Surviving on Trump's Dangerous Planet

Yet another war, and yet another argument for an end to oil

A Cuban farmer cleans the solar panels outside his modest home

For what seems like the fiftieth time in my long life, the U.S., with Israel, has attacked another nation, as per usual without an honest debate in Congress and so far with the reported deaths of both Iran’s leader and eighty or so of its schoolgirls. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the workings of Trump’s brain well enough to gauge the casus belli, but I will note—because again I’ve been around a while—that Iran has the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas and the third-biggest pool of oil (trailing only Saudi Arabia and, um, Venezuela). As oil executives helpfully explained to Politico last month, they are generously prepared to be a “stabilizing force” in Iran should the regime fall—indeed, they’d rather do it there than in Venezuela because, as executives explained, “Iran’s oil industry, despite being ravaged by years of U.S. sanctions, is still considered to be structurally sound, unlike that of Venezuela’s.”

Bob McNally, a former national security and energy adviser to former President George W. Bush who now leads the energy and geopolitics consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, said the prospects for growing Iran’s oil production are “completely different” from Venezuela’s.

“You can imagine our industry going back there — we would get a lot more oil, a lot sooner than we will out of Venezuela,” McNally said. “That’s more conventional oil right near infrastructure, and gas as well.”

In the meantime, our attack almost guarantees that the price of oil will jump, also good news for the industry that backed the president’s reelection so fulsomely. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported this afternoon

Iran and its neighbors on the Persian Gulf are some of the largest oil and gas producers in the world and the country has long threatened to disrupt oil exports as an act of self-defense or retaliation from attack.

That may be already happening. According to data from Bloomberg, some oil tankers are pausing or turning around outside the vital Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, deep channel between Iran and Oman that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and thus to global markets in and bordering the Indian Ocean.

But this kind of analysis is almost too easy, because so much of the geopolitics of the last century has been about the control and the flow of oil.

What’s interesting is the lessons others are taking from it.

Let’s look for a moment at Cuba, which seems like it might well be next on the Trump hit list. The president said yesterday that he was looking for a “friendly takeover” of the island nation, and it’s clear that the tool he’s using is energy: after cutting off Venezuelan supplies, he’s also pressured Mexico to stop sending crude to Havana. As a result, he explained, “They have no money. They have no anything right now.”

Which is largely true—things in Havana have grown desperate in the last few weeks as Washington has tightened the screws they’ve been turning for decades. As the Spanish newspaper El Pais put it in a story yesterday, the entire nation is on “the verge of darkness” as energy supplies dwindle. It quotes a young anthropologist, José Maria:

He says the blackouts don’t affect him as much as others: his area is “privileged,” close to the water pump that supplies the municipality. He doesn’t have a generator, but he does have a rechargeable fan and a battery for his phone. From his apartment, on some days, he can see entire neighborhoods plunged into darkness

As it happens, I went to Cuba to do some reporting the last time the country was in such a fix, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it Havana’s economic lifeline. In those days the country’s biggest problem was food, and it survived in part with a fairly remarkable turn towards urban agriculture. I was endlessly impressed with the Cubans I met who were learning how to grow the food their neighbors needed, even as I was depressed by the police state they were inhabiting.

Now the overwhelming problem is energy, and it’s here that something else quite profound has been happening: an almost unbelievable surge in the production of solar power. As The Economist reported on Thursday

Mr Trump is obsessed with oil, but Cuba has been building out an alternative source of energy supply at record pace: solar panels imported from China. According to Chinese export data compiled by Ember, a think-tank, in the 12 months to April 2025 Cuba’s imports of Chinese solar panels grew by a factor of 34, faster than anywhere else in the world. The island has gone from having almost no solar power a few years ago to levels which help it cope with Mr Trump’s embargo.

The regime’s energy policy is mostly responsible for the boom. In March 2024 the government announced a plan to build two gigawatts of solar power plants by 2028. It depends heavily on China for funding and construction, as well as for the solar panels themselves. On February 11th the government claimed that its new solar plants generated almost a gigawatt of power during the lunchtime peak, enough in that moment to meet the electricity needs of a third of the country.

With their help, life of a sort stumbles on. Here’s a Reuters report from last week:

“Given the frequent outages, which pretty much stop you from doing anything, a friend offered to help me invest in panels and set everything up,” Havana resident Roberto Sarriga told Reuters.

