Wendell Berry, who died yesterday at the age of 92, was such a great man that I hardly know where to start. He was on the very short list of the best writers of our time: his essays on rural America were the words that launched ten thousand farmers markets; his poems, the staple of many happy weddings (and I’ve peed in a dozen different bathrooms where the Manifesto of the Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front was framed above the toilet). If you’ve never read his short stories of the Port William Membership, or his finest novel, Jayber Crow, you can count yourself lucky that you’ll get to encounter them for the first time.

Berry was also, of course, politically engaged. I remember standing with him twenty years ago, at a protest against the Capitol Hill powerplant that I’d asked him to attend. It was a bitterly cold day, and at one point he turned to me and smiled and said, ‘Do you think maybe they’ll arrest us soon?’ He didn’t particularly like movements, but he understood the power of moral witness; he occupied the Kentucky governor’s office, in a protest against mountaintop removal coal mining, with a toothbrush and volume of Shakespeare in his pocket.

And, perhaps above all, his life was a work of both art and politics—his decision to give up a New York lit’ry career and to return instead to the Kentucky of his boyhood, settling along the Ohio River where he and his wife Tanya farmed and he wrote, embodying the commitment to place and community that animated his writing. (His family is asking that in lieu of flowers people might send a donation to the Berry Center that is carrying on his agrarian work).

I was very lucky that my wife handed me a copy of his essay collection Home Economics about forty years ago, when we were still courting. If I hadn’t fallen under his spell I’m not sure I would have spent my life in rural America, red state and blue; I know that he taught me how to see my town and my county, and my country and my species, in new/old ways that have undergirded all my work. And I’m very glad that we became friends, visiting and writing back and forth. His droll good humor rarely faltered, in my experience. I did not agree with him at all times, nor he with me—though he had solar panels behind his house, for instance, he didn’t think they belonged on farmland, while I think they’re a boon to both farmer and planet. But we agreed on most things of real dimension, and I was always delighted to see in the mailbox a letter with the return address of Port Royal Kentucky. He was one of the last people with whom I had a true written, as opposed to electronic, correspondence. Sometimes he’d tap things out on a manual typewriter, but more often it would be in pencil, on lined yellow paper.

The most recent arrived in July, and after news about grandsons and granddaughters it contained his newest discovery, a 1940 volume titled Stops, A Handbook for Those Who Know Their Punctuation and Those Who Aren’t Quite Sure. He was recommending it to me on the grounds that it is the “only book of my acquaintance that makes grammar delightful,” but also because he’d noted that it was published by the press (now defunct) at Middlebury College, where I teach. So while the rest of us were figuring out how to enlist Claude to help with our composition, one of the best writers of our age was still enjoying sharpening his prose, just as he enjoyed sharpening the tools of his work in field and forest. “I’m writing this on the porch of the ‘camp house,’ still unwired, built, I think, in 1964, in the woods between the river and the road.” He died on that farm yesterday, surrounded by family.

I got the news about his passing even as I was trying to grapple with the latest from a man who will attract more notice when he dies, but less affection. Elon Musk is always advancing his own vision of the world, of course—in fact, he’s just pledged to spend a hundred million dollars helping Republicans this fall. Or maybe two hundred million—neither would be a noticeable sum to a trillionaire, of course. Whatever good he did with his early advocacy for electric vehicles has now been undone a hundred times over with his advocacy for the people who hate EVs and all the other things we need. (He’s, as of last week, building gas turbines to make more electricity for his rightwing Grok AI project, already polluting the air of black neighborhoods in Memphis).

He offers the Nazi salute; we are at his behest settling thousands of refugees from white South Africa (and no others) in our country; his rancid racism has destroyed Twitter. It would be a pleasure never to think of him again, but because he’s the richest man in the world, one has to monitor what he says. And here’s yesterday’s installment, from of course his own social media site:

Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them.

Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.

The disingenuousness of this is remarkable. Extremely severe extinction events have indeed happened just five times in the last half-billion years, which means it would be extremely unlikely we’d spontaneously come across one any time soon: human civilization is, after all, just ten thousand years old. And yet of course we face one, not because of anything nature has done, but because we’ve filled the air with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, which his allies wish to continue indefinitely. “Just switching to sustainable energy” is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that, but since he’s a part of the political movement against this idea, he is now backing an alternative: “space satellites to control temperature,” which he further explains will be accomplished by a “super-intelligent swarm” of “sentient satellites, launched into Earth-Sun Lagrange points by mass drivers on the Moon.”

This is the kind of fantasy that drove Berry to distraction (and to work)—all about control and domination, all done by the few to the many, utterly ignorant of context. Immodest in every way.

But in Musk’s case it was accompanied by another revelation that began to emerge over the weekend. It turns out that the human toll of the horrific rampaging floods on the Nepal-Tibet border may well have been exacerbated by Musk’s decision to destroy the US Agency for International Development early in the DOGE assault on our government. USAID, in collaboration with NASA, helped maintain a network of monitors high in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Musk, in Feburary 2025, “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” One casualty was apparently this network. As Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw America’s response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake, wrote this weekend on (ironically) X,

“DOGE famously used keyword searches for terms like "climate" to terminate federal grants. Among the victims: a collab between USAID and NASA for flood prediction, early warning, disaster readiness, glacier inventories, and mapping dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal.”

As Konyndyk added

Could these programs have helped foresee or mitigate this week's glacial flooding catastrophe? Hard to say with an outlier event like this. But that was their purpose.

Sadly, it's hard to anticipate or mitigate climate hazards which your ideology has decreed do not exist.

Musk’s victims already number in the millions—a Lancet study predicts 14 million by 2030 as the indirect results of shutting down America’s humanitarian work, which puts him up there in the Stalin/Mao category, and almost certainly the most deadly human of this millennium. So maybe a few thousand more people hardly matter.

But contrast what Musk did with the actions of a principal at a school along the river. When a friend upstream phoned one of his teachers a blurted warning, he immediately evacuated the entire student body, saving at least 900 lives. Given a warning, he acted (precisely what the world has not done with climate change). “I thought that even if the warning turned out to be wrong, the worst it would cost us was one day of study,” Rajendra Dawadi said. “But taking it lightly could mean the loss of hundreds of lives.”

Principal Dawadi will spend the rest of his life going to the weddings of the students whose lives he saved, and I imagine there will be no small number of babies named in his honor. Elon Musk’s name will be cursed—the richest man in human history, who used his wealth and power to kill the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Here is a recent poem of Wendell Berry’s, published in The New Yorker less than a year ago and titled The Loved Ones.

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

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In other energy and climate news:

+The Nepal disaster continues to yield important writing, and insights. Wen Stephenson, who has traveled widely in the region, has an interview with Nepali climate expert Manjeet Dhakal, who says, among other more important things:

Maybe this is a small thing, but there is also the electric vehicle exhibition going on in Kathmandu. [EV sales have surged in Nepal] and many of these new vehicles were there in the port of entry at the border and were completely washed away.

He does not sound optimistic about international support for recovery

What we have seen in the past is, even though the world responds when these events are in the headlines, it fades away after a few months. The 2022 flood in Pakistan, it was all over the news, and then we saw the fate in terms of the scale and the level of support they received.

Climate scientist Michael Mann also has an important account of the tragedy.

The glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And it was the exclamation point on a summer of extremes, illustrating with a sole unnatural disaster the apocalyptic future that lies in store if we fail to take dramatic climate action.

As the death toll continues to mount – the latest count showed more than 900 dead and more than 4,400 individuals missing – this event has crystalized the climate crisis for many.

One reason is undoubtedly the sheer horror of what unfolded here. Chilling surveillance and eyewitness footage captured the horrific moment a 40mph wall of “liquid concrete” violently overtook fleeing crowds, instantly swallowing entire families and burying them beneath feet of thick, red-soaked silt. Another reason, however, is that the connection with climate change was unassailable in this case.

The torrent was the direct result of warming-induced glacial collapse, which dumped millions of tons of rock, unleashing a high-velocity wave of mud and debris. The new reality in the era of human-caused climate change, a CNN headline put it, is that “living downstream from a glacier has become a deadly liability”.

+Sammy Roth has a typically fine account of energy policy making in Sacramento (short version: opaque) but it really cheered me up to read about my Third Act colleagues speaking truth to power

I’d been told that the Senate Local Government Committee would convene around noon to debate Assembly Bill 1156. But after 20 minutes waiting in a crowded hallway, word circulated that the hearing was delayed — nobody knew for how long. I started to understand why all the industry trade associations and lobbying firms have offices within walking distance of the Capitol. Good luck to any normal person who wants to watch government in action, let alone make their voice heard.

I decided to get lunch. As I left the building, though, I spotted a group of climate activists with Third Act Sacramento. They were marching and distributing flyers.

“We’re trying to let [lawmakers] know that they are part of the solution, and that they’ve got to take major action,” Third Act organizer Katherine Keeney told me. “Newsom wants to tout himself as an environmentalist, but he’s backpedaling on everything. So we’ve got to keep hitting him. We can’t give up.”

And they got much of what they came for—as Roth reports, a passel of clean energy legislation now sits on Gavin Newsom’s desk.

+Many thanks to Damian Carrington at the Guardian. After his reporting earlier this decade on the massive methane leaks from oil and gas wells in Turkmenistan, he now can report that they’re going to do something about them.

The Guardian revealed in 2023 that Turkmenistan was the worst country for methane mega-leaks. Sources in Turkmenistan said this scrutiny was the “critical step” in leading the secretive and authoritarian government to engage with foreign partners.

A “super-emitter” leak, the escape of tonnes of methane per hour from a single valve or pipeline, heats the planet more than the emissions from a million SUVs or an entire coal-fired power station.

Turkmenistan had now stopped eight leaks by repairing corroded pipes, faulty wells and failing flares. The work was an “incredible first step”, said the UN, but much remained to be done.

+David Helvarg, veteran ocean defender, with a reminder that the November election will have a lot to do with the fate of the earth’s oceans.

+Not just America. As Lori Guetre reports, the oil-soaked Canadian province of Alberta is about permit a giant data center that will

emit roughly 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) in greenhouse gas emissions over 30 years. From one project. That's about 15% of Canada's annual emissions, cumulatively, from a single facility - the equivalent of adding about 700,000 gasoline cars to Canadian roads for the next thirty years.

+Bolting solar panels over a couple of California irrigation canals didn’t just produce a bunch of electricity, it also—according to Hugo Rojas—came with other benefits

Evaporation beneath the arrays fell by 50 to 70 percent against those open reaches.

Growth of algae and aquatic weed dropped by about 85 percent, and that is the figure with an operating budget attached. Weed control is a bill an irrigation district pays every summer, in crews, in machinery, and in water a clogged channel never delivers.

Meanwhile, from Brendan Brown, a reminder of who you want in your solar farm and who you don’t. It would, I think, have cheered Wendell Berry, who wrote with his usual wisdom about lambing, to read this:

Goats, the more famous eaters, are a menace on a solar site. They climb, and a herd of goats will treat tilted panel rows as a playground, damaging the glass with their hooves. Worse, goats chew for entertainment, and a solar farm is thousands of acres of exposed cabling. As one Penn State extension guide puts it dryly, goats are not recommended for solar arrays, with reports of damage from both climbing and chewing.

Cattle fail the other direction. A cow is simply too tall and too heavy for standard panel rows, unable to graze the ground beneath the arrays and perfectly capable of bending mounts and equipment by leaning on them. Panels can be mounted high on pedestals for cattle, but that has to be designed in from the start, at extra cost.

Sheep pass every test. They fit under the lowest rows, they eat grass rather than infrastructure, they move calmly, and their appetite is relentless. As one North Carolina extension specialist summed it up: cows are too tall, goats climb, and sheep are the one domesticated grazer that can take care of business without damaging the goods.

We’ll be covering everything from the AI data center boom to Super PACs for clean energy, climate hushing, protecting our public lands, and how to get environmentalists to actually vote. (According to the Environmental Voter Project, 11.2 voters for whom the environment is the number one issue didn’t actually manage to cast a ballot last time, which has resulted in…some problems).

Anyway, you can find What If We Get It Right? wherever you get your podcasts. So you don’t miss an episode, follow the show on your fave platform

More to the point, today we’re doing a live version of the thing to kick it off, with one of my oldest friends and favorite people, Naomi Klein, who is I think the smartest progressive intellectual at work in the English language. (My familiarity with the other languages is, sadly, minimal). Anyway:

Substack Live TODAY (Aug 31st) @ 3pm ET: Fascism v. The Planet, with Naomi Klein.

We’ll be talking with Naomi about many things, but certainly among them data centers, how fascism is intertwined with environmental policy, and her new book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor.

To join, just hop onto any of our Substack pages at the correct time and you’ll find us. If you miss the live conversation, fear not, we’ll be releasing it in our podcast feed too. I’ll be the stumbling, halting voice in the corner, and I thank you in advance for not snickering too much as I learn the craft.

It’s been harder than usual for me to write these past few days, and that’s because the glacier collapse and subsequent calamity along the Tibet-Nepal border hit very hard. As it happens, I’ve stood in that border crossing where you’ve watched the giant wave obliterate…everything in a split second. I’d spent weeks in the high, dry, cold of Buddhist Tibet, and then crossed into the lush humid chaos of Hindu Nepal, and so I can summon up some sense of what it must have been like, and of the people who died almost before panic could grip them.

More, I knew it was coming. Not on that day, of course, but I’d been in Tibet twenty years ago partly to report on what we already knew was an enormous threat: the fallout from the rapid melt on what is sometimes called Earth’s Third Pole. The danger of these collapses, and the blocked lakes they can create, were well-known to scientists; they happen often, but usually in unpopulated valleys. I’m not going to concentrate on these reports—there’s been much good coverage in the last few days. Jonathan Watts, for instance, does the important service of laying out the exact link between the climate crisis and the collapse.

Two days before the collapse, the ground temperature hit its highest point in the last two years, according to Dr Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, whose team had sensors 6 miles (10km) away from the site.

“These high temperatures would have weakened the snowpack, filled crevasses with water and thawed the bonds between ice and rock that hold these glaciers in place,” he told the Science Media Centre.

Jeff Berardelli tracks the ongoing increase in temperature in the region (it’s been about twice the global average, up 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1940). And Jonathan Mingle provides a very fine account of his own travels in the region, and of the similar smaller incidents that have happened across the years.

I want simply to ask you to focus on the image at the top of this newsletter, taken by a Chinese mountaineer named Zhia Yitie, that shows the collapse—that’s the stream in the center of the picture that looks like a waterfall. And what I want you to notice is how much ice is still there—to the naked eye it looks like 99 percent of the glacier remains. And this is just one glacier of perhaps 50,000 across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. My point is: there is infinitely more damage to be done, or to put it another way there is infinitely more damage we might still be able to forestall. And that’s what should concern us.

Just to do the math for a minute: on average, Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American. More than 99 percent of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower (though much of that capacity was wiped out in last week’s floods). They are not causing the crisis that is killing them: we are.

Indeed, even as the mud was settling over the ruins of Himalayan villages we took the next steps to insure these catastrophes would continue, announcing an “agreement” with the Venezuela that we control to dramatically increase its oil production. As Al Jazeera put it,

Shortly before the deal was announced, energy analyst Gregory Brew likened reports of the impending agreement to oil concessions sought by the British Empire in the early 20th century.

“Such a thing is without precedent,” Brew wrote on social media. “The closest thing would be BP [British Petroleum] (back when it was majority owned by the UK govt) claiming ownership of Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves pre-WWII.”

Trump himself has embraced the colonial-era slogan “Manifest Destiny”, as part of his plan for a “growing nation” that “increases our wealth” and “expands our territory”.

This is literal colonialism, in the service of Trump’s Big Oil donors—it’s pretty much precisely what we did to Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953, triggering a set of bloody events that continue to this day.

And it comes, of course, as we continue to sabotage renewable energy—this week’s installment, thanks to great investigative reporting from Evan Halper, finds the White House paying a European firm to cancel yet more wind leases, on the condition that the money be “reinvested” with a big Trump donor building export facilities for liquefied natural gas on the Louisiana coast.

In short: in a world beginning to turn away from oil, the United States has become the biggest force trying to insure we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere. If the rest of that ice is going to fall off that Nepali glacier, this will be why.

Which means that the question I promised to raise in last week’s newsletter is more important than ever: how do we translate these horrors (of which there will be far far more as the growing El Niño envelops the world in record temperatures) into political change here?

To be clear: I don’t mean before November’s midterms. The issues on which that will be fought—democracy, data centers, dementia—are baked in by this point. Gas prices will play a crucial role too, which means that anyone challenging the GOP should be pointing out the absurdity of our energy policy: the polling is clear that Americans hate Trump’s attacks on wind and solar. I’ll be spending the rest of the fall out on the trail with the Third Act and Gray Pac, mobilizing voters in key races; for the moment the goal is just to reestablish some beachhead for sanity in DC.

But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change—replacing oil and gas with sun and wind—that is our best hope for limiting warming. And the El Niño will be peaking just as the Democratic candidates start jockeying for position. So it is not too early to start trying to get them thinking about all this.

Matt Pawa, the lawyer who helped launch much of the litigation to hold oil companies responsible for global warming, has helpfully provided a three-part summation of why Democrats should run in part on climate. It is lawyerly in the best sense of the word, which is to say filled with fact—he finds the long-term polling data, offers the historical examples dating back to 1988, and brings it home with what I think will be the most salient argument: clean energy is potentially very cheap energy.

We are in an utterly extraordinary moment of energy transformation. Yet powerful corporations are keeping us stuck burning stuff from the dinosaur era to make energy. It’s dangerously heating up the climate and causing extreme weather. It kills millions of people who breathe bad air. It poisons our water. And yet renewable energy is now the cheapest way to make energy. This is not a moment for climate silence. It’s a moment for action.

You can see this dynamic playing out right now in the UK, which isn’t in the midst of an election but—since a parliamentary system means a kind of daily political battle—is nonetheless trying to figure out how to grapple with the schock they got this summer: week after week of blistering heat, and the drought that came with it. The green and pleasant land spent most of the summer brown and sweaty. (Not only that, but it turns out that shoppers shop less if the temperature gets above 25 degrees Celsius, and so businesses are grump too).

It’s all put the Labour government in a difficult spot. On the one hand, they’d like to appease the Murdoch press and open up more of the North Sea to drilling. This would accomplish nothing to reduce energy prices, since oil prices are set on a global market and there’s not enough crude left off UK shores to influence that number. But it would send a signal of “moderation,” which is the same kind of signal that American politicians—New York governor Kathy Hochul, say—have tried to send with their embrace of gas. (It turns out, new reporting shows this week, that Hochul was also lobbied persusasively by a natural gas front group).

But the problem is that danged heat, and the upsurge in concern, anger, and activism it’s causing among voters—it turns out that that latent hope for a workable future emerges quickly once the temperature rises. And so we’ve seen in recent weeks a spate of new data comparing the climate damage from North Sea oil drilling to the economic benefit: “the economic damage caused by the carbon pollution from the oil and gas produced would be between £119bn and £336bn in the coming decades, compared with the £28.7bn in value to the UK estimated by Adura, the fossil fuel company promoting the new fields.”

As Matthew Taylor lays out in a long and useful essay, it’s become a crucial question in UK politics, with the surging Greens on one side and the Conservatives and far-right Reform on the other

The leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, and the Conservative party leader, Kemi Badenoch, have called for a massive expansion of drilling in the North Sea, claiming they would reverse the ban on new licences if elected.

In a speech this year, Farage declared that the UK should be “self-sufficient in gas”. Badenoch followed with the promise of a growing UK oil and gas industry that would “ensure our energy security for generations to come”.

At the moment, the new Labour leader Andy Burnham is trying to figure out if there’s a straddle available. His new environment secretary, the wonderfully named Angela Eagle, tried to bluster her way through in a recent column for the Guardian but I suspect that promises of “healthier ecosystems” to fight fire risk won’t cut it. People are generally sophisticated enough by now to know that the real question hinges on fossil fuels.

I don’t know how the UK decision on drilling will fall next week—again, there’s a lot that’s been baked in by now—but I do know that ambitious American politicians would be well-advised to get ahead of this storm. I don’t think it’s hard. The basic argument goes like this:

“Donald Trump and the GOP are corrupt and stupid to insist that the future lies with fossil fuel. I will stop coddling Big Oil and instead start making it much easier to America to run on energy from the sun and wind. Instead of shutting down wind farms we’ll be opening them up; instead of tariffing solar panels we’ll be making it simple for Americans to stick them on the roof and balcony. This is our best chance to cut the risk and cost of catastrophe (not to mention rising insurance prices). It’s also our best chance to let Americans enjoy the plummeting energy prices that other parts of the world have begun to see. And it may be the only path we have to restoring even a little of our standing in a world that now sees us as a reckless and rogue state.”

If nothing else, prospective candidates should be thinking of it as a way to El Niño-proof their campaigns. And they should get on it sooner rather than later.

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In other energy and climate news:

+The most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen of the energy demands of AI, from Erald Kolasi and Jesse Damiani, shows that

In 2026…AI diffusion and deployment is responsible for as much as 1.1% of all global energy demand, substantially higher than what most naïve conventional estimates suggest. For example, a simplistic analysis from Our World in Data claims that AI diffusion accounts for only 0.2% of global primary energy demand.

As we argue comprehensively in this piece, these kinds of assessments are generally less useful because they’re focused purely on electricity consumption and ignore the broader lifecycle energy dynamics powering AI diffusion globally. In reality, we show that AI-driven global energy use is likely already higher than the energy consumption of the entire United Kingdom. We also estimate that AI will be responsible for roughly 1.2% of all global GHG emissions for this year. These are stunning figures that undercut the typical narratives about the relative insignificance of AI on global energy consumption.

