And We're Off

The 5-month drive to SunDay launches at Old North Church--and online

That slightly out-of-focus picture shows the gritty, common-sense (and also transcendent) mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, with her 3-month old daughter Mira. A few minutes earlier, from the pulpit of Old North Church in Boston, she’d flipped a switch to light the green lantern you can see glowing in the steeple behind her. At the same time green lights—all sustainably powered—came on top of many of the city’s buildings and bridges, all to mark the official launch of organizing for September’s big SunDay celebrations/protests/teach-ins. At the same time, a gorgeous new website went live, so people could start registering actions and getting involved.

I’m going to update you regularly on SunDay in these pages as the day approaches, because I think that our job is not just to understand the climate catastrophe but to prevent as much of it as we still can. And I think that there’s really one main, scalable, timely path to doing that: the rapid deployment of sun, wind, and batteries. It’s happening (in China, the use of coal for electricity generation fell five percent in the first quarter largely because of surging deployment of rooftop solar) but it’s not happening fast enough—and especially not here, where the Trump administration is doing all it can to slow the energy transition. (Last week it set tariffs on solar panels from Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia at 3,521 percent).

So we have to make the case for sun and wind and batteries, and we have to do it now—seizing the opportunity to change both local laws and the national zeitgeist. That’s what SunDay is all about: in September it will feature rallies and concerts, e-bike and EV parades, teach-ins about heat pumps in the homes of owners. You name it—indeed, you think it up! This will be a largely DIY day of action, in every corner of the country, and if it works then when we’re done no one will ever talk about ‘alternative energy’ again. Everyone will know this is the normal, obvious, beautiful way forward.

SunDay will have not just a technical heart, but an emotional one—lots of art and music, and if you’re into that sort of thing a certain amount of divine inspiration. The latter was on display in Boston, when the mayor’s lantern-lighting was proceeded by a multi-faith service at Old North, still a working Episcopal church, presided over by Boston’s bishop Julia Whitworth and the church’s gracious Vicar Rev. Matthew Cadwell. Thanks to Fletcher Harper, the indefatigable head of GreenFaith, and Revs. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas and Jim Antal, the service featured voices from Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Protestant traditions—and there was Grammy-nominated Antonique Smith, the head of Climate Revival which works to spread the message in black churches, singing her indelible version of Here Comes the Sun.

Lots of big-time partners are already engaged in this work—I had the pleasure of meeting with all the Sierra Club’s leaders on Friday in Tennessee, and they seemed excited to go to work. (Shoutout to Emily Gorman who is heading up the SunDay work for the club.) My colleagues at Third Act are hard at it, led by Anna Goldstein and Deborah Moore. Solar United Neighbors, which has put panels on countless rooftops, is playing a big role; Rev Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus was on hand for the Boston launch, as was Kelsey Wirth, founder of Mothers Out Front. Local groups, like the Better Future Project in Massachusetts, are playing key roles already. But our hope is that it will, like the sun, blaze up into something larger and more beautiful than we can imagine. That won’t happen automatically—there’s a small but talented central staff hard at work, led by veteran organizers Deirdre Shelly and Jamie Henn. Henn, especially, has been deeply engaged in most of the important and successful battles of the climate era, but always behind the scenes: it was fun to hear him talk at the Boston ceremony, and fun to hope this will be a chance for others to appreciate just how talented he and his colleagues are.

At any rate: we’re going to play defense against Trump and his insane cuts for all we’re worth. But we’re going to play offense too. As we’ve all known, at least since Nosferatu, vampires can’t flourish in the sunlight. So that’s what we’re going to bring. Help us!

In other energy and climate news:

+Ground has been broken on a billion-dollar solar farm in Genesee County, which will be the largest in New York State

Greenbacker Renewable Energy secured the deal to build the 500-megawatt installation in Genesee County. Work has already begun, and the project is scheduled to come online in 2026.

The scheme is one of 23 major projects that New York State Governor Kathy Hochul greenlit to provide 2.3 gigawatts of clean energy in December 2024. The Empire State is targeting to get 70% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Meanwhile in Tennessee, plans are still underway for building out solar manufacturing facilities, despite the new tariffs—indeed Silicon Ranch just landed $500 million in new funding from a Danish venture firm

Silicon Ranch, launched by former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) as he was leaving office in 2011, has always thrived by making large-scale solar happen in regions where it hadn’t been widely adopted, like the Tennessee Valley and Georgia. Now solar developers are finding they don’t have to do much convincing because utilities need all the power they can get to keep pace with growing electricity demand.

