Beginning next week, Australians across a huge swath of the continent will begin getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon—to charge their cars, runs their dishwashers, fill up a storage battery to run the house at night. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t belabor it here, except to say that humans have spent the last 1.79 million years (according to new research last week) working hard for energy: spending time gathering firewood, spending time working to pay the power bill. Now, in one large part of the earth, for one large part of the day, electricity will be too cheap to meter. You want some abundance? Here you go.
So it seems like a good time to dig in to the larger questions of energy, climate, pollution, and money—an interrelated set of issues, and one where the numbers are shifting quickly and dramatically almost every month. Here’s the bottom line, which I think is beginning to drive public policy almost every place except the U.S., where we have lots and lots of work to do: As the cost of clean energy keeps plummeting, it gets more and more obvious how much money we waste, and how much financial risk we incur, by staying with fossil fuel.
As it happens, this is a free newsletter, which is fine by me: crucial information should be free. But boy am I grateful that some people who can afford to do so take out a modestly priced and voluntary subscription to keep it all going!
Let’s start first by talking about the climate crisis, and the ways it’s rapidly becoming an economic crisis. My old colleagues at 350.org have been publishing a series of quite brilliant reports on the subject in recent weeks. One, for instance, is on the insurance crisis, which is growing across the planet. This is from Risalat Khan and Kenny Stancil:
In the United States, homeowner insurance premiums increased by 29% from January 2021 to January 2026, and personal auto insurance rose nearly 25% over the same period. These mounting costs are among the biggest contributors to overall inflation.
France raised its mandatory natural catastrophe surcharge on property insurance from 12% to 20%, effective January 2025. In northern Australia, premiums climbed more than 130% in real terms between 2007 and 2022, a 6% growth year on year.
Across most low- and middle-income countries, insurance coverage is usually less than 10%, and sometimes far less, leaving uninsured communities and businesses to bear most of the risks and losses from climate disasters.
Somewhat karmically, a new report from risk analysts First Street finds that…data centers face much of this risk from extreme weather:
Approximately 54% of global data center capacity operates in markets facing elevated chronic heat or drought stress, while 79% is exposed to significant acute hazards such as flood, wind, or wildfire. For many markets, climate risk should now be considered part of the base case rather than a tail-risk scenario.
But most of us only buy insurance once a year, and it’s such a depressing task that we try to forget about it immediately. Groceries are different, and as Nicole Pita points out the link to climate change is pretty clear.
Droughts in the US Midwest and Canada destroyed harvests in 2022. Floods in India and South Asia pushed up rice prices in 2023 and 2025. The climate crisis is affecting crop production itself, making food harder to grow. The irony is that food systems produce one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, making them both a victim and a driver of the crisis.
And it will get worse. Here’s a new report from the Autonomy Institue on what the climate crisis is doing to the cost of “Five a day” in the UK
Heat waves are projected to add around 11% to the price of the UK’s top twenty fruit and vegetables by 2035 and around 68% by 2050 under a high emissions scenario, on top of normal inflation. Imported tropical fruit such as melons, oranges, bananas, easy peelers and grapes will rise 12% to 14% by 2035 and 80% to 93% by 2050 on these climate grounds alone.
• Compounded with estimated normal inflation, total average shelf prices of the overall basket of fruit and veg will reach upwards of 170% above today’s level by 2050.
• This means that climate-flation will be contributing 40% of total inflation across the basket of basic goods by 2035 and over 60% of it by 2050. Climate change will have gone from a junior contributor to the dominant driver of shelf-price inflation on fresh produce inside the working lifetime of someone in their thirties today.
(A note to the perplexed: “easy peelers” turns out to be what Brits call mandarin oranges and clementines. I like it.)
Extreme weather also makes growing crops more expensive. For example, Del Monte Corp., which sold more than $4 billion of bananas, pineapples, avocados and other food products last year, has been investing in measures to shield crops from rising temperatures and sun damage. This includes covering them with shade cloth and spraying them with a reflective layer of so-called plant sunscreen. The company is also paying more for cooling throughout its supply chain, including by requiring upgrades in fruit-processing plants in the Midwest that were originally designed for lower temperatures.
The effects of climate on pricing are difficult to capture, because they build gradually, says Hans Sauter, Del Monte’s chief sustainability officer. But lower yields, increasing disease threats and higher costs can all contribute to more expensive produce. “This is part of our DNA. We have been dealing with climate events forever,” he says. “But these new circumstances are making it more expensive.”