Just as interesting, here’s an Arizona State University study from May that I somehow missed, which shows that data centers can raise the surrounding temperature by four degrees.

The waste heat produced by a single data center can surpass the amount emitted by 40,000 households, according to ASU’s David Sailor. Air-cooled condenser arrays discharge air heated to 14 to 25 degrees F above the surrounding air temperature, creating thermal plumes that move downwind over neighboring areas.

“They’re such a concentrated load of electricity consumption and hence heat emissions that we became concerned about the impact that they could have locally, and also in the downwind neighborhoods,” Sailor said.

With hundreds of megawatts of data center capacity operating in many cities and thousands more centers proposed, the combined impact on urban temperature could be substantial. U.S. data center capacity is projected to more than double by 2030.

“Even if these data centers only contribute to an additional heat island magnitude of 1 degree or 2 degrees, that can still have a very significant impact on our lives,” Sailor said.

That’s especially true in places where extreme heat already poses serious public health risks.

A 1-degree boost in air temperature, for example, is enough to drive higher use of air conditioning across entire neighborhoods. Those air conditioners, in turn, put even more heat into the surroundings.

All of this doubtless helps explain why the now comically misnamed Environmental Protection Agency has just moved to restrict public comments on data centers. As Maxine Joselow reports:

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate a federal requirement that states publicize and solicit public input on applications for air pollution permits for a range of industrial facilities, including new data centers and the power plants needed to run them.

The move could prevent residents from raising concerns about — or even learning about — data centers before permits are approved and construction starts.

+The Texas grid has had a boring summer, Matthew Zeitlin reports, thanks to the boring boxes full of batteries that weren’t there even a couple of years ago.

The state’s grid operator, ERCOT, has not issued a single “conservation appeal” so far this summer, asking Texans to voluntarily reduce electricity consumption to support the grid. By contrast, in 2023, the grid manager issued six between August 24 and August 30….

Batteries on the system can still charge even when demand is at its highest, and then discharge in the evening to help make up for lost solar. “Even when we were setting peak demand records, we’re still on net charging batteries, which at first blush feels so wrong,” Rhodes told me. “We have so much solar on the system that we’re charging batteries when prices are low, getting ready to discharge as the sun goes down before the wind picks back up.”

Let’s take Monday as an example again: At 7:50 p.m., when solar was down to just 1.5% of the mix on the grid, batteries were discharging 11,573 megawatts and real-time prices were around $125 per-megawatt-hour. On the same Monday of 2023, real-time prices at 7:50 p.m. were bouncing up and down from just below the statutory peak of $5,000 per megawatt hour and batteries were putting out just over a gigawatt.

+Pete Hegseth’s Army has fired a West Point professor for daring to teach that humans cause climate change. According to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes (whose publisher was also fired last week),

Adam Kalkstein, a climate scientist who spent 17 years teaching future Army officers, said he consistently received “outstanding” appraisals of his work. When leadership last year imposed a ban on teaching that humans contribute to climate change, he tried to comply but ultimately pushed back, saying that it was a disservice to the cadets’ education.

“It’s not a college-level course. It’s not even a high school course. Not because it isn’t rigorous; it is. But because we’re leaving out essential information,” Kalkstein said during a November 2025 meeting of the geography department with Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, then the dean of the academic board, according to the lawsuit. “We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” Kalkstein said…

The dean responded to Kalkstein by reminding him that Trump, as commander in chief, sets the agenda for West Point. The meeting ended with the dean storming out, according to the lawsuit.

I would just say: what contempt this shows for cadets, who we ask to put their lives on the line.

+They’re harvesting champagne grapes a month early in France, in an effort to cope with the record heat. As Claire Moses and Ségolène Le Stradic report,

“We’ve been a bit thrown by this harvest,” Mr. Toubart, a local grower, said. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

He explained that “the vines start growing earlier, winters are milder than before, and weather conditions throughout spring and summer actually accelerate the vines’ growth cycle.”

France has seen four heat waves since May, totaling 63 days of heat wave conditions, according to the country’s weather service. Daily and monthly records for summer heat were broken this year, and a heat wave in July was longer than one in 2003 that killed 15,000 people in France.

+The venerable Fiona Harvey has the best account I’ve seen yet of why chefs are switching to induction cooktops—cooler, quieter kitchens that are much cheaper to run. And she provides a quote that I hope will put to rest the idea that you need gas to produce true wok cooking.

“There is that sense of theatre with fire and flames,” says Jeremy Pang, a third-generation Chinese chef in London and founder of the School of Wok. “It feels quite traditional and exciting. But we have found that we can get just as high temperatures, and just as good cooking, with electric.”

The secret to traditional Chinese cookery lies in the “wok hei” – literally, the breath of the wok, meaning the smoke and heat that the chef must master, to give all ingredients the right degree of scorching and flavour. Pang was worried that this would be harder to achieve with electric, but soon found that he could reach temperatures of 350-400C, and in an easily controllable fashion.

“We use carbon steel with oil, and you can still get that actual smoke and flavour that you would with gas,” he said. “Gas cookers are incredibly good equipment, but you get so much heat off them, it’s a huge problem.”

Meanwhile, one of Harvey’s longtime colleagues at the Guardian, environment correspondent Paul Brown, has died after a highly useful career. As he remembered of his early days on the beat, back in the Thatcher era:

“We were talking about what would happen 50 years away. It needed all our ingenuity to make it sound like a news story, because people find prospects that far into the future boring.” Any enduring newsdesk scepticism was dispelled when a readers’ survey discovered that it was the second most read subject after medical stories. “It certainly made a substantial difference to the editors’ attitude,” he added.

+The Ember thinktank has produced a hopeful report on the spread of solar in Africa, arguing that it is going even faster than official statistics indicate:

Three-quarters of Africa’s solar growth is likely from distributed solar – and that is exactly what’s difficult to measure

Distributed solar, which is small-scale, customer-side solar installed mostly on rooftops – makes up most of Africa’s solar growth, and it’s the hardest type to measure. Ember estimates that 75% (20 GW of 26 GW) of the total solar capacity added between 2023 and 2025 is distributed solar. That’s because only a quarter of new solar can be explained by utility-scale and off-grid solar – utility-scale solar is fairly well-documented and visible through government procurement projects, and although off-grid solar is growing fast, its scale would still be very small in context of the gap.

+Here’s a sad number for you, courtesy of Ayesha Tandon. Climate change is currently exposing 580 million children around the world to an extra 20 days a year of “heat stress.”

For example, the paper finds that people living in Côte d’Ivoire currently face 112 heat-stress days every year. It adds that around half of these are due to human-caused climate change.

In contrast, Germany sees only 0.1 heat-stress days per year in today’s climate on average, which is largely attributable to human-caused climate change.

As it happens, I’ve spent some sweaty nights in rural Cote d’Ivoire, and I remember vividly a man who told me he was deeply hopeful that he could get a solar panel so he could connect it to a fan so that he and his wife and daughter could sleep more easily. That’s the world we live in.

+An important new analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists manages to deftly apportion blame for a drying West to big oil companies, with data that will doubtless be of interest to communities bringing legal actions against the carbon giants.

Our findings show that human-caused climate change has reduced April snowpack by roughly 36 percent, decreased warm season streamflow by approximately 13 percent, and increased irrigation demand by 4.3 percent. Roughly half of these impacts are attributable to emissions traced to the Carbon Majors since 1950, translating to a nearly 15 percent reduction in snowpack, a 6.1 percent decrease in streamflow, and a 2.4 percent increase in irrigation demand.

+Glad to see former Washington governor Jay Inslee’s new Substack. In its most recent number, he argues for greater action from states.

States control major levers over their own energy systems — from utility regulation and permitting, to infrastructure development and finance. And clean energy is the tool best suited to the moment. A July report from the advisory firm Lazard shows that solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of new electricity generation by far, cheaper than new gas power plants. Clean energy is also faster to build, which matters enormously given how quickly demand is growing. Clean energy made up 91 percent of new grid capacity added in the first quarter of 2026, and solar outpaced coal generation for the first time in American history this past May. States that embrace that reality can deliver real relief to their residents. States that don’t will be left paying more for less.

This year also presents an inflection point, in which American voters will elect the governors, legislators and public utility commissioners that will help determine our nation’s energy future. Thirty-six states hold gubernatorial elections this November, and at least 21 brand new governors will take office next year. Voters will decide on new members and majorities in state legislatures and utility commissions in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. One way or the other, 2027 will bring a new crop of state leaders, and with it the opportunity to build a more affordable and prosperous American economy — powered with clean energy.

Meanwhile, the retrograde directors of too-many rural electric co-ops are lining up behind natural gas as the fuel of the future, according to a new account from Diana DiGangi. That makes me even gladder that the Solar Advocates Project at Third Act is taking on rural co-ops as an organizing focus. Join us for a webinar Sept 9 to learn how you can help.

+Pre-election day shoutout to Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Senator who co-sponsored the Green New Deal alongside AOC. He’s facing a primary challenge Tuesday from Seth Moulton, who seems obsessed with transgender athletes in sports, the ultimate non-issue of our time.

+Scientists left microphones running at 12 midwestern solar farms…and heard twice as many grassland birds as in the adjoining corn and soybean fields. As Hugo Rojas reports

Most solar farms use single axis trackers, panels that tilt through the day on a horizontal steel tube running the length of each row. That tube sits a few feet off the ground and carries brackets, junction boxes and cable trays every few yards.

To a barn swallow or a robin, that is a cliff face with ledges on it. Underneath, the seeded mix grows up through the array and out into the strips between rows.

The two things together give a bird both cover and structure, a combination neither a crop field nor a plain grassland offers.

+As everyone says the fondest of goodbyes to Dolly Parton, let us remember that one of her last original songs was World on Fire, with these lyrics:

Liar, liar the world’s on fire
Whatcha gonna do when it all burns down?
Fire, fire burning higher
Still got time to turn it all around

Don’t get me started on politics
Now how are we to live in a world like this
Greedy politicians, present and past
They wouldn’t know the truth if it bit ‘em in the ass

Here she is singing it at the 2023 American Country Music awards

In our political life, reality hardly matters any more. Earlier today the president of the United States, in a fit of pique, proposed renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” He hides in a food cart and sends journalists out as decoys to be killed on his behalf. His winsome aide hands him an endless stream of flattering tweets. And yet the world stumbles on. People die, obviously, as a result of this folly—in the Middle East, and in middle America, where suddenly measles is a serious threat again. (Hell, the deaths attributable to Elon Musk’s decision to destroy USAid put him in the Stalin and Mao category for negligent manslaughter.) But human societies are for a while resilient; we assume that there’s always a chance for a reset. After the next election normal service will resume. If you start with a rich country like the U.S., it can absorb a lot of decline.

But that’s not how physical systems work. You push them and then past a certain point things change. If the temperature drops below 32 degrees water freezes, and if it rises above 212 then it boils, more or less. This newsletter spends a lot of time in the world of politics, because that’s where we need to make changes. But sometimes we need to remind ourselves that ultimately that political world is a subset of the physical one, simply because that’s how things work.

And we’re now reaching, I think, the point where that physical system is running out of margin.

Take a look at this graph. It shows the temperature of the global sea surface, averaged on a daily basis. Since our planet is 70 percent ocean, it’s a pretty good gauge of how hot the planet is getting. And what it shows is that in all the decades we’ve been measuring, it’s never been hotter. Given what we know about climate history, it’s almost certainly never been hotter in the history of our species. (Handily, by the way, that 21.1 Celsius line is just about exactly seventy degrees Fahrenheit.) As a Canadian professor wrote, “August 21st likely marked the warmest Sea Surface Temperatures have been for the entire Holocene period, and possibly even as far back as the last Interglacial 125,000 years ago.”

As Damian Carrington chronicled yesterday

The new ocean heat record being set in August is especially remarkable as global sea temperatures are typically highest in March and April, after the austral summer. The southern hemisphere has significantly more ocean area than the northern.

“The record is another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the new data. “El Niño is adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming. The consequences are already visible: the number of marine heatwave days globally has more than tripled since the early 1990s.”

That means many things. Among them, as Ben Noll laid out yesterday,

The unusual ocean warmth has fueled powerful storms in the Pacific, such as Hurricane Lala near Hawaii, helped create a reservoir of extra moisture that has contributed to recent rainfall extremes across the United States and boosted summer heat across Europe.

This is a system that’s being pushed much too hard and much too fast, and it’s breaking.

Forty two percent of the world’s ocean area is now experiencing a “marine heatwave.” This means that wide swaths of coral are already “bleaching,” turning a deadly shade of pale; we don’t have the numbers yet, but it’s entirely predictable. We learned earlier this summer that the last huge coral bleaching event, the fourth this century, ran from 2023 to 2025 and

impacted 84% of the world’s coral reef area in all three coral reef-containing ocean basins (Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans). Mass bleaching was documented in at least 83 countries and territories.

It’s not just that coral reefs are one of the wildest corners of God’s brain; it’s that they provide food for 500 million human beings and keep waves from destroying shorelines. But still—they’re underwater. We don’t actually seem them on a daily basis. It’s hard for us to imagine the damage.

Trees are easier for us to see; think of them as coral reefs but on land. And here’s a completely remarkable account from Eric Niiler on how the hot new wildfires bred by our hot new atmosphere are degrading them in the most obvious possible ways

On a gentle slope on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where a towering green canopy of ponderosa pines had stood for centuries, wildfires have transformed roughly 1,700 acres into brown, bare shrubland.

That forest is gone for good, scientists say. Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.

It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40 percent of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result.

These trees help define the American west. (Google the Oregon license plate). But they also function as part of an ecosystem. To wit:

Researchers say that as trees disappear, winter and spring snow will melt faster, affecting wildlife as well as communities that are already struggling with water shortages. Some Western states get as much as 75 percent of their water from snowmelt.

“When you remove the forest, that snow is more susceptible to melting earlier,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an interdisciplinary scientist at Colorado State University. And he noted that a warmer, more arid climate dries out soil and pulls moisture from plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. “That thirstier atmosphere is a big concern,” he said.

Oh, and:

Forests also absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Bigger, older trees store more carbon than younger trees and shrubs. The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.

But again, much of that is invisible—co2, sadly, can’t be seen. (If it turned the sky smog-brown like carbon monoxide we’d have done something decades ago). And even forests are far away from where most people live as to seem almost unreal. (Once, a visitor looking at the Vermont foliage near my home asked me if we collected the colored leaves when they fell and put them back up next year, as if they were a kind of Christmas decoration).

So let’s think about that water for a moment, the snowmelt that’s disappearing ever faster. Here’s another remarkable account of the American West, this time from Reis Thebault. It begins in the control room of the Central Arizona Project, the vast canal project that supplies water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and its surrounds, which are some of the fastest growing communities in America. The Colorado, though, is drying up, and so big cutbacks are coming.

Short-term reductions, announced by the federal government on Friday, will cost Arizona roughly one-third of its share of river water over the next two years. But beyond that, a range of cutbacks remain possible.

Under the most severe outcome, the system would be cut off entirely during the driest years, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine.

“They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” said Brenda Burman, the project’s general manager. “It’s not possible to picture it.”

There’s a certain poetic justice here, perhaps—communities that have built their identity on the myth of the ruggedly independent western man overcoming the hostile elements, only to find themselves entirely dependent on the socialized distribution of limited water.

Cave Creek, a picturesque burg steeped in cowboy kitsch in the foothills north of Phoenix, gets 95 percent of its water from the aqueduct system

“Without Colorado River water, we would be a dusty little town with dirt roads,” Mayor Robert Morris said.

The town’s leaders have been scrambling to find backup plans. Cave Creek has hired a water consultant and struck deals with neighboring municipalities, cobbling together enough supply for the next five years, Mr. Morris said.

He has sought to prepare residents for higher bills and stricter conservation, working to undo a foundational part of the state’s philosophy in the process.

“The biggest thing for people to overcome is the idea of unlimited, cheap water,” Mr. Morris said.

But even that blow to identity is small compared to the blow that comes when you run out. And not just of affordable water, but of affordable food. And we seem to be nearing that point. We’ve long known, for instance, that yields of staple crops are rising more slowly than they would otherwise, because of higher temperatures. But a new study this week put some fairly remarkable numbers on the future: “severe water scarcity” events due to global warming could easily triple the price of wheat.

Looking ahead, climate model projections suggest that water scarcity will expand under continued warming. Our results indicate that a temperature increase of about 3°C could triple average global wheat prices relative to 2010.

But we don’t have to wait. As Somini Sengupta pointed out this weekend, in four paragraphs that may set some kind of record for condensed reality, that future is more or less now.

Wheat is at the heart of the modern diet, and this year, it is facing an accumulation of modern dangers. The breadbaskets of the world are getting pummeled by drone strikes and devilish weather, nudging prices higher amid already soaring food costs in the wake of the Iran war.

Heat and drought have diminished harvests in some of the biggest wheat-producing countries, including the United States, which is expected to have its worst wheat harvest in a half-century, spiking prices. Poor countries that agreed to buy American wheat under the threat of Trump tariffs could be stuck paying abnormally high prices.

The Black Sea, a crucial passage for the global wheat trade, is an active theater of the Russia-Ukraine war, while the Houthi militia’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have already forced grain shipments to take a longer, more expensive route around South Africa.

Beyond that, a supercharged El Niño further threatens water levels in the Panama Canal, while drought has reduced water levels to perilously low levels in transit routes like the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe, raising transportation costs. All this at a time when the global atmosphere is hotter than normal because of a century of fossil fuel burning, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers in poor countries.

All of this is down to fossil fuels—the oil we’re fighting over in the Strait of Hormuz, the gas and coal whose methane and carbon emissions have sent temperatures soaring and river levels dropping. It’s reality.

Just to repeat the numbers, this time from Neal Burnette-Irwin and Marion Kilpatrick

Mark Jankowski with USDA’s Outlook Board is still crunching the numbers for the year, but says the crop is set to break all the wrong records.

“On our balance sheet, we didn’t make any changes to our export or other use forecasts, so all that essentially did was tighten up ending stocks by six million bushels from where we were last month. Now we’re looking at U.S. ending stocks of 717 million bushels, down 203 million bushels from last year, reflecting the fact that this wheat crop is a small crop. It’s historically small.”

U.S. wheat growers can point to a number of challenges this year, but Jankowski says the issues aren’t limited to domestic wheat production. The crop is also suffering globally.

“A fairly sharp reduction in the European Union production estimate. We lowered it by 1.8 million tons this month, reflecting very hot, dry weather that spread across the entire EU region over the summer. Much of that extreme heat hit during the grain-filling stage for wheat, so it is showing up as reduced yield potential. With a 1.8-million-ton reduction in the forecast this month, that would bring the EU’s wheat production forecast down to 134.2 million tons, down just about 11 million tons from last year.”

It’s not just wheat. In Europe, knocked to its knees by an endless stream of heat waves this summer, we have reports of vegetable harvests collapsing by double digits—sixty percent of France’s broccoli crop, for instance, is gone. Britain could face food shortages within months, one excited newspaper report warns; in Ireland, they’re calling for an emergency food stockpile as harvests run low. The UK government has refused to release an unredacted copy of a report from the country’s intelligence agencies about ecosystem collapse amidst rising temperatures, but we do know that it predicts the very real possibility of widespread food shortages by 2030, resulting in “price rises, migration, political destabilisation and possible war… fueled by the human-induced climate crisis.”

What I’m trying to say is, we are running up against limits. We have made it hot enough on this planet that things are going very wrong. This is not like politics, where you get to say something dumb and change the subject. As I’m writing this, for instance, word has emerged of a court filing where the Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center has threatened to tear the building down unless Trump’s name is carved on the wall. That’s not real; it’s a game, one designed to distract. But wheat is real.

Because we’ve pushed so hard into this new hot world, our margin has been substantially reduced, in some cases to nothing. As one scientist quoted in that excellent article on western trees and fire said,

“Forests do have innate resilience and under normal circumstances, they can take a hit or two and bounce back,” Dr. Coop said. “But circumstances just aren’t normal anymore.”

Still, there are things we could do. When it comes to forests we could at least not knock more roads into the middle of them, as the Trump administration decided to do last week. (If you want to read a bang-up piece of writing about the Peavine Fire currently devastating Reno, I recommend this from my beloved Third Act colleague B Fulkerson).

When it comes to the Colorado River, we could—as conservationists have suggested for decades—demolish Glen Canyon Dam and let Lake Powell drain downstream to Lake Mead. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would give us a little more margin.

And we could deploy lots and lots of solar panels to desalinate enough water to supply some of the needs of places like Phoenix (solar panels that, by the way, shade the desert and conserve some moisture). And we could, you know, stop building water-intensive data centers. (Big victory in New Mexico yesterday, where activists included my Third Act colleagues managed to win a temporary halt to the giant Jupiter project, “in part due to recent revelations about the use of millions of gallons of fresh water for the data center’s construction in recent months.”)

When it comes to food, we may have more margin yet. America’s fertile cropland is filled to an astonishing extent growing corn syrup, feed for cattle, and gasoline—an area the size of Indiana is devoted solely to producing ethanol, an absurd boondoggle. So we’re not without options. Using it to produce solar power and, you know, food people eat would take off some of the pressure.

Above all, of course, we can rapidly deploy renewable energy. At this point it won’t lower the temperature rapidly, but it could keep it from climbing rapidly. And it’s within our technical capacity—the planet possesses the factories capable of turning out solar panels three times as fast as we’re currently going.

I will return next time to politics, because politics is unavoidable. It’s how we will or won’t rise to these challenges. But for now I just want to drive home the reality, the sheer inescapable reality of life on our rapidly overheating planet.