Sarriga said that with the help of solar panels he could have internet, charge his phone so people can locate him and power a TV to keep his elderly mother entertained watching her favorite soap operas.

Most people can’t afford their own panels, of course—unless they have relatives abroad who can send them dollars. But private businesses often can, and on Thursday the government offered new tax breaks for businesses that undertake new renewable energy projects. Perhaps in response, the Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow small oil sales to private businesses.

“The strategy here is to show the Cubans and the world that the only lifeline that Cuba has left is the United States,” said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a nonpartisan policy and advocacy group in Washington. “That doesn’t mean choke them off. That means leave it clear that they have become a de facto dependency of the United States.’’

But it’s not the only lifeline. China has solar panels to sell, for cheap, and once they’re up your lifeline is the sun. And unlike the oil terminals we apparently bombed at Iran’s Kharg Island complex this morning, there’s really no good way to strike at solar energy, because it’s inherently decentralized. Look at that picture at the top of this essay, of a small farmer washing off his solar panels; that’s a person set up to survive what the world has to throw at him.

That’s clearly the story from Ukraine, which has weathered Putin’s assault on its energy infrastructure by building a new, harder-to-attack infrastructure. As Paul Hockenos reports:

Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”

Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.

It’s not just missiles, either. Iran, for instance, is widely regarded to have the ability to mount cyber attacks on centralized American infrastructure. As Rodney Bosch reported during the last round of U.S. strikes on the nation,

U.S. intelligence officials had warned that Iran might retaliate against American involvement by launching cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Electrical grids, water systems and financial networks were seen as high-risk targets.

(On days like this, I’m glad I have solar panels all over the roof. )

China has obviously figured out all these lessons. It foresaw the attacks on Venezuela and Iran, two of its big suppliers of crude, and began to dramatically increase its oil stockpile. But of course it’s done something much more important: build out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.

Since 2021, China has added more power capacity across all energy technologies than the US has in its history, including 543 gigawatts last year, according to figures released late last month by the country’s National Energy Administration.

None of this is about ideology. China, Cuba, the U.S., Venezuela, Iran—all suffer from democratic deficits at this point (a sad list for an American to have to compile). It’s about power, in both meanings of that word.

And it’s about survival, as the rest of us imagine rebuilding a world that might actually work for its inhabitants. We have a few humble but powerful tools—the solar panel, the windmill, the battery—that make it easier to imagine something other than our current nightmare.

In other energy and climate news:

+We have new numbers on just how much renewable energy the Trump administration has managed to prevent in America. These numbers are only from public land, mostly national forest and BLM land in the West, where the administration has imposed what one reporter called a “blockade” on clean energy.

Over 22 gigawatts of utility-scale wind and solar projects on public lands have been canceled or are held up as a result of the order, according to Wood Mackenzie data and the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management website. That’s enough capacity to power roughly 16.5 million U.S. homes — a significant amount at any point, but especially when the country is clamoring for more low-cost electricity as energy demand and utility bills soar.

+Meanwhile, a new report from the Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee detailed the extent of the subsidies that the federal government is currently payuing the fossil fuel industry.

Within their Big, Ugly Betrayal bill, Republicans provided over $3.5 billion annually in new subsidies to major polluters like ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Coterra. This is on top of the $31 billion per year in subsidies that these fossil fuel companies were already receiving from taxpayers—for a total payout of over $34.5 billion annually. The Big, Ugly Betrayal bill opens up millions of acres of public lands in an attempt to develop and mine fossil fuels while lowering the federal return for such resource extraction.

According to the report’s calculations—an effort led by Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley—this comes at a cost to consumers that looks like this:

Analysis from economists and industry experts expect that the Big, Ugly Betrayal bill will increase household energy bills:

On average by $110 in 2026, according to the Center for American Progress;

• On average up to $280 by 2035, according to the Princeton University REPEAT Project;

• Between 9 to 18 percent nationwide, according to Energy Innovation;

• By 10 percent over the next four years in western states, according to the Clean Energy Buyers Association.

+Meet Montana Republican Senator Tim Sheehy, who while running his successful campaign to beat Jon Tester decried “goofy, subsidized green energy crap.” It turns out, according to an E&E News investigation, that his house is covered with that crap.

The Montana Republican installed rooftop solar and battery storage systems at his Bozeman home several years ago, according to property records, satellite imagery and two local renewable energy industry officials who were granted anonymity to preserve commercial relationships.

