Tale of Two Cities

Unimaginable thirst in Tehran--but some relief in New York?

Prayers for rain at a Tehran mosque last week, amidst the deepest drought in the country’s history

We are not getting out of the climate crisis without immense amounts of damage—the only question at this point is whether we can extricate ourselves with something like our civilizations intact. And the news from one cradle of civilization isn’t heartening: in Iran, where urban settlements date back to 4400 BC, the deepest drought in the country’s recorded history has now reached the havoc stage.

Tehran, shrouded in truly toxic smoke because the country’s power plants have run short of natural gas and begun burning “mazut, a dark residue of petroleum high in sulphur and other impurities,” is now facing a possible evacuation because it has run out of water. As Yeaganeh Torbati points out in an excellent essay, Iran’s water woes are deeply rooted in agricultural policy that prioritized irrigation above all (see also California); its international isolation has not helped it cope (including with the tragic fires that broke out last week in the Hyrcanian Forest, one of the oldest woodlands on earth and a biodiversity hotspot). But the savage drought has been the final domino here, in a country where, as the head of one water utility points out, “Higher than normal heat has intensified the evaporation of water resources.” As the Australia Broadcasting Corporation summarized it:

Faced with a perfect storm of weather woes and decades of mismanagement, President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a warning to his country earlier this month that the situation could deteriorate even further.

“We’ve run short of water. If it doesn’t rain, we in Tehran … must start rationing,” he said.

“Even if we do ration and it still does not rain, then we will have no water at all.

“They [citizens] must evacuate Tehran.”

While it may seem like an exaggeration, it is the shocking reality facing the Iranian population — particularly in its capital, which has in excess of 15 million people across the broader metropolitan area.

This particular kind of disaster is becoming more common on a rapidly warming world. We’ve already had severe Day Zero scares in big cities in Brazil and South Africa; a new study earlier this month warns that

moments when water levels in reservoirs fall so low that water may no longer reach homes—could become common as early as this decade and the 2030s.

To find out where and when DZDs are most likely to occur, scientists at the Center for Climate Physics in Busan, South Korea, ran a series of large-scale climate simulations. They considered the imbalance between decreasing natural supply (such as years of below-average rainfall and depleted river flows).

By some estimates, two billion humans are at risk.

The residents of New York are not at present among them. The city’s water supply system is one of the miracles of the modern world, and after six decades the “third tunnel” that will make that water system more secure is almost complete. (As a cub reporter in the early 1980s I spent several happy days underground, watching ‘sandhogs’ from Local 147 blowing up rock walls to extend the shaft).

But that doesn’t mean New York is immune from climate danger, as anyone who lived there during Hurricane Sandy will recall. (As the financial journal Business Week printed in block letters on its cover the week after that catastrophe, “IT’S GLOBAL WARMING STUPID”).

And it certainly doesn’t mean that New York isn’t part of the cause of the global climate collapse. Not from its emissions—subway-riding New Yorkers are fairly green—but from the churn of capital through its financial markets that underwrites the ongoing expansion of the fossil fuel enterprise, in ways that scientists have said for years now simply has to stop.

A huge step in the right direction came this morning, when the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, announced that he was recommending the city stop investing its money with Blackrock, the largest single representative of irresponsible capitalism on planet earth.

Lander is urging three of the city’s pension funds to drop BlackRock Inc. because of “inadequate” climate plans, the latest move to penalize investment firms for failing to tackle global warming.

The guidance to reject BlackRock, the city’s largest money manager overseeing $42.3 billion of index funds for the pensions, follows a review of the firm’s efforts to press companies to decarbonize. Lander said Wednesday he’s also asking plan trustees to terminate much smaller mandates with Fidelity Investments and PanAgora Asset Management.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this decision. To call Blackrock a “giant” is to pitifully underestimate its size—it has $13.46 trillion under management as of this fall. It owns ten percent of the world’s stock market. If it wanted to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, it could, more easily than any other single entity on planet earth.

Instead it has dithered endlessly, making occasional noises of climate concern and then backtracking when red state treasurers (with far smaller portfolios than Lander’s to wave around) squawked at them. In August, Democratic officials from a dozen states sent warning letters to asset managers, calling on them to “reject pressure from the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers, and instead commit to thorough evaluations of risks tied to global warming, supply chains and corporate governance.” Lander’s recommendation is the first concrete outcome.