Because we’re pushing the margins, and we’re doing it right now. One of the more remarkable essays I’ve read in recent months comes from Aruna Chandrasekhar, describing modern-day Mumbai as a “city of sweat.” This relates directly to the elevated sea temperatures with which I began this account—Mumbai, as anyone who has had the privilege of visiting the Gateway of India will recall, sits on the edge of the Arabian Sea. The city’s seawalls are already overtopped in storms, but the constant danger is the humidity. Here’s Chandrasekhar (and the whole article is very much worth reading)

In summer, Mumbai’s air holds up to 90% of all the water it can possibly contain, leaving almost no room for sweat to evaporate – which in turn leads to rapid dehydration, exhaustion and fatal heatstrokes. On a 38C day in April 2023, 14 people died in an outdoor rally attended by India’s home minister. What has come to be expected of millions upon millions of Mumbaikars, no matter how bad it gets, is resilience. But that resilience is coming up against hard limits of survivability.

Jari Mari is a crazy mosaic of the city’s extremes. Migrant, working-class Muslim and Dalit families live in tin sheds and one-bedroom concrete blocks stacked behind the high-security walls that seal off runway 27. The housing is so dense that the narrow lanes see no sun and feel no wind. But the heat still gets through, and the kids are always sick, many of the mothers in these houses told us: everyone has to sleep with their doors open, mosquitoes be damned. No one we spoke to could afford air conditioning.

In Sabiya and Sameer Khan’s one-room house, temperatures touch 49C. When we tell Sameer we’re not here to shoot planes, but to take thermal pictures of his asbestos roof, he looks at us like we’re mad. We show Sabiya how the fan above her stove is pushing hot air back down on her. A couple of blocks away, kids play cricket on concrete that shows a reading of 58.7C.

58.7 Celsius is 137.66 degrees Fahrenheit. No more need be said.

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In other energy and climate news:

+A highly important new report on “climate double agents”—DC lobbyists who work for communities trying to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible, and also for…the fossil fuel industry. As Sara Sneath explains,

Dozens of lobbying firms were identified by researchers as working on both sides of climate action. James Browning, the founder and executive director of F Minus, said local governments who hire these firms to lobby for climate mitigation, disaster relief, and wildlife conservation likely don’t know that the same firms are working for clients like ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which critics say are pushing to further dependence on fossil fuels. “They are locked into these relationships with big firms and may also not know they are the ones blocking climate efforts,” Browning said.

For example, the analysis shows US multinational law firm Greenberg Traurig has lobbied for three fossil fuel entities (API, ConocoPhillips and the Western States Petroleum Association in California) that have opposed state-level legislation aimed at holding fossil fuel companies financially accountable for their historic climate-warming emissions and using that revenue, in the form of climate superfunds, to support climate mitigation costs. Miami-Dade county, in Florida, hired the firm to lobby for shoreline protection and Everglades restoration. “That’s a glaring conflict,” Browning said.

+Okay, we’re creating lots of icebergs. But we’re also creating drones that can latch onto them. Tim Hornyak describes the uses of the “Ice Dart.”

Landing on icebergs specifically allows drones to monitor them for days or months, producing more detailed observation than a quick aerial surveillance mission. This could simplify iceberg tracking compared to methods such as helicopter deployment, dropped instruments, or dart-like tracking devices, and provide another data layer to satellite and ship-based iceberg detection, according to the researchers. It could also provide a means of monitoring icebergs that are otherwise untrackable.

+Veteran analyst Dana Nuccitelli reports that the war in Iran really did turbocharge EV sales around the globe—except of course in the U.S.

The price of oil and refined fuels spiked, and interest in EVs followed. Since March, electric car sales have surged in Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. In Europe, the world’s third-largest auto market, EVs now represent nearly 30% of new car sales…

There remain a few glimmers of hope in the American EV market. California, which accounts for one-quarter to one-third of annual electrified vehicle sales in the country, just launched its own rebate program for first-time EV buyers. And American legacy automakers like Ford and newcomers like Slate are taking innovative approaches in an effort to introduce more affordable electric vehicles.

But unless those efforts achieve success soon, the formerly dominant American auto industry will be relegated to fighting over the scraps of an ever-shrinking internal combustion engine vehicle market as the world transitions to an electrified future, unintentionally supercharged by the consequences of Trump’s Iran war.

+I cannot tell you what this new scientific data really means—but you have to admit it’s interesting:

Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be leaving a measurable imprint inside the human body. Researchers analyzing more than two decades of U.S. health data found that blood bicarbonate levels have climbed about 7% since 1999, while calcium and phosphorus have declined—changes that closely track increasing atmospheric CO2.

At the very least, this should cause us to do a little…reflecting

Humans evolved when atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were approximately 280 to 300 ppm. During the past decade, atmospheric levels have risen by an average of about 2.6 ppm each year, while 2024 alone saw an increase of 3.5 ppm.

Fellow Author Dr Phil Bierwirth, a retired environmental geoscientist affiliated with the ANU Emeritus Faculty, emphasized that the study does not establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship. However, he said the consistency of the changes across a large population warrants attention.

“I actually think that what we are seeing is because our bodies are not adapting,” Dr Bierwirth said.

“It appears we are adapted to a range of CO₂ in the air that may now have been surpassed.

“The normal range maintains a delicate balance between how much CO₂ is in the air, our blood pH, our breathing rate and bicarbonate levels in the blood.

“As CO₂ in the air is now higher than humans have ever experienced, it appears to be building up in our bodies. Maybe we can never adapt such that it is vitally important to limit atmospheric levels of CO₂.”

+Lucy Carrigan, with a fine report on one of the hottest and driest summers in Irish history

The wildfire that started on Monday, July 20, was still smoldering on Monday, August 1. It burned this way, it burned that way, the wind changed direction and the fire with it. It went down the east side coming menacingly close to the villages of Killurney and Kilcash, it whipped around and headed off in the opposite direction and came down towards the villages of Cloneen and Killusty. A friend living in the mountains posted photos of an apocalypse: oppressive dark clouds of smoke illuminated by the ominous, reddish orangish glow of fire ravaging the mountain. A long way from the boardrooms of power and influence, Tipperary Fire and Rescue were out in force, so too the Army Corps. And, the farmers who were quick to see the danger to their lands and their homes.

Despite all of their most valiant of efforts, Sliabh na mBan burned and burned. The fire got deep into the peat and was next to impossible - without a soaking rain which did not come - to put out.

Sliabh na mBan is now charred black.

+Ben Santer is a climate science OG and longtime leader in the field. He’s recently had a cancer diagnosis, and explained how it changed his thinking in certain ways

They're looking at red blood cell counts, they're looking at hemoglobin. And it's that long-term monitoring that enables them to understand, , okay, my condition isn't just something that was an error, an erroneous measurement. It's there. It's present over time, and it's getting worse or it's getting better. So I mention that because there are real parallels here. There's a lot of benefit in monitoring, and that's what's imperiled. Certainly in climate world, the current administration seeks to go after the monitoring and impede our ability to make and continue to make long-term measurements of basic markers of the health of planet Earth. And in the medical arena, there are threats to things like vaccine development and cancer research and some of the basic research underpinning confident medical diagnoses. No. No, we can't let that happen. It will affect both our own ability to access the best personal healthcare, and it will also affect the health of the planet on which we live if we allow these injuries and insults and threats to basic science.

It's not a viable survival strategy to say see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

+I know it’s hard to believe, but the Trump administration is trying to limit efforts in other nations to control plastic pollution. The Washington Post got its hands on a leaked document:

The overwhelming majority of plastic is made from chemicals derived from petroleum or other fossil fuels, and the Trump administration has pushed to expand oil and gas drilling and domestic production. Negotiators under Trump have become far more vocal in opposing binding limits on plastic production, compared with a more conciliatory tone under President Joe Biden.

The negotiating position also reflects a broader administration strategy of citing national security concerns to promote fossil fuels, such as when it declared a national energy emergency last year, blocked the development of wind farms and exempted oil and gas firms from Endangered Species Act requirements in the Gulf of Mexico.

+Small electric tricycles with solar panels on the roof—built in China—are replacing gas-powered vehicles in a desperate Cuba, trying to survive as America chokes off its energy supplies.

This is how people get around now,” said 40-year-old Liecer de la Cruz, who owns one of these vehicles.

The tricycles, with a cost between $2,000 and $4,000, are used to transport goods and serve fixed routes once covered by buses.

While their price is out of reach for most Cubans, many have sold their older gasoline-powered cars to buy the tricycles. Others got them from relatives abroad, where they are generally cheaper, and some small-business owners even used their profits to invest in them, expecting to recoup the cost.

One of the year’s most important political battles—the one against ICE deportations in Minneapolis this past winter—took place in a geographically confined area filled with people with cellphones who could record its brutal but fairly simple dynamic. The other—the fight against data centers—is sprawling and nationwide, often taking place in rural areas where journalism is all but nonexistent, and has generated few dramatic images beyond people yelling at county board meetings. It’s been very effective—earlier this month even Texas governor Greg Abbott, facing a tough re-election fight, called for an “audit” and temporary freeze on new connections. According to a new poll from Heatmap, 75 percent of Americans oppose data center development near them. But the opposition has also been hard to parse. There are few nationally recognizable names leading the battle, no single book or documentary guiding the fight.

I’ve had a front row seat for parts of it, because my Third Act colleagues across the country have been avid participants in many of the fights (we’re hosting a big webinar next week, in fact) and even so I’ve found it hard to really keep track of. But we’re about a year in to the most heated part of the battle, and I think we can say a few things with assurance. And a few things with less assurance. So here we go, in descending order of confidence.

One—It really is an environmental plague. Those impacts look different in different places; in dry areas, for instance, the use of water is egregious, and its effect on electric rates will vary from one jurisdiction to another. But for those who are concerned about the rapid warming of the planet, the last few weeks have made it finally clear that there’s an unholy alliance between Big Tech and Big Fossil. Many thanks to Bloomberg’s New Energy team for a comprehensive breakdown showing that the planned data center buildout will increase greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector by at least twenty percent, and perhaps as much as a third. That’s because—in their effort to go fast, and bypass as much permitting as possible—data center developers are increasingly opting to run them with what Matt Day and Mark Chediak called “bespoke” gas power plants. To give you a sense of the scale, here’s a couple of projects in Texas:

Earlier this month, Cleanview, which tracks US power infrastructure and data center development, identified Amazon as the developer of an 8,000-acre site in Pecos County, which will become among the biggest single sources of carbon pollution in the US.

About 30 miles (48 kilometers) to the west, past a pecan orchard and scrublands dotted with oil derricks, Chevron Corp. is building Microsoft a gas plant to power a new data center complex on a 2,000-acre site.

The two plants alone could generate more than 10 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power New York City on a hot summer day. Their combined annual emissions may be as high as 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to regulatory filings. That’s slightly less than half the cumulative emissions of Washington state, where both companies are headquartered.

In Ohio, as Kalley Kwang reported last week, Open AI and Nvidia are at work on a vast data center that will cost as much as half a trillion dollars and consume

eight gigawatts of computing capacity, or enough electricity to power about six million households in the United States.

One way to view a data center is as a machine to burn huge quantities of natural gas—which in turn is one reason why the oil-soaked Trump administration likes them so much. Indeed, earlier this month the president said that “data centers could be bigger than oil.” This comes at precisely the wrong moment, just when clean energy is offering us a chance to blunt the worst impacts of rapidly rising temperatures. California has managed to cut its use of natural gas for electricity in half in the last three years by building solar panels; that great gain would be wiped out by this sudden bloom of archaic gas technology.

Two—It’s clear by now that this is all part of the extension of oligarchic control over our lives. The data center buildout is the work of the biggest companies in America, controlled by the most callow human beings. Elon Musk fuels his weird and racist Grok AI by running huge diesel engines day and night in poor and Black neighborhoods to Tennessee and Mississippi; Meta is building out the biggest of the Texas plants in service of Mark “Pervert Glasses” Zuckerberg’s vision of a “personal superintelligence” “that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.” Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is intent on a new Texas data center that Hiroko Tabuchi has reported may be the single most polluting facility in the entire country.

A few years ago these men were still held in some esteem. Not so now; they’re seen, rightly, as people whose own greed drives them. Another way of thinking about AI is as an IPO waiting to happen. These barons lined up behind President Trump on inauguration day (and Musk in particular got him the job); they get to share the rising hatred of the president.

Three—Its’s clear by now that AI, and the data center development underlying it, pose real and significant dangers. One is economic; what economic growth the Trump administration has managed to generate is focused in this sector, and it seems increasingly certain that it’s a bubble that will burst with real economic consequences. As the indefatigable journalist/gadfly Ed Zitron has been pointing out repeatedly, the revenues from large language models seem unlikely to equal the vast sums paid out to build the data centers; each day is a test to see whether the stock markets (and hence people’s retirement accounts) defy gravity a little longer.

But there’s a much deeper kind of risk from AI. I highly recommend listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with industry analyst Helen Toner earlier this week. Klein has been a (guarded) booster of AI tech, bringing knowledgeable enthusiasm for its uses. But the news in recent weeks that models from both AI and Anthropic broke the rules their programmers had set for them and figured out how to hack other companies had him talking in a new tone.

We are not out of the territory wherein we can be confident that the A.I. is not going to do something criminal and possibly catastrophic in order to solve an incredibly stupid problem.

A new industry open letter last month, signed by more than a thousand AI professionals, essentially begged the federal government to step in and impose some regulations. As they said,

The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

One of the signatories, an AI scientist at Anthropic, went further, tweeting:

Not only is AI "not guaranteed" to make a dramatically better future, the odds of failure are terrifyingly high: I think* there's something like a 40% chance we get an outcome around as bad as human extinction or worse

People intuit these risks, even if few of us really understand them.

Four—In part, that’s because the daily experience of using AI is so grim for so many people. We can acknowledge that certain forms of the technology—the machine learning that predates large language models, for instance—may help with things like medical research; for people with deep expertise in a field it can offer a (closely-watched) assist. But for most of us, day to day, this is just a new form of unwelcome harassment. Garrett Graff, the incisive journalist, used his newsletter this week to detail the many ways AI is “making everything worse.” Citing everything from the new scams it’s enabling to the much-touted hope by AI execs that it will steal millions of jobs, he concludes:

The ordinary Americans’ experience with AI is as if after the invention of electricity, every factory worker was assigned to start each workday by receiving an electric shock, and newly founded electrical companies went around to rural farms tasering farm children involuntarily and then dropping a dead electrocuted hog down the family water well.

(Which is the kind of robust sentence Claude is unlikely to produce.)

Pretty much all of us who teach are clear that it is undermining student’s ability to learn to research, and really to think; new data from China seems to show large-scale and alarming effects. Kids intuit this, and at some level resent being the guinea pigs in this vast experiment

Five—(and remember, these arguments are going by descending level of sturdiness), I think people intuit something else here. I’ve written an entire book and large parts of another trying to understand what it is about these technologies that worry me. Past the practical dangers, there’s a profound personal and even spiritual one: they’re basically about transcending the limitations of being human. But it seems increasingly clear to me that those limitations are precisely what makes being a human so interesting.

At the most basic level, much of the Silicon Valley fascination with this stuff stems from a widely-advertised fear of…dying. Ray Kurzweil, whose job at Google is “AI Visionary,” is the prophet of the Singularity, when we cross some threshold that moves us into a different world. Earlier this year he gave a series of interviews where he explained, among other things, that

Kurzweil’s most consequential medical date is 2032, when he predicts humanity will reach longevity escape velocity. He defines it as the point at which each passing year brings medical advances that add more than one year to a person’s remaining life expectancy. Chronological time continues, but improvements in prevention, diagnosis and treatment theoretically return more life than aging removes. When Ismail asked for his current date, Kurzweil answered simply: “2032.”

I have watched Kurzweil swallow his dozens of daily pills to make sure he stays alive long enough (he’s arranged to have himself frozen if he dies before Claude can assure his immortality). But even people who haven’t seen this kind of sad spectacle up close have, I think, have some gut reaction that utopia is not billionaires figuring out how to live forever on an overheating planet while entertaining the rest of us with AI “art” that erodes everything that matters about the world. But we have no real way of expressing those fears. Why would Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin or Musk or Bezos listen to us?

Except when we can, in the places where live, manage to block their blasted data centers.

The political analyst Andrew Eggers complained the other day that there’s

something bleak about seeing the policy debate over how we ought to shape and regulate this massive, unbelievable, titanic technology collapse down into what’s essentially a NIMBY squabble over where to park the chips that power it.

But that’s wrong, I think. People are rallying where they can, on ground that means something to them. We can’t compete with these guys when it comes to buying elections—Musk alone is pouring $100 million into Senate campaigns in the next few weeks. We can, however, organize in the places we care about, and in the process strike some kind of blow for the things we care about, even if we perceive the threats only dimly. Just as Minnesotans forced the beginnings of a reckoning with our repulsive deportation policies, so people across the country are forcing, as best we can, some kind of conversation about this disfiguring technology. One hopes that it doesn’t bleed over too much into attacks on completely useful technology—in some places the data center fight is leading to solar advocacy, in others to restrictions on solar farms. Resistance is always messy—but right now it’s required.

I remind myself regularly that I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where farmers could not insert themselves into London’s parliamentary debates, and instead used their anger at the high-handedness of colonial authorities to force the start of a conversation on colonialism that’s still underway. We fight where we can and when we can

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In other energy and climate news:

+Wanna see a pickup truck going airborne after a Texas heatwave buckles the pavement? Of course you do.

Especially if it comes with a long story about how this is happening all over the place. As Todd Frankel reports,

It was a dramatic example of what has been playing out repeatedly this summer along the nation’s roadways, railroad tracks and bridges: Intense heat is causing surfaces to expand to the point that they break.

The failures illustrate how the nation’s transportation networks, built for a different era, increasingly struggle to handle hotter modern-day summers. And this summer has been brutal. July, federal scientists have said, was the single hottest month on record in the contiguous United States.

Heat waves melt asphalt into goo. Train tracks twist. Overhead power lines sag. Concrete snaps into pieces in what are known as “blowups” — the technical term for what the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation defines as “a heave in a concrete or brick pavement caused by pavement expansion from excessive heat.”

The entire state of Wisconsin was cautioned earlier this summer to “watch for pavement buckles.” A blowup last month closed part of Interstate 97 near Severna Park, Maryland, clogging traffic for a quick repair and then for three straight nights. Interstate 49 in Shreveport, Louisiana, was also shut for hours while crews raced to deal with a blowup. After a bike path next to U.S. 36 buckled, officials in Boulder County, Colorado, warned residents to prepare for more

As long as we’re talking about pickups, the Wall Street Journal had an interesting report on why we can’t have nice things. As Christopher Otts reports, the V-8 engine is back for American pickups, mostly because some buyers can’t deal with the slightly decreased noise level from more efficient engines

What truck buyers and muscle-car fans love more than anything, it turns out, is the rich, throaty roar of a V-8 and the vibrations it causes.

After just one year of its new Hurricane engine, Ram brought back the old eight-cylinder engine to its lineup for 2026 model-year trucks—and it is paying off for parent company Stellantis. Buyers can pick a truck with a Hurricane or pay more for one with an old V-8 engine, called the Hemi. Ram sales are up 22% this year, bucking an industry decline of 3%.

“It just sounds like what a truck should sound like,” said Brian Ewart, a 39-year-old Kansas dad and Navy veteran who recently spent $80,000 on a Ram with the V-8.

+A former Colorado coal mine has been converted to a big solar farm. In fact, the story is even better than that

The Coors coal mine, which lies 40 miles northeast of Denver, operated from 1979 to 1987, then served as a fly ash disposal site until 2016. Since then, the land has sat unused.

Now, Molson Coors' energy is bringing energy production back to the area with a new 47-acre solar panel farm.

That’s right—an abandoned fly ash disposal site is now going to use the sun to brew beer.

+Phoenix firefighters and paramedics have to figure out how to keep people alive in infernal heat. Here’s an excellent short documentary about how they do it. (Lots of ice)

+The summer’s crazy series of European heatwaves is producing, among other things, some very fine journalism. Eric Klinenberg offers up an extended essay on the changing meaning of summer there

“Travelling to European cities is about cultural experience,” Daniel Scott, a scholar of tourism at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, told me. “Whether it’s Paris, Barcelona, or Rome, you amble around, sightseeing, street shopping, taking a riverboat tour, going to a museum, a restaurant, a café. Most of that time, you’re outside.” Climate change increasingly turns pleasure trips into exercises in escaping pain. “When I’m in Europe, I always notice how many people crowd under trees and shaded areas,” Scott said. “But at some attractions, like the Acropolis, there’s no way to avoid the blazing sun. On especially hot days, they’ve got the Red Cross giving out water, medics pre-positioned because they know many people are going to be in trouble when they come down.”

Meanwhile, the ongoing heat and drought continue to make life difficult for the new UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, who would clearly love to prove his centrist moderation by approving some new North Sea oil drilling and gutting EV sales targets, except that people are starting to connect that up with the fact that their country has caught on fire. A bunch of green groups sent him an open letter; meanwhile, here’s the image that Greenpeace managed to make across hundreds of square meters in a scorched field

Of course, you could take the position of UK’s MAGA wing, the Reform party, whose deputy leader last week penned an oped advising overheated Britons to lie back on their recliners and enjoy it.

“When it’s a bit warm, let’s enjoy it. And if it means that English wine and sparkling wine gets better and better, fantastic. That means we can take on the French – fantastic. Let’s celebrate some of these things rather than just be sort of doom and gloom about it.”

Right. Just a reminder that there were at least ten thousand “excess deaths” from the heat in June alone across Europe.

+Speaking of “excess deaths,” China has managed to avoid 262,000 of them so far by switching to EVs. As Fred Lambert points out

The study, published May 13 in Nature Health, used high-resolution satellite air-quality data and machine learning to measure pollution across 150 Chinese cities. The researchers compared actual pollution levels to a counterfactual scenario in which every vehicle on the road still ran on an internal combustion engine.

