Now where?

The world has turned a corner, offering a new and improved view

While Trump struggles to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, here’s a Chinese freighter leaving Shandong with a cargo of wind turbines bound for Romania.

On February 28, a few hours after President Trump launched his absurd war against Iran, I used this newsletter to note that it was yet one argument for clean energy, for “building out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.” A few days later I tried to lock that point into the public discourse by observing that though sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.

Those points have by now become the commonplace wisdon—note, for instance, Paul Krugman’s fine column this morning. It would be pleasurable to wallow a bit in the president’s disgrace, but not productive. So, as the war fitfully winds down, with the remaining question being just how expensive our surrender will turn out to be, it’s time to peer a little further out into the future and try to figure out how the quite different postwar world might use this opportunity to make rapid progress.

I think the first thing to remember is that the war was launched against a backdrop of already ongoing energy transition. As a rollicking new report out today from the thinktank Ember makes clear, the move towards power from the sun and wind was well underway, predicated by a fear of climate change that helped produce the investments that drove the cost of clean energy inexorably down. The report’s authors remind us where the bottom line sat as of the beginning of the war:

Around 80% of the global population can get 80% uptime solar-plus-storage power for less than $100/MWh, and half can get it for below about $80/MWh. That is already competitive with average fossil generation costs today, typically around $100/MWh.

And they go on to remind us, even more crucially, that those numbers will keep inexorably moving

Today’s affordability map is therefore not fixed. As time moves on and electrotech costs continue to fall on learning curves, regions that are already cheap become cheaper, and regions just outside competitiveness cross the line. The global area where solar plus batteries can provide high-uptime electricity at low cost expands over time.

By 2030, our analysis suggests that more than three quarters of the world’s population can get 80% uptime solar-plus-storage power for less than $80/MWh, and 90% of the world for less than $100/MWh.

Another way to say it is, the fossil fuel industry was already on the back foot before all this began. Indeed, a way to understand the Trump presidency, including its “excursions” into Venezuela and Iran, is as a reaction against this new reality: the desperate attempt by Big Oil, and by a would-be Big Man, to assert what Trump keeps calling “energy dominance.” We were trying, as it were, to “roll coal” on the rest of the world, with war but also with Trump’s other tricks, especially tariffs. His bet was that America was so militarily powerful, and its market so attractive, that we could coerce other countries into going along with his vision of a 1950s world where America used its oil supremacy to keep atop the heap.

For a moment it seemed almost to be working. Faced with preposterous tariffs, a number of countries promised to buy large amounts of American liquefied natural gas in order to placate the administration and see their bill drop. But China, the big target, was unintimidated, fighting back with its control over critical minerals, and with the fact that it no longer feared disruption in global energy markets. That’s because, as David Fickling pointed out the other day, China had restructured its energy supply over the last three years, effectively going on an “oil detox.” The war, and its effect on prices, simply supercharged this, as one can tell from the easily available statistical evidence on things like how much people were charging their cars with electricity as opposed to pumping them full of gas.

Public charging in China in April increased 17% from the previous month, to hit 10.38 terawatt-hours, or TWh, similar to the electricity consumption of the Netherlands. Add the majority of charging that happens at home, and the increase from last year is probably about 8 TWh — equivalent to about 800,000 barrels per day of oil. Other data back this up: The decline in gasoline and diesel production during April, relative to the average over the previous three years, was almost identical, at 790,000 barrels per day.

But as Fickling also pointed out, the real threat for Big Oil is that China’s Asian neighbors, who are the remaining potential growth market for LNG, are watching closely and figuring this out. These are the countries that were supposed to be cowed by American might and then supplied by the new surge of gas from the fracking belt

The problem is that those rising middle powers do have alternatives to meet their energy needs, thanks to the growth of renewables. Asia’s LNG-to-power market was already being aggressively undercut on price by solar, batteries and wind. The war in Iran has demonstrated that clean energy is more reliable, too.

Indeed, just run the numbers and you get some pretty stark news:

A new gas-fired power plant in Asia needs to sell electricity for more than $100 per megawatt-hour to break even. Even existing plants, whose construction costs have long since been paid off, need $70/MWh or more if they’re fueled with LNG. Photovoltaic solar power, or PV, can be had for half the new-build price, at around $50/MWh or less. You can even add a battery and wind turbines and have round-the-clock clean electricity for less than what established gas plants are paying just for their fuel and maintenance.

