat the ISP assumptions.

+Every once in a while, one’s happy for the work that goes into a book. Here’s a video clip from a member of the British Columbia legislative assembly, lightheartedly convening a book group to study my last volume, Here Comes the Sun. It turns out that one of constitutents, Tannis Wightman, sent a copy of the volume to every member of the legislature, not to mention every member of Canada’s parliament.

+A dedicated group of activists walked fifty miles across New Jersey to the State Capitol last week, to push for passage of the Make Polluters Pay climate superfund bill. As Zach Blackburn reports:

“We’ve seen this playbook before. Big corporations rake in record profits, then walk away and stick working people with the bill,” said Nedia Morsy, the director of Make the Road New Jersey. “Working families shouldn’t be the ones shouldering the cost of climate change.”

The advocates join a growing chorus of New Jerseyans who seek to see the bill passed before this year’s state budget. In March, three Budget Committee senators — Renee Burgess (D-Irvington), Gordon Johnson (D-Englewood), and Patrick Diegnan (D-South Plainfield) — said the committee should pass the Polluters Pay Act first.

Meanwhile, across the border in New York Cathy Becker outlines three new bills to try and cope with the climate insurance crisis. My favorites:

S186A: Insure Our Communities Act. This bill would prevent property insurers from furthering the climate crisis by insuring and investing in new oil, gas and coal projects. Instead, insurers would be required to invest in building our communities under the state Community Reinvestment Act.

and, much like similar legislation (SB 1166) in Hawaii,

S8585: Recovery for climate disaster losses. This bill would allow the New York Attorney General, private insurers doing business in the state, and the New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association to seek damages from fossil fuel corporations in cases of climate-related disasters.

+Important piece from Australian researcher Tamara Krawchenko, attempting to measure the carbon impact of warfare.

This isn’t a minor oversight. Militaries are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has generated an estimated 311 million tonnes of what’s known as CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined annual emissions of Belgium, New Zealand, Austria and Portugal. CO₂ equivalent is the metric used to compare the warming impact of various greenhouse gases to carbon dioxide.

Recently published research calculated that the first 15 months of Israel’s war in Gaza generated more than 33 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined 2023 annual emissions of Costa Rica and Slovenia.

+I suppose it was inevitable. There are enough solar panels in Chile now that thieves have begun to steal them. Antonia Mufarech reports that

In this narrow strip of the Andes, exceptionally sunny conditions, market-based electricity pricing and a favorable investment climate have fueled a swift photovoltaic build-out, from just 3% of total installed capacity in 2015 to a third of the system today, according to government data. Following a pattern in other places like California and the UK, this solar boom has brought crime along with it. But here the trend is turbocharged by more remote expanses and entrenched organized crime, posing risks for Chile’s critical infrastructure, with potential consequences for grid reliability and foreign investment.

“The theft of cables, panels or electronic equipment can temporarily shut down entire solar parks and cause significant economic losses,” said Erwin Plett, chief executive officer of renewable energy advisory Low Carbon Chile SpA, adding that it also drives up security and insurance costs. “Chile remains one of the most attractive renewable markets in the region, but maintaining that leadership requires ensuring the security of energy infrastructure.”

+Finally, just a heads up that our friend the sun not only supplies light, and warmth, and via photosynthesis our supper, and now all the power you could ever need. It also happily offers entertainment. A big coronal mass ejection on Sunday should reach the northern U.S. tonight in the form of northern lights. Enjoy!

Our world seems to me to be moving very very fast these days—often that’s because of the feral energy of the Trump White House, feverishly trying to do the wrong thing on as many fronts as possible. In the last few cycles have come the news that that the White House is evicting bison herds from federal lands in Montana (a favor to ranchers, an insult to tribal leaders), approving fruit-flavored vapes (a favor to the big-donor vapor lobby, an insult to public health) and insisting that the Pope wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon (an insult to Catholics, a favor to his easily bruised ego). If the strategy is designed to wear us down, it’s definitely working on me.

But something else is moving fast too, and far more productively—that’s the ascension of new technologies. I don’t mean AI, which so far has had little impact on me and a generally dispiriting one on my fellow Americans, to judge from the polling; I mean the surging changes in clean tech, which are rewriting what’s possible in the course of months, even days.

Consider, for instance, the news from California. As I’ve noted before, the Golden State is suddenly supplying huge amounts of night-time energy from big grid-based batteries; basically, at night its running on stored sunshine. But the reporter Claire Barber, in an interview with grid expert Ed Smeloff, put a number on this yesterday: California’s new batteries, installed over the last 36 months or so, are the equivalent of a dozen new nuclear power plants. If California had installed a dozen nukes in a couple of years, you’d know about it—indeed, the fate of its single reactor, at Diablo Canyon, has inspired thousands of articles, documentaries, protests and counter protests over the same stretch of time. But batteries are…metal boxes that pose no great threat. They just…work. Smeloff:

The most remarkable change in the California energy market has been the very rapid addition of grid-connected batteries and the use of those batteries to provide peak demand capacity. California is transitioning fairly quickly from using primarily natural gas resources to now using batteries. The batteries are [used] during the peak period, which is in the evening, typically around seven o’clock, producing as much as 40 percent of the peak capacity requirements. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement in a short period of time.

Bottom line, from Stanford’s Mark Jacobson on Tuesday: California using 61% less natural gas this year to generate electricity than it did three years ago.

There’s also the sudden advent of a slightly smaller class of batteries, ones that as Elizabeth Ouzts observes are

designed to fill specific community needs and — due to their size — relatively quick and low-cost to build.

The Blue Ridge Power Agency, which serves a string of nonprofit utilities in central and western Virginia, is set to go live this summer with a collection of five batteries of about 5 megawatts each. The systems will help two rural electric co-ops and the city of Salem’s utility save money by storing power when it is cheap and abundant. They can then rely on that saved-up power when high demand on the grid spikes prices.

All in all, the projects are predicted to save the member utilities $100 million over the batteries’ 20-year lifespan, addressing long-held local concerns over rising costs.