By 2023, the spread of new energy vehicles (NEVs) — a category that includes battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and hydrogen vehicles — was linked to a 23.80% reduction in fine particulate matter (PM2.5), a drop of 8.97 micrograms per cubic meter. Carbon monoxide fell even further, down 30.67%.

The researchers estimate those air-quality improvements prevented roughly 262,000 non-accidental deaths, along with about 75,000 all-cause deaths.

The numbers matter because outdoor air pollution causes more than 4 million premature deaths worldwide each year, and roughly a quarter of those occur in China.

This is by no means confined to China. A new study shows that children in London have larger and healthier lungs thanks to regulations aimed at reducing car traffic in the city. As Damien Gayle reports

Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children’s lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere.

Meanwhile, China is exporting so many of those lung-saving EVs that they’re running out of ships to carry them on. Paul Berger writes:

Some automakers are so desperate to get vehicles to Europe, Australia and Latin America they are squeezing them inside shipping containers more commonly used to transport furniture, clothes and electronics.

The export supply is now so immense that Chinese automakers are expanding into the shipping sector, too. BYD launched its first dedicated car carrier in 2024 and now has a fleet of eight vessels.

+There’s less English-language reporting about the massive heatwaves that have plagued Asia this year, with country after country setting new records. But this, from Raphael Rashid in Seoul caught my eye

In a potato field in Yanggu county, 80 miles (130km) north-east of Seoul, Lee Sang-hyuk dug into the soil and found nothing worth saving.

A week earlier the crop, located in Gangwon province, had looked fine. Now the potatoes came up soft and collapsing, “like boiled potatoes”, spoiled by heat that had turned the ground into something closer to an oven.

“It’s not just one or two fields like this. How can I even put it into words? It’s so upsetting,” he told local broadcaster SBS.

His ruined harvest is one thread in a punishing summer across east Asia, as record heat swept through South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong in recent weeks.

On 2 August, the south-eastern city of Yangsan recorded a temperature of 42.5C, the highest registered in South Korea since modern weather observations began in 1904.

The heat has since been blamed for at least 31 deaths nationwide, according to the country’s disease control agency, while more than 900,000 livestock and 1.4 million farmed fish have died.

Authorities issued a heat warning, urging people to “immediately stop all outdoor activities”.

South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, told his cabinet the extreme weather was “unlike anything we have experienced before”.

+The first signs of the dawning El Niño are showing up in the Pacific, as David Gelles reports from Kiribati:

Already, around Christmas Island, one of this nation’s 33 atolls and islands, the ocean surface temperature is 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than usual for this time of year, compared with the previous 30 years. And as much as 10 percent of the corals appeared bleached in a series of dives over the past few days, Atwood said.

“We expect this to get worse and worse and worse until the end of this year,” she said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

+Headed back to college? The good people at Rewild Your Campus are hosting their annual online advocacy bootcamp next month so you can learn how to work with the groundskeepers to make things better. Meanwhile, from Jaimie P. Cloud, a new book for “young people and those who love them” about living well on a working planet

+Sarah Hoffmann reports from inside ALEC (the rightwing legislative lobby) that the fossil fuel industry is counting on a conservative supermarjority in the Supreme Court to protect them from liability for the climate crisis.

“If we had a different Supreme Court, this would be a very different presentation that I’m giving you,” Paul Watkins said during this year’s annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Watkins is the founding partner of Fusion Law, a firm in Arizona that has received millions of dollars from the political network of Leonard Leo, a conservative power broker and co-chairman of the Federalist Society, who is largely credited with orchestrating the Republican takeover of the Supreme Court.

During his late-July presentation to ALEC, a conservative lobbying and advocacy group with a long history of platforming climate denial, Watkins held out hope that the court would deliver a ruling favorable to the oil and gas industry when it considers a major climate lawsuit involving ExxonMobil and the Canada-headquartered company Suncor Energy in October.

“But it’s a good reminder of how close we are to really catastrophic outcomes,” said Watkins, who has played a lead role in Leo-backed campaigns to prevent companies and large financial institutions from considering climate risks in their investment decisions. Watkins, who also served as the inaugural director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Office of Innovation during the first Trump administration, added that a different Supreme Court might allow such a lawsuit to move forward.

Meanwhile, with the redoubtable Sheldon Whitehouse in the lead, 99 Senators and Congressmen filed a friend of the court brief urging the Supremes to let Boulder Colorado have its day in court in the Suncor case.

“In the Clean Air Act, Congress created a comprehensive and detailed system for reducing air pollution,” they wrote. “It did not address deceptive marketing or sales of fossil fuels at all.”

The members of Congress also noted that many of the briefs written in support of Exxon and Suncor were authored by groups or people that have received funding from fossil fuel-linked donors: “These amicus briefs present as an outpouring of support for a legal position, but publicly available information shows them to be funded by a small and powerful phalanx of self-interested entities,” the congressional members write. “These industry front groups and their funders are part of a tightly connected web of organizations dedicated to protecting fossil fuel interests in Congress, at executive agencies, and in the courts.”

+Not only is Zorhan Mamdani bicycling around the city (with a helmet!), he and his team are exploring ways to put the sweltering heat in the city’s subway system to good use with:

a new technology that could cool subway platforms and reuse excess heat to warm nearby city buildings during the winter.

The proposed thermal energy network would be tested at the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall 4/5/6 and Chambers Street J/Z station complex. Officials said it would be the first project of its kind in a U.S. transit system.

The study comes as the MTA prepares a major overhaul of the aging Chambers Street station. Officials said the location offers a chance to explore ways to address extreme heat, a growing challenge across the subway system.

According to the MTA, Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall is one of the system’s hottest stations, with average summer temperatures reaching 96 degrees Fahrenheit in 2025.

“There are few feelings worse than escaping the extreme summer heat only to find yourself on a subway platform that is even hotter,” Mayor Mamdani said. “We can make our subway platforms cooler and more comfortable while putting wasted heat to work during the winter.”

The proposed system would capture heat from subway platforms, store it underground and redirect it to nearby municipal buildings during colder months. Officials said the project could reduce energy costs while improving conditions for riders.

Last time I marked the fifth anniversary of this newsletter with a remarkably heavy burst of analysis—a ‘where do we stand’ summary that let me speak at the highest possible level about our past, present, and future. So of course I’m worn out, and perhaps you as well. We’re going to proceed less systematically this time—I’m going to show you some numbers that have arrived in the last few days, and try to make sense of each of them, with only slight regard for how exactly they fit together.

And it’s all a useful reminder that though the climate and energy crises have everything to do with psychology and sociology and economics and political science and theology and love and art and winter, they are rooted in quantifiable physical fact, which cannot be wished away and which must be faced resolutely.

So, to begin:

#76.9 degrees Fahrenheit

That was the average temperature for the lower 48 states in July, according to just-released federal stats, making it the hottest month in American history, 3.3 degrees hotter than the twentieth-century average. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Wyoming was the furthest above average for the month. Among other things, this development robs climate deniers of a cherished talking point. July 1936 had been the co-record holder. We understood why—in the words of climatologist Andrew Dessler:

During the early 20th century, aggressive plowing and the replacement of native grasses left Great Plains soils exposed. When drought conditions developed, those degraded soils dried out quickly, reducing evaporation and soil moisture and reinforcing the heat.

But try telling that to Fox News. Dessler, by the way, has had a fascinating three-part series on those century-old midwestern extremes. But now it’s mostly academic; we’re living in a hotter country than any American has ever seen. And indeed a hotter world. As Jeff Masters reports, July 2026 tied for the warmest month in the planet’s history, with July 2024

#3.6 degrees Fahrenheit

That’s how much temperatures have risen on average in Europe since the 1960s, according to the new State of the Climate 2025 report, which veteran analyst Bob Berwyn broke down this week. Just think about that for a moment, because it helps you to understand the scale of what we’ve done. When you walk outside your home, in Europe or America, it’s three degrees hotter than it would have been a just few decades ago. Think of that amount of extra heat (and remember that ninety percent more is stored away in the oceans, waiting to be released).

Writing from Berlin, Jim Tankersley and Tatiana Firsova offer a vivid account of what that feels like in every day European life.

It’s changing the way children see summer.

“Some days it’s too hot, and the heat is just so oppressive. I’m more of a winter person,” said Sophia Nachtsheim, 15, who visited Krumme Lanke on Thursday with her mother and three younger siblings.

#$65 billion

That’s the windfall profit so far for the oil industry thanks to the Iran war, according to a new analysis from the folks at Oil Change International.

The five major international oil companies (IOCs) recorded massive jumps in profits in Q2 2026 compared to the same quarter of 2025. Their total adjusted net income amounted to $51 billion for the 3 months – that’s nearly $400,000 per minute. Meanwhile, people around the world are paying around 30% more for gasoline and diesel, with some countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, seeing increases of 80% or more.

It would of course make great sense to tax these windfall profits, earned entirely on the back of dead Iranians and Americans, and everyone who’s paying $4.50 a gallon at the pump. Portugal actually is, at a 33% rate. Exxon’s Darren Woods has responded to wider EU efforts with threats

“We canceled investments that we had planned for Europe based on the last time they passed a windfall profits tax. In fact, we’re suing the EU because we don’t think that’s a legal taking for the industry.”

#4.8 percent of global energy-related carbon emissions

So far the energy debate around AI has focused on how much electricity it takes to run data centers. But the number above comes from a different heretofore uncounted part of the problem: it’s what a new study says artificial intelligence could add to the atmosphere simply by making it easier for the fossil fuel industry to find and exploit oil and gas wells. Emily Atkin has a topnotch account of the new study, which makes it clear that a data center might as well have an oil derrick sitting on top. She includes these additional numbers

Specifically, they found that Big Oil’s use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI’s data centers.

On the low end, these tools could enable additional yearly carbon emissions equal to Mexico’s, according to the research. On the high end, they could enable yearly climate pollution equal to Russia’s—the world’s fourth-largest emitting country.

Meanwhile, I mentioned this parenthetically last week, but it deserves more attention: climate researcher Zeke Hausfather took the time to calculate how much energy is used when you really use AI “agents” for carrying out tasks. And the answer is: a lot. Asking Claude a question is not so energy-intensive, but as he explained to Robinson Meyer this week

Increasingly AI is being used in an agentic form. And that more means that you give AI a set of instructions or a goal to achieve. And then AI goes off and does many, many, many, things to try to achieve that goal. AI agents are, at least in the corporate world and the software engineering and scientific world, the vast majority of AI use today. And those agents make both much more complicated calls than the prompts would suggest and many, many more calls. And so when you look at the actual energy use of these AI agents, it’s something on the order of 600 times larger per prompt than the traditional, like, type something in a chat box and got to get an immediate response. And so that does end up adding up. I actually looked at two months of my own AI use because I had local logs of all of the numbers there…I found that on average I was using about three kilowatt hours a day for my agentic energy use which is the equivalent of running two refrigerators.

#70%

That’s been the average growth in U.S. battery installations over the last three years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and it’s continuing to accelerate. Here’s the chart

Notice that it’s continuing to rise this year. And as long as we’re doing charts, here it is broken down by state, with batteries in lavender. You’ll note that only four or five states are really participating in the battery revolution so far, which leaves enormous room for rapid growth elsewhere. Batteries are the transformative technology for the second half of this decade, as sun and wind were for the first half). Note also the incredible damage the Trump administration has done to the wind industry.

#44%

That’s how much you’d save in carbon emissions by retiring your internal combustion car and replacing it with an EV—even if it was only two years old, and taking into account the amount of energy used to build both vehicles. A new study in Science from G. Elliott Campbell attempts to answer a question that’s puzzled many good-faith people: does it really make sense to get rid of my ICE car if I’m worried about the climate. It does, beginning the day you drive it off the lot. It’s somewhat more complicated if you sell your used gas-guzzler to someone else, but as Science editor Jesse Smith notes

The energy impact benefits from swapping an EV for an ICEV begin to accrue as early as the first day of the life of the ICEV, and that replacement early in the life cycle consistently provides reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Financial considerations will also affect when people choose to make the replacement, of course, but from the perspective of emissions, it is almost never too soon to switch.

As Campbell explained to Tik Root

“We’re trying to show that there’s not an environmental motivation for extending the lifetime of a gas vehicle,” he said. “Electric vehicles are a very clear winner.”

This isn’t true of everything you own, by the way. It basically depends on whether the carbon emissions of the thing mostly come from building it, or from powering it. Hence this chart that Professor Campbell sent me. Hold on to your cell phone another year!

#20 percent

That’s how much of French nuclear capacity is offline due to low river levels with the summer’s heat and fierce drought. (Oh, and a jellyfish invasion at a coastal plant, itself caused by warming seas). As Le Monde reports,

According to Agence France-Presse (AFP) calculations based on data published by energy group EDF since 2015, 20.4% of generating capacity was unavailable. Between 9:45 am and 10:00 am, EDF's nuclear fleet recorded a new peak in outages due to "environmental constraints" or "external environmental causes," both in terms of the number of reactors shut down or operating at reduced output and in terms of lost generating capacity.

The point is not to say ‘shut down nuclear power plants.’ It’s merely to point out that charge long leveled at sun and wind—that they provide “intermittent power”—is probably truer now of other energy sources (including the natural gas that can get shut down if, say, a war breaks out in the Strait of Hormuz). See the numbers on batteries above—I think it’s pretty clear that once you connect them to a solar or a wind farm you’ve got some of the world’s firmest power. By the way, that’s how BMW has kept its Hungarian plant churning out EVs even as the country’s lone nuke shut down, causing a cascading energy shortage across the country.

#22%

That’s how much domestic airline emissions have fallen in Austria over the last three years, since the government banned short haul flights to domestic destinations that were served by trains; something similar happened in France, which passed a more limited version of the same law. As Logan Varsano writes,

These initial successes in Austria and France are promising.

They also prompt a number of follow-on questions: What might be the climate benefit if such policies were more broadly adopted across Europe? What if they were implemented beyond Europe’s borders? What if they were applied to short-haul international flights, and not merely domestic routes?

Research published in 2021 found that, in Finland, replacing all short-haul flights with non-high-speed rail could cut emissions by 95%. One year later in 2022, different researchers took a broader look at commercial passenger flights across 31 countries. A 2023 study took a closer look at Spain's two busiest domestic corridors: Madrid-Barcelona and Madrid-Valencia. In 2024, data from IATA focused a lens back on France. And more recently, a September 2025 study on commercial intra-European aviation concluded that substituting short-haul flights with rail alternatives could reduce a trip's emissions by up to 97%, depending on the length of the trip.

I’d just add: city center to city center trains are infinitely nicer than dealing with airports, at least for me. Until we get the blimps up and running, more rail please!

#5.5 degrees Celsius vs 2 degrees Celsius.

This last one is a little complicated, but it underscores the most important point I keep trying to make in this newsletter: we must act fast!

It comes from a new study about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Currents, or AMOC, the most important heat distribution on planet earth, and one we’re threatening to wreck by raising temperatures. What the study—out today in Nature—calculates is the risk of raising the temperature fast, which is what we’re doing now. On a “slow ramp,” this computer model shows that the currents stay stable until temperatures are raised 5.5 degrees Celsius—which is a lot of breathing room. But if you ramp up the temperature quickly, going past 2 degrees Celsius can shut them down. Rosa van den Dool interviewed one of the study’s authors:

The explanation lies in how the ocean is able to adjust to change. “Under slow warming, the entire ocean, from the surface down to its deepest layers, has time to gradually reorganize and adapt to the changing conditions,” says co-author Henk Dijkstra, professor of dynamical oceanography. “Under faster warming, the ocean simply can’t keep up.”

According to the researchers, the critical warming rate lies around 0.3°C per decade, a pace the world is already approaching. Van Westen compares it to driving a car: “If you’re driving toward a wall, it makes sense to steer around it. To do that, you need to brake, otherwise you fly off the road. When it comes to global warming, the world is still pressing extra hard on the accelerator right now.”

Math can’t tell us everything we need to know about the climate crisis. At some level, the crucial calculation is about the size of the human heart, and whether we’re ready to really press for the change that’s required. But math illuminates the parameters that humans must live within, and it shines a light on our possibilities. Above all it explains why these are the crucial years: temperatures and solutions are rising at the exact same moment. Our job is to see if we can nudge the odds in this race.

And we can, so we must. Thank you for being part of the fight!

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In other energy and climate news:

+An increasing line of attack on solar arrays is that they are taking up “prime farmland.” I have no idea why this attack isn’t mounted on, say, ethanol farms, which cover vastly more acreage and produce vastly less energy, but in any event a new New York State analysis has undercut the whole premise. It finds that when farmers have a reliable income from solar arrays, they often expand their agricultural operations. As Kathryn Krawczyk writes,

After the Trump administration accused the state of fast-tracking solar farms on prime farmland, New York leaders fired back last week, saying that renewables ​“empower our farmers to keep their land in use and in their family, while avoiding the threat of permanent conversion or abandonment.” That’s because farmers can lease a plot to solar developers and return it to agricultural use at the end of the array’s life, as the state officials explained in their 11-page letter.

“A recent study by Cornell found that the overwhelming majority of farmers who received solar lease payments used that income to continue or even expand farming on their land, not to exit farming or scale back operations,” the leaders wrote. ​“Discouraging or inhibiting property owners’ ability to independently make choices about what they can and cannot do with their land can cause financial harm and undermine fundamental property rights.”

Meanwhile the New York State League of Conservation Voters and the Laborers Union have teamed up to urge Albany to keep expanding the state’s solar program.

As the country celebrated its 250th anniversary, solar was our savior. We were close to not having enough energy to support our need to keep cool as the temperatures soared over 100 degrees. But solar reduced our peak demand by nearly 8% — and saved ratepayers from paying an additional $200 million for electricity, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency.

As our summers get hotter, we find ourselves asking the same daunting question every year: Can New York’s energy grid hold up during a heat wave?

Solar energy has been stepping up when New Yorkers needed it most, helping keep the grid reliable while responding to near-record demand.

Data from the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state power grid, shows that rooftop and community solar projects cut statewide peak electricity demand by more than four gigawatts. Solar supplied 15% of statewide electricity demand during peak hours on the hottest day of the heat wave, according to data from Grid Status. This is what a cleaner, more resilient grid looks like: air conditioners running full blast, powered by solar generation across New York.

And one more piece of good news from upstate New York: ClientEarth has gone to court to force a big company—Thermo-Fisher—to offer fossil-free retirement funds, on the interesting grounds that forcing people to invest in oil and gas can violate their religious beliefs.

For Dr. Andrew Hartley, his retirement plan has been quietly working against his beliefs. Dr. Hartley is a statistical science director whose faith directs him to steward and protect the planet and shapes how he lives: he cycles almost everywhere, banks with an institution that doesn't fund fossil fuels, and helps lead two environmental religious organizations. So, when he asked his employer — Thermo Fisher Scientific, a $180 billion life sciences company publicly committed to a "healthier, cleaner, safer" world — for a single fossil-free fund option in his retirement plan, he expected to be heard. Instead, the company chose to ignore him for over a year.

The legal foundation for this case comes from an unlikely place. In 2023, the Supreme Court strengthened workers’ right to religious accommodation. In Groff v. DeJoy, the court ruled that employers cannot deny religious accommodations just because they create minor inconvenience or trivial cost. Employers must show a genuine, substantial burden on the business.

This matters here because Dr. Hartley’s request was not unduly burdensome on the large company that employed him: he merely wanted one additional fossil-free fund — a common, widely available option that would allow him to save for retirement without violating his faith. Thermo Fisher has offered no explanation for why that would be a substantial burden on its business.

+I’ve described the upcoming People of the Sun gathering at the Standing Rock reservation. You can get tickets here, and note the opportunity to underwrite attendance by Native Americans elsewhere in the country who may not be able to afford the trip on their own.

+Interesting news from radio-collared pronghorn antelope near a big solar farm in New Mexico: leaving some gaps between various parts of the solar field seemed to give the animals enough room to keep traveling where they needed to go. Daniel Garcia:

Nearly all of the collared females that lived close to San Juan Solar did not stay away from the facility completely.

They did not find any distinct boundaries where pronghorns abruptly halted their use of the nearby habitat. The animals continued to move towards the fences and ran with the working arrays

So we’re more or less at the halfway point of this project, and I thought it might be a useful time to sum up how I’m thinking about our predicament. But instead of just writing a short essay, I figured I might do it by also giving you some sense of how data transmutes into argument and hopefully insight in my mind in any given week.

The most important bottom line, of course, is the temperature; that it’s rising, ever faster, is the basic text of our moment on earth, and I do my best to keep track of the underlying science and its unfolding implications. The chart below shows the latest data, from Zeke Hausfather, one of the most understandable climate researchers at work anywhere (though, loyal to my roots, I thin Jim Hansen continues to hold the crown.) What the chart shows is how sharply the mercury has climbed in the last few years, and how much more it’s going to jump in the next 18 months, based on consensus forecasts from a variety of models. 2024 is the current record holder; we may well break that record this year, and we certainly will in 2027. (Hausfather, by the way, has an excellent newsletter, where this week he finds that employing “agentic AI” instead of just asking ChatGPT idle questions uses about six hundred times more electricity. This is new and important information).

How do we know what 2027 will bring? Here’s another graph this week, of sea surface temperatures from the key region of the Pacific where El Niño is now taking shape. As you can see, we’re racing ahead of the pace even of other warming years. It doesn’t take much imagination to see why everyone is now clear we’re staring at an historic year, with a truly massive release of heat from the oceans into the air.

It’s painful for me to look at charts like this, every time. I’m constantly reminded that I knew this was coming, and that I failed in my efforts—journalistic and activist—to prevent this rise in temperature.