It turns out he’s not alone:

At least nine congressional Republicans have had solar panels on their homes, including Sheehy and New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew, marking a contrast with their party’s growing disdain for clean energy. Several lawmakers, including Van Drew, said they installed the panels to lower their energy costs. Adding a battery system allows homeowners to tap solar energy when the sun or grid goes down.

E&E News previously reported on seven of them by reviewing home images of every Republican senator and 59 House Republicans who are in leadership or facing tough reelection races. Sheehy’s panels were discovered later because they’re on a building adjacent to his listed address. Van Drew was not included in the original search because he represents a solidly red district.

Among the nine members, just one voted against the tax overhaul that eliminated the solar subsidy — Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Massie, Sen. John Curtis of Utah and Rep. Ken Calvert of California all acknowledged using the now-expired tax credit to help purchase their panels.

Meanwhile, shockingly, it turns out that if you give them sufficient money, MAGA influencers will start hocking solar panels. As Kelsey Brugger, Zack Colman and Pavan Acharya report,

Environmentalists and solar power proponents have found a pair of surprise allies: Katie Miller and Kellyanne Conway.

Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Conway, the polling guru who led President Donald Trump’s first campaign, raised eyebrows this month when they publicly touted the clean energy source that has come under fire from the Trump administration.

According to a confidential strategy memo obtained by POLITICO, their advocacy is aligned with a campaign by members of the nation’s largest renewable energy lobby group to MAGA-fy solar power — technology that Trump once derided as “a blight on our country.”

The memo distributed earlier this month shows the American Clean Power Association launched the “American Energy First” campaign to engage Conway and conservative influencers like Miller “to amplify the benefits of solar energy” and “note the harm that could result from reckless trade policy.”

+Thanks to the good folks at the World Council of Churches for their new guide on how to help pressure banks to cut off financing to the fossil fuel industry

Meanwhile, Alastair Marsh reports on the changing tactics of activists taking on those banks—including describing the campaign that I’ve been involved in to ask Costco to cut its credit card ties with Citibank.

Alec Connon of Stop the Money Pipeline says he wants to start applying pressure on municipal governments to withhold bond deals from banks judged to have weak net-zero goals.

Lucie Pinson of Reclaim Finance says she’s now working on new ways to get European banks to sever ties with fossil-fuel clients, which includes framing the issue as one of national security and economic cost.

Because whether you believe in climate change or not, relying on imported oil and gas “undermines Europe’s strategic autonomy,” Pinson said. And it “exposes us to the goodwill of counties that are not our friends.”

+China’s foremost environmentalist Ma Jun—who I met almost thirty years ago when he was fighting what seemed like a very very lonely battle—has a new interview out in which he says that government transparency about pollution data has not only helped clean the country’s air but may be leading to more open government generally

“The environment – including climate – is the area with the biggest consensus view in [China]. It could be a test run for having more multi-stakeholder governance in our country.”

+Important piece from veteran journalist Keith Schneider about how plans for a mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters park in Minnesota could redefine public lands protection in a very grim way.

The U.S. Senate this week is poised to vote on a narrowly-cast resolution intended to clear a new pathway to eventually open a long-disputed copper mine close to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeast Minnesota.

There’s a lot more, though, riding on the Senate vote, and not just for a region of the American north country adored for its towering pines, and deep, clear waters.

If it’s approved and signed by President Trump, the measure could also significantly advance the president’s goal of accelerating development of coal, oil, timber, and minerals on public lands across the U.S., and seriously diminish the government’s ability to protect America’s cleanest waters, most exquisite forests, and wildest natural landscapes.

The White House wants to achieve that result, in tandem with House and Senate Republicans, by deploying the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to eliminate specific federal environmental safeguards, like the prohibition on mining near the Boundary Waters Wilderness.

The CRA, a 30-year-old statute, gives Congress the authority to hastily review and approve resolutions to nullify federal agency rules. In the 20 years between the law’s passage and Trump’s election victory in 2016, Congress had never passed a resolution to impede environmental safeguards.

+From the indefatigable Emily Atkin, an account of how Supreme Court justice Sam Alito is sitting on a case that could end many lawsuits against oil companies—even though he owns a ton of stock in the affected companies. Meanwhile, Atkin also announced that she’s starting a video podcast with climate journalist Tracy Wholf. Apparently in our modern world most people like to look at videos instead of read text, and Atkin is (unlike some of us) young enough to make the shift. I will continue typing.

