So many moving pieces

Trying to understand the planet and its politics on the longest day

People often ask me why I give away this newsletter for free. After explaining that I’m able to because some kind people take out a voluntary subscription, I give the noble answer: this is the most important topic on earth, and so people need to know about it. The less noble answer is, sometimes I wonder if I’m really able to capture what’s going on, or if there are simply too many moving parts for anyone (me anyway) to write coherently about “climate change.”

That’s because it’s simultaneously the most important scientific story on the planet (in terms of physics and chemistry, but also everything from meteorology and agriculture to public health) with the largest imaginable economic effects, which should mean (but doesn’t) that it should dominate our political life. Understanding how those three spheres interacts means trying to figure out everything from human psychology to geopolitics, and much in between. So I thought I’d try to give just a tiny sense this week of how, even in the course of a few days time, all these things bump up against each other.

Let’s start by looking at the science, of which there’s been a lot this week. Because the IPCC takes five years or more to issue its massive assessments, a somewhat smaller and nimbler group of sixty international experts has been assembled to issue interim annual updates, and this year’s is a doozy. Let’s let Zeke Hausfather sum it up

“Things aren’t just getting worse. They’re getting worse faster,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth. “We’re actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there’s a silver lining. I don’t think there really is one in this one.”

The headline here is that we’ll pass the 1.5 degree mark within a few years, but that’s long been obvious to anyone paying attention. The scary part is about the constantly growing energy imbalance on our planet, as more and more of the sun’s heat is held here instead of radiating out to space—this imbalance is up by about 25 percent over the last decade. Air temperatures are hitting new records almost every month, of course, (and if you want to read about the human damage that is causing, this new report from Pakistan is utterly typical) but most of the heat is pouring into the planet’s oceans. This makes oceans rise faster because warm water takes up more space than cold, and because ice is melting—the rate of sea level rise has doubled in the past ten years compared with the period from 1971-2018.

I think the important thing to take away from this is that everything is now happening in very real time—forget 1.5 degrees, we’ll pour enough carbon into the air at our current pace to lock in 1.7 degrees within nine years. And that two-tenths of a degree, which sounds like so little? That’s enough to move 200 million human souls out of the comfortable climate zone they currently inhabit. (Nine years is the Trump term, and then assuming he leaves the next one).

But we’re already in the white water above the waterfall. New NASA data (and by the way it wouldn’t surprise me if these kinds of reports start to dwindle dramatically) this week showed an extraordinary increase in extreme weather events like droughts and floods around the world. Here’s how Roger Harrabin of the Guardian explained the findings

The study shows that such extreme events are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting and more severe, with last year’s figures reaching twice that of the 2003-2020 average.

The steepness of the rise was not foreseen. The researchers say they are amazed and alarmed by the latest figures from the watchful eye of Nasa’s Grace satellite, which tracks environmental changes in the planet. They say climate change is the most likely cause of the apparent trend, even though the intensity of extremes appears to have soared even faster than global temperatures.

The closest thing we have to an explanation may have appeared in another new study, this one from the dauntless climate scientist Michael Mann and others, which found, as Seth Borenstein explained in the Associated Press, that climate change has tripled the number of “atmospheric wave events linked to extreme weather in the last 75 years.”

Planetary waves flow across Earth all the time, but sometimes they get amplified, becoming stronger, and the jet stream gets wavier with bigger hills and valleys, Mann said. It’s called quasi-resonant amplification or QRA.

This essentially means the wave gets stuck for weeks on end, locked in place. As a result, some places get seemingly endless rain while others endure oppressive heat with no relief.

“A classic pattern would be like a high pressure out west (in the United States) and a low pressure back East and in summer 2018, that’s exactly what we had,” Mann said. “We had that configuration locked in place for like a month. So they (in the West) got the heat, the drought and the wildfires. We (in the East) got the excessive rainfall.”

The reason for the stuckness? We’ve melted much of the sea ice in the Arctic, reducing the temperature difference with the equator, and

that weakens the jet streams and the waves, making them more likely to get locked in place, Mann said.