Though I’d like to shut my eyes, I try to force myself to be absolutely aware of its consequences, large and small—check out this report, for instance, that he record drought in France has dried up 43 percent of the nation’s streams, an ecological catastrophe. And check out this new assessment from the UN that the El Niño is likely to push 50 million more of our brothers and sisters into “acute hunger.” I know just enough ecological science, and just enough political science, to be able to intuit how bad this unraveling is: we learned this week, for instance, that the globe is setting new records for forest loss thanks to wildfire. As Hirokio Tabuchi and Harry Stevens reported:

Loss of pristine rainforests alone reached 6.7 million hectares in 2024, nearly twice as much as in 2023, researchers at the University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute said in an annual update of the state of the world’s forests.

The world lost the equivalent of 18 soccer fields of forested land every minute, the researchers estimated.

What that means is that the warming is feeding on itself, producing conditions for fires that in turn pour more carbon into the air. That same warming means the air holds more water vapor, and hence we simultaneously get more deluge and flood, and that too carries an unbearable price. As Jonathan Watts and Natasha May reported last week, for instance,

As wildfires rage across Europe and North America, the unprecedented rains continue elsewhere. While South Korea swings between heatwave and downpour, in Japan and Vietnam torrential rain has led to landslides. China, meanwhile, has seen bouts of extreme rainfall since the flood season began in April, according to the water resources ministry in mid-July, marking the start of a month-long peak flood control window. More than 600 rivers have since risen above warning levels – a 35% jump from the average for the same period over the past five years…

The extreme weather across the region can clearly be linked to climate change. Climate scientists have long predicted that large areas of Asia will disproportionately suffer from more intense heat, humidity and drought as a result of climate disruption caused by the burning of gas, oil and coal.

The hardest part, by far, of producing this newsletter is dealing with the sadness that such stories inevitably produce, and I worry sometimes that I’ve grown emotional callouses to make it possible to keep providing a record. But I’ve always been haunted by the idea that humans would step over this precipice without really understanding they were doing it; bearing witness seems a necessary minimum. You have to stare at the world, however much I’d sometimes prefer not to, and you have to look unflinchingly. As my dear friend and colleague Rebecca Solnit wrote this week:

Once, across much of the the world’s temperate zones, we looked forward to summer as a time of delights, from summer’s bounty of fruits, long days, warmth, school holidays, activities like camping and swimming, travel and adventure. Now many of us dread it.

The degree to which that dread is reaching the most normie of observers is probably a useful thing. Here’s a report from Ceylan Yeğinsu, who usually covers the cruise industry, about her heat-and-smoke plagued “vacation” in the midwest:

When we reached my mother-in-law’s cottage on Lake Michigan, a murky haze blocked the view. We hurried the children inside. Instead of the beach day I’d promised my daughter, air quality forecasts warned of “hazardous” conditions, forcing us to stay indoors.

It’s not just the midwest, of course—yesterday Portland Oregon had the worst air in the world, beating out Kinshasa. I mean, they’ve been taking rainfall records at Kew Gardens in London since 1871 and July was the first month without.any.rain.at.all.

And so—first bottom line from these five years—we can and must say that that global warming is proceeding even faster than feared, having accelerated across this period and moved to a level where it is causing daily disruption across the planet. This is the most basic news that the world needs to know, the most important thing happening on our earth. The degree to which we are now dancing along the precipice can’t be overstated—here, for instance, is Adam McKay’s perfectly fair account of just how close to civilizational bankruptcy we’ve come, driven by the lie that “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.”

But the rise in temperature is not the only thing happening on earth. In the years I’ve been writing The Crucial Years I also published two books, and the most recent—Here Comes the Sun, out in paperback next week—was very much the result of this newsletter. It allowed me to see, a little earlier than most, that we’d quite suddenly hit the steep part of the S curve for renewable energy, and that solar, wind, and batteries had almost magically transformed themselves from “alternative energy” into the obvious way forward.

That very much continues. Indeed, last week we passed—almost unremarked—a serious milestone in human affairs. As a team from Bloomberg reported

After crossing the 100-gigawatt mark in 2012, it took the world 10 years to deploy 1 terawatt of solar power. An additional 1 terawatt, enough to meet all of US power demand at its peak, took less than three years to build. Not even two years later in 2026 — the precise timing is subject to debate among analysts — the 3-terawatt threshold was reached.

This achievement comes from many places (China above all), and I can’t stress enough how quickly it has arrived. In 2012 California generated about one percent of its electricity from solar power. Last week we learned from the think tank Ember that in May it became the first large economy to generate more than half its power directly from the sun for an entire month. As Nicolas Fulghum wrote, “battery storage is the big difference maker, enabling California to push the share of solar generation to this level.” And the bottom line, as the Utility Dive newsletter pointed out a few weeks ago, is remarkable: From January through May, solar generation in CAISO increased 21% compared with the same period in 2024, while natural gas generation decreased 60%, EIA found.

This is among the most significant statistics the climate fight has yet produced. In the fourth largest economy on earth, an extensive buildout of renewable energy has immediately and radically undercut the use of fossil fuels. No other intervention in the last forty years has come even remotely close to this scale of decarbonization.

And that good news comes, as environmentalist and politician Tom Steyer observed this week, despite recent efforts by the California government to slow down progress, as Gavin Newsom and others play footsie with the fossil fuel industry.

After decades of undisputed climate leadership, California regulators and politicians are bending the knee to Big Oil — buying the manufactured panic of petro-criminals and selling our future as collateral. The clean energy revolution was born in California — and if Big Oil has its way, it’ll die in California, too.

The point is, even California could be doing more. We’re completely capable of upping the pace everywhere on earth: China’s factories in a decade could produce enough solar panels to power the whole world. Suddenly, beautifully, there’s huge possibility, and it’s our job to spread the news.

Spreading the news is the chief point of this newsletter. (If you know someone who likes listening rather than reading, here’s my recently released TED talk, which makes the case as best I can, though with some unfortunate jabbing by my left hand, which apparently is not connected very closely to my brain.) Anyway, it all adds up to the fact that:

The next bottom line is, a truly rapid World War II scale conversion to renewable energy is utterly essential.

That conversion will not stop global warming—it’s much too late for that. But it will allow us to do two things: shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets, on a planet where every tenth of a degree moves a hundred million people into the danger zone, and also rebuild our civilization on more localized lines instead of the current model with its ruinous (and murderous) reliance on a few concentrated deposits of fossil fuel. It is the most important single task humans have ever faced, and it will succeed or fail depending on how fast we do it—we do not have any spare decades left at hand. Every month we slide deeper into the inferno, something this El Niño will be demonstrating in real time.

And so the question that really underlies this newsletter, and my work in general, is: how do we speed up this transition even a little?

Part of the answer, of course, is individual action—and here let me say thanks to all who are a part of this community, because readers of The Crucial Years played a serious role first in getting a quarter-billion dollars for heat pumps in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, and second in pushing ten state legislatures this spring to allow balcony solar. But we know that individual decisions in our homes need to be backed with strong policy if they’re going to move at anything like the speed we need.

That’s not impossible: over the years of this newsletter, we’ve chronicled the rise and passage of the Green New Deal Build Back Better Inflation Reduction Act, and then of course its demise in the early months of the Trump administration. But as the irreplaceable analyst and activist Leah Stokes reminds us in an important essay this week, key parts of the IRA remain intact, and continue to underwrite factory expansions across the country; that’s one reason that, despite all the efforts of the White House, solar and wind projects continue to come on line in this country. (Trump got two more blows in yesterday, putting huge tariffs on the key components of solar panels, and sending off another billion dollars of taxpayer money to buy back another set of coastal wind rights from another foreign company).

Given the indefatigable opposition in the White House, good policy is hard to come by in this country right now. But with the prospect of a Democratic Congress improving (please, everyone, do what you can heading to November; GrayPac is a good place to start if you’re looking) there’s some movement towards “permitting reform,” to make it easier to build everything from transmission lines (needed) to gas pipelines (disastrous). For a while now there’s been a fragile consensus among energy nerds that such reform is on balance a good idea—with renewables cheap, it would spur their progress, which is why you see stalwart climate warriors like Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse working on them. But a new analysis put out earlier this week by the extremely well-sourced researcher Jeremy Symons calls that into doubt.

As a result of the 2024 elections and the surge in AI-driven demand for new gas-fired electric power, the script has flipped and natural gas is now poised to be the biggest winner of permitting reform…

Among all the provisions being considered for permitting reform, the most consequential would benefit gas by giving the president unconstrained powers to categorically exclude major power projects and pipelines from NEPA without court review. Not coincidentally, the gas lobby is a leading proponent of getting permitting reform across the finish line in 2026.

Remember, I’m trying to give you a peek inside my mind as I write this installment, so I’ll say I highlighted Symons’ analysis in part because I knew Senator Whitehouse and his staff read this newsletter some of the time. Trying to communicate to “elites” is important; they have huge power, and they need all the facts to figure out how best to structure legislation.

But trying to build big public movements is even more important, because ultimately that’s what sets the ground on which politicians must operate. If they feel the pressure of public opinion they will move, and if they don’t they won’t. One big story of the past five years has been the dwindling of the public climate movement, for any number of reasons: success (the IRA) reduces pressure, and so does the unavoidable distraction that comes with, say, global pandemic, the resurgence of fascism, and globe-spanning war.

We need to spin up that activism again. I helped launch Third Act right about the same time I kicked off this newsletter; it’s done immensely successful work even against the political tide, and I couldn’t be prouder of its staff and leaders across the country. And readers of The Crucial Years have been a part of that: for instance, you helped make Sun Day a success in America last September, which in turn set in motion the lobbying that led to those plug-in solar victories this spring.

There’s not going to be a Sun Day in 2026; we don’t dare distract from the organizing to win the midterms. But there will be—and this might as well serve as a kind of announcement—a big powerful global version coming in June 2027, right around the summer solstice. It should be happening at the moment that El Niño will be delivering the highest temperatures that any member of our species has yet seen, and as the lines are being drawn for the 2028 election, and as we set huge new records in the rest of the world for solar deployment. It will be a chance to change the politics so that far more rapid progress is possible.

The other side never wavers in the fight. Emily Atkin (proud pioneer of the climate newsletter space!) has an important new entry this week on the rise of the anti-solar online influencer; it’s a dismaying but important read. So we need to make sure that our side is more creative, more connected, and more real.

This newsletter will resume its normal operation in a few days time. But for now, let me just say what a fierce joy it is to be fighting this fight alongside you. There are days when I’m despairing and there are nights when I can’t sleep, but there’s never a moment when I’m tempted to walk away. I’m glad to be here with you.

The climate fight moves in stages. A decade ago, we got to the pledge stage. First, governments signed the Paris accords, and then, under pressure from Greta Thunberg’s movement, banks and corporations did the same. Leaders don’t mind making pledges; the hard part is always a few years away, and the pledge itself takes off some of the pressure.

Then other stuff intervened: covid, the invasion of Ukraine, AI, the high prices that those things caused, the fascists that were elected on the back of those high prices. So politicians and corporations began to abandon their climate pledges, in favor of other priorities.

But what do you know, now something else is happening: a global outbreak of extremely high temperatures, and with them all the disasters we’ve come to expect. The question is, will that provide pressure enough to get climate action back on course? We’re going to find out over the next year, and I think we’re going to find out first on the other side of the Atlantic

This spring and summer have been horrific in Europe and the UK. A wavering jet stream—the product of a melting Arctic—has brought heat dome after heat dome to the continent, producing bouts of extraordinarily high temperature. Records have been smashed left and right, and now that heat is producing vast fires, centered in Spain and France, but spreading far afield to the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere.

I want to start the account by saying: these are not the worst heatwaves underway in the world. It’s hit 127 in Iran, even as the bombs are falling; India has seen another brutal spring and summer, and as Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan write from Andhra Pradesh, the toll on very poor people is unbearable. They describe Mahalaxmi, paid by a government scheme to join with other women in digging a new reservoir by hand

By 11am, the first shift of their day was over. The women headed home, exchanging few words due to their exhaustion. Mahalaxmi did not speak when she got home, but went straight to the bedroom where she collapsed in apparent sleep.

Unable to rouse her hours later, her husband, Palli Shyam Sundha Rao, rushed to find a doctor. Examining her lifeless body, the doctor concluded Mahalaxmi had died from heatstroke.

“It was such a shock to all of us,” said Purilla. “She always seemed so strong. If the heat can take her like this, then it could take any of us.”

So let that serve as a baseline. Scary as what’s happening in Europe and the U.S. is, we retain some wealth to buffer our lives and our communities. That’s not true elsewhere. Still, it’s been wildly hard in Europe. As Mark Landler and Chico Harlan reported on Thursday,

Ravenous fires. Searing heat waves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval — ruinous wars, deadly pandemics — it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.

It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

And there is absolutely no doubt how connected all this is to global warming—that is, to our longstanding habit of burning coal and gas and oil. Raymond Zhong, writing in the Times, new research makes that clear

For central Spain, the scientists found that the intense heat and dryness in July had roughly a 17 percent probability of occurring in a given year in the present-day climate. In the preindustrial world, however, the likelihood of such conditions would have been one-twentieth as high, the researchers estimated.

In fact, we can say with increasing specificity what happened, and it’s very similar to things we’ve seen elsewhere, and that I described a few weeks ago in an interview with UC climate scientist Daniel Swain. What we’re seeing is what he calls “weather whiplash,” when the extreme rains that climate change produces cause a massive growth of vegetation in the spring, only to see these new high temperatures produce “flash droughts” that turn those green grasses and shrubs into tinder, waiting for lightning to strike. The folks at Yale Environment 360 quoted

Francesca Di Giuseppe, fire forecast coordinator at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, who said the “rebound” from a wet winter to a dry summer was a key factor. After an exceptionally rainy winter spurred the growth of vegetation, an unusual summer drought turned that new growth to tinder.

The results have been brutal. I won’t bother cataloguing deaths and dollars—if we’re “lucky,” the former will be measured in the many tens of thousands, and the latter in the hundreds of billions—but I do want to give some small sense of what life is like. Madeline Schwartz, editor of the international journal the Dial, writes from Paris that

This summer has unleashed a special kind of hell on France: not just several heat waves with temperatures reaching as high as 112 degrees Fahrenheit, but drought and forest fires, some right next to Paris. On my street, the leaves have already turned brown; a once lush lawn now looks like burned straw. Across the country, farmers are reporting that crops have withered in the blistering conditions.

The British paper The Express reports that signs in grocery stores warn produce buyers about high prices and unavailable items

“Produce such as carrots, onions, and potatoes will likely be hit the hardest due to dry soil shrinking crop sizes, while leeks, cabbage and cauliflower could also become harder to find.”

Salad crops such as lettuce may also face a price hike, as they could be replaced by pricier imports due to the heavy irrigation required.

Cupboard essentials such as bread, pasta, and cereal could be affected too, as wheat and barley crops come under heat stress.

Pippa Neill describes the stress on farmers

“The vines are dying. The grass is yellow and now we can smell the smoke,” Uyen Do, an organic farmer in the Dordogne region of France says, almost in tears. “It’s already very difficult to survive economically and now with climate change it’s becoming a struggle that I’m not sure we’re capable of going through.”

But British farmer Brian King says drought is just one part of the problem. During the recent heatwaves, which saw several days where temperatures exceeded 30C, “the environment was so hostile that the plants are so stressed they want to die because they just can’t take it”.

Drought has pushed the Rhine River to its lowest recorded levels, stranding the barges that normally carry coal and gas. As Eamon Farhat reports,

The cost to ship diesel from Rotterdam to Karlsruhe — further inland from the closely watched Kaub chokepoint — has climbed to the highest since Bloomberg began compiling the data in 2009.

“With every centimeter it’s getting more difficult,” said Florian Krekel at Germany’s WSV, which manages the country’s waterways. “There’s no rain in sight.”

As river levels fall, Hungary and France are having to shut some nuclear power plants because they can no longer safely cool them; oh, and a sunken Nazi warship has reappeared along the dwindling Danube in Serbia, so that’s nice. The Royal Horticultural Society, meanwhile, may have to move its hydrangea garden to the north of England

But it’s the fires that have really left their mark on this European summer. As Margherita Stancati, Noemie Bisserbe, and Ed Ballard wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week, the continent has never seen anything on this scale before:

In Spain, the fires have destroyed more than 370,000 acres so far this year. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the leader of Madrid’s local government, earlier this week described the Madrid wildfires as perhaps “the worst natural catastrophe in Spain’s history.”

The intensity of the fires has created large, fire-fueled thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, for the first time in France’s recent history. The clouds, which have been observed during wildfires in Canada and Australia, are created by intense heat that lifts hot smoky air and causes the water vapor to condense into ash. The clouds can generate lightning, further spreading the fires.

The U.S. is so vast that sometimes we barely notice things happening in the other corner: there are big wildfires burning in Oregon right now, for instance, (and the chance for many more over the course of a windy weekend). But we forget how compact European countries are. France is among the largest of its nations, but the Tour de France had to be shortened on its final day in order to free up policemen to go help with firefighting in other regions of the country. So there’s no escaping the smoke, or its political meaning. And that’s what we need to talk about.

All this comes after a period of what American politicians have called “climate-hushing,” when even non-MAGA leaders have been backing away from the steps needed to speed up the energy transition. That’s been true in other places too. Bill McGuire, a climate researcher at University College London, wrote that

Such is the astonishing scale of the wildfires burning at the gates of Bordeaux and Madrid, that if they had happened 20 – even 10 – years back, they may well have shocked the world into taking action on the climate crisis. But like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water, we have become inured; not only to the ever more devastating impacts of climate breakdown, but increasingly to the actions needed to bring global heating to heel.

Even as more than 35,000 wildfires rage across the surface of our world, and as we continue to rewind our planet’s climate so it resembles hotter episodes from its distant past, governments and trading blocs are very deliberately turning away from climate action.

The latest evidence that we are not only doing too little but actually doing less as time goes by is provided by the climate action media platform, We Don’t Have Time. It reported last week that the 12 months to July this year saw the reversal across the world of 45 climate policies. The retreat on climate action is global, but Europe – previously seen as a leader in emissions reductions – is in the vanguard, weakening measures across the board, including in the areas of carbon pricing, methane emissions and the phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles.

There are even some who are seizing on the new disasters to urge…less action. In a truly remarkable essay for Britain’s conservative Telegraph, pundit Allister Heath used the fires to say that the “war against global warming has been lost” and hence it was time to

“accept this sobering reality, cut our losses, cease tilting at (and building) windmills, ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with, and even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate.”

This is monumentally stupid on several different levels, and Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian now proprietor the the British magazine the Prospect outlines a number of them in a (highly enjoyable) takedown. But mainly: why would you recommend a Mediterranean climate at the precise moment that the countries that ring the Med are on fire? And of course it’s not as if you get to choose even the current, fiery Mediterranean climate. If you abandon “net zero,” or the other attempts to rapidly build out solar panels and windmills, you’ll get an ever hotter version.

That hasn’t stopped Britain’s Conservatives from purging party members who want to continue the energy transition, and there are at least some signs that England’s new prime minister, Labour’s Andy Burnham, is tilting in somewhat the same direction. The Murdoch tabloids have been mounting a crusade to open up new oil wells in the North Sea, and Burnham said this week that the country needed to be “pragmatic” in the face of rising energy costs, never mind that the global price of energy won’t budge one pence with whatever new supply can be found in the dwindling deposits off the UK coast.

But my guess is that Burnham may well decide to stand up to Murdoch et al and turn his back on more drilling, simply because the heat and the smoke have made the case for climate action so wildly clear. As Fiona Harvey and a team at the Guardian reported yesterday, a rebellion is brewing because many Labour parliamentarians

are increasingly worried about how support for expanded drilling will play with an electorate alarmed by the worst drought since 1976, soaring temperatures, wildfires, and climate-related food inflation and potential supply shortages.

They worry about losing more voters to the Greens: Zack Polanski’s party has stressed its opposition to further new licences for the North Sea, including the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea and the Rosebank oilfield, west of Shetland. A decision to go ahead with the projects could trigger a new surge in defectors from Labour.

Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, urged ministers to “keep carbon in the ground”, and watch the recent national emergency climate briefing. She added: “We’re seeing ice caps melting, seas warming up, hotter and hotter summers. This summer has been a warning that we have to go towards a sustainable future fast.”

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, said there was “no legitimate reason” to press ahead with Jackdaw because it would make only a negligible difference to energy prices while sending the wrong signal internationally as Europe experienced record heat.

Lewis said approving the field would show Burnham was “not looking at the evidence” and that Labour risked adding “the stain of the climate crisis” to the party’s record, alongside Gaza.

Indeed, Britain’s brand new foreign minister Ed Miliband, who had been its energy and climate minister until last week, has already issued a joint communique with his Spanish counterpart calling for deeper climate action

At a time when Europe is facing record heatwaves and terrible wildfires as a consequence of the climate crisis, the two Ministers agreed that this summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.

Both parties agreed that tackling the climate crisis was an urgent policy priority for all countries- to tackle the cost of living, protect health and wellbeing, and to ensure European economic and energy security. The two Ministers noted that climate action was essential to protect not just current generations, but our children and grandchildren too.

The two Ministers underscored the priority they attach to combating climate change within their foreign policy and agreed on the need to co-lead the green transition, convinced that decarbonisation, energy security, environmental protection and resilience are inseparable from our security and the prosperity and competitiveness of our economies.

I think that this is a good sign—and I think it’s a dry run for what the whole world is going to go through over the next twelve months. The signs keep mounting that the El Nino building in the Pacific is going to be massive in scale. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said yesterday,

“This is only a warm-up act. El Nino is strengthening, adding fuel to a planet already on fire.”

