On the flow of money, and of time

Earth's most important climate denier dies at 87

Here’s how Lee Raymond’s hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, remembered him this morning.

The Texas paper was more direct, and more accurate, than anyone else covering the story. The Times obit gave top billing to the fact that he led the acquisition of Mobil and “cut costs relentlessly;” the Wall Street Journal waited till paragraph six to note that he was “openly skeptical” of climate science (much like the Wall Street Journal). But the Chron had it right—when people think back in a hundred years or a thousand or ten thousand, the one thing worth remembering about him will be the crucial role he played in holding back action on climate change.

I’m going to recount the lowlights of the story here, and add one that gets very little notice in the obituaries, but that ties directly to the ongoing crisis.

Raymond was a research engineer who spent his whole career at what was then the world’s largest company. He joined its board in 1984, already a leading candidate for CEO, which means he was near the top during the 1980s, the period when (as we now know thanks to great investigative reporting) the company’s scientists correctly identified the dangers of global warming and linked them directly to Exxon’s products. That research, as Inside Climate News reported in 2015,

laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs office. Marked “not to be distributed externally,” it contained information that “has been given wide circulation to Exxon management.” In it, the company recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

Unless that happened, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered,” the primer said, citing independent experts. “Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”

This was, of course, the same decade when Jim Hansen was carrying out his groundbreaking research at NASA (and I was writing The End of Nature). Exxon, as it turns out, was on precisely the same wavelength. Here’s, to me, one of the great historical what-ifs: imagine that, on the night that Hansen made his remarks to Congress, an Exxon exec like Raymond had gone on the evening news and told Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, or Peter Jennings that “our research shows pretty much the same thing.” No one would have accused Exxon of climate alarmism; instead, we would have gotten to work as a civilization.

Instead, they chose denial. And it was Raymond who played a lead role, as Exxon helped form the Global Climate Coalition, first of the obfuscation fronts. He became the spokesman for anti-science in many ways: in 1997, as the world approached the first global climate talks in Kyoto, he gave what may be a speech second only in importance to Hansen’s original testimony. Speaking in Beijing to the Worl Petroleum Congress, he contended that the world was cooling, that there was no way to know if co2 was to blame, and that in any event “it is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly whether policies are enacted now or twenty years from now.”

These, of course, were exactly the things Exxon’s scientists had told them were not true. Indeed, they’d been explicitly warned that

man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.

And Exxon had believed its scientists. As a 2015 Los Angeles Times report made clear, they’d begun building drilling rigs higher to counteract rising sea levels, and plotting out what parts of the Arctic might be prime for oil drilling once they’d helped melt the ice.

Exxon, more than any single force on earth, made sure that the planet didn’t address climate change while it had time. Given what it knew in the 1980s Exxon could have had a head start on building and owning the solutions like sun and wind. But, as one of Raymond’s successors said two years ago, that didn’t happen because “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders” with clean energy. And he was right. You can make money putting up solar panels, but you can’t make Exxon money, because the sun delivers energy for free. It doesn’t offer the same scope for greed.

And greed was the word here. For his role in helping wreck the earth’s climate system, Exxon paid him $686 million, or $144,573 a day during his tenure as CEO. His retirement package was $400 million.

And even when he finally left Exxon in 2005 he continued on doing damage—this is the often overlooked part of his story. He was the lead independent director at JP Morgan Chase, which had been the Exxon house bank, and which, as I chronicled for Rolling Stone in 2020, became the fossil fuel industry’s biggest lender—the “doomsday bank.”

Many of us ginned up a campaign to get him off that board (along with Rev. Lennox Yearwood and other protesters, and with Jane Fonda looking in through the glass windows, I was arrested at a DC Chase branch to help kick off that fight in 2020). It was eventually successful—that summer he was demoted as lead director, and left the board in December.

But Raymond’s legacy lives on. Just as Exxon has gone on pumping out oil (and climate nonsense), Chase has kept pumping out money. As the brand new edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report pointed out last week, Chase remains the number one financier of fossil fuels around the world, besting Mitsubishi, Citigroup, and Bank of America; since 2021 they’ve pumped a quarter-trillion dollars into this effort. Asked by the Guardian for a comment, a Chase spokesman said

Asked for comment about its fossil fuel lending, a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson said: “As one of the world’s largest financiers of energy, we support the full range of energy solutions and technologies, with a focus on reliability, affordability, security and long-term resilience.” That kind of bland corporate-speak hides an almost unimaginable multitude of sins.