+Fascinating new numbers from Yale’s climate polling program. Despite the constant advice of political pundits to stop talking about climate, they found that the number of people who are alarmed about climate change has grown steadily to more than a quarter of the population, and that with those who are “concerned” form a clear majority. Here’s what it looks like over the last decade.

+Interesting think pieces emerging from across the pond. Ryan Smith, in Liberal Currents, contends from a European perspective that the fossil fuel industry is a key bulwark of an emerging fascism

The European Union’s present economic vulnerability to fossil fuel pressure is a pointed example of how a truly free and democratic society is not possible when the kings of oil and gas can threaten their stability, pollute their information systems, and poison their politics at a whim. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was born by declaring independence from the rule of the British monarchy. Today, we must do the same with the petro-kings and the unreliable energy which has enthroned them or suffer under the boot of fossil fuel fascism and climate catastrophe.

And Belgian legal scholar Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, writes in Time that economic growth is not the panacea that many contend

Historically, the global economy everyone is so desperate to grow, has funneled vast wealth into the hands of a few, trapped millions in insecure and poorly-paid work to boost corporate profits, relied on the plundering of natural resources and the exploitation of cheap labour in the Global South and has caused irreparable damage to the planet.

This is not a system that has gone slightly off course. It is one that is fundamentally unfit for purpose.

+The U.S. has systematically bullied small nations into ditching an effort to cut emissions from ships around the world, Fiona Harvey reports

US “bullying” over a proposed carbon levy on shipping appears to be paying off, experts have said, after Panama reversed its support for the measure.

In a leaked document seen by the Guardian, the key maritime state has co-sponsored a proposal to the International Maritime Organization that would in effect cancel the carbon levy and undermine attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The shipping industry accounts for about 3% of the world’s carbon output, a proportion likely to rise without a move to green technologies.

Scores of developing countries have been the target of “unprecedented” bullying from the US over the issue – behaviour that one expert has called “thuggery”.

+In the utterly maddening department, oligarchs including Elon Musk are asking permission to launch as many as a million satellites. Some would beam sunlight back to earth, all would turn the dark night sky into a junk-filled mess. You can join in the opposition here

+As spring training opens, the campaign that began with the Dodgers to end sportswashing of oil companies has spread to ten cities

“We love these teams,” said David Rosenstein, a Dodger Stadium protestor with Third Act SoCal. “But we don’t love the deceitful practice of sportswashing. We encourage owners and managers to end this complicity now and find new sponsors.”

Global anti-sportswashing sentiment appears to be reaching unprecedented levels: As the 25th Winter Olympics wind down, two groups of Olympians and others (here and here) have urged the International Olympic Committee to jettison fossil fuel sponsorships.

“Dodger owners Mark Walter, Billie Jean King and Magic Johnson, all of whom have publicly supported conservation or sustainability, have a massive opportunity to show a new kind of global leadership by dropping Phillips 66,” Dubin said. “The intent of our protest was to stigmatize sportswashing, but also to inspire teams to be climate leaders.”

+Finally, some quite lovely news from Africa. Working with Chinese kits, entrepreneurs in Nigeria and Kenya are building electric vans and taxis

Saglev of Nigeria has begun assembling 18-seater passenger electric vans using imported kits supplied by Chinese automaker Dongfeng Motor Corp. The Lagos-based company says it plans to make up to 2,500 vehicles a year, eventually assembling 17 electric models for Nigeria and other West African markets.

“This is a major step in Nigeria’s transition toward clean, fossil-free transportation,” said Saglev’s CEO Olu Falaye. He said the van is the first locally assembled electric vehicle of its kind for mass transit in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa.

“This feat is a clear signal that electric mobility in Nigeria is practical, scalable and ready for adoption,” Falaye said

There’s a similar push in Kenya, where Chinese backed Rideence Africa recently signed a $2.46 million deal with Mombasa-based Associated Vehicle Assemblers (AVA) to begin local assembly of electric taxis and minibuses from kits supplied by China’s Jiangsu Joylong Automobile and Beijing Henrey Automobile Technology.

And from Senegal, a report on the spread of electric buses and the way they’ve helped cut traffic jams dramatically in Dakar. With special lanes, transport times across the vast city have been cut in half. As one passenger explains, “that makes life much easier. And the buses have air-conditioning.”

I know it is a forlorn hope for the moment, but someday the world will work on projects like these, instead of on yet more bombing. Or so I believe. Thanks for being part of that great effort!