“This study shines a light on yet another way human activities are disrupting the climate system that will come back to bite us all with more unprecedented and destructive summer weather events,” said Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who wasn’t involved in the research.

The effects as this plays out will be—well, horrific. An eight-year study study of six keyt crops—corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum—in the premier scientific journal Nature on Wednesday predicted that each degree Celsius increase in temperature will lower global food production by an average of 120 calories per person per day. Solomon Hsiang, who led the study at Stanford’s Doerr School for Suystainability, helpfully summed up the findings for CNN:

“If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast,” he said. The world is currently on track for around 3 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century.

America would be hit particularly hard, because we have the best grain-growing soil and climate on earth—but it’s in a vast continental interior susceptible to drought in the new world

If humans keep burning large amounts of fossil fuels, corn production could fall by 40% in the grain belt of the US, eastern China, central Asia, southern Africa and the Middle East; wheat production could fall by 40% in the US, China, Russia and Canada; and soybean yields could fall 50% in the US.

Again, this is not far away—remember that we learned in one of those other studies that the global carbon budget for staying below two degrees will be exhausted by the mid-2040s on our current trajectory.

So—you would think this would be the biggest story on planet earth, and by several orders of magnitude. After all, “what’s for breakfast” is one of the four most important questions on earth, along with “what’s for lunch,” “what’s for dinner,” and “do you think you could love me too?”

And at some level our leaders understand this. Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve and hence arguably the most important figure in the world economy, told the Senate Banking Committee this week that “banks and insurance companies are pulling out of coastal areas and…areas where there a lot of fires. So what that’s going to mean is that if you fast-forward ten or fifteen years there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage.” America’s wealth is largely stored in its houses—perhaps you remember the global financial crisis of 2008 when that wealth started to evaporate? This is that, but on steroids. Indeed, a new analysis from the entirely credible people at Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that the U.S. alone is already spending a trillion dollars a year on climate damage. “That’s 3% of GDP that people likely would have spent on goods and services they’d prefer to have, and amounts to “a stealth tariff on consumer spending,” the analysts write. (And it’s not just the U.S.—a new study found that climate-caused subsidence in soils is now a multi-trillion dollar risk for insurers across the EU)

And yet—and here we are definitively switching from science to politics and economics—this kind of news is not producing the kind of reaction any normal person would reasonably expect. It’s not even producing it at the Treasury Department, which you think might pay some small attention to the Fed Chairman. Instead, check out this description of events from intrepid reporters Alastair Marsh and Laura Noonan

At a June 11 gathering of the Financial Stability Board, officials from France, the Netherlands and Canada voiced dismay after Michael Kaplan, the Treasury’s interim undersecretary for international affairs, said climate should only be a focus if there’s proof of an imminent financial stability risk, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private talks.

The comments drew instant pushback, with some officials raising their voices, the people said. That led FSB Chair Klaas Knot from the Netherlands to briefly suspend the meeting until those present had cooled down, the people said.

That’s right, they had to stop the meeting for a while so that financial regulators didn’t—I don’t know, beat up?—the American representative. And of course America is where most of the world’s capital hangs out. The new edition of the now-venerable Banking on Climate Chaos report came out week, and it was as big a doozy as the various scientific studies. After making endless pledges to help decarbonize the planet, the big banks—led of course by Chase, Citi, and Bank of America—”walked back many of those climate pledges and significantly increased their fossil fuel financing, including ramping up finance for fossil fuel expansion.” This is a gold-standard report—it found the banks, after four years of decreasing their funding to the fossil fuel industry, had increased it by 162.5 billion between 2023 and 2024, which were also the two hottest years we’ve ever recorded on this earth.

Probably the best account of the folly of our financial system comes from the Sierra Club’s Ben Cushing, who last week put out a crucial paper calling on the planet’s investors to weigh systemic climate risks. “The greatest threat to long-term portfolios isn’t from holding particular stocks—it’s the continued rise in global emissions. And unless those emissions are reduced in the real world—not just in investors’ accounting systems—the damage will continue, and portfolios will bear the cost.”