Or, fairly concrete. Lander’s term ends on December 31. The advocates who have pressed for this policy—especially New York Communities for Change—are pushing him to get one of the city’s three pension plans—the New York City Employees Retirement System or NYCERS—to actually commit to the plan at its December 17 meeting. They think that with some prodding by Lander the votes are there to make the change.

If anyone has the political credibility to get it done before Christmas, that would be Brad Lander. Though he finished third in the primary, he emerged from this year’s mayoral contest with more love than any player in the city, maybe even including Zohran Mamdani. Partly that was because stood up for immigrants early, getting arrested by an ICE thug. Mostly it was because he figured out he was going to lose to Mamdani, took it with exceptionally good grace, and ended up playing the important role of his being his verifier—assuring people with both his insider and his Jewish credentials that the young socialist was up to the job. He comes out of 2025 both a macher and a mensch, and now he’s rumored to be planning a run for Congress; assuming he ties up some of the loose ends here, he will take on any future race with the fervent support of the environmental community, for whom he has delivered big-time. (And with the fervent opposition of Wall Street, which is proving to be a useful credential in itself).

In a larger sense, I’ve been reading accounts for months now of how climate is dead as a political issue. I think this move makes clear that isn’t true; in fact, I’d wager that as energy affordability takes center stage in next year’s midterms, the transition off fossil fuels will be a key issue for progressives to seize.

They will need to do so quickly. As events in Tehran make clear, time is now moving fast. The physics of global warming are implacable: run out of water and you have to move your city. We’ll have to make politicians move fast to have any hope of getting ahead of the curve.

In other energy and climate news:

+A million takes on the end of the climate talks in Belem. The Washington Post declared it a failure

Nearly 200 countries agreed Saturday to step up efforts to adapt to global warming and warned about the risks of inaction, but rejected proposals to directly address the fossil fuels warming the planet.

and Mark Hertsgaard in the Nation went further

In a diplomatic black eye for host country Brazil, what had been promoted as a summit of “truth” and “implementation” delivered little of either. When climate change is already imposing terrible suffering, when emissions are still increasing, and when 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want governments to take stronger action, COP30 left the climate fight at a standstill, if not backsliding.

Writing in the Guardian, Fiona Harvey was a little more sanguine: her very long and very readable tick-tock on the proceedings concluded that there was at least an “oblique” reference to fossil fuel in the text—delegates agreed to keep backing the “UAE consensus,” a callback to the wording at the Dubai COP two years ago when everyone agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels.

I didn’t go to Belem this year because I think that, at least for the moment, the UN process is not the heart of the fight. It hit its highwater mark in Paris, and that agreement was extremely useful for the world—but now, most of the action lies less in diplomatic sphere than the economic one. I think we’re in a sorting-out process now that the price of clean energy has dipped so low—that’s rewriting many of the fundamental tenets of climate policy. The one really intriguing note that emerged was a joint announcement from Colombia and the Netherlands of plans for a late April meeting in Santa Marta on a “just transition away from fossil fuels.” It’s possible that a nucleus for aggressive action will begin to form here—perhaps some vessel for acknowledging that the past can’t continue forever, no matter what Washington and Riyadh insist.

We’ll keep an eye on it

+Interesting straw in the data-center wind: Georgia’s utility regulator announced that their pipeline for new electric load had shrunk by a whopping six gigawatts last quarter, because “data centers are ‘underperforming expectations’ due to lower materialization rates, project cancellations and delays.” The next few months may be crucial: if the AI bubble deflates, as more and more watchers seem to be predicting, at least some of the new demand for electricity may start to dry up; in a less panicked rush, the chance of making wise decisions about how to power the data centers we do need would increase, I think.

And here’s an interesting straw in the wind about the fossil fuel industry’s campaign to shut down clean energy in rural areas across the country. One big Ohio county will vote next spring on whether to continue its ban. As Kathiann Kowalski reports,

Next May, when Ohioans head to the polls to vote in primary races, residents of Richland County will weigh in on a referendum that could ultimately reverse the ban. It’s the first time a county’s renewable-energy ban will be on the ballot in Ohio.

From the very beginning, ​“it was just a whirlwind,” said Christina O’Millian, a leader of the Richland County group. Like most others, she didn’t know a ban was under consideration until shortly before July 17, when the commission voted on it.

