A Hinge Moment on Planet Earth

(And some politicians are just standing in the door)

The podium at the Santa Marta conference, with one of the finest logos for any gathering I’ve ever seen

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.

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!