A different kind of leader gives a different kind of speech

An afternoon with the Pope

A day after Donald Trump’s truly disgusting and dangerous address to “my generals” (and War Guy Pete Hegseth’s declaration that the Pentagon was no longer interested in that ‘climate shit’), I get to bring you news from Castel Gandolfo outside Rome of a very different speech from a very different man—one with no divisions at his command, but a certain kind of power all the same, which he seems to be trying to exercise for the general good,

If you’d told me 20 years ago that the Roman Catholic Church would emerge as perhaps the most progressive large global institution, I would have giggled. And I am well aware of the Church’s myriad defects (though feel free to enumerate them further in the comments section below; you won’t offend me, a sometime Methodist). But beginning with Francis’s noble gestures and continuing with his mighty encyclical Laudato Si—a thorough and scathing critique of modernity, and probably the most important document of this millennium so far—the Vatican has been out in front in many ways.

And the sense I got from listening to the Pope speak this afternoon is that that will continue. I haven’t checked the quotes that follow against a transcript, because one isn’t available yet—the talk just ended about ten minutes ago. But I’ll fix any mistakes once it’s online; I wanted to give you all a sense of his address right away, in part because it made me feel better in this miserable week.

The scene was Castel Gandolfo, the longtime summer home of the pontiffs, which Francis opened to the public (truly beautiful gardens filled with stone pines—but then, every tree in Italy seems to have been signed up for special scenic-beauty training). This year marks the tenth anniversary of Laudato Si, and many climate leaders from around the world had assembled for a conference called Raising Hope to see if Francis’s successor would continue his legacy. (I’ll get to talk tomorrow, but nothing you haven’t already read). At a meeting at the Irish ambassador’s house last night I ran into Kumi Naidoo (the former head of Greenpeace and one of the most unstoppable activists in the world), former Irish president Mary Robinson who has made climate a crusade into her ninth decade), Svitlana Romanko (Ukrainian heroine leading the fight against Russia’s gas and oil exports), and Marina Silva (Brazil’s environment minister, and a hero herself). Many more were on hand for today’s address, the significance of which the New York Times explained in an excellent curtain-raiser yesterday.

Anyway, a large auditorium was filled to bursting with Catholic environmentalists—a healthy sprinkling of red-capped cardinals in the first row. After some warm up from a merry MC (“cheer if you’re from South America”) and some remarks in a mellifluous Irish accent from the veteran Catholic organizer Lorna Gold and some random piano stylings from “Emmy award-winning pianist Mark Chait” and an upbeat pop number from the Italian all-woman Christian pop group Gen Verde and an icebreaker where you shared with your neighbor your favorite element of creation (“it can be a mineral”) and a reminder that it is the 800th anniversary of St. Francis’s Canticle of Creation and a singalong with someone who played Whitney Houston in a movie and then the ladies of Gen Verde again (“we’re a million voices singing as one: We choose peace”—man would Pete Hegseth hate all this) and the Pacific Artists for Climate Justice who sang a truly angelic rendition of This is Our Home (“Oceans are rising…houses slowly slipping away”) and then a hymn from Michelle McManus, the Scot who won Season 2 of Pop Idol—and then there he was! No stony-faced generals here—an absolutely ebullient audience as he walked down the aisle to a huge, reverberating cheer of “Papa Leone.”

Before Leo actually spoke, the magnificent Filipino climate activist Yeb Sano—his life changed in 2014 when he fasted for two weeks at the UN climate conference after Typhoon Haiyan devastated his home—offered an introduction focused on the “twin crises” that motivated the original encyclical: “The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” We gather here, he said, to answer a question: “how do we dare raise hope” in the face of this crisis. “Our answer is this: we do it together.”

He introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger, who remains a quite large man, and who wasted no time getting to his point: “The Catholic church has 1.4 billion members. 1.4 billion Catholics out there. Four hundred thousand priests, six hundred thousand nuns, two hundred thousand churches. Think about that—that power. To be involved in our movement to…terminate pollution.” He called the pope an “action hero”—”as soon as he became pope he ordered the Vatican to put solar panels on top of the buildings. This will be the first state to be carbon neutral.” Truth be told, Schwarzenegger was mostly unimpressive—he said not to worry about the Trump administration, which makes sense since he’s leading the Republican effort to block California’s redistricting and help save Mike Johnson’s hold on the House. Also, you can only say “terminate pollution” six or seven times before the joke gets a little old. Anyway, he was a B-lister in this room

The star sat in an armchair chair in the middle of the stage—he was dressed entirely in white , and when he started talking he sounded like…your uncle from Illinois. Not an orator, exactly: “if there’s an action hero with us this afternoon, it’s all of you!” But a firm and strong voice—a midwestern voice, calm and assured. He opened with a salute to the encyclical whose anniversary he was honoring: it had “greatly inspired the Catholic church and many people of goodwill…Let us give thanks to our father in Heaven for this gift we have inherited from Pope Francis.”