“We felt as constituents that we just hadn’t been heard,” O’Millian said. She views renewable energy as a way to attract more economic development to the county while reining in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Brian McPeek, another of the group’s leaders and a manager for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, sees solar projects as huge job opportunities for the union’s members. ​“They provide a ton of work, a ton of man-hours.”

Many petition signers ​“didn’t want the commissioners to make that decision for them,” said Morgan Carroll, a county resident who helped gather signatures. ​“And there was a lot of respect for farmers having their own property rights” to decide whether to lease their land.

+From Fred Lambert at Electrek, one of the most interesting essays I’ve read in a long while. He suggests that electricity is becoming the new “base currency” of the planet, and that China has figured this out before anyone else.

Last week, I was in Bijiashan Park at night overlooking Shenzhen, arguably the most technologically advanced city on earth, built over the previous few decades, partly on cheap electricity, cheap labor, and manufacturing innovations.

I could see the giant high-voltage power lines coming over Yinhu Mountain to power the constant light show that is Shenzhen at night. I couldn’t help but think about how cheap electricity and a strong grid have been critical to China’s exceptional economic rise.

As you stroll around the city, you see power everywhere. There are charging stations at every corner, including insane 1 MW charging posts, electric cars and trucks, trucks that carry batteries to electric scooter shops, which are also literally everywhere.

Everything moves on electric power. Industries are powered by electricity, and now, with the advent of AI, virtually everything is increasingly processed by LLMs, which are ultimately powered by electricity through power-hungry data centers.

In a world where everything runs on electricity, electricity itself becomes the currency of civilization.

It is measurable, divisible, storable, and universal – all qualities that a currency needs, but unlike fiat and crypto, it’s actually directly linked to productive output. No politics. No inflation. Just physics.

+New data, new threat: Apparently “zombie wildfires” are cropping up across the Arctic, as blazing forests ignite underground infernos capable of burning all winter long even under heavy snow cover, and then reigniting come spring. As Patrick Greenfield and Kristi Greenwood report, that’s…not good

“It is a massive problem,” says Lori Daniels, a forest and conservation sciences professor at the University of British Columbia. “Zombie fires, also called holdover fires, are fires that move into the organic soil matter and smoulder. It’s a very slow, but hot, combustion through a prolonged period and then they resurface. In December 2023, we had over 100 fires that were still burning, and in the spring of 2024, they continued to burn,” she says.

Current estimates show that only about 15% of the northern hemisphere is underlain by permafrost, yet these frozen soils contain roughly twice as much carbon than is now in the atmosphere. By burning slowly and at a lower temperature, they release vastly more particulate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions than flaming fires.

“These boggy soils take hundreds to thousands of years to accumulate the carbon that is stored in the organic soil layers. In some cases, it’s burning right down to the rock,” says Daniels. “Over a very short period of time, we are combusting all of this ancient carbon into the atmosphere. It becomes a feedback loop with tremendously negative consequences for the ecosystem. It changes the hydrology – you’re losing the substrate and the seed banks within them, you’re changing the soils to some sort of mineral base instead of an organic base,” she says.

+I’ve written before about Gideon Mendel’s astonishing photos of flooding around the world. He’s back with a new set of stunning images, these from the Philippines. Take a minute to page through them. It will give you one more thing to be thankful for tomorrow!

+The EPA and other federal environmental regulators continue in pillage mode—last week they stripped federal protection from millions of acres of wetlands, rolled back the Endangered Species Act, and opened up huge areas of the coastline to oil drilling. As Maxine Joselow noted, they were moving fast even by Trump administration standards

“This was the week from hell for environmental policy in the United States,” said Pat Parenteau, a professor emeritus and senior fellow for climate policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “Unless stopped by the courts, each of these proposed rollbacks will do irreparable harm to the nation’s water quality, endangered species and marine ecosystems.”

Meanwhile, the plucky Antonia Juhasz has been out along the Atlantic coast, chronicling how Trump’s crusade against offshore wind is wrecking opportunities for workers along the seaboard.

“You may think, what does this have to do with clean energy?” Rico Albacarys asks as he ushers me into his union’s training facility’s high-voltage cable splicing lab. “This is a really important component for offshore wind turbines,” he explains, demonstrating how apprentices get hands-on learning with different techniques for working on the cables that power turbines. “We apply voltage to make sure it works properly and doesn’t, you know, explode,” Albacarys adds.

