Pretend you're running for Congress

A first stab at how to talk about energy and climate in 2026

This may have been the worst week in recent American political history—from the oil-soaked invasion of Venezuela and the threats against half a dozen other nations, to the debut of Elon Musk’s new child pornography tool, to the murder of Rene Good, whose last kind words were ‘I’m not mad at you.’ I hope and trust you’ve been out in the street—our small Vermont town had a half-mile of mourners carrying candles.

The midterm elections are not yet looming over us, but they’re very much in mind—along with street protest, we also badly need to beat MAGA for control of Congress, which would give the forces of relative reason at least a small foothold in our political life. Those midterm contests should turn on revulsion at fascism, but chances are they will be decided, at least in part, on what we’re now calling ‘affordability.’ And energy may well be at the heart of that: what eggs were to 2024, electricity may be to 2026. So it’s going to be crucial for candidates to be able to talk effectively about this topic. I imagine I’ll be revisiting this many times this year, so consider this a first primer—and consider forwarding it to you local good-hearted candidate. (And should you decide to become a candidate yourself, Run for Something is a great resource, and remember that Lead Locally has an upcoming virtual training session for potential climate-focused candidates).

I think the most basic message is: keep it simple. Energy and utility policy is intricate and abstruse, a matter of PUCs (public utility commissions) and ISOs (independent system operators) and RTOs (regional transmission organizations). We need to repair incentives for utilities, so that they’re spurred to save energy instead of build infrastructure; we need to move to a “connect and manage” system that forces fast interconnections. But you don’t actually need to explain all of that every time you give a speech. Instead, you need to establish a few things.

1. The Trump administration and the GOP Congress are dramatically increasing demand for electricity, mostly because they’re approving every data center any of their billionaire buddies suggest. You might point out that the biggest fruits to date of all this electricity are a lot of weird child porn on X, and a hard job market for entry-level workers seeing their prospects crimped by AI. And you could point out the absurd pollution it’s producing—black neighborhoods of Memphis, for instance, get to breathe the smog from Musk’s jet engines powering Grok. But the basic bottom line is: a sudden, Republican-led spike in demand for power.

2. At the same time, the Trump administration and the GOP Congress are systematically blocking the cheapest forms of electricity to meet this new demand. They’ve shut down wind farms that were sending power back to shore and they’ve prevented big solar farms from being built. There’s no secret why—they’ve said over and over again that it’s in service to the oil industry. For America as a whole this is a treasonous gift to the Chinese, who are now assuming world leadership in energy technology. But in each Congressional district what it means is: no cheap energy for us, thank you Republicans

3. When you increase demand and decrease supply, prices go up. Electricity prices increased something like ten percent last year. This is the Republican tax—the gratuity that you get to add to your electric bill to help the oil barons who in turn pass on a small amount in campaign donations to the GOP. (If you really want to piss people off, point out that the rates paid by data centers have gone up far far less than the rates paid by, um, people)

4. And that rise in rates compounds over time, because we just keep paying. If you want your voters to understand what they’re missing, you need to point to Australia. a country of 40 million people who—beginning in June, right at the start of the general election season—will be getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon. There is not a voter in America who can’t understand three free hours of electricity a day—time to run your washing machine, cool your house with the AC, fill your storage battery. “Friends, if we had leadership like Australia’s, we’d be getting free power. Instead, you get to give the fossil fuel industry a big gift. When I’m elected that will end.”

I’m not claiming that this is everything you need to know about energy to govern effectively. But what I know is that Republicans have won too many elections in recent years reciting simple lies: crime is out of control, immigrants will take your job, climate change is a scam. It’s time to win elections by telling simple truths—clean energy is cheap and abundant, and comes with lots of jobs attached.

Oh, and no one is going to need to invade Venezuela to grab their share of sunlight. I think people are growing tired of the violence that surrounds every aspect of Trumpism, including the conquest of foreign countries. So say that too.

I think it’s a winning message.

In other energy and climate news:

+Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado with some data on how much land we need for solar power—if we took just the acreage the world currently uses to grow “biofuels” like ethanol and covered them with solar panels, we could produce twenty three times more energy, which would be enough to power every car and truck on the planet four times over.

The reason these comparisons are even more stark than biofuels versus solar is that most of the energy consumed in a petrol car is wasted; either as heat (if you put your hand over the bonnet, you will often notice that it’s extremely warm after driving) or from friction when braking. An electric car is much more efficient without a combustion engine, and thanks to regenerative braking (which uses braking energy to recharge the battery). That means that driving one mile in an electric car uses just one-third of the energy of driving one mile in a combustion engine car.

Put these two efficiencies together, and we find that you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.

+So the EPA is going to stop calculating how much damage pollution does to people, and instead only add up how much regulations cost polluters. Maxine Joselow, in the Times, calls the shift “seismic.”