And now move down one more order of magnitude, and consider the report, out this morning, from the Rewiring America think tank, about how solar, battery, and heat pump technology have advanced so quickly that a few policy shifts could allow the electrification of almost every home in America, turning them into useful and affordable parts of a national energy infrastructure. (Good coverage from Catherine Boudreau here). Consider, say, what we could require of data centers. If some must be built, then force them to supply their own electricity—by buying heat pumps and solar panels for surrounding homes. It’s cheaper than building new supplies, and much much faster.

Hyperscalers are driving more than $100 billion per year into energy generation and infrastructure investment. Directing even a portion of that spending toward distributed energy resources could mobilize tens of billions of dollars for household energy upgrades. Hyperscaler investment in home energy upgrades would make such upgrades affordable for an additional 19 million households (increasing affordability from 30 to 58 percent of eligible households) — unlocking average lifetime savings of $9,400 per household

Again—all this stuff is available right now. There are plenty of heat pumps and batteries; if Google wants a data center, it should be handing them out to the neighbors. And once they have, then all these homes can be easily knit together into virtual power plants (VPPs); as a new report from the good people at Pew points out,

Fully leveraging these existing and future Distributed Energy Resources through VPPs, including providing appropriate compensation for DER owners, could deliver power during peak demand at 40%-60% of the cost of traditional solutions.

And if you’re thinking—’yeah, but policy changes come too slowly to matter in a polarized America,’ well, your cynicism is justified. But not entirely. The last few weeks have seen something remarkable, with legislative action happening at a speed I can’t quite recall. Everyone who participated in Sun Day last fall (and that’s many of you) helped launch a nationwide campaign for, among other things, balcony or plug-in solar. And that’s already bearing fruit: just eight months later it’s passed legislatures in Virginia, Maine, Colorado, and Maryland. It’s through the Senate and the House in New Hampshire, and the Senate in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, through the House (and late last night the Senate) in Connecticut and through committee in Massachusetts (in the latter two, its part of important larger omnibus solar bills). It’s also before committees in California, Illinois, and DC. This is a reminder that activism can (and must) move as fast as technology—before the spring is out, and despite serious opposition from utilities, we’ll have enough states to establish a firm American market for a technology that has swept through Europe in recent years. (Here’s a great account from my colleagues at Third Act Upstate NY on the kind of organizing that is producing these wins).

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel alternatives are…slow to appear. Dan Gearino has an excellent account of plans for a truly massive gas-fired power plant in Ohio, announced in March by the always classy Howard Lutnick as AC/DC’s Back in Black blared from the speakers. “We’re operating in Trump time,” he told the crowd ahead of the ceremonial groundbreaking. But Trump time sometimes means fantasy time.

“The whole thing doesn’t add up,” said Ric O’Connell, executive director of GridLab, a nonprofit that provides technical expertise on the electricity grid to policymakers and advocates.

O’Connell thinks the power plant’s high costs will make the project difficult to justify outside of a moment in which the Trump administration is seeking attention for big projects. Due to inflation on key components, the project would cost $3,586 per kilowatt, two to three times the cost of a combined-cycle gas plant two years ago.

“They’re just smiling and waving for the cameras, and then, as soon as Trump’s out of power, the [power plant is] going to get scaled way down or killed,” O’Connell said.

The clean energy build-out, of course, can’t come fast enough, because the climate crisis is pushing on inexorably. April saw the atmospheric level of co2 average 431 parts per million for the first time at the monitoring station in Mauna Loa (but don’t worry—Trump’s new budget zeroes out funding for the facility). A new report put a very human face on those statistics: as Oliver Milman reports, it found that the time may be coming to start thinking of the painful necessity to move people out of New Orleans, because climate change is in danger of putting it past a ‘point of no return.’

Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 metres of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

The way to avoid this—or a thousand follow-on horrors—is to move with desperate urgency to rebuild our energy system. That won’t end global warming—too late for that. But not too late to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets, and every tenth of a degree we raise the temperature moves a hundred million souls from a safe climate zone to a perilous one. Maybe New Orleans is in that next increment. Maybe your house. Someone’s house, that’s for sure. So speed, speed, speed.

Share

In other energy and climate news:

+Superb account from David Wallace-Wells of the meaning—political and scientific—of the fast-brewing El Niño. It’s very smart—and also, he’s a beautifully fluid writer.

An awful lot depends on the actual size of El Niño and the particular scale and distribution of suffering it might unleash. In general, I tend to think climate people overestimate the political impact of discrete disasters — and that we process even mind-bending catastrophes largely by normalizing them, as we’ve done in recent years with wildfires in Los Angeles and Maui, mass heat deaths in the Pacific Northwest and on the Hajj, and flooding events in places like Spain and Brazil beyond what has been observed, in those places, for decades. But coming during a Donald Trump presidency, this one even more nakedly hostile to climate concern than the last, and on the heels of a war that has illustrated unmistakably the dangers of fossil-fuel dependence and driven up the price of food and energy, I do think a pattern of unmistakable global climate disruptions could do a lot to dislodge our seeming complacency. What comes next, as ever, would be as much a matter of political economy as climate.

+Cuba is installing solar power as fast as any place on earth, because it literally has no choice—the U.S. has cut off virtually all its supply of oil, and Marco Rubio was last week seen posing with the general in charge of the U.S. Southern Command in front of a map of the island. As the FT reports

Thanks to Chinese technology, the Caribbean island has 34 solar parks in operation with a capacity of almost 1.2GW, a 350 per cent increase on 2024, enabling Cuba to more than quadruple its proportion of solar-powered generation to around 9 per cent of its total by the end of last year. Cuba plans to have built 92 solar parks with just over 2GW of capacity by 2028.

“In the last 12 months alone, the government successfully installed 1GW of that — so they’re halfway to the target,” said Euan Graham, senior analyst at energy think-tank Ember. “A gigawatt is a very significant amount in the system and getting to 2GW would be pretty transformative.”

+In the Guardian, Alexander Hurst calls for top American officials to be sanctioned for their support of fossil fuel expansion, much as America has sanctioned top leaders in countries like Russia and Iran.

It’s time to apply the same logic to a different caste of oligarchs, American this time, who seem inextricable from the apparatus of the Trump administration. They include Silicon Valley tech barons and fossil fuel industry executives whose names lurk deeper in Trump’s shadow, along with the apparatchiks who carry out an overall anti-environmental policy that should be rightly viewed as ecocide.