Regions where temperatures are already warm will likely be the most exposed to climate inflation, in part because additional heat can more readily slash agricultural harvests. Among the worst-off are countries in Africa and South America, which also tend to have lower incomes, with less infrastructure and fewer resources to guard against climate change.
But the fossil fuel that drives climate change raises costs in other ways too. The most obvious is their effect on public health. It’s hard, of course, to calculate this with precision, but the attempts leave us with staggering numbers: the NRDC, five years ago, demonstrated that fossil fuel pollution was costing America $820 billion a year. (That’s nearly a Musk). The numbers elsewhere are much higher.
Sometimes, though, it’s easier to see them in reverse. A new study this month, described by Gary Fuller, finds that when London cut down sharply on urban air pollution with its congestion pricing zone, remarkable things followed:
Low emission and clean air zones attract controversy whenever they are proposed, but there is growing evidence that they work in improving air quality. The Bradford zone was followed by a reduction of about 25% in GP visits for heart and breathing problems and survey data shows that the central London zone was followed by a reduction in the likelihood of a person taking sick leave…
The researchers looked at emergency admissions to hospital, excluding cases such as accidents, burns, drug overdose, poisoning or self-harm. For people living in the central London zone, admissions increased at 3% per year before the schemes started. After their launch this trend was altered, with a 3% reduction in annual trends for emergency admissions, including an 8% reduction for heart problems and a 6% reduction for breathing problems.
That adds up to real money. Not only that, but people can breathe, always a plus!
If you try to add all this up, you get some interesting numbers. As Kate Yoder reports
“What’s striking is that already, households are bearing serious costs,” said Kimberly Clausing, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She co-authored a paper from earlier this year finding that families were paying between $400 and $900 more each year because of the effects of climate change, with the costs above $1,300 in the 10 percent hardest-hit counties, many of them found in Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and California.
What’s more, people are figuring all this out.
Two-thirds of US voters agree that global warming is affecting the cost of living to some degree, according to new survey data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, including most Democrats and moderate Republicans. Of those two-thirds, a majority of them said that climate change was driving up what they pay for groceries, utility bills, and home insurance.
And then there’s the sheer cost of energy itself—of the need to keep paying for coal and gas and oil while the far-cheaper sun and wind goes to waste. We’re stuck in a political moment when feckless Democratic politicians (paging Kathy Hochul) are making “affordability” their excuse for going along with Big Oil. But in fact one example after another is making it clear that, as Ray Wills writes, “what is making us poorer is not the move to clean energy – it is doing the transition slowly and badly. His examples are back in Australia
The Australian Energy Market Commission’s latest Residential Electricity Price Trends work is blunt: accelerating renewable generation, transmission and battery storage is ‘essential’ to keep electricity prices affordable over the next decade.
In scenarios where new wind, solar and transmission arrive on schedule, household bills fall compared to today. When those projects are delayed, prices remain higher for longer because the system leans more heavily on expensive gas and unreliable old coal.
Independent modelling tells a similar story. Analysis for the Clean Energy Council shows that if Australia stalls the rollout of renewables, household bills in 2030 could be around 30% higher than on a timely transition path – roughly $449 a year extra for a typical household, and even more for small businesses.
Individuals can and do figure out some of the ways to lower their own costs. Not surprisingly, the spike in gas prices for Americans during our farcical Iranian excursion convinced some to change their habits or their technology. Lydia DePillis looked at the numbers:
Americans are powerfully attached to their cars, and their spending at gasoline stations jumped 21 percent from February to May. But that ability to spend has limits. According to Dow Jones Energy, consumption was 6.1 percent lower in May from a year earlier. Some of that is a long-running trend owing to the increasing efficiency of passenger vehicles, said Denton Cinquegrana, the company’s chief oil analyst, and about half is probably a consumer response to higher prices.
But much of the real work needs to be done by governments: nothing people can do by themselves will have much affect on the cost of food, healthcare, or energy. And when governments do their job well, the results can be amazing. I began with Australia and its free afternoon electricity; let’s close with Europe. As Jan Rosenow points out, the continent’s commitment to energy efficiency is paying off: it’s spending 29 percent less on energy than it would have if consumption had kept growing this century.
Importantly that is energy nobody had to generate, import or pay for. It built up slowly, over twenty-five years, across 27 countries, in warmer buildings, more efficient factories, better appliances, the switch to LED lighting and steadily more efficient transport. At any given price Europe now pays around a third less than it would have without those gains.