As the consequences build, the pressure on decent politicians to act will grow. Obviously the Trump administration, and its fascist friends elsewhere, will continue to coddle the fossil fuel industry—but it will be harder and harder for others to turn aside renewed climate fears. I’d be willing to bet that climate will be a key issue in the Democratic primaries (and campaigning for those will be well underway by this time next year).

In fact, there’s already an effort underway—the veteran campaigner Margie Alt is helping lead a Climate Action Campaign this summer to get the issue back on the political…front burner.

Actions began on Thursday and will take a variety of forms. In Michigan, participants will demonstrate against the Republican representative Bill Huizenga who voted for Trump’s so-called big beautiful bill, which boosted planet-heating fossil fuels.

In Arizona, young activists will meet with the Democratic representative Adelita Shirley Grijalva, a climate champion, and encourage her to continue talking about global warming. In other districts, organizers have circulated petitions calling on the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, to prioritize climate issues or plan to call on their representatives to connect the climate crisis to recent heatwaves.

I have no doubt it will annoy some Democrats—and no one is saying the issue should dominate the midterms, which must be fought on the value of democracy and the cost of living. But every politician worth her salt should at every opportunity at least mention the anti-renewables jihad that the Trump administration has launched—the number of Americans who support shutting down 90% finished windfarms is tiny, and the rest of us are truly annoyed.

And in many ways this generation of politicians is the luckiest yet, because they have a tool to call on that make those pledges relatively easy to fulfill. With ever-cheaper power from the sun, wind, and batteries, this ultimate cycle of the climate fight will look different than the ones before. We’re going to get a last chance to get this crisis at least a little right. We dare not lose it.

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In other climate and energy news:

+If you ever thought to yourself, “I’d like to have the author reading this newsletter out loud and randomly jabbing his left fist to accentuate every single word,” you’ll be glad to know that my TED talk from the spring is out in the wild. Many thanks to the fine crew who put it together

+Fun to see the mainstream media catching up on balcony solar, now that we’ve got ten states legalizing it. Ivan Penn and Claire Brown in the Times report

“Politicians all over the country are wringing their hands, wanting to do something about energy affordability,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, a senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization focused on health and safety. “Here is an immediate answer.”

+Blueberries grown under solar panels in Massachusetts are sweeter, new research finds. As Kelly Lippke writes:

Harvest testing showed that berries grown under the panels developed larger, juicier fruit with a noticeably sweeter taste, reported Open Energy Information. Filtered shade reduced heat stress on the plants, slowing the ripening process just enough for natural sugars to fully build.

Protecting the crop from extreme heat also preserved internal moisture, producing firmer berries with higher natural sugar levels and lower acidity than sun-scorched crops.

By softening extreme heat and reducing water loss, the overhead system turned harsh weather into ideal growing conditions, proving that solar arrays and commercial farming can actively complement each other.

+In Minnesota, an old coal-fired power plant is now the core of a big solar farm. As Luis Reyes reports

In Becker, Minnesota, the most valuable thing at the state’s biggest coal plant turned out to be none of that hardware. It was the plug.

On July 21, Xcel Energy announced it had completed the third phase of Sherco Solar, pushing the site to 710 megawatts generated by 1.7 million panels. That makes it the largest solar facility in Minnesota and one of the biggest in the Upper Midwest, by the utility’s own careful scoping.

The capacity number is respectable. The interesting part is where those panels connect. Sherco Solar feeds the grid through the transmission infrastructure and interconnection rights of the Sherburne County Generating Station, the coal giant next door that has been pushing power into the same wires since 1976. Borrowing that connection let 710 megawatts of solar walk past the single worst line in American energy.

+The war in Iran is proving extremely profitable for big oil, as Collin Eaton chronicles:

At ExxonMobil XOM -0.97%decrease; down pointing triangle, profits more than doubled from a year earlier to their highest level since 2022, while Chevron CVX 2.35%increase; up pointing triangle reported its highest quarterly earnings on record.

Exxon said high oil-and-gas production and its nearly two dozen refineries from Texas to Singapore pushed earnings to $14.5 billion. The total was its highest since the peak of an energy crisis kicked off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

As the story makes clear, the fossil fuel industry needs chaos to prosper now—but chaos also leads everyone to start looking for other answers. Indeed, as Matthew Zeitlin makes clear, the big profits are coming because Exxon, unlike Putin, has working refineries; but as he also points out, overall oil consumption has fallen pretty fast.

This can help explain why, despite the strong profits, investors do not seem particularly jazzed about the oil giants — ExxonMobil and Chevron shares are only up slightly since the beginning of the war in Iran.

+A new book from the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, starts laying out a post-Trump climate policy path. Building Up in 2029 is extremely useful, with some younger contributors describing what will be necessary to make their lives work. Interestingly, it aims to adapt one aspect of Trump-style governance: a federal equity stake in key companies (though without the corruption):

One of the red lines in US policymaking over the last several decades has been the appearance or reality of policy being firm-specific. The role of government, in this line of thinking, is to set basic rules of the road that all firms have to follow, and let the market determine which firms succeed or fail. This approach has much to recommend it: Government may not have as high-quality information as the private sector has via price signals (so it could bet on the wrong firm), and there is a risk of corruption if policymakers exploit firm-specific policy to boost their own private wealth.

And yet, in a world of monopolies, oligopolies, and imperfect market competition, price signals may not be that reliable for the private sector either, and there are reasons to think that public service norms can make civil servants behave selflessly. More to the point, governments that are concerned about where and how goods and services are produced have an interest in not ceding too many consequential decisions completely over to the private sector, which in contemporary America has its own short-term profit biases.

To be sure, equity stakes are neither necessary nor sufficient for a robust climate agenda. But their new availability shows that the Overton window is rapidly shifting on the US government’s tool kit. To wit, in June 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the Trump administration embraced the idea of taxing AI companies through a takeover of shares for a new sovereign wealth fund. If AI turns out to be a bubble, the idea won’t cost the government anything. If the industry finds a viable revenue model, the plan could generate trillions of dollars for climate and other priorities 25—multiples larger than the IRA without having to spend a dime of taxpayer money. This is an example of how policies on AI, defense, and China competition can provide numerous vehicles for the “what” for climate action. The “how” can be provided by old tools like grants, loans, taxation, and regulation, alongside more novel tools like sovereign wealth funds, public factories, international carbon clubs, and climate macroeconomic planning.

+The estimable folks at Solar United Neighbors are launching a new scheme for “Neighbors Coops” this summer, and there’s a planning session you can attend (virtually) to see if it’s right for you

We are launching a new program, Neighbors Co-ops, to train and support community members to implement a local solar co-op in their neighborhood, town, or city!

As a Co-op Lead, you’ll host local events, recruit co-op members, track participation, coordinate with solar installers, and guide the co-op process — with support from SUN every step of the way. The commitment is not small, but you’ll reap the benefits through lower electricity bills for you and your fellow co-op members by installing solar on your homes!

Meanwhile, make your plans now for mid-September’s People of the Sun gathering at Standing Rock in North Dakota. It’s going to be a truly remarkable coming together, at the site of the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline—which is, among other things, one of the loveliest places in the American west, at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers. As Cody Two Bears, a huge leader of the environmental justice fight, writes:

Native communities face some of the highest energy burdens in the country. Many families pay far more of their income toward electricity and heat than the national average. In some places, homes still lack reliable access to basic electricity. For remote Tribal homes, connecting to the grid can cost tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, our communities are on the front lines of climate change and have contributed the least to the crisis.

Solar energy is not an abstract solution for us. It can mean keeping the lights on. It can mean lower bills for an elder. It can mean backup power when the grid goes down. It can mean workforce training for Native youth. It can mean a Tribe has more control over its own infrastructure, its own economy, and its own future.

That is energy sovereignty.

The Trump administration, of course, quashed much of that Solar for All work, and the fallout has been particularly painful for Native communities. But if there’s any group in this country that knows history takes a long time…As Cody Two Bears continues:

People of the Sun is an Indigenous-led summit, honors ceremony, and concert celebration taking place September 16-18. It is happening ten years after the NoDAPL protests, but it is not only about looking back. It is about honoring the work Native Nations have carried forward over the last decade and building what comes next.

We are bringing together Tribal leaders, community members, climate advocates, artists, funders, organizers, and allies for conversations about energy sovereignty, food sovereignty, water, financing, infrastructure, workforce development, and the future of climate work in Indian Country. We will honor Native communities doing this work. We will make space for music, culture, connection, and celebration.

Because this work is heavy, and our people need places to refill our cups.

People of the Sun is for people working in the climate space. It is for people who care about the environment and want to better understand Indigenous-led solutions. It is for funders and allies asking how they can help in a meaningful way. It is for anyone who understands that the next chapter of climate work must be rooted in justice, community, and sovereignty.

+Finally, the Financial Times reports that China is pouring money into support for green energy projects across its region, driven by the Iran war’s oil shortages. It’s a good reminder that our dismal politics are not the only, or even the main, story in the world.

The value of China’s BRI green energy deals in the first six months of this year topped its total for the whole of 2025, according to research by Australia’s University of Queensland and the Green Finance & Development Center in Shanghai. It included $11.8bn in construction projects and $8.3bn in investments.

“The lower cost of green energy has consistently driven Chinese investment despite the trade war and now countries that have been working with China on green energy might see benefits from less energy price volatility caused by the Iran war,” said Christoph Nedopil Wang, a China energy and finance expert at the university and author of the study.

We talk regularly about Big Oil, but it would probably make more sense to at least occasionally refer to it as Big Gas—many of the same players are involved, of course, and the two are often found in the same places, but it’s been clear for some time that oil is not a growth industry. The rapid rise of EVs in most of the world undercuts projections of future use—we’re at or near the top of the plateau now, and by 2030 or so the amount of oil we use should be going down.

That’s why the hydrocarbon industry’s growth story has been largely about natural gas. It’s used for many things—heating, cooking—but above all for generating electricity, and it’s on that ground that the fossil fuel industry has set out to build its market, stressing constantly that it is clean and cheap. Two important new reports in recent days make it clear how false those claims really are.

The first comes from a Center for Climate Integrity team led by Rebecca Leber and Rebecca John. Leber has a long record covering the industry—her 2020 report in Mother Jones about the industry paying Instagram influencers to plug natural gas was an early landmark in our understanding of pay for play social media, as well as the lengths the industry would go to in order to tell its fibs. (“#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an LA-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers.”)

But as they document in the new report, which should be read in full, this is a very old story. It turns out that the natural gas industry has been playing the pr game for a very long time. As far back as the 1950s, gas had a bad image: it was known to contribute to respiratory problems when burned indoors (more on that later!), and to local air pollution. And as scientists first started analyzing the greenhouse effect in the 1970s, most of the concern was about carbon dioxide, but there was a growing realization that methane—which is essentially what natural gas is—was the smaller but still important sibling greenhouse gas. And so the industry began doing what it did best, which is lying, or to use the technical term, “public relations.” They constructed a whole mythology around natural gas, turning it into the fossil fuel equivalent of the “other white meat.”

In the late 1980s, the gas industry and major oil companies started to brand gas as a “bridge fuel” — a clean-burning transition fuel to a renewable energy future. In reality, they planned a long-term future for natural gas, while simultaneously undermining renewables, obstructing the destination to which gas’ “bridge” was supposed to lead. Over the next 20 years, the industry effectively solidified the bridge fuel myth by co-opting the science and oversight originally intended to keep carbon and methane emissions in check.

Working together in a growing coalition that included the oil majors and ultimately several major environmental groups, the industry managed to temper concerns about methane using strategies crafted by the same firms that for decades undermined the scientific consensus about the harms of tobacco. AGA and allied groups aggressively challenged the science around methane through industry-funded studies and the creation of the objective-sounding Gas Research Institute.

But their approach was multi-dimensional. While muddying the waters on the industry’s methane problem, the gas industry was careful not to deny the issue of climate change outright, instead focusing attention on carbon dioxide. It paired this with relentlessly promoting the concept of gas as clean — certainly cleaner than coal or oil — and positioning gas as a bridge fuel and climate solution. In the process, the gas industry solidified partnerships with EPA with the explicit goal of fending off regulations in favor of voluntary emissions management, while also recruiting environmental organizations that would lend legitimacy to their arguments.

I want to highlight the effectiveness of this strategy with a story about…me. In 1988, before this campaign took off, I was writing The End of Nature, sometimes called the first book for a general audience on climate change. And in it I wrote:

A common suggestion is to replace much of the coal and oil we burn with natural gas, since it produces only about half as much carbon dioxide. But it natural gas—methane—escapes into the atmosphere before it burns, it traps solar radiation more efficiently than co2…As a result, switching to natural gas may have no effect on the greenhouse effect. It might even make it worse.

So give me credit for knowing this crucial science when I was 27.

But not really, because I think I more or less forgot it over the next two decades, as the gas industry rearranged the terms of the debate, and turned it into the lesser of two climate evils, the “bridge” to a future of cleaner energy. This argument was bought wholesale by politicians, especially Democratic ones—if you go read Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses, most of them include a paragraph praising the fracking revolution as both an economic boon and a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; we were replacing coal with something cleaner. The Sierra Club’s leader, Carl Pope, barnstormed around the country with one of the fracking industry’s chief spokespeople, promoting this “solution” to the climate crisis.

And so it seemed novel to me when two Cornell scientists, Bob Howarth and Tony Ingraffea, about fifteen years ago, began publishing data showing that leak rates from fracking meant that natural gas was no cleaner than coal—the argument that had been there all along. I wrote some early pieces on their work for the New York Review of Books, and then published a long piece in the Nation that made the same point I’d made more than a quarter-century earlier.

Our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.

I’ve made up for my forgetfulness, I think, by helping lead battles against fracking, and against the buildout of LNG export terminals; those of you who have been long subscribers to this newsletter got to participate in that latter fight, which we won in the Biden years and then lost in the Trump risorgimento. But if the PR campaign flummoxed me, imagine how well it worked on people who weren’t paying much attention at all (which included virtually everyone in political life, especially Democrats who saw natural gas as a way to have their green cake and reccycle it too). Many thanks to Leber, John, and their whole team for laying the story out in all its gory detail.

The other claim about natural gas is that it’s cheap—this is the formulation that “leaders” like New York governor Kathy Hochul are currently relying on as they link fracked gas and affordability as an excuse to cut back on moving towards renewables, and that data center developers are using to justify a buildout of natural gas generation.

But a report out this morning from the good folks at Oil Change International puts paid to all that. It makes clear that the industry is running out of the really cheap stuff—the fracked gas from the Permian and Appalachian shales that it’s been pumping for the last two decades. Many of those wells are playing out fast, and now it’s going to need to turn to the more “geologically complex” Haynesville shale of east Texas and Louisiana, and that will drive up costs—especially since more and more of the gas is, at least theoretically, going to be exported to Asia as the industry builds out massive shipping terminals along the Gulf of Mexico.

If industry succeeds in locking in unprecedented demand for U.S. gas by expanding exports and domestic consumption, U.S. supply may be pushed to its limits. Gas supply can only meet such high levels of demand if prices rise to cover the higher production costs of marginal gas supplies. This connects rising dependence on gas to rising energy costs. U.S. consumers and those in LNG-importing countries must push policymakers to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to reliable, affordable renewable energy

The numbers are fairly startling:

Between 2026 and 2040, the average wholesale price of gas could be 80 percent higher than during the past decade of U.S. LNG exports, a decade when energy price volatility was already causing hardship in the U.S. and LNGimporting countries. Prices could double relative to the 2020 to 2025 average by the late 2030s.

In other words, those politicians locking us in to natural gas are guaranteeing that our kids will spend much of their lives paying far more for energy than they should—and far more than people in the rest of the world will be spending. Because politicians in those countries are starting to wake up. A big piece in the Times yesterday described the ways that many governments are now trying to “unshackle” themselves from natural gas, after watching the supply dry up with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the Philippines, for example,

the country’s largest solar project began delivering its first megawatts of power in March. That came two weeks after the outbreak of the Iran War, which pushed up energy prices and knocked out 20 percent of the global L.N.G. supply.

“That was fortunate timing. It was like fate,” said Emmanuel Rubio, the chief executive of Meralco PowerGen, the utility-backed power generation company that operates and invests in Terra Solar and gas- and coal-fired power plants in the Philippines.

For a country that imports nearly all of its fossil fuels, the solar project has proved that “we can actually be, to a certain extent, self-reliant,” he added.

The collection of lies around natural gas are collapsing in other ways, too. Another new study, this one from an Ohio team, went back to those fears around gas and indoor air pollution that dated all the way back to the 1950s, and what it found was truly startling. As Gary Fuller summarizes, replacing a gas stove with an electric burner—say, an induction cooktop, available online for $60—reduces childhood asthma dramatically. And when I say dramatically, I mean: better than the best medicine.

Ohio’s publicly owned MetroHealth began the study in December 2024 but funding was terminated early by the incoming Trump administration. It had been designed to investigate if replacing gas cooking improved asthma for 1,200 people living near Cleveland, Ohio.

Prof Ash Sehgal of Case Western Reserve University, the project’s leader, said: “We had completed the project at fewer than 100 households. As a result, over 1,100 households were unable to benefit. We also had to lay off about 20 project staff.”

The team finished the stove replacements that were under way and closed the project, but to the researchers’ surprise, the benefits could be clearly detected even in the scaled-down study of 72 homes.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Angela Bland, a 38-year-old resident of Akron, Ohio, said: “I didn’t realise my gas stove was the issue until I used the electric stove. I now need my inhaler way less often.”

If you want more on this study, check out Sammy Roth’s Climate Colored Goggles newsletter. He interviewed Segal too: “Our improvement was about twice as much as you typically see with medical treatment of asthma,” the researcher said. It truly is remarkable to think how much good we could do simply by dousing the campfire that most people have in their kitchen.

Anyway, to summarize: the natural gas industry is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.

Any effort to slow it down is met with massive resistance. In Colorado, for instance, some towns have tried to prevent gas hookups in new buildings, requiring them to go all-electric. The industry has responded by organizing on behalf of a constitutional amendment called the “Right to Natural Gas,”which will go on the November ballot. As Maya McDaniel writes

The proposed amendment states that “producers and utilities have the right to sell natural gas to homes and businesses.” That could force changes to building codes that encourage electric heating and cooking, undoing progress towards electrification.

“Really, it’s just a cynical attempt to lock fossil fuel industry profits into the state constitution,” said Kelly Nordini, CEO of Conservation Colorado, an environmental nonprofit. “That’s bad for people’s pocketbooks, for clean air, for clean water; it has no provisions for public health or safety.”

Really, the first lucky break for natural gas came back in the 19th century, when it acquired that moniker, to differentiate it from “manufactured” or “town” gas, made by burning coal in the absence of air, and then piped through municipalities for street lighting and other tasks. These gasworks shut down as big deposits of naturally-occurring gas were discovered, hence the name.

I’ve taken to calling it ‘fracked gas’ in recent years, since that industry term for the new methods of liberating the fuel from tight rocks makes it sound almost as disgusting as it is. “Fossil gas” works too, or perhaps “asthma gas.” But our job is to make it a dirty word of some kind. The future depends on it.

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+Scientists who once relied on federal funding are turning to Only Fans as a backup. Check out OnlyMarms from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, where you can gorge on

Unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies” delivered as near-daily photos and videos of chubby, personable marmots (with charming names like Staple, Pawprint, and Cabinet) that give Jimothy the raccoon a run for his money. Viewers can leave monetary “tips” on each post, which are split between the platform and the poster.

Points for creativity, but it shouldn’t come to this

+A sad and powerful story from Bangladesh about how the cutoff of diesel due to the Iran war is devastating farmers who depend on the fuel to run their irrigation pumps. Peter Goodman writes:

For three days, he waited at the gas station in a crush of hundreds of villagers, as the temperature rose to 104 degrees. People tried to cut the line, and fights broke out, drawing police officers wielding batons. This, Dulal Hossain endured for the chance to buy diesel fuel.

He was tormented by worries about his rice plants, the source of most of his livelihood. The diesel he eventually carried home by bicycle, in a jerrycan strung from the handlebars, would fuel the pump that bathed his fields with groundwater. The pump was empty.

It was late March, the dry season in western Bangladesh, and a month after the United States and Israel unleashed war on Iran. Around the globe, energy prices were soaring as shipping was halted through the Strait of Hormuz. In South Asia, diesel was scarce. So crops were deprived of water.

For six weeks, Mr. Hossain, 68, pedaled between the gas station and his fields, bearing replenishment for his pump. He inspected his rice plants like a parent attending to an afflicted child. Their leaves were turning yellow. Stems drooped toward cracked soil.

He could not stave off calamity. When he harvested his rice last month, he wound up with barely one-fourth the usual volume. That was enough to feed his family, but left him nothing to sell. Short of cash, he cut back on meat and fish. He resorted to borrowing to buy seeds for growing vegetables.

“I’m going backward,” he said.

The only slightly hopeful coda I can offer to this story is that Pakistan—which once ruled Bangladesh—has switched a huge amount of its irrigation pumping to solar panels over the last two years, reducing the use of diesel by at least a third. If the world leaned into it, we could have those panels in Bangladesh too by the next planting season.

+Ed Mazria, who has been a powerful voice for green building and electrification for many years, has an important essay in Architect magazine detailing how much we could be saving, in both energy and cash

The Trump Administration has been loudly warning the American public about a so-called “Green New Scam”—a narrative it is using as cover to “permanently end” energy-efficient appliance and HVAC standards and roll back the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC).

Their message: Energy-efficient appliance and HVAC equipment standards “raise costs and disrupt consumer choice,” while updating to the 2024 IECC “would increase residential construction costs by more than $9.2 billion annually compared to the 2006 code levels.” This, they say, would saddle homebuyers with as much as $14,000 in extra construction costs with a 10- to 20-year payback period.

Simultaneously, they point to the energy demands of AI and hyperscale data centers to justify keeping aging coal plants open and incentivizing new fossil-fuel power plants, all while actively stifling clean energy development.