The foul men – they are mainly men – burning the planet should have access to as little of it as possible. Trump’s own name should not adorn the gates of his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and his minion Lee Zeldin, who leads the ironically named Environment Protection Agency (EPA), should not be flown to Munich to lecture Europe about its destructive policies. No billionaire in Trump’s orbit should be able to ski in the Alps, nibble vintage jamón in Mallorca, be served champagne at the Cheval Blanc, or splash out upwards of €100,000 a week for luxury villas in the Algarve or the Côte d’Azur if they are complicit in an active ecocide that threatens the very existence of all these places.

+If you’re spending part of the summer in Maine (maybe campaigning to beat Susan Collins), check out a show at the Shaw Institute in Blue Hills: FOREVER OURS, Microplastics and PFAS, Where Science Meets Art. Fifteen New England artists have contributed; check out the life-size seal made from unrecycleable plastics.

Meanwhile, old sustainability hand Jim Merkel has a new documentary, Saving Walden’s World, which will air soon on PBS. It profiles women in Kerala, Slovenia, and Cuba, and argues that small-scale solar is the ultimate tool of decolonialization and resistance. “The homestead is a tactical site of resistance,” he says. “When we harvest the sun for energy and the soil for sustenance, we strip power from the systems that use scarcity as a weapon.”

And here’s a good project: MobilizeGreen is connecting underrepresented students with summer jobs in green careers.

+If you’ve wondered about the practicality of space-based solar power, Mark Gongloff has done the math.

The most recent payload (for which we have disclosed pricing) that SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy system took to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), where spacecraft go to reach GEO, was the GOES-19 weather satellite in June 2024. That trip cost $152.5 million, or $30,500 per kilogram1. At that rate, Overview Energy’s space-solar system would cost more than $4,100 per megawatt-hour, roughly 45 times as much as solar and storage on the ground.

But let’s say Elon Musk, now 158 billion theoretical dollars richer, gets generous and prices a Falcon Heavy ride to GTO at $4,000 per kilogram.2 That still leaves space solar’s energy cost at $540 per megawatt-hour, about six times as expensive as earthbound solar and battery storage.

Meanwhile here on earth public school systems are learning to pair the solar panels on their roofs with other energy upgrades to dramatically reduce costs. Kaleigh Harrison describes one such project in Montgomery County, Maryland

The solar installations sit within a $23 million energy savings performance contract (ESPC) covering 25 schools. Rather than focusing only on generation, the program integrates multiple upgrades, including advanced energy management systems and LED lighting retrofits.

This combined approach reflects a shift in how public sector entities are tackling energy use. By addressing both demand and supply, districts can improve building performance while stabilizing energy expenses. MCPS estimates the broader initiative will deliver more than 5.9 million kWh in annual energy savings.

(By the way, this definitely beats building a school on an abandoned fracking site contaminated with radioactive waste, as Saul Elbein reports from Texas).

+Maybe hold off on your plans for a western mountain climbing expedition this summer. Jeva Lange reports that guides at places like Mt. Rainier are bracing for a very difficult season, after record low snowfalls and record high spring temperatures have left snowfields and glaciers crumbly and brittle.

Think of a mountain like a scoop of Rocky Road in an ice cream cone. Fresh out of the freezer, the scoop holds its shape because everything is frozen in place — but as it starts to melt, marshmallows and nuts begin to slough down the sides.

Except on a mountain, it’s not marshmallows and nuts but avalanches and rockfall. In addition to being a life-or-death hazard in the moment — and top-of-mind for the risk-averse concessioners guiding otherwise oblivious novice clients — the debris on a warming mountain can close routes to the peak, crowding the ones that remain. “When you have a bunch of people on a route, it doesn’t make things safer,” Zimmerman said. “It makes things more dangerous because people knock stuff onto each other, and because it slows things down.”

I’ve climbed Rainier twice—you go up in the middle of the night to minimize the time spent climbing down melting snowfields in the heat of the day. But the time may be coming when you need to ascend at night in the winter.

+Continuing with last week’s discussion of the disappointing performance by some state level Democrats, Kate Yoder brings news of shortsighted policy in Maryland, Rhode Island, and elsewhere where blue governors have decided to bleed energy efficiency programs to temporarily lower the price of electricity or gas. This is the ultimate in false economy.

Focusing on immediate savings misses the bigger picture, since it would hurt affordability in the long-term. An analysis from ACEEE found that the proposed legislation in Maryland would increase costs for the state’s electricity customers by a net $592 million.

“Unfortunately, cutting energy efficiency programs — it’s like trading in your car for one that gets worse gas mileage at a time when gas prices are going up, and it won’t do anything to address those real cost drivers that will only get worse,” Kevin Trombley at energy think tank CERES said. “Energy efficiency is one of the only options customers have to insulate themselves from the volatility coming from things like natural gas or an aging grid susceptible to extreme weather.”

+Two Emilys—Sanders, at ExxonKnews and Atkin at Heated—have grim accounts of the way our new, politicized Department of Justice has swooped in to try and stop discovery in a Minnesota case charging Exxon with consumer fraud. As Atkin puts it,

The DOJ’s complaint is an incredible piece of rage bait for anyone following these cases closely. It is, in essence, an exercise in the propagandistic practice of repeating something false over and over and over in the hopes that eventually, people will start to believe it.

The falsehood that the DOJ’s complaint is built on is that Minnesota’s lawsuit is a covert plot to set national energy policy. In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ claims Minnesota’s lawsuit is seeking to “regulate global greenhouse gas emissions,” which falls under federal authority, and therefore must be dismissed. I thought about listing all the times here, but I will spare you. You can just read the complaint.

What’s more important to sear into your brain is that this just… isn’t true. Remember when I told you what (Minnesota AG Keith) Ellison’s lawsuit is seeking? Reimbursement for climate-related costs, the return of profits tied to deception, a court-ordered public education campaign.

Meanwhile, from New Mexico, another lawsuit challenging Big Oil, this time to pay for the costs of abandoned wells. As Nicholas Gilmore reports,

The complaint centers around what are called “asset retirement obligations” in the energy industry. The ARO represents the legal and financial obligations to plug and remediate a well, which can involve sealing the well and various levels of costly remediation.