This shield holds whichever direction the next shock arrives from. If anything, the figure undersells the benefit, because it counts only the energy saved and not the power stations, pipelines and grid connections nobody had to build. It is one of the most effective protection measures against future energy crisis: the energy not consumed cannot be withheld, weaponised, or made more expensive by a supplier you do not control.
As he points out, there’s vast room for expansion:
A heat pump in a well-insulated home on clean electricity cuts the energy the building needs, replaces the gas boiler, and runs on a grid that keeps getting cleaner. That single device also pulls the household out of the gas import chain for good, and as a side effect keeps it cooler through the sort of summer Europe now gets most years.
People are quickly figuring all this out across much of the world. It remains for a savvy American politician to really lay out the case. But when she does the rewards will be high. “Free” would be a popular thing.
+Some big wins for climate and energy in last night’s New York voting. It looks like a lock that former New York comptroller Brad Lander will be headed to Congress, where he will instantly become one of the House experts on the links between big money and Big Oil. My hope is that he’ll team with Sheldon Whitehouse in the Senate to form a loud and constant chorus on the topic. By the way, a useful video from the ever-candid Whitehouse here
Meanwhile, further up the Hudson River, Lisa Kaul won her Democratic primary for state Senate in the district around the town of Poughskeepsie. Climate was a big element in her campaign, and you can check out a quite powerful digital ad here—per the discussion above, it’s focused on affordability.
+Fascinating deep dive into the economics of Enhanced Geothermal from the straight-shooting Justin Mikulka. As he notes, this technology—drilling a pair of holes deep into the earth, pumping water down one so it will pass through hot rocks, retrieving the warm water from the other, and using the heat to turn a turbine on the surface—has gotten a ton of hype, and lots of expensive support from the federal government, above all I think because it is congenial to Big Oil (they know how to drill stuff, after all). But will it produce affordable electricity? Mikulka has well-reasoned doubts
Fervo describes its own power generation as “24/7 clean, cost effective, scalable.”
Fervo’s current $/KW costs are $7,000.
New build gas is estimated at $2,300+
Solar plus storage is at $2,100-$2,600
Now Fervo claims that if everything goes right in the future they will bring that down to $3,000. So even in their best case scenario they will not be competitive with solar plus storage which is also expected to get much cheaper. And they are a long way from their best case scenario and none of this has been proven at commercial scale.
Competing straight-up against sun, wind, and batteries is tough. If Fervo “works” it will be with massive government subsidy, which would be better spent on cheaper tech. Pipes and pumps and huge amounts of water—these are increasingly the tools of the past, up against the frictionless world of sun and wind.
I tend to think hydrogen falls into this same category—expensive compared with the straight-ahead application of electricity and batteries. But there are places doing it right: Lithuania just launched a ship that runs on green hydrogen generated from solar panels on its dock. As Luis Reyes writes
The ship is called Rasa, and it was christened at the Port of Klaipėda on June 18, 2026. This is not a concept render. It’s a 42-meter tanker that’s about to start collecting sludge, sewage, stormwater and garbage from other ships calling at the port. Glamorous work, no. Technically interesting, very much yes.
+Some of the bigger names in climate science, including American Michael Mann, have joined in a call to avoid solar geoengineering, centering their argument on the risk of “termination shock.”
Recent analyses demonstrate that it would take as long as two decades to create the required infrastructure. By then we would be completely reliant on maintaining it – a tall task in a dangerous world with global conflict. It would only temporarily mask the pent-up warming implicit in the ongoing buildup of carbon dioxide, and this pent-up warming would be released in a catastrophically rapid “termination shock” if circumstances force the cessation of solar geoengineering.
For me, I think we can only talk coherently about geoengineering in a world where the political power of the fossil fuel industry has been broken—one more reason why mass deployment of clean energy around the globe over the rest of this decade is so crucial.
+Check out the trailer for Josh Fox’s important new film, The Welcome Table. It debuted on HBO yesterday, and it’s about the surge of climate immigration already underway on our overheating planet. Fox, of course, is the independent filmmaker who brought us Gasland, the most crucial document in the fight against fracking. He’s got a good eye, a good mind, and a good heart.