But if financiers can’t bring themselves to think about more than the next quarter, Republican politicians can’t bring themselves to think about more than the next round of donations. The Senate this week decided to back up the House, and continued the job of gutting support for clean energy in the Big Beautiful Bill. As Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho explained, “the legislation achieves significant savings by slashing Green New Deal spending.” Instead, the Senate decided to reward oil drillers with new subsidies. For instance, as Evan Halper reports,

Several firms, including Occidental Petroleum, which is completing a large carbon-capture plant in the West Texas oil fields, sought expanded subsidies for using captured carbon dioxide to pressurize wells and draw more oil from the ground. The carbon-capture subsidy would push up the tax legislation’s price tag by what experts forecast will be billions of dollars.

It emerged after Occidental’s CEO said she personally lobbied President Donald Trump… The CEO said subsidizing the technology will enable oil companies to pull 50 billion to 70 billion additional barrels of oil out of the ground that they would not otherwise be able to get at.

Trump’s team was also busy arresting the public official who has done the most to stand up to the financial system’s insane greed, New York City comptroller Brad Lander, who spent the afternoon in the hoosegow for the other crime in our current regime, helping immigrants. Meanwhile, remember those NASA satellites showing us the increase in extreme weather events? That’s the kind of thing the administration is busily shutting down. Scott Waldman in Politico reported that

All told, it’s an unprecedented assault on humanity’s understanding of how global warming is transforming the planet, scientists say. And they warn that Trump’s actions will blind the United States and the world to the ways people are rapidly heating the planet by burning fossil fuels.

As Energy Secretary, and former fracking exec Christopher Wright put it on Twitter last week,

“Climate alarmism has had a terrible impact on human lives and freedom. It belongs in the ash heap of history.”

Given the science above, I don’t think it’s climate alarmism that’s going to end up on the ash heap of history—I think it’s pretty clearly humanity, not to mention the rest of the planet’s biology. All of this would be stupid enough if we had no alternative to fossil fuels. But of course this week, like every week, there was more and more news of precisely how well those alternatives were working. To give just the smallest sampling:

The world’s first large-scale sand battery went into operation in Finland

The new 1 MW sand battery has a precursor. In May 2022, Polar Night Energy rigged a smaller design to a power station in Kankaanpää town.

Launched just as Russia cut off gas supplies in retaliation for Finland joining NATO, the project was a timely example of how renewable energy could be harnessed in a new way.

It’s quite a simple structure to begin with, Polar Night Energy said of its prototype. A tall tower is filled with low-grade sand and charged up with the heat from excess solar and wind electricity.

The sand can store heat at around 500C for several days to even months, providing a valuable store of cheaper energy during the winter. When needed, the battery discharges the hot air - warming water in the district heating network. Homes, offices and even the local swimming pool all benefit in Kankaanpää, for example.

And in Japan, a new fleet of solar cars was unveiled, designed especially for small island nations that don’t have great distances to drive. As the Japan Times reported

The electrification of transport, a potent strategy to address climate change, is gaining momentum, with over 38 countries committing to no less than 30% zero-emission newly sold medium— and heavy-duty trucks by 2030. For LDCs and SIDS, harnessing the drive for electrification using what is often their richest natural endowment — sunshine — could represent a breakthrough.

These seem small and niche to you? Then consider the ongoing miracle in China, where new data shows that the world’s largest economy generated more solar power through May of this year than it did in all of 2022. As industry watcher Felix Hamer said, “this is what a thirty percent annual growth rate can look like.” Just as an example, China leads the world in converting old coal mines into solar farms—90 projects so far, with 46 more in the works according to new data this week from Global Energy Monitor.

That’s all good news. To go back to the top of this account—those vast scientific studies showing the breakdown of the planet’s climate system—there are only two things that can conceivably scale fast enough to make a real difference. One is some kind of as-yet-undeveloped carbon sequestration scheme. The other—now fully available to us everywhere—is the rapid buildout of clean energy across the earth. If we were functioning effectively as a species, spreading solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries would be job one, two and three on this planet—especially since if we were successful at it we could stop fighting wars at least partly about oil, wars which this week, of course, threaten to escalate into something far worse.