This is why Trump’s failed war is so important. Those Asian leaders—who again represent most of the projected increase in demand for energy—would have slowly moved in the direction of cheap clean energy. But now they don’t have to go slowly, with one eye over the shoulder to make sure a wrathful America doesn’t punish them. They will now laugh at Trump all the way to the bank.

And all of this converges at the exact same moment with something even more important: the El Niño about to unleash itself on the planet. Political leaders here and abroad thought they had somehow bottled up the issue of climate change, that they could conveniently ignore it. Physics, as usual, has other ideas, and it looks as though those ideas will be expressed with…vigor. Essentially, an El Niño serves as a way for the ocean to release heat that has been accumulating in its waters, and as Tom Harris notes, there is a lot of that heat.

Global ocean heat uptake jumped by a staggering 23 zettajoules (ZJ) in 2025 alone. For context, 23 ZJ is roughly 200 times the total annual electricity generation of the entire human race. The 2025 ocean heat uptake represents an eight-fold increase over the 1958–1985 annual mean baseline

The degree to which we’ve been storing global warming in the oceans can’t be overstated, and now the door to that sauna is being flung open. You may recall the shock a few years ago when global temperatures started occasionally breaching the 1.5 Celsius mark; Harris cites predictions that we could see months in 2027 when we go past the two-degree mark. Jim Hansen and his team just published a new paper predicting that the El Niño is coming fast enough that 2026 will likely set a new record for global temperature

For the purpose of predicting temperature in the remainder of 2026, we note in Fig. 8 that global SST in 2026 has approximately “caught” the 2024 global SST in May (upper figure) and 2026 continues to be at least 0.1°C warmer than in 2023 (the last El Nino onset year). We expect that gap to be maintained, as the upcoming El Nino is at least as strong as the one in 2023. We note also that Earth’s energy imbalance for the last 15 months of data (January 2025 through March 2026) is 1.58 W/m2 , even higher than the prior decade (Fig. 4). The year 2026 should already exceed the 2024 record, with higher temperatures to come in 2027.

(And as Hansen notes, if his predictions are correct it will go some way towards rejiggering scientific assumptions about just how sensitive the climate is to our emissions—that is, recent celebrations in some quarters that the worst climate outcomes were off the table may well have been premature. Meanwhile, also worth reading Daniel Swain’s very detailed forecast for how it all may affect the West Coast)

We don’t know in advance all the ways that El Niño will manifest, but I confess to being fearful; we’ve been barely dealing with the stresses that temperature rise has already inflicted, and the soaring mercury will come as farmers are already facing the fertilizer shortage that Trump’s war provoked. The best we can hope for at this point, I think, is a year that stops a little short of cataclysmic; in any event, I believe it will be enough to produce a return to the politics of, say, 2020, when the world was more focused on the climate crisis.

We’ve been drifting away from that focus in this country, mostly because Democratic politicians began to lose their nerve in the face of ongoing attacks by the fossil fuel industry. But now is the time to regain that focus. As it turns out, new research makes it clear that Americans are in fact at least as worried about climate change as they ever were. Here’s a summary from David Gelles:

Take, for example, April research from Gallup, which found that 44 percent of U.S. adults “worry a great deal about global warming or climate change.” That’s among the highest percentages since 1989, and just short of the all-time high of 46 percent registered in 2020.

Another 22 percent of Americans worry “a fair amount” about climate change, meaning it’s an issue that is solidly on the radar for two-thirds of U.S. adults .

A survey last year from George Mason University also found that about 65 percent of Americans were “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about global warming.

And unlike in some previous studies, when climate change often ranked near last among voters’ major concerns, that poll found that the threats posed by a warming world were squarely in the middle of the pack, above issues like crime and health.

Democratic candidates in the primaries—which are not so far off—are going to have no choice but to grapple with the fact that

A full 72 percent of Democrats say they worry a great deal about the issue, the second-highest figure on record, according to Gallup

But really, it should be an asset, not a trouble. As a new study of climate communications makes clear across six countries makes clear

“By a margin of more than 4:1 we’ve seen people believe more clean is a better path to affordability than more fossil.”