The 74-page lawsuit points to the 2021 sale of 670 “aging” and “low-producing” wells in Lea County from Exxon Mobil’s subsidiary XTO Holdings to Empire’s subsidiary Empire New Mexico. The lawsuit notes the companies’ financial records show a valuation of a little more than $6 million for the AROs of the wells, which are an average age of 63 years old.

Rogers and Horton cite state data, however, in their argument that a “conservative estimate” of the asset retirement obligations for the wells is actually almost $200 million. The discrepancy, they say, points to the companies’ intentions to skirt the ARO liability for the wells altogether.

+Andrew Moseman has gone inside the California “skunkworks” where Ford is trying to build its $30k EV. The building is a century old, originally used to churn out Model A’s. But now

EVDC represents a full embrace of the frictionless workplace: no corner offices, just open rows of computers amid a makeshift garage brimming with 3D printers, spools of wiring, and racks of gear. Coders are a short stroll from the visual designers tinkering with clay models. Electrical engineers are around the corner from the “lab car,” a rectangular steel frame meant to suggest the general shape of a vehicle, with a complete mockup of the future car’s electrical system strung along the skeleton so that workers can test any part of it. This is about process; the closest thing to the shape of a car is a wooden one with test car seats inside, set up in the fabrication shop. The shepherds of our tour met any question about the specifics of the forthcoming truck with a quick you’ll find out next year, though a prototype dressed up in that zebra camouflage just happened to sneak by as we moved between building.

+Is it a good idea to dam the Bering Strait to try and preserve the great currents of the Atlantic? Probably not, but as Raymond Zhong points out, it’s the kind of thing you start thinking about when you’re truly desperate

If the AMOC is strong, then closing the strait would cause less fresh water to flow out of the Arctic Ocean and into the Atlantic, they found. That would help keep the North Atlantic salty and the AMOC stable. But if the AMOC is already near collapse, then closing the strait would have the opposite effect, destabilizing the AMOC further. The timing, in other words, is key.

At the moment, though, scientists don’t know exactly how close the AMOC is to collapsing, said Aixue Hu, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Some projections suggest it could happen before the end of this century. But “the uncertainty is very, very large,” Dr. Hu said. That makes it hard to be sure whether damming the Bering Strait would help or hurt the AMOC, said Dr. Hu, who wasn’t involved in Mr. Soons’s study.

+In Australia, a push for a big tax on gas exporters and on windfall profits. In Canada, a call (from Galith Levy, proprietor of the Climate Prize) for much faster pathways to commercialize clean energy innovation. From Britain’s prestigious medical journal The Lancet a demand for a crackdown on fossil fuel propaganda. (Disinformation campaigns are life-threatening and pose a grave danger to both public health and the global climate. The tactics used mirror those used by the tobacco industry, which, for decades, spread doubt about the harmful effects of smoking.”)

I think you can sense a quickening of the global demand for action. The ever-falling price of clean energy, the ruinous insanity of the Iran war, the rising pace of climate disaster: we’re at the start of the next, decisive cycle in energy and climate politics. Stay tuned!

+Oh, and Disneyland is going to convert its kiddy car ride to EVs. As Pierce Sharpe reports:

The Anaheim theme park plans to replace the gasoline-powered cars on its classic Autopia attraction with fully electric vehicles — ending nearly 70 years of exhaust fumes in Tomorrowland as California regulators continue cracking down on emissions statewide

.

Many of the people who’ve been working for years on climate issues assembled this week in Santa Marta, Colombia for a conference on how to get off fossil fuels. Sponsored by the Colombians and the Dutch, it was an outgrowth of December’s unhappy COP negotiations in Brazil: the fifty or so nations that actually wanted to move decisively past coal, gas and oil scheduled a meeting of their own. By all accounts it was a kinder, gentler version of the regular climate talks, in part because fossil fuel lobbyists (who have become the largest “country” at the regular negotiations) were not welcome. The wonderful Irish diplomat Mary Robinson put it well: “COPs are more formal, negotiators have their lines and they will not cross them and it’s so different here,” she said, adding that participants “have felt more human together.”

By lucky accident, the gathering took on extra meaning because it coincided with Donald Trump’s absurd misadventure in Iran. All of a sudden there was a new reason, past the destruction of the planet, for getting off fossil fuel: gas is too damn expensive, assuming you can get it all. What we’ve done in the Strait of Hormuz is one of those accidents that changes history: as the head of the International Energy Agency, the venerable Fatih Birol, said last week:

“The vase is broken, the damage is done – it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.”

The pieces of that broken vase are scattered across the planet, especially in Asia and Africa, where fuel prices are soaring and fertilizer made with fossil fuel is suddenly either unavailable or ruinously expensive. As Reuters reported this week

Agricultural bodies, including the International Grains Council, are already cutting their forecasts for the next harvests. And the United Nations, which is trying to ​negotiate shipping access for fertiliser through the Gulf, has sounded ⁠the alarm over food security in developing nations.

In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, high fertiliser costs contributed to exacerbated hunger in poor, import-dependent countries, and analysts say regions like East Africa are again vulnerable.

Australia may offer an early indication of the impact on production of global staples.

In the bread-basket state of Western Australia, one industry group now expects the wheat planting area to drop by 14% ​as growers shift away from the fertiliser-intensive, low-margin grain.

But the good news, of course, is that these countries are rapidly putting together a new and sturdier vase, this time based on energy from the sun and wind that doesn’t need importing. The Santa Marta conference focused on the financing needed to make this switch work—a very real problem, but in the face of the desperation caused by events in the Mideast those who can are going ahead. As Wing Kuang reported, “Chinese EV manufacturers reported an 82.6 percent rise in month-on-month sales in March.” As the business pages of the India Times reported yesterday,

Increasing penetration of ⁠EVs, especially ⁠two- and three-wheelers, and rapid deployment of Battery Electric Solar Systems across Southeast Asia and South Asia is now viewed as guaranteed by those in the industry.

The optimism was palpable at this week's Asia Battery Raw Materials & Recycling Conference in Hanoi, where much of the discussion among delegates was more how the region was going to source sufficient raw materials to make batteries, rather than how to increase demand from current levels.