He said: “the challenges it identified are in fact even more relevant today than they were ten years ago,” and it is time to “transition from understanding the encyclical to putting it into practice,” to prove it was “no mere passing trend.” It was impossible not to hear this as a challenge to, first and foremost, the American administration. (Leo obviously keeps tabs on American politics—just yesterday he described the meeting with the generals as “concerning, because it shows, every time, an increase of tension. This wording, like going from minister of defense to minister of war. Let’s hope it’s just a figure of speech,” and then decried “the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States.”) The pope quoted Francis again: “Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident signs of climate change.” But it was time, he insisted, to move “from collecting to data to caring, transforming both personal and communal lifestyles.” For a believer, he said, “this conversion is no different from the one that orients us toward a loving God.” No one can call themselves “a disciple of Jesus Christ without sharing his orientation towards Creation.”

He insisted progress would come, as his predecessor had said, “not from individual efforts alone, but above all from major political decisions on the national and international level,” and in the most explicitly political section of his talk Leo called for putting “pressure on governments to implement more rigorous regulations, procedures, and controls” because “only then is it possible to mitigate the damage done to the environment.” Read this, I think, as a reaction to EPA secretary Lee Zeldin, and his grubby March announcement of the “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” His purpose, Zeldin smirked, was to “drive a stake through the heart of the climate change religion,” which has become the go-to phrase for the collection of grifting mediocrities now making American energy policy. Today, the guy who’s got more claim than anyone else on earth to actually being in charge of religion told him in the kindest possible most pontifical way that he’s out of line.

That won’t move the Trump White House, of course. And I don’t think Leo will be another Francis—it doesn’t seem in his nature, that brash politics of gesture, or the sweeping and sharp rhetoric of Laudato Si (“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”) But that’s fine—his predecessor exploded some serious dynamite, and now Leo gets to dig out the debris and build the tunnel. My sense of the Catholic church is that it is slow to action, but that once it starts to move it—rather like the implacably marching glaciers of our tough moment—will keep moving. Laudato Si, Leo carefully noted, has inspired schools, dioceses, academic programs, and international dialogue.

“Its impact,” he said, “has extended to summits, inter-religious initiatives, economic and business circles, as well as theological and bioethical studies.” Above all, he noted that Francis’s phrase “care for our common home” has become a standard usage, employed “in academic work and public discourse across peoples and continents.”

In a world where the Trump administration is working as hard as it possibly can to upend the hard-won world consensus on climate change—where the president told Europeans to shut down their windmills, and where his emissaries insisted last month that the Paris agreement was “silly”—the Pope’s speech today was a sign that outside our borders work continues more or less as usual. The crisis grows deeper, but so does the response. He ended by offering the hope that at the global climate conference in Belem next month—which the U.S., of course, is pledged to boycott—that the governments who do come will listen to “the Earth and the poor, families, indigenous peoples, involuntary migrants and believers throughout the world.”

Then more music—the world premiere of a new song. And a blessing over a font of waters and glacial ice gathered from around the planet. And a roar of affection from the crowd. The room was, just in its general happiness, a rebuke of its own to Trump’s pathetic narcissism yestery.

“I have never walked into a room so silent before. This is very -- oh, don’t laugh -- don’t laugh. You’re not allowed to do that. You know what, just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud, and if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want.”

And that’s from a crowd that literally works for him. The Pope’s got no battleships. (Trump again: “It’s something we’re actually considering, the concept of battleship, nice six-inch side, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. Starts melting as the missile’s about two miles away.”) But that doesn’t mean the Pope is going to lose—the fight’s not over yet, however much Trump would like you to think so.

In other energy and climate news:

+The White House is devoting $625 million of our money, and 13 million acres of our land, to the project of reviving the coal industry. This is the dumbest possible policy, except it’s not a policy at all, just a payoff. There are fewer coal miners in this country than there are students at the main campus of the University of Illinois; it provides 15% of our power, down from 50% at the turn of the century; its elimination has been the only real success in the American fight against climate change (though too much of that was simply replaced with fracked gas, substituting methane for co2.). As Dharna Noor reports:

“The Trump administration is hell-bent on supporting the oldest, dirtiest energy source. It’s handing our hard-earned tax dollars over to the owners of coal plants that cost more to run than new, clean energy,” said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the national environmental non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is a colossal waste of our money at a time when the federal government should be spurring along the new energy sources that can power the AI boom and help bring down electricity bills for struggling families.”