As of now, with the Iran debacle receding and El Niño looming, we can say a few things with certainty:

1. The cheapest power on earth comes from the sun and wind, and everyone but us seems to have realized it

2. That clean power gives us some hope of dealing with the climate crisis that threatens our future, not to mention our insurance premiums

3. That clean power does not involve us in foreign wars

4. And the only important person on earth who does not agree with1, 2, and 3 is Donald Trump, who is being daily proven wrong on exactly everything. I mean, the man can’t fix the reflecting pool. So opponents should constantly identify Trump with climate denial and with solar denial; make him the face of our retrograde policy.

   How hard can that be?

In other energy and climate news:

+The indefatigable organizer Pete Sikora offers a truly comprehensive lesson in effective (and ineffective) mobilization, by comparing the progress New York City has made with its law requiring big-building energy retrofits with the lack of progress that New York State has made on its climate laws. His diagnosis:

We are wildly unlikely to win with only small numbers of white progressives, while acting as if we also have deep, but unseen support in communities of color. Instead, we have to organize and mobilize strong support in enough places around the state to build a truly multiracial effort mobilizing working people.

A strong, diverse campaign ought to include low income whites in at least some rural places. It can’t happen without enough good, accountable paid organizers working to build support in diverse places and demographics, especially Black, Latino and Asian low income communities. We’ve got to find the money and build the organization or organizations to make it happen.

Meanwhile, there’s emerging evidence that good organizing is taking at least some toll on Trump’s crusade against the planet and the science that helps us understand it. As Justin Gerdes reports, the courts are starting to take apart Trump’s anti-wind efforts:

On June 6, a federal judge vacated guidance issued by the Treasury Department in August 2025 that had ended renewable energy project developers’ ability to prove their eligibility for federal tax credits by demonstrating they had already spent at least 5% of the total project cost.

Last week, the Justice Department gave up on defending President Trump’s wind permitting moratorium.

“The door to federal permitting is now unlocked again and each developer will be able to make the case for permitting their individual project based on the facts and the law,” Kit Kennedy, the managing director for power, climate, and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo.

This comes after federal judges this winter struck down all five stop-work orders issued by the Interior Department in December 2025 to block construction of East Coast offshore wind farms.

For clean energy companies, and their putative allies in Democratic state attorneys general offices, the message is clear: stay on offense.

And after a fearsome howl from critics, word came yesterday that the White House will back off the attempts I described last week to remove the system of buoys monitoring the flow of ocean currents. Maxine Joselow:

The National Science Foundation had said in May that it would begin removing hundreds of underwater instruments this month that collect data on coastal flooding, marine heat waves and other climate and weather events.

But the agency announced on Thursday that it will pause efforts to take apart the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, while convening an expert panel to determine its future.

“Effective immediately, N.S.F. will not proceed with further removal or de-scoping of equipment,” the agency said in a statement.

+A series of hot, dry summers have finally claimed one of England’s most iconic trees, a giant oak in Sherwood Forest that, as Patrick Barkham says,

was said to have provided a sanctuary for the outlaw and his gang when fleeing the tyrannical Sheriff

Elsewhere in the UK, more than 80% of peatlands have been degraded—and around the world these damaged ecosystems are producing as much as five percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas systems. So it’s good news that researchers and farmers are figuring out how to “re-wet” or flood the systems, and then use them for solar panels. As Stephanie Baum writes, researchers have foundthat

solar panels on rewetted peatland provide a unique habitat for bird species along with generating green energy and potentially locking up carbon…

Hanna Rae Martens, a peatland ecologist at the University of Greifswald and lead author of the study, said, “The presence of wetland species like reed bunting and the endangered meadow pipit shows that the solar park is truly re-wetted and has peatland species returning.

“But we also recorded species like Eurasian tree sparrow and tree pipit, which are not typically found in peatlands. They all appear to use the structure of the solar panels. When I’m out on site, I see a lot of meadow pipits sitting on the panels, flying off to catch insects and then flying back to their perch.”

+A big new solar panel factory in Cartersville, Georgia will soon be the country’s largest. As Michelle Lewis writes,

This isn’t just another factory; it’s the only place in the country where every major piece of a solar panel – from ingot to finished module – gets made under one roof. The module assembly side is already running at full capacity, turning out 16,700 panels a day.