That all this counts as irony is the one delicious lining to all the pain and suffering. Donald Trump, purchased underling of the fossil fuel industry, has managed through his own colossal incompetence and ego to nip the hand that feeds his bank account. Yes, at the moment the industry is soaring: BP reported the kind of grotesque returns yesterday that should have any rational government reaching for a windfall profits tax.

Maja Darlington, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said the war had been “an entirely predictable disaster for everyone except the oil industry. BP’s profits are booming, with Trump’s bombs bringing billions for them and bigger bills for us.”

But those billions are in the here and now; in the slightly longer term the opposite is happening. Big Oil’s only real growth strategy has been exporting liquefied natural gas to Asia. Bloomberg checked in the other day on how that’s going

The near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the serious damage sustained by Qatar’s LNG export plant has sent prices higher and buyers scrambling for alternatives. Gas’s reputation as a reliable and affordable energy source has taken a serious hit, and plans for its speedy adoption in Asia’s developing nations have been derailed, with potentially long-lasting consequences.

“Every day this is extended, prices elevate, the market tightens and demand destruction happens,” said Masanori Odaka, an analyst at Rystad Energy. “The longer this lasts, the more structural it becomes.”

Bloomberg News spoke to more than two dozen executives, traders and analysts across Asia, who painted a picture of a region that had been thought of as the future of LNG, but is now rapidly losing faith in the super-chilled fuel. Most requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to media.

Importers in India and Bangladesh are already rethinking whether to keep the fuel as a center piece in future strategies. Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines that were expected to become large growth markets, are looking alternatives. A planned gas power project in Vietnam is looking to switch to wind and solar plus batteries. In Thailand policymakers are pushing for more renewables.

This is an appropriate reaction. Cheap renewable energy had already begun to fuel the remarkable energy transition I’ve been chronicling over the last four years in these pages. Now it’s been supercharged by events, and responsible leaders around the world are drawing the obvious conclusions. As Selwin Hart, the UN’s envoy to the Santa Marta talks, put it in his address to the gathering:

“Renewables offer something fossil fuels never did: stability and sovereignty. There are no embargoes, price shocks or tariffs.”

But that’s not been the reaction, of course, in this country, where energy policy just keeps getting stupider. Read, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterful takedown of EPA commissioner Lee Zeldin

In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters…The E.P.A. has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, as pro-coal.

But here’s what’s astonishing. The person that Zeldin very nearly beat for governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has been embarked on an environmental demolition project of her own. At the precise moment that gas prices are soaring, and as a new and supercharged El Niño brings climate concerns back to the center of public consciousness, Hochul is doing her very best to sink New York’s landmark climate law and stick the Empire State with more expensive gas. She’s not showing the policy-making chops of her peers in far poorer places like Pakistan or Bangladesh.

The background here is long, and like all things in New York politics opaque. Suffice it to say that New Yorkers passed a reasonably ambitious climate law, and that the governor has not done much to enact it. If you want some background, the redoubtable David Roberts interviewed the equally redoubtable Pete Sikora, who explains

The governor just took everything that the Climate Action Council came up with—her own appointees—and ignored it. That’s the capsule summary. They didn’t do the policies, they didn’t do the regulations, they didn’t do the things that would have implemented the law. They did a few things here and there, but by and large, nothing that would have implemented the law correctly was done. Little bits and pieces. For example, the state passed ending oil and gas in all new construction. That’s fantastic. That’s really good.

As you pointed out, distributed solar is a real bright spot. The numbers are moving there. It’s good. The CHPE project is about to connect. That’s a big transmission project from Canadian hydropower to New York City. Very cool too. There’s good things happening. But by and large, the long list of things in the climate plan was not done—90% of it not done. The centerpiece was Cap and Invest. The governor pulled that back at the last second the same way she did on congestion pricing. It’s in this weird limbo where it’s paused now.

If you want a comprehensive list of the opportunities she’s missed, try here. Most political pros I’ve talked to—and I talked to some more this week because I was in New York this week to lobby on the state’s solar laws—seem baffled by what Hochul’s up to. She’s not in a tough election fight—after Trump pushed Elise Stefanik out of the GOP primary she faces only a Zeldin-lite Long Island pol, and in a year when an onion bialy could win in blue New York. My guess is that she’s about a year behind on her talking points; in the wake of Kamala Harris’s loss, a certain kind of moderate Dem decided that “affordability” was the new watchword and brought the idea that talking about climate was a mistake. (Not everyone went along—J.B. Pritzker in Illinois, for instance, has kept up the state’s clean energy momentum).

In New York’s case this may have been magnified by the sudden rise of Zohran Mamdani, who talked about affordability—but with a particular set of policies attached to it that made it more than rhetorical. For Hochul, an all-out push for wind and solar and batteries would have been wise since they are in fact affordable, but it was easier to go with the fracked gas lobby. So she’s fast-tracking new pipelines—in essence building the very infrastructure that New Yorkers rejected when they shut down fracking in the state. It’s all a tragic muddle, benefiting only Big Oil. Indeed, as Colin Kinniburgh reported last month,

A national industry group, led by some of the country’s largest pipeline builders and a slew of other gas interests, has recently entered the fray, tapping former state politicians to help advance Gov. Kathy Hochul’s “all of the above” energy strategy. Top of their agenda: pressing pause on the state’s climate targets.

New Yorkers can do a couple of things. One is press their state legislators to resist Hochul’s gutting of the climate law. The other is to lobby those same legislators to pass the ASAP and SUNNY laws, which would at least speed up solar permitting and allow balcony solar in the state.

And all of us can do a better job of demanding real action from our blue state leaders. Because this drift is not confined to New York—in Hawaii, for instance, Democratic governor Josh Green has called for a huge new liquefied natural gas project to supply the state’s electricity, ignoring the fact that the Aloha State is bathed in sunlight and washed by the steady trade winds that make it so delightful. Again, this is exactly the opposite tack that leaders across the rest of the world are taking, and in both states it will saddle residents with gas projects for decades to come.

I wrote about “climate-hushing” last week, and decisions like this are the inevitable result—on purely political grounds alone they surrender the high ground on what will be the most important issue of our century. And they surrender the gift that cheap renewables provide to both planet and consumer. They are exactly the opposite of what scientists told the Santa Marta conference was required—an end to new fossil fuel expansion. The next time a climate disaster strikes these states their governors will mouth the usual pieties, but they won’t mean much.