“The idea that E.P.A. would not consider the public health benefits of its regulations is anathema to the very mission of E.P.A.,” said Richard Revesz, the faculty director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

“If you’re only considering the costs to industry and you’re ignoring the benefits, then you can’t justify any regulations that protect public health, which is the very reason that E.P.A. was set up,” said Mr. Revesz, who led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

+Following up on my last newsletter about Greenland, Andy Revkin helpfully interviews a bunch of scientists who have worked there over the years, and who—not surprisingly—think taking it over is a crummy idea for a long list of reasons. As the veteran polar scientist Eric Rignot observes

A takeover by the USA could put an end to many international scientific studies in Greenland, which would be dramatic. We need to leave Greenland to the greenlanders. We need to respect them and work with them. We need to find a way to cooperate with them on the terms of their choosing. They have all the reasons in the world to be scared by the USA. The USA has not taken care of its own indigenous people, the condition of American indians is absolutely terrible. Until we show the world that we can take care of our own people, we should not pretend that we can take care of greenlanders.

Greenlanders will protect the environment in Greenland, they care about it deeply, they have done so for many generations. No other nation will do that job better than them. This is their home. Leaving Greenland to greenlanders is the best way to protect Greenland and the best way to show greenlanders the respect that they so much deserve

+Good news from New York where the first interview with the city’s brand new comptroller indicates that he’s serious about taking on the financial industry’s biggest players for their egregious climate stance. Mark Levine succeeds Brad Lander in the post, and he told Responsible Investor he will hold “every asset manager to extremely high standards on climate.” The point in question: should the city take its huge pension funds out of Blackrock, which has been a climate backslider for years (the result of red state treasurers applying the kind of pressure Levine is now considering).

+Interesting new paper from the International Journal of Astrobiology arguing that perhaps one reason we don’t find many other signs of intelligent life in the universe is that planets might need to develop coal in order to industrialize, and that coal is relatively difficult to create in massive quantities. Except, sadly, on our planet.

Central to our argument is the host of highly contingent taphonomic factors, involving plate tectonics and climate, that were required to convert the tropical lycopsid swamp forests of the Pangean supercontinent to the massive coal deposits of the Carboniferous period.

+A cogent argument from Chris Hatch, who points out that oil prices barely moved during Trump’s attack on Venezuela, probably because more and more players are realizing that we’re not going to need as much oil as we used to think.

The big reason is electric vehicles. More than half the new vehicles sold in China were EVs last year, and by the end of the year, the figure had risen to almost 60 per cent. “The rapid adoption of electric vehicles in China has been a major driver of China’s shrinking oil footprint,” according to the European Centre for Economic Policy Research.

It’s a shift that’s not limited only to cars, but extends from buses to two and three-wheelers and heavy trucks. And it’s a trend that’s unmistakable across Asia and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Tina Casey writes at Clean Technica that oil execs are skittish because they know that another big round of improvements in solar cells seems likely as perskovite cells get closer and closer to commercialization. She quotes Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm

“Utility scale perovskites are here!” Granholm posted on LinkedIn last week.

“I had the pleasure of visiting Tandem PV this week and their solar panels are at 29% efficiency today and will be over 30% within weeks — which means they are 30% more efficient than the average solar panel,” Granholm elaborated.

“That means less land necessary for solar installations, and lots of LCOE savings,” she added, with LCOE being shorthand for levelized cost of energy, a calculation that enables costs to be compared across different energy resources.

If you caught that thing about “less land,” that’s just as significant as the 30% efficiency improvement. Less land translates into lower costs for site acquisition, preparation, and maintenance, and it also provides farmers with more opportunities for agrivoltaic projects, in which solar panels are combined with farming in integrated systems.

+In the morbid contest for which climate side-effects killed the most people last year, heatwaves appear to have outdone fires and floods. According to World Weather Attribution,

Among all extremes, heatwaves stood out as the most lethal. In Europe alone, one study estimated that 24,400 people died during a single summer heatwave between June and August, across 854 cities representing nearly 30 per cent of the continent’s population.

In many parts of the Global South, however, comparable mortality data does not exist, the report noted, masking the full scale of heat-related deaths.

Continued greenhouse gas emissions meant that what might otherwise have been a relatively cooler year instead became an extremely warm one, fuelling prolonged heatwaves, droughts, storms and floods across the world.

+Forget the petrodollar. Aaron Foyer predicts the rapid rise of the electroyuan

Being a technology supplier gives China enormous leverage, especially with countries that are developing and looking to energize on a budget. Projects that are financed by Chinese banks, built by Chinese companies or assembled using Chinese parts could receive favorable financial terms in exchange for using renminbi in the agreements.