Meanwhile, check out this account of windpower in Missouri

Today, Atchison County is home to 342 wind turbines that support about 50 permanent jobs, along with a wind technician training facility and yearly landowner lease payments of several million dollars, Mr. Chamberlain said. According to the Atchison clerk’s office, the county collected $5.9 million from taxes from wind turbines in 2024, accounting for more than half of its real estate tax revenue. The city utility also doesn’t have to pay transmission line fees on the energy it uses from the wind farm, Mr. Chamberlain added, saving around $50,000 a year.

Mr. Chamberlain now drives around a pickup truck that bears the license plate “WND CZR.”

“I’m proud of what got started here, it literally changed the economy of the county,” Mr. Chamberlain said. “We’re always going to be rural and farming and agricultural-based, and this is quite an addition. I can’t think of anything else that would add $5 million in property taxes to our county without detracting from our base.”

Endless stories like these indicate that the renewable energy transition is still, haltingly, pushing forward, even in Trump’s America. There’s a kind of momentum that’s hard to completely break down: here’s a story from Maryland, for instance, about the brand new Climate Advisory Panel for the state’s pension system; happily, Mary Cerrulli, ED of Climate Finance Action, will be on it. Over time, this stuff matters bigly.

Meanwhile, even Saudi Arabia is busily trying to increase the share of EVs to 30 percent on its roads by 2030, now in a partnership with Chinese giant BYD. Don’t let them know what Donald Trump found out, that electric cars can only drive “15 minutes before you have to get a charge.”

+From Scudder Parker, part of a poem about least-cost utility planning and a coal plant that never got built in Iowa (mostly as a reminder of how long these fights have been raging)

The first drafts of this poem were

printed on the other side of a

2007 long-term reliability assessment.

How quickly the enormity

of what did not happen eludes me.

It was January. The wind roared snow

across the fields of Marshalltown.

Most witnesses recited that the billion-dollar plant

would make things better.

I was there to disagree.

It was a ritual of formal testimony

to establish need.

There were rules to guide what could be said.

I dressed appropriately

spoke my careful argument.

The regulators said OK

go build it but if it isn’t needed or

costs more than you say it’s you

not ratepayers who’ll pay.

+As part of the DOGE-driven assault on science, NASA announced it is terminating the lease on the offices of the Goddard Institute of Space Science at 110th and Broadway. This won’t get much attention (the building is better known as the home of the diner in Seinfeld) but in fact this is—along with the also-threatened climate observatory on Mauna Loa—the single most important structure in the history of climate science. It’s here that Jim Hansen and colleagues, in the 1980s, used a series of mainframe computers to build the most important climate models and temperature data tracking, allowing him to serve as….well, as the Paul Revere of global warming. This is the steeple where the light was hung, and surely someone will at least put a plaque on the wall. For the moment Hansen’s successor Gavin Schmidt says the GISS staff will keep doing their work remotely, but the administration, says CNN, is proposing to cut space science funding by fifty percent.

What will we spend the money on instead? Well, the National Endowment for the Humanities put out bids for statues in a new National Garden of Heroes. Team Trump has identified who the statues would be of, including William F. Buckley, Antonin Scalia, and Elvis Presley. No Jim Hansen.

+Old friend Fenton Latunatabua is one of the great climate hands in the world, having helped turn the Pacific Climate Warriors from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific into a fierce fighting force. Here’s his new Ted Talk, well worth a listen—he explains the genesis of their slogan, “We’re Not Drowning, We’re Fighting.”

+Meanwhile, across the Pacific and indeed all the world’s oceans, the worst coral-bleaching wave in history just keeps getting more tragic. Graham Readfern reports:

Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows.

Coral reefs are known as the rainforests of the sea because of their high concentration of biodiversity that supports about a third of all marine species and a billion people.

But record high ocean temperatures have spread like an underwater wildfire over corals across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, damaging and killing countless corals.

The 84% of reefs exposed to bleaching-level heat in this ongoing fourth event compares with 68% during the third event, which lasted from 2014 to 2017, 37% in 2010 and 21% in the first event in 1998.