Share

In other energy and climate news:

+Extreme heat is threatening the global agriculture system, according to a new report jointly produced by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Meteorological Organization. As Fiona Harvey reports,

Farmers could find it impossible to work safely for as many as 250 days of the year – more than two-thirds of the time – in already hot regions including much of India and south Asia, tropical sub-Saharan Africa and swathes of Central and South America.

Livestock are already experiencing an increase in mortality rates, as heat stress begins for common species at about 25C. Extreme heat reduces yields from dairy cows and cuts the fat and protein content of milk. Pigs and chickens are unable to sweat and, as temperatures rise, face digestive tract breakdowns, organ failure and cardiovascular shock.

Yields begin to decline at temperatures above 30C for most agricultural crops, with damage including weakened cell walls and the production of toxins. The yields of maize in some areas have declined by about 10%. Wheat has fallen by nearly as much, and is projected to decline further as temperatures rise to more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

Meanwhile, the FT has a comprehensive report on the ways that the cattle industry is “eating its own tail.” As Stephanie Walton writes

The US cattle and beef industry is in a bad way. The megadrought currently plaguing the western states has been going on for 22 years, with no signs of abating. The quality of grazing land has declined, raising feed costs and driving the cattle herd to its lowest numbers since 1951. Meatpackers are paying high prices for live cattle, which would normally cause ranchers to increase herd sizes — but that’s not happening. Costs are passed on to consumers, but meatpacking plants are also closing…

We are in this situation for two reasons: rising temperatures and groundwater depletion. Rising temperatures are the result of greenhouse gas emissions — a not insubstantial amount of which comes from cattle. Methane emitted from cattle has roughly 80 times the warming potential of CO₂ over a 20-year period.

+Many thanks to Congressmen Jamie Raskin and Jared Huffman for pushing back hard on the Trump deal to send a billion dollars in taxpayer money to buy back offshore wind leases. They’ve openen an investigation into the company in question, Total Energies, as Emily Pontecorvo reports:

“We’re going to get every document, every email, every last receipt on this deal, and every person who had a hand in this is going to answer for it,” Huffman said in a press release. “What I have to say to TotalEnergies is this: Consider yourself on notice, we’re coming for you.”

The move comes just a day after the Trump administration announced two additional identical settlements resulting in the cancellation of two more offshore wind leases.

+Just noting for the record: Energy Secretary Chris Wright said last week in Congressional testimony that he was “pretty confident coal will lead the world in global electricity production when I die." Also last week: new global data shows that renewables had overtaken coal to become the largest source of electricity production.

+Project Drawdown has been investigating a question I know is on your minds: which kind of chocolate is worse for the atmosphere? It is, of course, complicated—cacao usually leads to deforestation. But the best answer is fairly clear.

Rather than cutting down trees to plant cacao, growers can plant the crop in the shaded understory of forests—a practice known as agroforestry. Planting cacao and other trees on degraded croplands can improve carbon sequestration while improving local incomes and food security. In Ecuador, for example, the Third Millenium Alliance is paying farmers to protect existing cloud forests and restore adjacent forests with native trees including cacao.

+The remarkable organizer Luisa Neubauer wrote last week from Germany to report that they’d had much bigger than expected turnout for protests demanding faster climate action from the government. Agence France Presse covered the demonstrations, quoting Neubauer:

“I’m surprised that the federal government thinks it can get away with its lame excuses and its obstruction of the energy transition,” she said. “No one here is buying that.”

The organisers, who included groups like Greenpeace and WWF, said about 24,000 people demonstrated in Berlin, 30,000 in Cologne, 15,000 in Hamburg and 12,000 in Munich.

+The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has a fascinating story about the links between UK pension funds and American fossil fuel projects.

Sixty local government pension funds have invested a total of £8bn into funds paying for the rapid construction of gas infrastructure on the Gulf Coast of the US. Residents say these terminals are already causing health problems in their communities. Experts say they represent one of the biggest threats to the future of the planet.

Over 7 million school staff, civil servants and other public sector workers either save with, or receive their pension from, local government pension schemes. Our revelations have sparked concerns among local councillors, who have urged fund managers to divest from fossil fuels.

While the companies behind these projects are enjoying a boost from the war in Iran, they could tumble in value as the world switches to renewable forms of energy. Councillor Andrew Scopes, who sits on an advisory panel for West Yorkshire Pension Fund, said: “We will still be paying benefits out in 60 years’ time. We need to be looking beyond the possible short-term gains, at the long-term risk.”

In sweeter news from the UK, researchers are finding that new solar farms are attracting lots of birds. As Warren van der Sandt writes:

Where diesel-chugging tractors once dominated, solar arrays now stand sentinel. Many people in the region have raised concerns about this shift. They naturally fear for the future of their rural and agricultural heritage.

New data has unmasked a startling silver lining: these industrial sites are becoming accidental havens. Birds are now flocking to solar panel arrays in the English countryside. And a few unexpected visitors have been found.

+New research from Brazil confirms that women are often the most at risk in extreme weather events

“The burden of domestic and care functions – looking after children, elderly relatives and people with disabilities – places women in a position of additional vulnerability during forced displacements,” Silvia Sander, protection officer at the UN High Commission on Refugees, says.

“This multiple responsibility means women tend to prioritise the safety of others, which can delay their own escape and increase exposure to risks.”

The pattern repeats with brutal consistency, says the expert. “Factors such as poverty, race, informal work and single motherhood interact with the effects of climate change and create layers of interconnected vulnerability,” Sander says.

+Lovely news from the Amazon, where solar projects are replacing expensive, dirty and noisy diesel generators in thousands of small settlements. As Fabiano Maisonnave writes:

“We used to depend on diesel and lamps,” said Waldemir da Silva, a leader in the Três Unidos Indigenous community of about 40 families at the mouth of the Cuieiras River, located about 45 miles (72 kilometers) from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, and accessible only by boat. “Today we have electricity 24 hours a day, without noise or smoke.”