So as I bring this tour to an end, let me remind you to figure out something to do for SunDay. The first events are appearing already on the map. From Julie Williams comes the sun of the week:

I hope this tour through science and economics and politics has been helpful in some way—you can see why I sometimes despair, not just of the future but even of my own ability to get across what’s happening in the present. I think I’ve been at this so long that I have a better sense than most of how all those moving pieces interact, but there are so many pieces and they’re now moving so fast.

Which is why we need to be moving some of them ourselves—the stakes of this wager are so ominous that anything we can do to change the odds we must; it is the greatest of all the challenges we face on this anxious planet. Thank you, immensely, for being a part of this fight.

In other energy and climate news:

+An important new campaign from the people at Methane Emergency Brake. Methane, of course, trails only carbon dioxide as the chief greenhouse gas, and because it is short-lived in the atmosphere cutting it sharply would buy us time for the longer-term project of decarbonization. Among other facets, the campaign includes helping the EU stand up to Trump-administration pressure to import more liquefied natural gas. A petition here.

All that’s particularly important since a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that scientists “may have significantly underestimated the increase in [methane] emissions from fossil fuels since 2008.”

+The Chattanooga Times Free Press has an account of Beth Geer’s tenure as a utility director simply titled “5 things former TVA director said before Trump fired her.” Several other champions of renewable energy have also been ousted from the board of the nation’s biggest public utility, in a purge certain to set back progress there.

+Veteran journalist Michael Grunwald’s new book We Are Eating the Earth is a look at agriculture’s contribution to the climate crisis, which includes a classic account of the ethanol lobby. You can get a sense from the excerpt in the Atlantic

+Progress in Oregon, where activists helped pass new legislation requiring the state pension fund to figure out the effect of their investments on the climate. Allie Lindstrom, senior campaigner at the Sierra Club:

“Climate change is not just an environmental crisis, it’s an economic crisis too. Without urgent action, the climate crisis will cause massive damage to our economy and people’s financial security. We applaud the Oregon Legislature for recognizing how climate change threatens the economic security and the retirement savings of its public workers, and for directing the State Treasurer to act accordingly to tackle those threats by holding polluters accountable and investing in climate solutions.”

+The “Formosa Four”—arrested for blocking the entrance to the headquarters of a chemical and plastics company that has polluted the waters near its Texas factory—will go on trial this week in a New Jersey court, and the judge is allowing them to mount a necessity defense. The seasoned fisherwoman, campaigner (and author of An Unreasonable Woman) Diane Wilson said

“This is a huge win in the fight against Formosa Plastics and the ongoing harm they’re inflicting on our bays and fishing communities. I’ve spent thirty-six years trying to hold Formosa accountable, but they keep polluting, and expanding, and treating the fines as just another cost of doing business. When the system fails to protect people and the environment, and our communities, sometimes you have to take more drastic measures. I’m grateful that Judge Batista recognized that reality and agreed to let us make the case that our actions were not only necessary, but they were justified.”

+Given the season, tomatoes seem the right note to end on, and thanks to a link from my Third Act colleague Vanessa Arcara I have the story for you. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have found that solar panels with specially designed filters allow tomatoes grown beneath them to thrive—indeed to “grow faster and bigger than those under direct sunlight.”

"We've been all just licking our lips, waiting for the taste test," said one researcher, adding that he would be "personally very sad" if the tomatoes turned out to be tasteless, given how promising the plants appeared by eye. The light reaching the tomatoes activates different functions, such as making sugar to sweeten the fruits and proteins to change the texture. "The taste test will be the final hurrah."

Science demands variables, so he purchased organically grown industry reference greenhouse tomatoes as part of the test. He chopped up the various tomatoes, put them on plates, and mixed them up so even he could not tell which were which. Only the labels on the bottom of the plates held the answer. The researchers tried the tomatoes by themselves, with some salt, with some pepper, with some crackers, and then ranked each in order of preference.

The result? Just as tasty.