“Producing the first solar cells at Cartersville is a milestone for Qcells and for American manufacturing,” said Andy Park, global CEO of Qcells. “A dependable domestic supply chain doesn’t just create thousands of good-paying jobs; it gives our customers greater certainty on price, supply, and tariffs, and a product they can trust from start to finish.”

Cartersville, by the way, is represented by a far-right climate-denying congressman, Barry Loudermilk, who has explained that wind and solar are not “mature enough” to be on the grid. Joe Biden did his darnedest!

+As I wrote about more than a year ago, Elon Musk is powering his peculiarly racist AI with a series of highly polluting engines around datacenters in Tennessee and Mississippi. The NAACP, noting that most of the damage is inflicted on Black neighborhoods, filed suit to make the world’s richest man comply with federal environmental law, but now the Trump administration has ruled that their single biggest donor can ignore those laws. The Southern Environmental Law Center is challenging that conclusion:

In the filing, the Department of Justice never disputes that xAI is pumping out unlawful and harmful pollution into Memphis and North Mississippi. Instead, the Department argues that it doesn’t matter whether xAI is breaking the law and threatening community members’ health if the Trump Administration blesses the lawlessness. While the Department points to vague national security concerns as its reason to let xAI continue to illegally pollute unabated, all companies, even ones that contract with the federal government, are required to follow the law

The attempted power grab by the Department of Justice has implications that go far beyond Memphis and North Mississippi. The Department is trying to dramatically undermine the longstanding right enshrined by Congress in federal law that allows impacted communities to file lawsuits—known as citizen suits—against polluters for violating the law. Citizen suits are an important part of the federal Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other bedrock environmental laws. They serve as an essential backstop—and often a last resort—for communities when government regulators fail to hold polluters accountable. The provision was passed by Congress with bipartisan support, and courts have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of citizen suits.

Elsewhere on the oligarch watch, Alex Cuadros reports that the Trump administration is rewarding another big donor by weakening restrictions on methane emissions.

Trump has since named a former Hilcorp lobbyist to a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting him in charge of an effort to unravel the methane rules with help from trade groups backed by [major donor Jeffrey] Hildebrand, a ProPublica investigation has found. That will bring a sweeping reprieve for the nation’s 700,000 stripper wells, boosting Hildebrand’s profits while saddling society as a whole with the climate fallout.

Stripper wells collectively contribute just 6% of the nation’s oil and natural gas. But in recent studies, scientists have identified them as the source of roughly half the sector’s methane emissions — in part because they tend to be thinly monitored, run-down and thus prone to leaking. As a result, these barely productive wells play an outsize role in climate change, disproportionately amplifying heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

+Kudos to my Third Act colleagues, the Sierra Club, and the Hip Hop Caucus for keeping pressure on the World Cup over its sponsorship from Saudia Aramco, world’s biggest oil company. As Dharna Noor reports,

This coming Sunday, protesters will demonstrate at or near five 2026 World Cup stadiums and six other major sporting arenas, chanting and holding signs calling for an end to fossil fuel sponsorships.

“People all over the world are watching the World Cup, which is a good reminder that we’re all in this together, that it’s one planet,” said Brent Suter, pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels of Major League Baseball and supporter of the campaign to end “sportswashing”. “It’s a good moment for a big message about the climate.”

+I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the rickshaws of Dhaka, mostly back in the day when they were powered by human muscle turning pedals. That was largely replaced by two-stroke engines, and more recently by batteries, and now there’s an emerging plan to use those batteries in the evening as a virtual power plant for the Bangladeshi capital. When rickshaws return for the evening with a third of their batteries still charged, SolShare is figuring out how to aggregate that power and sell it to the grid. Drivers should see a thirty percent increase in income.

+Finally, here’s your dose of over-the-top good news today. The French have launched a first-of-its-kind floating platform designed both to capture solar energy and to…farm oysters.

The result of several years of collective work and consultation between researchers, marine professionals and local stakeholders, this prototype represents a concrete response to several contemporary challenges: the energy transition , the preservation of the oyster farming sector in the face of climate hazards, and the sustainable development of lagoon areas.

I leave you with a picture of it being towed out to sea off the city of Sète