Like a great many Christians, I don’t believe a loving God consigns people to eternal damnation. But I do believe that Lee Raymond, Exxon, and Chase have helped send the rest of us to a kind of hell. As Jeff Masters just reported

The world recorded its highest burned area for any January-May during the past 15 years, with more than 150 million hectares burned globally – 22% higher than the previous high set in 2020 and about double the recent average for this period. In the U.S., the burned area so far in 2026 has been the highest for at least the past 10 years — about double the 10-year average — according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

In other climate and energy news:

+Let’s take the bad taste out of our mouths with a new book from Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao that argues that the most effective ways to fight climate change are also things that make people happy, from changing diets to changing vacations.

Leave The Lights On boldly reframes climate action not as a burden, but as an opportunity to build a brighter future—without guilt, and without giving up the things that make life worth living. With warmth, clarity, and a refreshingly optimistic voice, Zhao and Dunn explain what it means to “do your part.” Because sustainability doesn’t lie in doing everything, it lies in doing something, joyfully.

+Earlier this year I told you about claims from a Scandinavian battery maker that they had invented a solid-state battery with remarkable storage capacity, and promised to follow up. It now appears to be, as I suggested, too good to be true, and Finnish authorities are on the case. However, as Fred Lambert reports,

I hope it doesn’t cool people on the technology, because solid-state batteries do appear to be genuinely, finally coming. Toyota has invested over $15 billion and targets production vehicles by 2027-2028. Samsung SDI has the world’s largest pilot solid-state production line and plans mass production by 2027. These are real programs from companies with real technical credibility. Solid-state is coming — just not from Donut Lab, and not with the impossible combination of specs they promised.

Meanwhile, here’s something quite real and remarkable, and just a little further south. The almost unbelievably adaptive Ukrainian defense industry has just rolled out an electric motorcycle that carries two soldiers in full gear at 80 kilometers an hour, and with a range of a hundred kilometers. What does the Ukrainian army want with this? Well, it produces no noise, and no heat signature for drones to hone in on.

Motorcycles have become one of the most operationally critical vehicle classes on the Ukrainian frontline, where small mobile groups, reconnaissance teams, and casualty-evacuation crews need to move quickly through terrain impassable to heavier vehicles.

Meanwhile, the Chinese also seem to be hard at work on new battery technology that may hold even more promise than solid-state batteries:

Unlike traditional lithium-ion batteries, which rely on heavy metal compounds like nickel, cobalt, and manganese to “house” lithium ions, lithium-air batteries utilise lithium metal as the anode and oxygen from the air as the cathode reactant. This design significantly reduces weight and complexity, earning them the nickname “breathable batteries.”

The theoretical energy density of lithium-air technology is staggering, reaching up to 12,000 Wh/kg—a figure comparable to gasoline (approx. 13,000 Wh/kg). While current laboratory prototypes have achieved over 1,200 Wh/kg, this is already more than four times the 250–270 Wh/kg capacity of mainstream lithium-ion batteries and significantly higher than the 500 Wh/kg expected from solid-state batteries.

+Michigan politicians—Democrats in the lead—are so scared of EVs that they literally want to ban Canadians and Mexicans who have brought Chinese models from driving them across the border.

“We’re gonna be aggressive here because Michigan jobs are on the line, but also so is national security. So close our border to Chinese vehicles and Chinese technology in the vehicles, even for day trips. That’s how aggressive we believe we need to be right now,” Rep. Hailey Stevens (D-Mich) said while speaking at a policy conference.

Something tells me this is not the smartest way to protect autoworkers. Maybe instead they could take a clue from Mexico, where president Claudia Sheinbaum just unveiled an electric van designed and built in the country and available for under ten grand. Here’s what the future looks like—her name is Olinia and she’s undeniably cute

By the way, Democrats like Slotkin are among those pushing more use of ethanol, which is a terrible idea. As David Widawsky points out

Producing ethanol requires substantial fossil fuel inputs, including fertilizer, processing energy and transportation. But the larger problem is land use: when crop production is diverted from the food supply into fuel production, forests and grasslands somewhere else get converted into new agricultural land to replace the lost food. That conversion releases massive stores of carbon into the atmosphere. Globally, the emissions from these land-use changes often outweigh the tailpipe emissions reductions ethanol is supposed to achieve.