Students can move on to receive Global Wind Organization training, or at least that’s the plan. The higher level training costs over $2,000 per person and certification lasts for only two years.

Trump’s effort to squash offshore wind complicates things. “We’re trying to thread the needle between when do we start training folks so we have enough people trained, and not starting to train them too early so they have to get re-certified before they actually are able to work on the turbine,” Albacarys explains.

+Bad idea watch. A private U.S.-Israeli company is fooling around with solar geoengineering—a really good account of Stardust Solutions Inc. from Karl Mathiesen and Corbin Hiar in Politico.

And an American company, Reflect Orbital, is planning to launch some satellites designed to put extra sunlight on solar panels from space. According to Sky and Telescope,

The company plans to launch 4,000 much larger satellites over the next several years. Those bigger spacecraft would each cover about three-fourths of an acre and far exceed the full Moon’s brightness. Nearly all of the stars would disappear for observers within illuminated areas on the ground. Residents of municipalities and other entities that purchase illumination would be deprived of darkness at night, not to mention the beauty of the star-lit sky.

We do not need this. The sun is perfectly capable of providing what we need, and increasingly we have the batteries to store it when the sun goes down. The company’s CEO helpfully explained his reasoning: “It would be really great if we could get some solar energy before the Sun rises and after sunset, because then you could actually charge higher prices and make a lot more money.” Ugh.

+A smart piece from Julie Rehmeyer, explaining why and how environmentalists mut get past a reflexive commitment to Small being Beautiful if we’re going to deal with the realities of the moment. I liked it for its calm tone

But today, the only path to cutting carbon fast enough demands massive industrial scale. That means solar fields that stretch across mesas, not just panels on a few roofs. It means transmission lines running for hundreds of miles to carry clean electricity from where the wind blows hardest to where people actually live. It means rows of shipping containers filled with batteries, factories stamping out heat pumps and EVs by the millions, and supply chains wrapping around the world. The materials of environmentalism are no longer primarily soft and organic: they’re steel, silicon, and high-voltage wire. Corporations are essential environmental partners. And instead of slowing down, we have to move fast — as fast as we possibly can.

This is not the answer we imagined in the age of compost bins and community gardens, but it’s the one the carbon math demands. Trying to persuade people to consume less didn’t prove terribly effective, but the cheapness of renewables now offers a pathway that has a chance of saving us. And renewables only became cheap once global supply chains could pump out panels, turbines and batteries by the millions. We have to deploy every one of those millions to bend the curve on warming.

The world changed, decisively. But Small Is Beautiful still shapes our environmental intuitions — the snap judgments about what feels right or wrong. They tell us that smallness is fundamentally good, that industry is inherently suspect, that the safest moral stance is to say no. These instincts once pointed us toward ecological sanity. Increasingly, they point us away from it.

We’ve seen a striking example of that here in Santa Fe. A large solar and battery project has been proposed just outside of town, one that would provide enough clean, affordable, reliable energy to supply every household in the city. But many of those who live closest to the plant — often self-branded environmentalists — banded together in determined opposition.

They conjured vivid images of the battery storage system bursting into flames, igniting the surrounding juniper and piñon and burning their houses down. But the reality is that battery storage systems have an impressive and rapidly improving safety record. Never has a utility-scale battery storage system ignited a wildfire. Alternate uses of the land, such as for housing, come with their own fire risks. And, of course, we desperately need thousands of projects like these to counteract the immediate and existential risk of continued fossil fuel use — which is the true driver of the dramatically increased risk of wildfires.

Similarly, J.A. Ginsburg argues that we are on the edge of a “materials transition” that rivals the scale of the energy transition now underway

The materials transition is a revolution hiding in plain sight. Products that look exactly as they have always looked can be different on a material level. A classic Herman Miller Aeron office chair manufactured in 2025 looks identical to the first Aeron that rolled off the production line in 1994. But nearly all of the new chair is made from old stuff. Up to 91% is recycled (depending on the availability of recycled materials), including as much as 2.5 pounds of what is euphemistically referred to as “ocean-bound plastic”—old fishing nets and nurdles that otherwise end up degrading into microplastics, swirling in the prison of a “garbage patch” gyre, escaping into food chains.