This administration’s narrative is the real scam. By relying on outdated and cherry-picked numbers, the administration is attempting to strip away policies that have in fact saved consumers trillions of dollars, all to prop up the flailing fossil fuel industry.

When you look at the facts—a jurisdiction transitioning from the 2021 to the 2024 IECC—the cost of the upgrade in a home purchase is roughly $2,000 to $3,000, according to analyses by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

Furthermore, the annual energy savings pay off that initial cost in about 2.5 years. Better yet, if that $2,000 to $3,000 is rolled into a standard 30-year mortgage, the monthly utility bill savings exceed the slight increase in the monthly mortgage payment. The homeowner will usually see a net-positive monthly cash flow in the very first year.

Good news then, as Jan Rosenow reports, that the EU is embarked on a crash program to increase electrification. Under the new plans

electricity is to meet 46% of the EU’s final energy consumption by 2040. Getting there means to speed up 9x compared to the annual increase of the electrification rate since 1990.

Meanwhile, the redoubtable Auke Hoekstra has the numbers from Africa that demonstrate just how expensive it is to live without electricity. It’s worth reading this carefully:

Households without electricity spend $38 billion a year on fuel-based light, and per unit of useful light a kerosene wick costs up to 150 times more than an efficient bulb (Mills, 2005). A family burning kerosene pays $12 to $18 a year to light one room badly and fill it with smoke (CEIBS, 2024). The poorest customers in the world’s energy market pay its highest prices. Nobody designed that; it is simply what happens when the only light you can afford is the kind you buy by the bottle, week by week. Or maybe when nobody offered you an LED light on solar yet.

Solar, of course, is the answer here:

Currently three solar panels would cost about $200. The cheapest 2 kW off-grid inverters costs around $100. A five kWh battery will cost around $200 in a few years. $500 in total. Include streamlined financing and distribution and you are looking at around $700 for a family of on average seven people. $100 per person.

Such a setup could easily last 20 years and if people have to pay for it themselves they will take care of it and sell it if they don’t need it anymore or upgrade. So that’s $5 per person per year. Times 660 million people we are talking about 3 billion per year. Compare that to the $2.4 trillion in health damage alone and it is a truly paltry sum. If you care about nature and climate change it’s also the most effective intervention possible per dollar. And it aligns with our feeling of fairness. Very few people will say: these families don’t deserve $5 per person per year to solve their energy problems.

+European insurance exec Gunther Thallinger has been telling the truth about climate change for a long time, and his message is getting more and more urgent. Talking to reporters last week he said

Extreme weather events — such as the heat wave that just hit Europe — are making more and more assets too risky to insure, according to a director at Europe’s largest primary insurer.

“Certain locations and perils cannot be covered as we would wish them to be covered,” said Guenther Thallinger, who sits on the management board of Allianz, in an interview. “We cannot help it.”

Heat, floods, storms and wildfires “could become so frequent that they challenge traditional insurance models,” he said. “Risk-adequate pricing would not be affordable any longer.”

Those European fires keep getting worse, as French and Spanish authorities struggle to contain blazes even as the fourth extreme heat wave of the summer begins today. French firefighters reported yesterday that they had encountered their first pyrocumulonimbus or “fire cloud,” a phenomenon that has become fairly regular fare in Canada, Australia, and the American west. As Claire Moses reports

These large, fire-fueled thunderstorms, also known as pyroCbs, are created by intense heat from large blazes or volcanic eruptions. They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers. But they rarely bring rain.

One pyrocumulonimbus generated more blazes over the weekend in one of the hardest-hit areas of France, Marc Vermeulen, the director of fire and emergency services in the Gironde region, said at a news briefing on Sunday.

Wildfires are so hot they can sometimes create their own weather systems. The smoke from the fires acts as a plume of heat rising fast into the atmosphere, according to Britain’s Royal Meteorological Society. That chimney effect sucks in air at ground level, feeding the blazes oxygen and pushing them into new terrain.

Meanwhile, it’s so hot in Japan that they’ve coined a new word for it: A kokushobi, or “cruel heat day” is when the mercury tops 40 degrees Celsius. As Kiuko Notoyo and Francesca Regulado report,

“Numbers are difficult to understand because people perceive them differently. By giving it the name ‘cruel heat day,’ people will understand it better just by hearing it, and they’ll feel that today is dangerous,” said Taro Kawasato, the assistant director of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s climate prediction division.

+Superb coverage from Emily Fishbein and Jauman Naw of how the repressive Myanmar government, and warlords along the Chinese frontier, are producing gruesome conditions in the rare earth mines.

The businesses carrying out this extraction face few consequences in Myanmar — in part because the industry operates in a legal grey area. Chinese companies extract rare earths in autonomous, militarized regions controlled by local ethnic armies, which protect mining operations while taking a cut of the profits. The mined material is then trucked across the border into China, where it is mixed and essentially laundered with rare earths from other sources and processed for use in global products.

The conflict monitoring organization Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, or ACLED, has ranked Myanmar’s war as the second-most extreme on the planet, and also the world’s most fragmented, with more than 1,200 distinct armed groups. Corruption and weak rule of law have further contributed to an explosion of criminal activity of all kinds. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Myanmar has the highest levels of organized crime of any country in the world.

+If you’re feeling a bit hopeless, you could go to Collapse Camp in Germany—and perhaps feel oddly empowered. An organizer explains:

Collapse Camp has a broader thematic scope. It's not just about actual disaster relief. It's also about emotional recovery, self-defense, protecting demonstrations and left-wing spaces, providing a solidarity-based power supply , and preserving food, to name just a few examples. We were surprised ourselves during the organizing process by how many fantastic offers we received that we hadn't even considered at first.

Always relegating the idea of ​​rational preparation for crises and disasters to the right-wing prepper camp is getting a bit retro. In a polycrisis and collapse, disasters are inevitable, and those who don't prepare will be left high and dry. Preparation, or "prepping," therefore comes in various forms: individualistic, fascist-style prepping, standard prepping (which, for example, the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Relief recommends), and now finally: solidarity-based prepping . And solidarity-based prepping isn't primarily about stockpiling supplies, but about building relationships.

Speaking of camping, EVs are now so popular in China that they’ve spawned a whole new craze: EV camping. As Julia Shong and K Oanh Ha report

In China’s fiercely competitive EV market, standout features sell cars. Beginning in 2022, manufacturers rolled out camping and napping options aimed at outdoor enthusiasts. These range from the ability to power lights while parked to dedicated “Camp Mode” settings that fold seats completely flat and regulate overnight cabin temperatures. EV maker Xpeng’s “Sleep Mode” even includes looping white noise tracks of a crackling bonfire, crashing waves and a heavy storm.

These high-tech cabins have also turned cars into an extension of the living room and bedroom in a society where privacy is hard to come by, as multigenerational households are common. “A lot of people are going to their cars to have a one-hour nap,” says Daniel Wu, head of global brand and marketing for XPeng. “After work they’ll stay in the car for about an hour before heading home, doing things they enjoy — for example, playing games — simply because it’s such a comfortable space.”

On Douyin, the “car‑camping life” hashtag has attracted 9.2 billion views, ranking among the platform’s most popular camping‑related themes. Tutorials explain how to convert EVs into campsites and suggest what gear to buy. EV rental bookings on the mainland during the Chinese New Year holiday this year surged six-fold compared with the prior year, according to local media, citing data from car rental platform Car Inc.

Everything I’m about to write is fairly obvious. But since wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.

Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.

To hit the basics: roughly a thousand wildfires are currently burning in Canada, many in northern reaches of the province of Ontario. Much of the direct fire damage is being borne by members of Canada’s First Nation communities, whose small communities are the main inhabitants of these wild places. People are crowded into Thunder Bay, Ontario, where every hotel room is filled; the stories of escapes like the one picture above are truly harrowing. Alessandra Freitas, for instance, interviewed members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in the northwest part of the province. Here, for instance, is the account of Miiyah Paavola:

“It was all very fast-paced. There was not really much time to think about what was happening,” Paavola told CNN.

She grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a small aluminum boat with five other people, three dogs and a cat. The isolated community, also known as Collins First Nation, has no road access, only a railway line and Collins Lake.

Paavola couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger until her boat pulled away.

“All you could see was orange and gray and it was very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away, she could finally see just how close they’d been to the fires. “When I was going across maybe about the second island, that’s when I watched it. I could just barely see the flames reach the shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke that followed it very quickly.”

“If we had waited any longer, we would have been dead.”

As Johnnie Jae, the founder of Red Pop! News pointed out,

It's NOT just that people and wildlife are losing their homes...it's the history that is being lost for generations to come.

It's tribal records, artifacts, art, regalia, ceremonial grounds, things that have been passed from generation to generation, hidden, protected and preserved, repatriated and restored.

So, just to be clear—the most powerful disruption from these fires is to small bands of people who have done nothing to cause them, and whose culture has been endlessly damaged by the larger western project of settlement and control.

But flame, of course, is not the only product of fire. There’s also smoke, which contains high concentrations of particulates, the solid and liquid droplets in all forms of air pollution that are especially dangerous because they can slip past a body’s natural filters, aggravating asthma and pulmonary disease and contributing to heart attacks and smoke. Those clouds of smoke drift on the prevailing winds, which have been blowing south towards southern Ontario, where Toronto has been engulfed in smoke. Here’s a particularly vivid portrayal of the life in North America’s fourth-largest city

But of course the border with the U.S. does not prevent smoke from spilling across, and some of the most densely populated parts of America have been inundated with smoke as well. Last Thursday, for instance, Detroit had the most polluted air in the world, as Charles Ramirez chronicled:

Detroit had an air quality index, or AQI, of 724 at one point, the No. 1 spot on IQAir’s ranking of the most polluted global major cities on Thursday. IQAir makes air quality monitoring and air cleaning products. The index is a measure of PM2.5 or particulate matter, and the index reading makes the air “hazardous,” according to the company, which means unhealthy for everyone.

By 5 p.m., Detroit’s index number had fallen to 341 and its ranking to second, behind Chicago’s 402. Both measures were considered “hazardous.”

Parts of Ohio were even worse. Toledo, for instance, doubled its old record for air pollution, and nearby Monroe recorded AQI values above 800. I’ve been in Beijing and Delhi on days when you couldn’t see across the street, and this was worse.

Jeff Masters has the most comprehensive set of numbers, as per usual

The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution records go back to 1999.

Now, in a normal world, this scenario would trigger a compassionate response, as leaders sought to help the people most at risk. But MAGA is an almost perfect mirror world, where every impulse is bad. On Fox, for instance, the channel’s public health expert timidly (“I know you’re going to cringe”) recommended that people at risk wear KN95 masks to prevent particulates from getting sucked down your throat. “Not a chance. Not a chance,” said host Brian Kilmeade.

Meanwhile, a series of Republican “leaders” started producing angry denunciations of Canada, for polluting America’s air with their thoughtless fires.

Michigan congressman John James, whose campaign for state governor has been endorsed by President Donald Trump wrote in an X post on Thursday: “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage your forests to prevent these fires. American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”

Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, longtime car dealer, said he planned to introduce “a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”

And of course the ultimate source of all MAGA craziness weighed in as well. Here’s Donald Trump:

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!”

Trump promised tariffs to make up for the costs, and indeed—and remember this—insisted that “maybe they should pay us some damages.”

The GOP case, such as it is, rests on the idea that Canada has erred in “managing” its woodlands, an outgrowth of the idea that he expressed during one wave of California’s hideous fires that the state should simply “rake its forests.” Or, as he expressed it during its first term, “you gotta clean your floors.”

Whatever the use of this prescription in America’s forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has never managed these forests in any way, certainly not to suppress burning the way that America did across the 20th century. These are not forests with roads; these are vast, trackless expanses. Climate analyst Zeke Hausfather has performed his usual public service by actually looking at the data.

Here’s the short version. Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1C increase in fire-season temperature (with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This relationship is robust to a variety of statistical tests and controlling for confounding variables. The boreal burns in rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed. Only about a fifth of Canada’s burned area over the past four decades was even inside forest regions that have ever been actively managed. You cannot have a fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a forest you were never managing.

As he points out, even if the Canadians somehow decided to go “thin the forest,” it wouldn’t work.

The boreal is on the order of three million square kilometers. You are not going to thin or prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a fuel break anyway.

So what is driving the huge increase in Canadian wildfires? It appears some mysterious force is raising the temperature of the earth. As Quinn Gablicki points out, quoting the University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck,

As long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, global temperatures will increase, droughts will worsen, and there will be bigger, more frequent wildfires and smoke events.

The haze hanging over much of the United States today, Dr. Overpeck said, is “the harbinger of worse times to come.”

Or, as Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management put it on Friday,

“Warmer, drier weather is becoming more common, increasing wildfire risk in Canada and around the world,” she wrote. “Northern Ontario and Quebec, for example, received less than 40 percent of normal precipitation this June, with temperatures above historical averages.”

None of this, of course, is surprising in any way. America’s forests are currently on fire too, and in remarkable fashion. With our no-pack snowpack year, large fires are burning across the interior West—and what do you know, lots of the smoke is drifting north into Canada, causing bad air quality in British Columbia.

“As wildfire activity increases, so has smoke across many areas of the region. Much of this smoke is originating from fires south of the Canada-U.S. border and will have varying impacts over the coming days,” an update Saturday evening from the provincial wildfire service said.

This is far from the smallest irony in this saga. In fact, “irony” hardly seems an apt word, suggesting that there is something even slightly subtle about the idiocy. For instance, as our leaders complain about Canada, it seems as if it might be nice if they also noted that our neighbors to the north have consistently set firefighters south to help America fight its great blazes. When Los Angeles caught on fire in January of 2025, Ontario deployed 150 firefighters to help.

“Our closest friend and our closest ally needs help, and we’re going to make sure we’re going to be there supporting them,” the province’s premier said.

And what do you know, last week a Canadian pilot died fighting one of the vast conflagrations on the Colorado-Utah border. As Michele Brunoro reports, Nicholas Dale left behind a wife and two sons.

“He was out there doing his best and just so very sad that we lost a great person and an experienced person fighting something, a natural disaster,” said Dale’s long-time friend Adam Gilliver.

While we’re on ironies, let’s note in passing that the smoke pouring out of these great blazes temporarily diminishes the power of the solar panels that are our main weapon in slowing the heating of the earth. Miriam Wasser reports on the experience of one Massachusetts homeowner.

In the two days before the first big plume arrived, Stephen Gordon’s solar array produced about 53 kilowatt-hours of power per day — an amount he said is typical for a warm summer day, and more than covers his household needs during daylight hours.

Then came Wednesday, when people throughout New England woke up to gray or even orange-tinted skies. Gordon’s total output that day was just under 23 kilowatt hours, less than half of what his panels generated the previous day.

But of course all of those ironies pale next to the main one: smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess.

I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”

So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire.

This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies. As the Center for Climate Integrity documented,

Eleven U.S. states and dozens of city, county, and tribal governments collectively representing more than 1 in 4 Americans are currently taking major oil and gas companies to court to hold them accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and make them pay for the resulting damages.

And MAGA politicians are doing everything they can to try and stop those suits from succeeding. As Abraham Lustgarten reported in April

Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

At the federal level, the very same politicians complaining about Canadian wildfires are trying to moment, this takes the form of the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act. They’ve drawn support from the industry that owns them

“We thank Senator Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers,” said American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute (API) President and CEO Mike Sommers in a joint statement.

America, though the all-time champion, is not alone in spewing fossil fuels, of course. One of the other ironies of the moment is that just as Canada catches on fire, its prime minister Mark Carney is announcing a new system of pipelines from the tar sands of Alberta. As veteran climate journalist Adam Radwanski wrote in the Toronto Star, under Toronto’s “dystopian haze” Canada’s pivot away from climate action is “impossible to ignore.” In her excellent new newsletter Patterns, Naomi Klein writes “as the nation burns, Carney celebrates new fossil fuel projects as “nation building.”

So irony drifts back and forth. But responsibility can never really be shed. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry, but that’s simply not true.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Check Out SolarPak, mobilizing Pakistani youth to help extend the solar revolution there, which has been concentrated in its middle classes, to the poorest parts of the country. Its founder Ayaan Ahmed wrote me

Our team, all under 18, has electrified 27 communities in Khairpur Mirs, Sindh, and built an internal research arm, Impact Labs, that tracks household outcomes over years. A Carnegie Mellon economist now studies our results with us weekly.

In other words: the solar revolution is being extended to its last mile by teenagers, and we are measuring what happens when it arrives.

+Jeffrey Insko has an elegiac essay about the horrible setbacks in the fight to block Enbridge’s Line 5, setting it in a deep historic context

Yesterday, Governor Whitmer’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy granted Enbridge a key permit for the foolhardy Line 5 tunnel; the United States Army Corps of Engineers permit will surely follow very soon. Although not surprising, it’s a stunning decision, and not only— though this is bad enough— because it gives Enbridge permission to desecrate Indigenous burial grounds. It’s also in keeping with the Trump administration’s campaign to Make America 1953 Again.

+From Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and colleagues, a close analysis of New Yorker fiction to see how those short stories have dealt with climate change over time

We find that climate change exists in just 10.1% of these stories and freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction / biodiversity loss, or toxic waste exists in 15.6%. When present, these environmental problems are mostly marginalized and minimized; structural culprits – governments, corporations, and the wealthy – are rarely assigned responsibility; and pro-environmental actions and behaviors are rarely modeled.

I’m not sure this is precisely what story writers are called to do, but what do I know—I’ve only written one novel, and it was mostly funny.

+European coal mines are insisting they’re cutting methane emissions. Petra Sorge’s reporting shows that instead those mines are figuring out novel and absurd ways to measure methane emissions,

In Germany, open-pit mine operators all took a common tack, according to reports seen by Bloomberg and submitted to the country’s environmental agency. Soil samples were collected “from the freshly exposed coal embankment” and then crushed into small particles, while the methane emitted during this process was captured and quantified.

That makes no sense, said Necki, who compared measuring ground-level coal emissions to shaking and opening a soda bottle, then trying to measure the remaining carbon dioxide inside. “You will not get a valid result,” he said, “because the gas has already disappeared into the atmosphere.”

+Oliver Millman writes that the U.S. may soon be the “Cuba of gas cars,” a showroom of the automotive past.

China’s growing dominance in EVs came into sharper focus earlier this year, when Shenzhen-based BYD—short for Build Your Dreams—overtook Tesla to become the world’s largest EV seller. Its cars are already on the streets in Mexico and, following a recent trade deal, to a limited extent in Canada. The U.S. increasingly finds itself surrounded by a world going electric, and often doing so cheaply. In China, BYD’s Seagull model sells for $7,800, albeit heavily subsidized. In the U.S., the cheapest EV on the market, the Chevy Bolt, starts at around $29,000.

+Davide Castelvecchi, writing in Nature, has a truly comprehensive update on the rapid move towards sodium replacing lithium in batteries.

What has surprised many observers is how rapidly companies claim to have improved on sodium-ion’s flaws. Auke Hoekstra, an energy analyst at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, says he has been taken aback by the pace of advancement. “I honestly did not expect it to go that fast — and I am usually the guy who is seen as an optimist,” he says.

Hoekstra is known for his bullish predictions about renewable energy, which have often been correct. Now he is bullish on sodium-ion. Although other analysts and researchers are unsure how strongly the technology can compete with lithium-ion devices, he sees it as an innovation that will enable the price of batteries to keep falling, thus speeding up the electrification of the world’s economy. “For the future of energy, this really would be a game-changer,” he says.

Sodium for batteries can be extracted easily from the industrial chemical soda ash (or sodium carbonate), which is plentiful and more straightforward to mine than are most forms of lithium. “Sodium is an almost inexhaustible resource,” says Zhang Yizhi, a spokesperson for CATL. It is more than 1,000 times as abundant as lithium in Earth’s crust, and up to 60,000 times as plentiful in the ocean. Last month, industrial-grade sodium carbonate cost only US$200–280 per tonne, compared with $20,000–25,000 per tonne for battery-grade lithium carbonate, Zhang adds.

+George Monbiot has some sage advice for new UK prime minister Andy Burnham: shut down the ruinously expensive and laughably ineffective carbon capture and sequestration projects of his predecessors and save British taxpayers a few billion pounds.

The great majority of CCS will be attached to new fossil fuel-burning power stations, wood-burning power stations and hydrogen production from fossil gas. In fact, almost all the projects in the government’s first tranche are for fossil fuel-based schemes. But there are abundant alternatives to these highly destructive plans. Given the speed at which battery technology is evolving, enabling a balanced and reliable electricity supply without any use of fossil fuels, the committee’s claim is bunkum.

+Protestors hounded Microsoft’s sustainability chief at a conference this week, pointing out that the company is breaking all its emission reduction pledges in pursuit of more “compute” for its AI program. As Katie Brigham reports

“How does signing a 20-year deal with Chevron help you reach your clean energy goals?,” one protestor asked, referring to Microsoft’s recently announced power purchase agreement with Chevron for nearly 2.7 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power to supply a West Texas data center. The project represents one of the largest gas-powered artificial intelligence developments in the U.S., and Stiffler acknowledged that she had been planning to ask about it, herself.

Microsoft’s Melanie Nakagawa answered the question. at least in part, saying “that project with Chevron is initially using natural gas and it’s a natural gas contract,” before emphasizing that the company has built “over 4.5 gigawatts of clean energy already today,” and remains committed to balancing speed-to-power with its clean energy goals. She added that, “with this deal in particular, we’re looking at a range of tools in our toolbox to ensure that we can continue to grow our power, but also do so in a way that is responsible and sustainable.” She stopped short, however, of making any commitments to transitioning the project to renewable energy over time.

