Clean energy needs actual champions

Two very different gubernatorial races--and a smashing victory last night in Arizona--drive home the point.

A huge win for clean energy last night in Arizona, where Turning Point USA tried to turn solar panels into culture war talking points—and failed.

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!

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.”