The materials transition is about synergies, mash-ups and collaborations that arc across sectors. For example, BYD, the Chinese EV company, is considering using leather made from mushrooms for car upholstery. Mushroom leather’s negamatts include using only a tiny fraction of the land needed to raise cattle; a tiny fraction of the water needed to raise cattle; no livestock feed, freeing up arable land for food crops; fewer toxic chemicals for processing.

Strong by Form, a Chile-based startup that makes wood composites, is collaborating with BMW to develop structural automotive parts that are stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum. The negamatts range from metals that don’t need to be mined, smelted and refined to light-weighting that improves fuel efficiency.

+The great theologian Diana Butler Bass is a friend of this substack (here’s our Sun Day collaboration) and she has a lovely new book out: A Beautiful Year. Just in case you might be in need of a weekly meditation on perseverance!

+Congressional work is proceeding on a new permitting reform bill that would make it easier to site energy projects of all kinds. But as the irrepressible Jael Holzman reports, negotiators have to figure out some way to make sure that Trump officials won’t just overrule every clean energy project and greenlight every fossil fuel one

Rep. Scott Peters, a California Democrat involved in the House permitting talks, told me during a phone interview this afternoon that the language added to the bill “solves a lot of the problem on permit certainty” but that getting the deal across the finish line will require solving “the Burgum problem,” referring to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

Apparently, per Peters, a major Democratic sticking point is Burgum’s new layer of political review requiring him to sign off on essentially every Interior Department decision needed for permitting solar and wind projects. Any progress further will mean Republican concessions there. “Sending a camera out to survey a site... the Secretary of Interior has to sign off on that, and that’s the opposite of permitting reform.”

+First concrete has been poured on a big new Chinese nuclear power plant. If any country can figure out how to build nukes quickly and affordably, it’s probably the Chinese—though ‘affordable’ is always going to be an issue when they have to compete against the ever-cheaper solar power coming from that big reactor in the sky.

+Pipelines are being built across Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma to rush fracked gas to the ports that ship it overseas. The near term result will be sharply increased gas prices for U.S. consumers, who are now in essence bidding against Asians for the same commodity.

+A fascinating new report from Sweden looks at what its authors call the ‘circularity gap,’ the amount that the country wastes each year by just throwing stuff away that could be easily repaired or recycled.

Sweden’s Value Gap stands at 19%, revealing that nearly one-fifth of potential economic value is lost due to linear practices. This translates to almost SEK 600 billion annually (equivalent to 57% of the national state budget) across six sectors where economic value that could be created is either never realised or prematurely lost. The findings highlight a systemic issue: current economic models leave substantial value untapped. Closing this gap presents a powerful opportunity to strengthen Sweden’s circularity, enhance economic resilience, and better meet societal needs.

I predict the Swedes will do something about this, and that it might serve as an example for the rest of us who are…not Swedes and won’t do a damn thing on our own.

+A couple of things of beauty to close on here. First, Somini Sengupta describes the flood of Chinese solar panels starting to transform African life.

More than 600 million people on the continent lack access to electricity. Power outages are common even where there are electricity connections, which has in recent years led businesses of all kinds to turn to noisy, polluting diesel generators.

All told, solar imports from China rose 60 percent between July 2024 and June 2025, according to Ember’s analysis, which was published on Tuesday.

Kevin Gallagher, a Boston University professor who is not connected to Ember’s analysis, said it revealed a wide-open market opportunity for China, particularly as the United States abandons its support for what he called “green energy innovation.”

“Cheap imports can help underpin green industrialization in Africa and alleviate China’s overcapacity,” Dr. Gallagher said. “Africa doesn’t have time for geopolitical tensions, they just need cheap green power.”

And finally, the South Koreans just unveiled their newest floating solar plant

As Patrick Jowett reports,

The solar system consists of 16 floating structures that are arranged into patterns resembling both the Korean flag, Taegeukgi, and Mugunghwa, the country’s national flower.

The combined solar-hydro power plant is now projected to generate around 61 GWh of clean electricity annually, enough to supply approximately 22,000 households, equivalent to 27% of all households in Andong.

A spokesperson for Scotra told pv magazine the project adopted a resident-participation model, with 33 local villages investing through a dedicated legal entity. “Over 20 years, approximately KRW 22.2 billion in revenue will be returned to the community,” the company said. “This so-called ‘Sunlight Pension’ is expected to increase local residents’ income and contribute to regional economic revitalization.”

Have a very good Thanksgiving, friends.