Meanwhile, Sam Matey-Costa, reporting this week from Africa, describes a battery factory emerging in Uganda. To get a sense of what those batteries might be used for, check out his remarkable account of the Zipline drone program that brings lifesaving medicines instantly to every corner of Rwanda

First, we went to “mission control,” a room of screens and maps. One huge wall map showed all flight routes from this base, and one screen showed live tracking of all the drones currently in the air. This one Zipline base sends drones to over 1,000 health center drop points, hospitals and clinics across the western half of Rwanda. Their longest regularly supply flight is to Mibilizi, near the Congolese border. Before Zipline, it had taken seven to eight hours for someone to drive to Mibilizi to resupply their medical center. (And then, of course, that person had to drive seven to eight hours back). Now, Zipline drones have cut resupply time to Mibilizi, from order to delivery, to just 45 minutes. Less for everywhere else.

+About half of American children live in places getting failing grades for air pollution.

“Clean air is not something we can take for granted. It takes work,” Harold Wimmer, the American Lung Association’s president, said in announcing the latest findings. “For decades, people in the U.S. have breathed cleaner air thanks to the Clean Air Act. Unfortunately, that progress is now at risk due to extreme heat and wildfires, fueled by climate change, and policy changes that are making the problem worse.”

+From Hayley Smith, an excellent account of the absurd $400 million greenwashing deal between Saudi Aramco and FIFA for sponsorship of the soccer World Cup.

The soccer organization has touted its sustainability goals — including reaching net-zero emissions by 2040. But some experts say its deal with Aramco compromises that position. The oil company consistently ranks among the top greenhouse gas emitters in the world, responsible for 4.28% of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2024, more than any other company, according to the independent Carbon Majors database. (2025 data were not yet available).

“Having Saudi Aramco as a major worldwide sponsor of this FIFA World Cup completely undermines any credibility FIFA has, or could have had, around sustainability claims,” said Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto.

If this annoys you, join in the ongoing efforts against sportswashing—protests are planned for all the World Cup venues, and you can sign up here

Tanya Aldred has a fine account of how sports can help in the climate fight. And I’ll note that later this month I’ll get to both speak at the half of the home opener for the Vermont Green Football Club (our local very socially conscious soccer team that also happens to be national champion) and interview the recently retired xc ski great Jessie Diggins onstage at a big conference sponsored by Outside magazine in Denver. Diggins is the prototype athlete activist, working hard with the estimable Protect Our Winters group to argue for climate action.

+If you find yourself in New Haven, check out the new Rachel Carson exhibit at the Beinecke Library

Meanwhile, from the great Brown University researcher Timmons Roberts and colleagues, an important new book on the sprawling global effort of the fossil fuel industry to disrupt climate action. This is a truly important new global assessment:

People burning fossil fuels causes climate change, a scientific fact that has been clear for decades. And climate policy is broadly popular, with as many as 89% of people around the world wanting more climate action from their leaders. So why haven’t those leaders taken appropriate action? Because at every step, the fossil fuel, agriculture, and other high-carbon industries and their enablers have made it “exponentially more difficult” to enact policies to keep the climate, and the public, safe

+Rivian’s EV factory in Illinois will run on…recycled EV batteries. Patrick George reports:

In the Rivian project, the batteries will come from either its test vehicles or from vehicles that have viable batteries but can no longer drive. Those batteries get sent off to Redwood, which integrates them into power storage units.

Both companies declined to specify the cost of this project. The setup is expected to initially provide 10 megawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to about 1,000 home-energy battery storage units linked together, Redwood’s Straubel said.

“These batteries are already built,” he said. “We need to integrate them and connect them together, but that can happen quite fast. They don’t have to get imported from some other place.”

+And now get out to your local May Day demonstration!

I woke up this Earth Day morning in Santa Barbara, California—which is appropriate, since the offshore oil spill here in 1969 was one of the galvanizing events for the first Earth Day 56 years ago. People got mad, they squawked, and government began to listen. We should never forget what they accomplished—in 18 months Congress had adopted the suite of laws (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, EPA, etc) that the Trump administration is still trying to gut. And within five years those laws had begun to work. The air is far cleaner than it was, thanks to them. You can swim in far more lakes and rivers, thanks to them. Because they got loud.

We face a more complicated moment today, of course. The ecological crisis of our time is not caused by something going wrong—an engine spewing small amounts of carbon monoxide into the air—and not easily fixed by adding a catalytic converter to the tailpipe. Global warming is the result of things going as they’re supposed to: a “clean-burning” engine emits just water vapor, and lots and lots and lots of carbon dioxide. But that co2 traps heat, and is now warming the planet disastrously. To fix it we have to replace an energy system that runs on fossil fuels with another that runs primarily on the sun. And we have to do it fast.

I flew here yesterday, and for my carbon sins got a clear-sky view of pretty much the entire western United States. It was, as always, majestic—to fly above the Grand Canyon is to glimpse deep time. But it was also almost unbelievably sad. I’ve been telling you that this was the hottest winter, by far, in the history of the West. But to see it is different. I flew over peaks where I’ve glissaded down snowfields in June and there was not an inch of snow to be seen. Lake Mead from above looked like a bathtub with the plug open. Sere brown and tawny withered gold as far as you could see, and with it the scary promise of what will come this summer, the smoke that will rise and the flames that will burn orange against the night.

Temperatures are higher than they’ve ever been, even before El Niño breaks above our heads this summer. And yet we’re talking very little about climate change in our national conversation. There are many reasons for that—the most obvious is that the constant psychic assault from the president leaves so little room to think about anything else. But there’s also been a concerted effort among Democrats and some of their environmental allies to stay away from the topic on the grounds that it will distract from or undercut messages about “affordability” which are supposed to be the ticket to electoral success in the fall.

I’m committed to that electoral success—my calendar for the months ahead is mostly red districts, where Third Act is busy trying to move the needle with older voters. And I understand the concerns, but I think they’re basically wrong, and that talking straightforwardly about the climate crisis is both politically useful, and an excellent way to take on affordability. And I also think that human beings just need to be discussing the single biggest thing happening on planet earth, especially since we’re causing it.

The so-called “climate hushing” among Democrats is a product of political consultants looking at polling data. As Claire Barber explained in an excellent essay last month

The Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank run by veteran Democratic political strategist Adam Jentleson that opened its doors in 2025, made waves with its focus on shifting Democratic messaging away from progressive causes, like climate and LGBTQ issues. The think tank is pointed in its stance on climate messaging. A report released in the fall reads, “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”

“While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them,” the report said. Similar to the American Mind Survey, Searchlight found that a majority of Americans believe that climate change is a problem, but rank it below other key issues, like affordability. Searchlight also found high partisan (Democratic) association with the terms “climate” and “climate change” and suggested jettisoning mentions of both altogether.