+John Todd is one of those fascinating figures who have been at it a lifetime—his New Alchemy Institute became most famous for its Living Machines, which use plants to clean wastewater. Now he’s scaling up the concept—what if we used old tankers to roam the oceans (under solar power) just slowly cleaning up the seas?
For example, a large — but by no means the biggest class of — oil tanker, can hold around 80 million US gallons of liquid fuel, or other liquids. including sea water. There will be enough potential treatment capacity within the ships’ hold spaces to house eco-machines large enough to make a positive impact on surrounding waters
+Many thanks to the good folks at CarbonBrief for Cosmos, a database of the world’s climate research, currently containing 1.8 million studies
+Fascinating commentary from Jérôme Pinti on the role that animals play in regulating carbon and climate, citing a new consensus report from 300 researchers:
A 2023 paper in Nature Climate Change estimated that protecting and restoring wild animal populations and their ecological roles could increase carbon dioxide uptake by an additional 6.41 gigatons per year. Numbers like that show why animals belong in climate conversations, and how they can be part of climate solutions, with different roles in different ecosystems.
For example, in forests, animals such as elephants disperse seeds and influence where trees grow. In grasslands, grazers such as bison can affect plant growth, nutrient cycling, and fire dynamics. In soils and sediments, burrowing animals can change oxygen and nutrient availability and store energy as they hibernate during tough winter months.
The same is true for the ocean, which is Earth’s largest carbon sink. Marine organisms are active agents of resilience: They transport carbon, build habitats with carbon-rich materials, and tie up carbon in extensive food webs. In my Biological Oceanography Lab at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, we aim to quantify the importance of zooplankton and fish in the ocean’s biological carbon pump, a process where marine species, from plankton to whales and everything in between, move carbon from the ocean’s surface into the deep sea through a variety of processes.
On a more tragic note, one wildlife lover—a woman named Mona Khalil—was killed last week while pursuing her life’s work of safeguarding sea turtles laying their eggs. An Israeli airstrike wrecked her home on Mansouri Beach, and she subsequently died of her wounds. As Rhett Ayers Butler writes,
She had not set out to become a conservationist. Born in Lagos to Lebanese parents, she later left Lebanon during the civil war. In the Netherlands she worked as a porcelain restorer, a trade that required patience, precision, and care for damaged things. She could have remained there. Instead she kept returning to the family land on Lebanon’s southern coast.
One night in 1999, while walking near the shore, she heard a sound in the sand and saw a turtle coming up to lay her eggs. She learned that the beach was one of the last important nesting places in southern Lebanon. In 2000, after Israel withdrew from the area, she returned more permanently. With Habiba Fayed, she restored the family farmhouse and began protecting the nests.
And while we’re on animals, a new study finds that solar panels on barn roofs help lower thermal stress on cows during hot afternoons. As Lior Kahana reports,
To assess the impact of PV modules on roof heat flux, the team conducted field measurements at a naturally ventilated dairy barn in Shandong Province, China. The barn measures 32 m in span, 372 m in length, and has an eave height of 4.5 m. It features a south-facing gable roof with a 17.17° pitch and a single-layer profiled steel sheet construction without insulation.
The facility was divided into two zones. One section was left without PV installation, while the other was fitted with 1,152 PV modules with a total capacity of 299.52 kW. The modules were installed parallel to the roof slope, maintaining a 0.10 m ventilated air gap between the panels and the roof surface, and covered 60% of the south-facing roof area. The two zones housed 164 and 316 dairy cows, respectively.
“Linear mixed model analysis revealed that PV panels significantly reduced roof heat flux during daytime (57.7% influence weight, p < 0.001), with the strongest reduction occurring during peak solar radiation between 11:00 and 13:00,” the researchers said. “This effect was primarily attributed to shading, photovoltaic conversion, and convective cooling within the ventilated air cavity beneath the modules.”
“PV panels significantly lowered indoor temperatures during daytime (8.7% influence weight, p < 0.05), achieving a maximum reduction of approximately 2.3 C during the critical afternoon heat stress period (14:00–16:00),” they added.
+It’s always important to get hyperlocal perspectives on global crises: there have been lots of pictures of houses falling into the ocean on the barrier islands of North Carolina, but local resident and journalist Pat O’Keefe offers an in-depth and passionate discussion of the the many forces at work. One thing he notes is that the devastation of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina made it easier for legislators to sympathize with the plight of those along the coast.
+Rameen Siddiqui notes that the world continues to fall behind on the Sustainable Development Goals, even as the 2030 deadline approaches.