+Some of the most impressive resistance comes in the hardest places. Smack in the center of hydrocarbon Houston, Randall Morton has been running the Progressive Forum, a lecture series, for many years. Here’s his new column on how the city should pivot

Yet the Greater Houston Partnership is promoting a counterfeit Energy Transition Initiative focused on carbon capture and hydrogen. These technologies sound plausible as climate solutions, but they’re merely bets on fossil fuel. For example, 95% of hydrogen in the U.S. is made from natural gas processing. Carbon capture is mainly a license to produce more oil and gas. According to the Hansen paper, “Carbon capture at the gigaton scale does not exist; the estimatedannualcost of CO2 extraction is now $2.2 to $4.5 trillion. Such hypothetical large-scale carbon capture will not happen in anything near the required timeframe.”

Similarly, many endorse the use of liquefied natural gas (LNG), promoted as a “cleaner natural gas.” According to a widely cited Cornell study led by scientist Robert Howarth, LNG leaves a greenhouse gas footprint that is 33% worse than coal when processing and shipping are taken into account.

Despite smokescreens by Big Oil, science fundamentals are well-defined. Slashing fossil fuel emissions is the only way to prevent a “likely” Atlantic current shutdown. Houston leaders must pivot to true climate solutions while there’s time.

+The Department of Interior is constricting the amount of opportunity Americans have to comment on new plans for oil drilling. As Oil Change International’s tireless Collin Rees says,

“The announcement is another giveaway to the fossil fuel billionaires who spent millions to put Trump back in the White House, justified by a fake ‘energy emergency.’ The U.S. is the largest oil and gas producer and is expanding extraction faster than any other nation. The real national emergency is the cabal of oil and gas CEOs harming working people and wrecking the climate to line their pockets.”

+From CleanTechnica, more insight and detail on just how hard and fast Pakistan went solar last year

But by the end of 2024, it quietly rocketed into the top tier of solar adopters, importing a jaw-dropping 22 gigawatts worth of solar panels in a single year. That’s not a typo or a spreadsheet rounding error. That’s the kind of number that turns heads at IEA meetings and makes policy analysts double-check their databases. It certainly made me sit up and take notice when I first heard about what was happening in mid-2024.

It’s more solar than Canada has installed in total. It’s more than the UK added in the past five years. And yet it didn’t make a blip in most Western media. While the U.S. continued its decade-long existential crisis about grid interconnection queues and Europe squabbled over permitting reforms, Pakistan skipped the drama and just bought the panels.

+A round of fun for the end

—From the reliable podcast Cool Tunes for a Hot Planet, the late great Pete Seeger singing about Solartopia (at about the 2:30 mark)

—the new Netflix romance Ransom Canyon apparently has a starring role for solar power, at least on the production side. According to the Hollywood Reporter

Based on author Jodi Thomas’ book series that debuted in 2015, the show from creator April Blair (All American) filmed much of its 10-episode first season at ranches scattered across 150 miles throughout New Mexico. Filming on location made the shoot an ideal fit for solar power, as did the state’s annual 300 days of sunshine, plus a general lack of trees and tall buildings. In place of diesel equipment, Ransom Canyon’s set was largely run by solar-powered trailers, solar battery systems and large mobile batteries.

—And up in Canada (where, fingers crossed, people are voting today) one artist figured out a way to keep pipelines from crossing his land, even though, as in too many places, the subsurface was subject to eminent domain

When gas company representatives came to negotiate a right-of-way, von Tiesenhausen took the men for a walk around his property. They told the artist he had no means to stop them; the province was determined to develop its energy resources and expropriation was likely.

Then, von Tiesenhausen rattled off his argument: "My title says I own the top six inches [of the land], right? While this might look like a field to you folks, it's not. And that isn't a forest over there.…

"They went, 'What are you talking about?' I said, 'What's not readily evident to the untrained eye is that this is actually artwork, this whole land, and I maintain the copyright. Now, if you could put a pipeline underneath, I can't stop you, as long as you don't disturb the surface. But if you're going to disturb the surface over this one-mile length, then you're infringing on my rights.'"

The artist remembers one of the men saying, "You can't do that, can you?"

"I don't know," he replied.

Perplexed, the pair got in their truck and left.

Gallerist Clint Roenisch — then a curator with the Kelowna Art Gallery — was on a visit with von Tiesenhausen before a solo exhibition and was at the meeting. He'd found the artist's position "clever, sly and poetic — and most importantly, persuasive."

The gas company came back the next day and asked von Tiesenhausen to name his price. "It's not about the money," he said. Shortly after, the company notified him it would divert the pipeline around his property.

Take your wins where you can, friends—and start thinking big for SunDay in September!