A perfect example of this occurred in 2023, when a Chinese developer built a 500-megawatt solar farm in Uzbekistan and stipulated the power contracts be settled in yuan. But Uzbekistan is just one of many countries striking these sorts of deals with Beijing.

The rise of an electroyuan would completely reshape global financial architecture and geopolitics.

For one, it would increase the yuan’s share in international payments, something that’s already been growing for over a decade and brings a certain inertia with it. Countries that become economically tethered to Chinese power projects might start invoicing in yuan by default. Over time, swaths of Asia, the Middle East and Africa could start conducting their commerce and trade in yuan, further eroding the trade dominance the dollar has enjoyed for decades.

An international yuan trading world would also hand Beijing incredible geopolitical leverage and weaken U.S. influence. Just as the widespread use of the dollar gave the U.S. the ability to hit bad-boy nations with financial sanctions to compel their governments into taking specific actions, China could pull the same Don Corleone moves.

Along somewhat the same lines, Bloomberg’s Mark Gongloff argues that the smart money around the world is pouring into green tech, despite Trump’s best efforts

Global green-debt issuance hit a record $947 billion last year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, as the obvious need for cheap, quickly built energy supply in the AI age mostly outweighed the bluster from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Issuance could hit $1.6 trillion next year, one analyst told Bloomberg News. The AI bubble might need to keep inflating for that prediction to come true. But even if the mad scramble to build data centers happens to cool, continuing demand for electrification and cheap power in developing markets should put a solid floor under cleantech for the foreseeable future.

Globally, solar and wind-power growth in the first nine months of 2025 was more than enough to meet the increase in the world’s power demand during the same period, the think tank Ember noted recently. As renewable-energy market share grows, it economically outperforms fossil fuels, driving demand for still more renewable power. “The direction of travel is unmistakable: Clean power is scaling, markets are shifting and the electricity system is becoming the center of economic strategy — from AI growth to energy security,” Ember analysts wrote.

+A new study of a small Antarctic glacier found that its retreat was the fastest ever measured, which may be an ominous sign for much larger chunks of ice. Laura Paddison reports:

Hektoria is a relatively small glacier by Antarctic standards, and its partial demise won’t cost the planet much in terms of sea level rise, one expert said.

However, “it’s a smaller cousin to some truly gigantic — I mean size of the island of Britain — glaciers in Antarctica that could conceivably go through the same process, as this whole evolution of the ice sheets on Earth evolves with global warming,” a glaciologist added.

Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, who was not involved in the research, said the new findings “raise the bar on our understanding of how fast Antarctic glaciers may retreat.”

These glaciers, especially the cavities beneath their ice shelves and tongues, are some of the most inaccessible environments on Earth, he told CNN, but knowing more about them is crucial to better project how they’ll respond to climate change. The research raises fears that ice loss from Antarctica, which contributes to sea-level rise, “could occur more rapidly than projected,” he said.

+Remember when all the billionaires were going to leave New York if Mamdani got elected? That didn’t happen—but a new survey shows that half of all Americans are thinking about moving because of climate change. That won’t happen on that scale either (among other things, it’s hard to sell a home where the insurance prices are rising fast) but I’m sure it will increasingly be a factor in where Americans live. The problem is, where to go?

For those considering a move to another state, more than half of respondents wanted to avoid disaster-prone states like Florida and California and preferred to move to what they perceived as low-risk states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut.

In truth, Vermont has had devastating floods year after year, and it’s putting a huge strain on a small state. It’s where I live, so I know that story—but I imagine it’s much the same everywhere. Maybe we should stop raising the temperature so we can stay put.

+Fight sportswashing! The battle against the LA Dogers sponsorship by the oil industry is going national, as the World Series champions look forward to next year’s schedule. Here’s the sign-up form for how to get involved around the country, with a demonstration set for late February

+The richest 0.1% of the world’s population used up their share of the planet’s annual carbon budget just three days into 2026, a new Oxfam study found. The richest one percent took an entire ten days to reach the same mark, leaving them just 355 days this year for wrecking the planet

+Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has been the most outspoken critic of the oil industry in Congress for many years now. In a recent interview he did not hold back.

The fossil fuel industry is essentially running the United States government from the inside. It's a desperate industry. They know that clean renewable energy is cheaper. They know that they only compete by virtue of massive subsidies from being allowed to pollute for free, which nobody should be allowed to do. And they prop all of that up with enormous amounts of political corruption and leverage and a huge climate denial fraud campaign.

+The first fully recyclable giant wind turbine blade has been unveiled in China, all 361 feet of it.

Electrek reported that the company has designed a “special degradation solution.”

Compared with previous recycling attempts that required intense heat or high pressure — often damaging the fibers they sought to save — this new chemical process operates at ambient temperature and pressure. It chemically dissolves the glue holding the blade together.

The high-value carbon fiber can be recovered, cleaned, and reused in everything from new turbines to car parts.