Less than four years from the deadline, and only 16% of the targets are going to be met. The 11th edition of the Sustainable Development Report, released today by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, is the sort of statistic that ought to be raising much more alarm. The 2030 Agenda was supposed to end extreme poverty, preserve the oceans, build peaceful institutions, and put the global economy on a sustainable path. With 2030 in sight, 84% of these commitments are going downhill.
The reason the 2026 SDR is worth reading with care is not the rankings, although those are important. It is the timing. UN talks begin this year on the future beyond 2030. In 2027, a new Secretary-General will be elected. The framework that replaces the current agenda is being shaped in conversations happening right now, and the SDR’s argument, that implementation has been the missing piece throughout and must be the organizing principle of whatever comes next, lands at the precise moment when that argument can still influence the design of the successor framework.
+Jeff St. John contends that we have superb new acreage for solar panels—on top of warehouses around the world
In a sense, warehouse rooftops are like open fields in dense urban landscapes, with acres of flat space available for solar panels.
Ava has awarded Prologis a contract to build nearly 7.3 megawatts of solar on sprawling roofs across five sites, enabling about 3,000 residents to see lower bills. Keefer previously worked for Clean Power Alliance, another California community energy provider, which is building 9 megawatts of warehouse-rooftop community solar with Prologis…
His company’s analysis of federal data indicates U.S. commercial, industrial, and institutional rooftops could host 581 gigawatts of solar, enough to provide the lower bounds of the country’s overall electricity demand. Similar data from a 2023 study by the Environment America Research and Policy Center found that warehouses across the U.S. have nearly 16.4 billion square feet of rooftop space, capable of hosting enough solar to power more than 19 million homes.
+The estimable Yessenia Funes has an excellent account of why voting rights have lots to do with climate justice.
Leslie Fields has a background in civil rights and voting rights work. She worked at the NAACP, where she discovered environmental justice as a focus in Texas. Now, she is the chief federal officer of the Harlem-based environmental justice advocacy group WE ACT.
WE ACT has been responding to the nationwide consequences of the Voting Rights Act’s rollback. Section 2, in particular, is about voters electing the representatives they want. It’s about the people choosing the person they trust to lead.
“If we don’t have the representatives we need, who come from the community and are accountable to the community, then you’re going to have terrible decisions being made on the local level and all the way up regarding the environment, regarding communities’ sustainability, regarding where investments are being made,” Fields said.
“Some of the states that we’ve lost billions of dollars in Justice40 funds from the Biden administration to support climate resilience and adaptation,” she added, “won’t have the leadership to represent them, and we’re still fighting to get that funding back.”
+More money coming from the World Bank for Africa solar, as Antony Sguazzin explains
WeLight, which operates more solar mini-grids in Africa than any other company, said the International Finance Corp. bought a stake in the business, backing its expansion into Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The firm, which currently operates in Madagascar and Mali, said it raised €27 million ($31 million) from the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm and founding shareholders. Axian Group Ltd., Sagemcom SAS and Norfund AS established WeLight in 2018 to provide electricity to rural communities that don’t have access to national networks. It runs almost 190 mini-grids, serving more than 800,000 people.
+Finally, a shout out to the good people of Matinicus, the island furthest out in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. I was visiting my fisherman brother there over the weekend, and found that locals had spent the year installing a truly remarkable solar system that powers most of the island and has cut its use of diesel for electric generation by two-thirds. This is a relatively poor rock out in the Atlantic Ocean, and if it can build—mostly with local expertise—a truly state-of-the-art solar system, it should be a good spur for communities everywhere. Energy independence, not to mention lobster! This system may allow the community to survive into the future—Eva Murray’s excellent chronicle can be found here
Newly installed solar on Matinicus Island. Note that because the rocky soil makes it hard to anchor the panels into ground they’ve cleverly used those rocks to ballast the system against the wind. Old tech and new! Many thanks to Phil Davies for a tour, and for his hard work to get the system up and running
“Free” should be the goal of many things in our economy, and I’m glad this newsletter is part of that gift economy. And proud that a certain number of people who can do so without financial strain make this gift possible by taking out a voluntary and modestly priced subscription
Spectacular as usual, Bill!
Always thorough, endlessly grateful for your tremendous work and attention.
Save your posts in tabs to read though at a slower pace, not to marathon through them
Valuable and indeed crucial
Thanks Bill !