The moves have sparked outrage from environmental advocates who note that coal pollution has been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the past two decades. One study estimated that emissions from coal costs Americans $13-$26bn a year in additional ER visits, strokes and cardiac events, and a greater prevalence and severity of childhood asthma events.

I will add that the 13 million acres in question would supply enough land for about four-fifths of the panels we need for solar power’s contribution to a net-zero America.

Oh, and the president’s Energy Secretary thinks that opposition to coal comes from the ‘chardonnay set.’ As Jamelle Bouie pointed out, “there are almost certainly more people — more blue collar laborers, specifically — involved in the cultivation and production of chardonnay grapes and wine than in coal.”

+Given the relentless attack on renewable energy from the White House, Sammy Roth argues powerfully that the politically wimpy solar and wind energy trade groups need to actually respond with some real force

When the Trump administration said last month it was making it harder for solar and wind projects to qualify for federal tax credits, for instance, Abigail Ross Hopper — president of the Solar Energy Industries Assn. — urged the Trump administration to “stop the political games, stop punishing businesses, and get serious about how to actually build the power we need right now to meet demand and stay competitive.”

Similarly, when federal officials halted work on Revolution Wind, American Clean Power Assn. Chief Executive Jason Grumet called it “a broken promise to the communities, workers, consumers, and businesses counting on this project.”

“Taking jobs away from American families while raising their energy bills is not leadership,” Grumet said.

Underlying both missives — and the industry’s entire playbook, so far as I’ve seen — is the assumption that clean energy companies are dealing with a normal, good-faith government. That Trump and company aren’t just trying to own the libs and line the pockets of campaign fundraisers. That they truly care about “energy dominance.”

It’s time for solar and wind executives to stop pleading with MAGA Republicans and start telling Americans the real story. That clean energy is cheaper, healthier and just as reliable as fossil fuels. That China is dominating the renewable energy arms race, and we badly need to catch up. That we don’t need coal, and we won’t always need oil and gas, and “energy dominance” is a lie meant to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

+Lovely update from NPR on the ongoing solar revolution in Pakistan.

The speed of solar adoption in Pakistan has been unprecedented, says Jan Rosenow, leader of the energy program at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The scale of solar being deployed in such a short period of time has not been seen, I think, anywhere ever before.”

This became apparent last year, when solar imports to Pakistan more than tripled from just one year earlier, approaching $2.1 billion, according to data from Renewables First, an energy and environment think tank in Islamabad. The boom looks set to continue, since Pakistan has already imported 80% of last year’s milestone amount during the first nine months of 2025.

+It’s pretty clear by this point that getting the administration of New York governor Kathy Hochul to do anything useful on clean energy requires unremitting pressure. Here’s a letter that the New York State congressional delegation sent to the state’s Power Authority reminding them in the nicest possible way that they’re supposed to be putting up 15 gigawatts of clean power by 2030. And here’s a petition you could sign asking New York to increase its solar goal.

The Albany Times-Union sums it up nicely

While the president of the United States talked about the “climate hoax,” United Nations leaders called for fast-tracking climate action on all fronts if we are to avert critical tipping points in the climate system. Yet since the release of New York’s Climate Action Council Scoping Plan three years ago, the state has passed only three major climate bills. This year, not one major climate bill was passed in the state Assembly.

This incrementalism in funding and implementing our landmark Climate Law only brings us closer to those catastrophic tipping points. Now, when New York most needs determined leadership on climate and energy policy, the draft 2025 state energy plan is a testament to the state’s failure to meet the moment.

+A lithium mine in Australia—located far from the grid—is using 81 percent renewable energy to power its operations. And it’s owned by coal baron Gina Rinehart, perhaps the most anti-clean-energy tycoon on the planet.

“Consistently, we are delivering between 79 and 82 per cent renewable power into our operations,” CEO Tony Ottaviano told analysts in a conference call on Thursday. “There are times where we run solely on renewable power for a day or so.”

Rinehart has campaigned against renewables and longer term net zero targets, which she has described as a “magic pudding” and unobtainable. She has previously described solar panels as an “eyesore”,

+Solar panels are emerging as an effective tool in China’s ongoing efforts to slow or stop the expansion of the Gobi desert. As Lewis Jackson reports,

“All of the panels above are like mini umbrellas,” Liu said during a tour of the facility organised by the Chinese government. “They are casting shadows on the plants and soil so there will be less evaporation of moisture.”