+From Toby Couture and David Jacobs in PV magazine, a fascinating look at what’s happening in Africa, where solar is being led by installations on stores, warehouses, and factories.

The logic of the African solar market differs fundamentally from that of European or North American markets. In countries like Nigeria, solar energy does not primarily compete with cheap grid power. It competes with gasoline or diesel generators.

In many African countries, power outages are a daily occurrence. The result is that for years, businesses, hospitals, hotels, and manufacturing plants have had to purchase (and service) expensive back-up generators—often at enormous cost. Diesel power is expensive, noisy, maintenance-intensive, and dependent on volatile import prices.

Against this backdrop, solar-plus-storage systems are fundamentally changing the economic equation. With pay-back times of one to two years in certain parts of the continent, a market is emerging that is not reliant on subsidies but instead that is driven by commercial self-interest.

This also explains the market’s remarkable structure: According to AfSIA, around 85 percent of newly installed solar capacity is in the commercial and industrial (C&I) sector. Private households have so far played only a minor role. The driving forces are companies whose business models depend on a reliable power supply. For such companies, solar is increasingly becoming a matter of competitiveness and operational reliability.

Mini-grids, battery storage, and private solar systems can scale much faster and more cost-effectively than traditional power plants and grid expansion plans. This does not mean that central grids will become obsolete.

However, their role is likely to change: away from being the sole backbone of the supply system, toward becoming part of an increasingly hybrid energy system.

+The invaluable Emily Pontecorvo has a new report on the growth of clean energy manufacturing across the U.S., which includes some heartening news:

The U.S. saw 30 new utility-scale solar factories and 30 new battery factories come online last year alone, according to ACP. The country now has the capacity to meet average domestic demand for storage systems through 2030, and can produce enough solar panels to satisfy demand two times over.

In both industries, nearly all of that capacity has been added since 2022, when the Inflation Reduction Act created new subsidies for domestic manufacturing. The advanced manufacturing production tax credit incentivized not just solar and battery factories, but also all the production of components that go into these technologies, including solar and battery cells, polysilicon, wafers, and anodes. On top of these direct subsidies, the IRA generated demand for U.S.-made products by granting bonus tax credits for utility-scale solar and battery projects built with domestically produced parts.

+Pontecorvo’s HeatMap colleague Katie Brigham calculates that with all the new tech IPOs this week, there will be lots of AI wealth that some of its holders may want to devote to climate philanthropy

“It is not lost on the people who are working on AI that there are big environmental impacts associated with data centers,” Lara Pierpoint, managing director of Trellis Climate, told me. Her organization helps philanthropists and foundations invest in first-of-a-kind climate infrastructure projects that wouldn’t move forward without their support. She expects that the “strong outdoor and environmentally-focused culture” of the Bay Area will also hold sway over these emerging philanthropists.

Nan Ransohoff, Stripe’s head of climate, laid out the scale of this coming capital influx in a recent Substack post: “The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220 billion at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history,” she writes.

Whether it will be enough to make up for the damage the wealthy do is a different question. A new report deepens the longstanding claim that the wealthiest do hugely outsized climate damage, but it turns out it’s less their yachts than their investments. As Fiona Harvey explains

Through their ownership of companies and private financial and physical assets, from oil producers to property developments, the super-rich are responsible for an outsized slice of the greenhouse gases that are overheating the planet. The top 1% of people by wealth, through their shareholdings and investments, control about a quarter of global annual emissions in total.

Greenpeace has calculated the “climate debt” of these high net worth individuals, by attributing to them their share of the damage done to the climate by the assets they own. By this reckoning, the world’s richest cause nearly $1tn a year of damage to the climate.

+As it gets hotter, the air gets dirtier. New data shows LA began the year with its five smoggiest months in a decade

So far this year, the South Coast air basin, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, has seen 39 days when the concentration of lung-irritating ozone (commonly known as smog) exceeded the federal standard, according to preliminary state air quality data.

That’s even worse than the infamously hot and hazy 2017, when Greater Los Angeles had 36 unhealthful air days by June 4 and ultimately saw 145.