The phenomenon really dates, I think, from the 2024 presidential campaign, and Kamala Harris’s abbreviated run for the White House. Climate campaigners were perfectly happy to shut up during that run for an obvious reason: Joe Biden had given them, in the Inflation Reduction Act, most of what DC could provide: a massive infusion of funds for the energy transition we require. The job was to pull Harris across the finish line so that her administration could continue the work well underway with the IRA. We failed at that: her message, on the politics of joy and the dangers of Trump ran aground on frustrations with inflation. Climate played no discernible part in the election; I’m not sure any issue played a part in the election, save a kind of general kvetchy grumpiness, and a sense that normal people were being squeezed.

In the wake of their defeat, Democrats have seized on “bread and butter issues,” and left supposed culture war clashes behind. That’s come at a real cost. Corporations, feeling only pressure from the right, have backslid dramatically on their climate commitments. (The big tech guys, who just a couple of years ago were noisily pledging they’d go net zero, are currently planning gas-fired data centers that Wired reports today will produce more emissions than mid-sized European countries). And journalists are, not surprisingly, wandering away from the whole area: the wonderful Amy Westervelt yesterday described a dour meeting of environmental reporters where, among other things, she learned that not just the Washington Post but also Reuters was laying off its climate desk.

Meanwhile, funders of climate journalism are largely folding, too, opting to back comms projects instead or simply stay away from anything as "controversial" as climate and journalism altogether. The cowardice is breathtaking.

As the media watchdogs at FAIR make clear, this decline in coverage is very real

Our research has found that online news coverage of climate change has been trending down. A search of the term “climate change” in Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 248 online outlets, found that there was almost 32% less climate coverage in 2025 than 2024.

This trend is similar in TV news. A recent Media Matters (3/4/26) study found that climate coverage on major US commercial broadcast TV networks was down 35% in 2025.

In fact, they even put the decline on a chart. Powerpoint time!

What’s interesting about all this is that it’s not being driven by some change in the basic underlying politics of climate. New polling data makes clear that Americans are as concerned about climate change as they ever have been. Gallup last week reported that

Americans’ concern about global warming or climate change remains elevated compared with what it had been prior to 2017. At least four in 10 U.S. adults have expressed “a great deal” of concern about the matter throughout the past decade (except for a 39% reading in 2023). Between 2009 and 2016, worry was typically in the low-to-mid 30% range but dropped to as low as 25% in 2011.

Currently, 44% of U.S. adults worry a great deal about global warming or climate change, among the highest in the full trend since 1989, along with 46% measured in 2020 and 45% in 2017.

And another series of Earth Day polls made the numbers even clearer. Americans, in increasing numbers, think that our environment is getting worse, and that government should be doing much more about it. Gallup again:

Americans’ assessments of the environment are particularly bleak ahead of Earth Day, as a record-low 35% offer a positive rating of the environment’s quality and two-thirds say it is worsening.

More than three in five U.S. adults, 63%, think the government is not doing enough to protect the environment, and most believe environmental protection should be prioritized over economic growth (58%) and development of U.S. energy sources (57%).

The key data point here, for political thinkers, is that the increase in worry about the environment is being driven by independent voters, precisely the people who will determine how the midterms go.

And it doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s not as if the president or his oil-soaked cabinet has made some convincing new case about the climate. He just blusters on about the “green new scam” and insists, as he did last week, that the “planet is cooling.” By this point, Americans have decided he’s an idiot—his approval ratings are now droppinginto the mid and even low 30s. If they think he’s got tariffs wrong, and the war wrong, and immigration wrong, and pretty much everything else wrong, why would they think he had the science of climate right?

So, especially as the climate disasters of this hot summer start to mount, and as the El Niño starts to scare people anew, I’d spend some time if I were campaigning making fun of the president on this score. I’d show that clip of him insisting the planet is cooling. It makes Republicans, who have supported him down the line in Congress on energy issues, look like idiots too.

But of course I’d couple it with a full-on assault about affordability, leaning not into the price of eggs, but the price of gas, utilities, and insurance. The first is tied to the war, but they are all three also about the folly of continuing to rely on our current energy system. All you have to say is: a quick move to clean energy drives down prices. If I were preparing ads for congresspeople, I’d definitely have one about how a solarized Australia will, in June, start providing electricity free for three hours every afternoon to all its citizens. Talk about affordability!

One problem with keeping quiet about climate is that it leads people to think that they’re alone in their fears. Here’s an interesting survey from last month fronm the folks at EcoAmerica.

Most Americans are concerned about climate change, but they don’t think most others share that concern. That quiet misunderstanding is one of the biggest barriers to climate action in the United States… The findings point to a striking paradox: while many Americans trust the information they encounter and are concerned about climate change, they believe others are far less concerned and less able to recognize accurate information.

I think some politicians are starting to recognize the possibilities here. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, venerable campaigner for climate action (with a particular focus on insurance) this winter tweeted out a memorable thread

There’s a thing out there called a “climate husher.” Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called “climate hushers” – people who think Dems should stop talking about climate.

In an electorate focused on costs, 65% say climate change is raising their costs. Climate-driven hikes in home insurance are the top economic issue in many places. By 74-10, voters want companies to pay for the harm their pollution causes.

{Poll-chasing analysts] ignore the ‘leadership lack loop.’ When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters. In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.

Last, they ignore that this is a fight in which there are real and dangerous villains. Our climate peril didn’t “happen,” it was done — by fraud and corruption.

The fossil fuel climate denial fraud operation and the fossil fuel dark money corruption operation are villainous. It’s evil stuff. Villains need to be fought. Plus, it’s a better story with villains. And true.

I’m pretty sure he’s right. Look, at Third Act we too are focusing a lot of our messaging on the Republican attack on democracy. But we can talk about a couple of things at once. And you can only have a working democracy on a working planet.

Happy Earth Day, all!

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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.”

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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

Share

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.

Share

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.”

Share

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.

Share

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.