Roughly a quarter of China is classified as “desertified” and campaigns to contain and reclaim the sands stretch back to the 1970s. Solar panels installed over the empty, sun-baked deserts are a recent and growing part of the arsenal.

The standard approach is to use panels to provide shade for desert-hardy seeds and shrubs introduced underneath while barriers around the sites slow wind speeds and stop the sand shifting. It can take up to five years to get results, according to the Ningxia government.

Projects like Baofeng’s remain a tiny portion of the hundreds of gigawatts of solar panels China installs each year, but Beijing has announced plans to rapidly grow the number of projects which use solar to fight desertification.

+Jael Holzman has the skinny on how a court greenlighted work on the wind farm the Trump administration had stopped off the coast of Rhode Island. In the face of the administration’s absurd arguments about national security (if a wind farm is a problem, now do the 4,000 drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico),

Then came the comments from Orsted’s head of marine affairs, Edward LeBlanc, who served in the military for decades and worked on offshore energy oversight. He told the court that the Navy had never once raised any issues with the project’s export cable and that as recently as July 2025, no military officials had expressed lingering concerns about electromagnetic emissions, vessel collisions or other potential national security problems.

+To understand why the White House is quite so frantic, reflect that their buddies in the oil patch know their only possible source of growth is exporting liquefied natural gas to the rest of the world, and as Justin Mikulka writes that’s looking increasingly problematic. The whole piece is well worth reading

The LNG industry is in a massive bubble and there will be financial destruction in its future and most analysts agree that the U.S. market is the one with the most risk for various reasons I explained in my piece “The End of the US LNG Bubble.” So why would EQT agree to buy LNG? Can’t they see the high likelihood of losing money on this? I’m guessing they can. But there is a method to their madness. Sure there is high risk of the LNG bubble bursting. But the higher risk to the future financial prospects of U.S. gas producers like EQT is that LNG exports don’t grow at the phenomenal rates that are predicted by the likes of Shell. If the LNG export market doesn’t create a domestic gas shortage in the U.S. and raise prices for domestic gas (Henry Hub) to $5 or higher, there is no money in a lot of U.S. gas production. So while the future for LNG exports doesn’t look good, the chance that it works is the best hope for the entire U.S. gas industry.

+A thoughtful essay from top climate scientist Kevin Trenberth on why, despite the flood of evidence (and now real-time experience) of climate change, it’s sometimes so hard to get some people to, well, acknowledge reality

A report published in June by the International Panel of the Information Environment, Fact, Fakes, and Climate Science, found that “powerful actors – including corporations, governments, and political parties – intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change. These narratives circulate across digital, broadcast, and interpersonal communication channels. The result is a decline in public trust, diminished policy coordination, and a feedback loop between scientific denialism and political inaction.”

Scientists like to present the facts, and the data to back them up. Our data paint a dismal future, unless we work collectively to avoid it. We have the capacity to do so. It is confounding to scientists that some folk would prefer to deny what we know about looming threats, and carry on as if it’s not going to happen. As founder and executive director of the Presidential Climate Cation Project Bill Becker has said: “You can lead people to data, but you can’t make them think.”

+Speaking of dishonest efforts to misinform the public, the highly confident not-a-worry-in-the-world Energy Department has felt the need to add the words “climate change” and “emissions” to its naughty list, Politico reports

“Please ensure that every member of your team is aware that this is the latest list of words to avoid — and continue to be conscientious about avoiding any terminology that you know to be misaligned with the Administration’s perspectives and priorities,” the directive from acting director of external affairs Rachel Overbey said.

Those instructions apply to both public-facing and internal communications and cover documents such as requests for information for federal funding opportunities, reports and briefings.

+Here’s a project for educators trying to connect all careers, not just obvious ones, to climate change for their students

+Since we started in Rome, let’s end in Abu Dhabi, with the world’s first net zero mosque, which will be constructed of rammed earth and powered entirely by the sun

Commissioned by Masdar City — a sustainable urban development around 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from downtown Abu Dhabi — and designed by British multinational engineering firm Arup, the mosque will generate 100% of its energy needs on-site through solar panels, and employ passive cooling and circular design techniques to reduce operational energy use by a third and water consumption by more than half.

One of the key challenges the designers had to overcome was the fixed direction of the mosque, dictated by the qibla wall, which always faces Mecca.

“Often we would want to optimize orientation to minimize the impact of solar and heat gain,” explained Paul Simmonite, associate director at Arup, in a video call.

Instead, the team had to explore other methods, including canopies, angled windows and skylights, wall insulation, and cooling materials for the exterior.

Here’s what it will look like

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