+I have a feeling that extreme heat may turn out to be one of the stories of the 2026 World Cup (along with the incredible thuggishness of American authorities). Happily, some activists will be there to explain why: protests are scheduled outside five venues sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. As the Sierra Club reports

The growing global movement against sportswashing surged to new heights in May when 2026 World Cup player Morten Thorsby of Norway joined footballers around the world in signing a petition urging FIFA to adopt stronger heat protections and drop fossil fuel sponsors. Now, Brent Suter of the L.A. Angels has become the first active Major League Baseball player in the game’s history to speak out.

“As an athlete, I care a lot about promoting companies that share my values, and I also care a lot about our planet,” Suter, a longtime environmentalist, told the campaign. “Have I used and directly benefited from fossil fuels in my life? Absolutely. Do I believe that continuing to fully depend on fossil fuels as a society is dangerous? Absolutely. We need to find ways to power our society in cleaner ways, and I want to represent companies that want to be part of the solution.”

Sammy Roth has more here

+The great climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus has left NOAA, as he explains in the latest installment of his newsletter

Yesterday, Monday, June 8, was my last day doing climate science for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, after 15 years of service. I’ve been a remote worker in North Carolina since the summer of 2022, and I was forced to resign due to a mandate to return to in-person work.

I don’t have another job lined up. Instead, I’m hoping to focus on my writing much more, and I’m planning to continue doing heat science work as a freelancer. I’m nervous about losing my salary for my family, but I haven’t felt this free in a long time, and I’m excited about what I can do now. I’m already well on my way with a new writing project (fiction for a change, and I’m having a blast!). Also, both my sons will be at UNC with in-state tuition in the fall, and we’ve already saved for that. I think it will work out.

In fact, perhaps more than work out:

I’d been very constrained at NASA for a long time. I was arrested twice for climate civil disobedience, but I was reprimanded and told that a third arrest would lead to my termination (I got arrested a third time anyway). At one point, after jumping up on the stage at the AGU, the biggest climate science conference in the US, I was under review by the JPL Ethics Office for a year. This was so stressful it gave me health issues. My overarching goal has been, and always will be, standing up for young people, working class people, marginalized people, and all of life on Earth, and standing against the billionaire class and fascism. I think I can probably accomplish this goal more effectively without the Big Brother-like constraints of my former job.

+From China, the world’s first underwater data center, cooled by seawater and powered by a wind turbine that sits on the ocean surface. As Amy Hawkins writes,

Located more than 6 miles (10km) off the coast of Shanghai, the datacentre is submerged 10 metres below the surface of the water and is powered by a nearby offshore windfarm. According to the Chinese government, the datacentre reduces power consumption by more than one-fifth compared with land-based datacentres.

+You’ll recall that the last edition of The Crucial Years had a lot to say about the quickening pace of electrification across Asia in the wake of the Gulf War. (Actually, I guess not the wake, since it’s still ongoing as of this morning). Anyway, the good folks at Ember yesterday published a massive report on the subject, chock-full of interesting numbers.

Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.

+Sad news from North Sumatra, where climate-driven extreme rains have killed off seven percent of an endangered orangutan species in a matter of days. It’s a reminder that we’re making a hell for everything, not just us.

Meanwhile, record winter temperatures in the Antarctic are raising yet more fears about destabilizing the great ice sheet. As Jonathan Watts reports

Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown.

The new winter peak temperature was logged by the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave, when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero degrees for three consecutive weeks.

Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”

+One more interesting solar breakthrough: panels that can directly desalinate water. Aaron Greenbaum describes the research

Recently, researchers from the University of Rochester in New York published a study in Light: Science & Applications that outlined a new desalination technique. The technique revolves around an aluminum panel etched using femtosecond lasers (lasers that pulse so fast they can only be measured in one-quadrillionth of a second). Thanks to the laser etching, the aluminum panel not only absorbs light but also becomes superwicked: It attracts water to an almost supernatural degree.

When the panel comes into contact with salt water, a thin film of water is pulled up, completely defiant of gravity, and evaporates using solar energy, leaving behind crystallized salt and other minerals. While the evaporated gas is recollected as salt-free water, the superwicked surface also moves salt crystals onto the edge of the panel, keeping the main surface clean and efficient. Not only is the process self-sufficient, but it also solves the problem of other desalination projects: It doesn’t discharge brine (a highly saline water that is poisonous to sea life).

That comes as at least a slight bit of happy news, after reports that the US has been blowing up Iran’s coastal water systems, which if true is a clear war crime.