Meanwhile, kudos to many activists including my Third Act colleagues for persuading the city of Boulder ,Nevada to fight a new data center, which the Trump administration wants to situate on nearby Bureau of Land Management land

“Even if the project is now on adjacent BLM land, the impact does not stop at a property line,” one resident said. “My biggest concern are our water supply and our electrical infrastructure.”

Another resident said, “Although the facility may be located outside of the city limits, the impacts of supplying utilities, expanding infrastructures, and supporting a project of this magnitude would directly impact Boulder City and its residents.”

+Finally, Maine’s first solar-powered ice-cream shop has come on line in South Portland. Willard’s is pioneering what it calls a “Sun to Scoop” model, to complement its “Garbage to Garden” waste reduction partnership. Would you like a picture of some solar panel installers eating ice cream? I am here to provide it

I write this under an ashy, yellow northeast sky; smoke from wildfires in Ontario and Minnesota swept across the region in the middle of the night, and I awoke at 3 (as I too often do in these parlous times) with stinging eyes. But I will try to see clearly enough to discern some of the latest numbers in the climate and energy battle—numbers which prove to me the economic folly of staying on our current course.

To me, I admit, these are secondary—there’s not enough money on earth to make me want to condemn people to a few centuries of waking up in smoke, and I know without calculation that a clear blue sky is worth almost any price. But I also know how the world works, and so I want to provide people with the ammunition they need to carry on this fight—and the last few weeks have seen that ammunition piling up in the arsenals of logic and thrift. There is at this point no doubt that the world would operate more cheaply on clean energy, which is a lucky thing, and one that needs to be hammered home till the conventional wisdom (that sun and wind and batteries are a luxury) is finally routed.

The most basic point, of course, and yet one often lost in the debate is that once you’ve installed renewable energy you no longer have to pay for fuel. IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, put a number on that in its annual report at the end of last month.

In 2025, renewables helped to avoid an estimated USD 480 billion in fossil fuel costs and around 8.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

If we round the number of our fellow humans off to about 8 billion, that’s $60 for every man, woman and child on the face of the planet, even though we’re still fairly early on the adoption curve for clean power. The numbers are stark:

Since 2010, the cost of solar PV has fallen by 89%, onshore wind by 71%, and offshore wind by 63%. This highlights how renewables are now the cheapest source of new electricity in most markets. In 2025, more than 90% of newly commissioned, utility-scale capacity delivered power at a lower cost than the cheapest, newly-installed fossil-fuel-based alternative.

If you move from energy generation to energy efficiency, the numbers are just as interesting. Mark Gongloff, in a charming essay that begins by noting GOP umbrage at Mayor Mamdani’s suggestion that during a heatwave 78 degrees would be a good setting for the AC, goes on to show how the Trump administration is gutting the ongoing federal effort to make appliances more efficient. Cost?

Higher standards available to the DOE could save the average US household $160 a year and all US businesses $15 billion a year in electricity costs between 2030 and 2050, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP), a nonprofit research and advocacy group.

And what about making money? Dan McCarthy describes a new study from the “business-focused” think tank E2 that shows that the clean energy projects—at least 216 in number—cancelled since Trump took office would have supplied at least half a million good jobs.

Trump took office amid an unprecedented surge in the clean energy economy. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act spurred the rapid construction of both renewable power projects and domestic factories intended to build solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, and other crucial cleantech.

But the boom went bust pretty much as soon as Trump won the election in late 2024.

Just as an example, here’s a story from a few days ago about the administration stymieing four windpower projects in Minnesota that would have produced not just a gigawatt of badly needed clean electricity, enough for several hundred thousand homes, but also 1,100 construction and 4,400 “indirect jobs,” for a total economic hit of $168 million.

If you want to try to add it all up, here’s another analysis, from the people at Energy Innovation. Their model shows that, taken together, the result of the major Trump era moves on energy policy will be that

Households will pay an additional $650 billion for energy – an average of $460 per household in 2035 and $490 in 2040.

And their attacks on EVs, which mean that more Americans get to shell out at the gas pump year after year, will

inflate gasoline prices 14 percent in 2035 and 26 percent in 2040, atop near-term upward pressure from the Iran war and other market forces.

and the One Big Beautiful Bill, by removing incentives for a quick energy transition, will

cost the U.S. economy 820,000 jobs per year on average over the next decade, in addition to the 144,000 clean energy jobs lost[1] within the past 18 months.

And

Slowing down electrification and domestic energy manufacturing will lower GDP in all years, totaling $2.3 trillion cumulative lost GDP, with effects flowing into other economic sectors. The U.S. economy will lose $150 billion in GDP in 2030, peaking at a $250 billion net loss in 2032, then reverting to losses of $200 billion in 2035 and $120 billion in 2040.

This all amounts to setting money on fire—almost unbelievable amounts. And real money—not notional SpaceX shares, now plummeting; not weird Kalshi bets. It’s money that families have to fork over, month after month, if they want to keep the lights on and the minivan trundling down the road.

And of course the numbers grow exponentially larger if you even try to calculate the public health and climate costs of burning ever more fossil fuel. The Energy Innovation study again:

Worsening local air pollution will raise healthcare costs by $43 billion, with annual increases of $4 billion in 2035 and $4.5 billion in 2040, contributing to rising household costs alongside rising energy prices and goods inflation.

And here’s a new report in the premier science journal Nature from Anders Levermann on the economic costs of a heating planet even before we hit the biggest and most expensive tipping points

By definition, tipping points are reached when a series of interlinked changes amplify one another until the whole system becomes unstable and shifts uncontrollably into a different state. Loss of sea ice at the poles, for example, reduces the amount of sunlight reflected into space, further heating Earth’s surface, which then accelerates ice loss. These vicious cycles of change define a tipping point, at which the climate cannot return to its former patterns.

Before that point, the climate system becomes increasingly unstable. It fluctuates considerably — a rise in variability is a well-established property of such ‘non-linear dynamical systems’ approaching a critical threshold. That society will face these fluctuations and that they will intensify through the tipping transition hasn’t been realized by scientists and policymakers, so far.

Earth will experience an increasingly erratic climate: more and stronger fluctuations in flows of melt water, ocean circulations and the extent of sea ice. These changes will lead to more frequent and intense extremes in temperature, precipitation and storms — leading not only to more heatwaves and droughts, but also to more cold spells and floods.

Modern economies are adapted to relatively stable climatic baselines. Agricultural productivity, infrastructure design, insurance pricing and financial risk management all rely not only on expected mean conditions but also on the predictability of variability.

Farmers need to factor in lost harvests; architects and urban planners need to account for extremes of temperature, wind and rainfall; and financiers and insurers need to consider the cost and scale of damages. But once these factors are no longer predictable, all bets are off — life becomes uninsurable and the world becomes unsafe.

In case you think scientists are the only ones worrying, Richard Partington discusses new analyses from leading bankers that attempt to put some numbers on these emerging dangers: the rapidly approaching El Niño, for instance, is threatening massive “food shocks” that will stretch into at least 2028:

“El Niño puts ‘climateflation’ back on the agenda,” analysts at the Italian bank UniCredit wrote in a research note. “Europe’s recent heatwaves are a reminder that the climate baseline is already shifting. El Niño could add a new layer of pressure later this year, as it amplifies the effects of global warming.”

According to analysts at Goldman Sachs, the strength of this El Niño could cause a 15.8% surge in global food commodity prices. That would have a knock-on effect worldwide, including for consumers in Europe, where it predicted food prices could rise by 1.3% across the eurozone.

Unlike politicians, bankers actually try to do something to limit their risk. As Ishika Mookerjee reports, private equity funds are unleashing an increasing army of “heat detectives” to figure out the climate risks of their investments.

A Bloomberg Green analysis of the latest sustainability reports published by 12 of the largest alternative asset managers show overall mentions of physical climate risks and related terms nearly doubled from a year before, with Carlyle Group Inc., General Atlantic LP, KKR & Co. and Partners Group AG seeing large increases. Funds tend to identify floods and cyclones as the most immediate risks. Most are now screening their portfolios for vulnerabilities to heat and treating it as a long-term, chronic risk, especially for their combined private equity assets totaling more than $700 billion.

Given all that, the endlessly maddening question is why are we still headed down this path. Why is Gov. Kathy Hochul not listening to the private equity sleuths headquartered in her state’s financial capital and instead signing up New Yorkers for 40 years of new natural gas pipelines, and why is Hawaii flirting with LNG? Why is the Trump administration doing everything it can to run our bill ever higher?

If you think the answer must be that there’s some competing policy formulation that comes up with different numbers, think again. Here’s the remarkable account from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the first meeting between the oil industry and the Trump White House after the 2024 election.

At one point during the meeting, the executives began complaining about the Climate Superfund bills that had recently passed in Vermont and New York. As they spoke, Trump’s policy adviser, Stephen Miller was texting the attorney general Pam Bondi. “I’m on it,” Miller told the group. Less than two months later, the administration sued both states seeking to block enforcement of the laws.

In another instance, the ExxonMobil chief executive, Darren Woods, voiced concerns about European Union regulations that required big companies to monitor and reduce the environmental effects of their activities and develop “climate transition plans.”

Haberman and Swan report that, upon hearing this, Trump instructed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to impose additional tariffs on the E.U. until they abandoned those regulations.

At another point in the meeting, held in the Cabinet Room on March 19, 2025, Miller asked the executives in attendance for a list of 10 projects the White House could help fast-track and requested that they “highlight how much more energy the projects would produce in the United States during the Trump presidency.”

And in one of the most fateful exchanges, the Chevron chief executive, Mike Wirth, pushed for an extension of the firm’s license to operate in Venezuela.

Less than a year later, the Trump administration had seized the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Shortly after that, Chevron expanded its presence in Venezuela.

Yesterday I called Swan to discuss this reporting, and he described to me a room filled with some of the most powerful executives in the world, stunned by what they were witnessing.

“They were almost in awe,” Swan told me. “There was no semblance of a policy process, but rather the C.E.O.s were raising their grievances, and Trump was essentially saying, ‘Make it so, it shall be done.’”

Indeed, as David Fickling reports, Big Oil has no choice but to rely on gaming political systems, because private investors have shifted most of their money to clean energy. That means that subsidies are ever more important

The cost of these measures looks set to rise to about $1.1 trillion this year, according to a study last week by the United Nations Development Programme. If crude averages $110 a barrel over the full year, it could climb as high as $1.43 trillion. That’s almost as much as was spent on such subsidies during the year the Ukraine war started in 2022.

Whatever the final figure, the amount of government cash support pumped into the fossil fuel system this year will be running close to the amount that both public and private investors were prepared to invest in it. It’s an extraordinary situation for an industry that claims to be governed by capitalist laws of supply and demand, rather than statist central planning.

Just to reiterate: instead of speeding the conversion to clean cheap energy, which would save households huge amounts of money, we’re instead shoveling taxpayer cash to the fossil fuel industry, and in the process overheating the earth, which will be the most expensive thing that ever happened, by orders of magnitude. The most important thing the planet’s leaders could possibly do is flip this switch, and reverse these flows—we’ve clearly got the money, since we’re shelling out these huge sums in subsidies. Fickling again:

This support is so pervasive that in most places we don’t even notice or question it. That has to change. Governments must stop throwing sand in the gears of the energy transition. Far from reducing as the climate emergency intensifies and heatwaves claim thousands of lives, they have been doubling down on counterproductive support for polluting fuels, while loading tariffs and regulations onto clean energy.

The horrible irony here is that markets are coming much closer to getting things right than our political institutions, which are currently doing all they can to maintain the status quo. Our next real chance to disrupt that madness? November 3.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Climate displacement is one of the defining crises of our time, and Josh Fox’s new film, The Welcome Table, finds a new way in: The veteran documentarian and activist gathers climate survivors to share their stories and show a path forward. The film is streaming now on HBO Max, but many groups are hosting screening parties, and raising money for local organizations; if you sign up to host a watch party they’ll send you a special screening guide.

+Chilean salmon farming is environmentally problematic, but a little less so when it runs on solar power, not diesel. Kelly Lipke reports on one farm where fish have found protection from sun and predators beneath the shade of floating panels.

+The always-important Tom Athanasiou has a long and eminently readable report from the “fossil fuel transition” conference in Colombia this spring. It’s the most eyes-open account of the session I’ve come across

Fossil fuel extraction must be phased out at a breakneck pace with almost complete cessation by 2050. Similarly, the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure must stop immediately. There’s no room—even in poor countries—for new oil and gas fields or coal mines. All effort must go to the construction of zero-carbon infrastructure.

Yet none of this is even conceivable unless the overall effort is very widely accepted as fair. This judgement will be made in many ways and many places, and not in abstract terms. For example, the tension between “phasing down” and “phasing out” fossil fuels is anything but abstract, and it won’t be easily reconciled. At Santa Marta, the “oil-rich African nations” insisted they would keep drilling as they transitioned to renewables. Onuoha Magnus Chidi, an adviser to Nigeria’s regional development minister: “Not phasing out—phase down. That is the message… We are phasing down, and we are saying that there should be early planning. It must be fair to all.”

I find his point impossible to dispute. The alternative has to be: if a phase-down strategy is pursued with adequate ambition, and if it takes proper account of both the North/South and rich/poor divides, then it becomes a phase-out strategy that can honestly be defended as being “fair to all.”

+Matthew Shaer has a superbly reported piece in the Times today on the folly of America’s automakers, mostly standing by as they watch the world move towards EVs

According to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based policy group, one of every four vehicles sold globally in 2025 was battery-powered. Analysts with Bloomberg have predicted that in the next decade, that number will more than double, putting gas-powered cars — for the first time ever — in the minority of overall new vehicle sales. Overseas, Asian and European manufacturers have spent years preparing for this eventuality, dumping billions into the development of battery technology. With predictable results: China now makes 75 percent of all E.V.s sold anywhere on earth. (The United States makes around 5 percent.) Many of those vehicles are produced by BYD, a Chinese company that recently became the largest manufacturer of battery-powered cars in the world.

+If you were worried that plug-in solar represented a safety risk, a new white paper should put your mind at ease; it’s nothing like the risk from gas and diesel generators.

Meanwhile, the fabulous folks at the Bright Saver nonprofit just dropped a new deal. Now that ten state legislatures have approved balcony solar (so many thanks to my Third Act colleagues around the country!), they’re going to be offering the panels at cost to anyone who signs up for a membership

The nonprofit is selling systems for ​“what it costs us to purchase in bulk from the manufacturers,” Bright Saver’s Cora Stryker said. She declined to name those manufacturers, noting that the organization is brand-agnostic and could switch at any time.

Bright Saver sells a 180-watt kit for about $285 and a 360-watt kit for $414. To access these prices, you first have to become a member, which costs $29 annually (with renewal optional). Otherwise, a 180-watt kit is $499, and a 360-watt kit is $699.

The organization aims to be the Costco of clean energy; only members can access the deep discounts. And more product deals are coming. Bright Saver plans to offer plug-in home batteries that work with balcony solar kits as soon as next year.

With the membership, the 180-watt kit works out to $1.74 per watt. The 360-watt system, which is just 5% the size of a typical 7,200-watt rooftop array, is significantly better priced at $1.23 per watt.

That’s a good deal in the U.S. Nationally, the average rooftop system costs $2.60 per watt before local and state incentives, largely because of the high ​“soft costs” of marketing, permitting, and installation. Balcony solar kits sold domestically by companies such as Craftstrom, APsystems, and EcoFlow hover around $1.50 to $2.50 per watt, although it’s possible to find systems on sale for less.

But even Bright Saver’s 360-watt-kit price is more than three times what Germans can pay. There, balcony solar through Ikea is a stupefying $0.35 per watt. Clean energy really is cheap energy, especially outside the U.S.

+Megan Mayhew Bergman, a superb teacher and one of my favorite nature writers, has a new essay on the need for real climate grief:

Just outside Manchester, Vermont, there’s a heron rookery I’ve driven past for nearly two decades. Each year, the elegant great blue herons and their nests dotted the skeletal marsh trees. The birds stood guard over their young through sleet and torrential rain, their stoic devotion a marker of Vermont’s tenuous spring.

Then, gradually, there were fewer herons. This spring, there was only one. I passed her on my way to dentist appointments and while driving my children to soccer games. The trees and marsh remain. But the once-visible community of herons does not.

This heron raises her young alone.

No one held a memorial service. There was no public acknowledgment that something beloved or integral to the landscape had diminished. Yet each time I pass the rookery, I feel an ache that does not seem entirely polite to share. It feels like a contradiction at the center of modern life: we experience profound environmental loss and largely pretend nothing is happening.

As a culture, we know what to do when a person dies. We gather, tell stories and hold sacred space. We make room for sadness. But what do we do when a species disappears from a landscape? What do we do when a coastline changes beyond recognition, when a forest is felled for wood pellets and lumber, or when a rookery we love becomes an empty, ghostly landscape of broken trees and still water, with nothing but the sound of the highway to drown out the chorus of the frogs?

+You know me, I like solar power. So trust me when I say, this is one of the stupidest—and really, most evil—technological ideas I’ve ever come across, which means that of course it’s been embraced by the Trump administration. As Hiroko Tabuchi writes,

The federal government has approved plans by a start-up company to test a satellite that would use a 60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight back to Earth after dark, as part of a project the company says would power solar farms, provide light for rescue workers and illuminate city streets.

In a license issued on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission gave the green light for Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., to launch its Eärendil-1 satellite into low Earth orbit. The company plans to deploy its test satellite this year but has said it eventually wants to send as many as 50,000 big mirrors into space.

The approval came despite a flood of opposition from astronomers, wildlife experts and others who say the light from the mirrors could distract airplane pilots, wreak havoc on astronomical observations and interfere with circadian rhythms, the light-and-dark cycles that help people, animals and plants know when to wake and sleep, to bloom or to migrate.

In other absurd federal government news, the White House is going to shut down its key agricultural research lab near DC

USDA announced plans 1 year ago to close BARC—a sprawling, 2600-hectare campus home to experimental agricultural facilities and labs where hundreds of researchers study invasive pests, cow genetics, bee biology, water conservation, and other topics. The agency cited a handful of dilapidated buildings and a desire to increase “efficiency” as the reason for shuttering one of its largest scientific campuses.

And if you can stomach one more, join Heather Hansman for the tale of Rec.Gov, the new reservation system for campsites on federal land which of course has been quickly gamed by bots

Even beyond bot usage, academics have shown that digital access through Rec.gov is inequitable, and that demand for camping and other public land access is outpacing technology and policy. Rangers can’t do anything about those empty campsites, which they want to see used. People like me are pissed they can’t get outside when they want.

And they’re also pissed that the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton is profiting off of every single Recreation.gov transaction, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

As we work though our frustration about access, it’s worth considering why a consulting company Bloomberg once called “the world’s most profitable spy organization”—one that you might remember as Edward Snowden’s employer when he leaked global surveillance documents, and which recently lost 31 Department of Treasury contracts because a former employee leaked Trump’s tax documents—is holding the keys to our public lands.

+As the UK fights on and on about net zero, the biggest source of its carbon emissions is a single power plant that burns mostly wood logged in the U.S. The thinktank Ember has the latest sad chapter on the debacle that is Drax.

Despite being the UK’s largest emitter, Drax’s emissions from burning woody biomass are not counted in official UK emissions statistics. This is due to a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change accounting convention designed to avoid double counting emissions between the energy and land use sectors. This means biomass power emissions are not included in the UK Emissions Trading Scheme and biomass generation is eligible for public subsidies earmarked for renewable energy. In total, Drax has received £8.72 billion in public subsidies for biomass burning since 2012.

Biomass power generation is currently defined as renewable because it is assumed that carbon emitted during combustion is sequestered through replanting and removed from the atmosphere as part of the natural carbon cycle. However, the carbon payback period for woody biomass can be significant, as it can take decades for regrowth to sequester the same volume of carbon emitted. Bodies including the European Academies Science Advisory Council have cautioned against unabated biomass generation for this reason. The immediate, direct emissions from burning wood at Drax are almost twice as high as direct emissions from gas generation (see Methodology for further details). Including emissions from biomass power plants in analysis of UK emitters accounts for the fact that the carbon saving from biomass power is far from guaranteed.

+France is undergoing a truly dire heat wave, which in turn is forcing it to shut down many of its nuclear reactors because rivers have become too warm to cool them. As the Euro edition of Politico reports:

Monday’s broiling temperatures in France forced EDF to stop three of France’s 57 nuclear reactors and reduce production in another seven, the state-owned utility provider said in a statement. When the mercury rose to record-breaking levels last month, a trio of reactors went offline and five were slowed down, causing an 8.7 percent dip in power production just as air conditioners caused a rise in electricity demand.

But solar panels don’t require a river to cool them, and so they’re functioning awfully well right now. In fact, here’s a remarkable idea to end with. As Anna Adamsson, Marriele Mango, and Olivia Tym report, in New Orleans a new model for solar is emerging:

A Beehive Microgrid consists of a “Hive”—a grid-connected microgrid powered by solar and energy storage (solar+storage)—and “Bees”—a group of mobile solar+storage trailers. Bees are charged and stationed at the Hive. In preparation for severe weather or during a power outage, the Bees can be deployed throughout a region to provide services such as Wi-Fi, electrical outlets for charging phones and other devices, refrigeration for food and medication, and to serve as a hub for volunteers or medical providers. When there are no disasters or power outages to respond to, the solar+storage systems can generate economic benefits, such as utility bills savings, and the Bees can be deployed to power outdoor community events like concerts and picnics

The most useful thing I did this week was appear on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast to talk about the rise of clean energy. He framed the story well, and asked generous and sharp questions, and my only regret is that I was too jacked up going in (this is one of the very few remaining real forums in American journalism) and so I think I interrupted him at several points when I just should have been listening. But I know it was a real conversation because at several points I found myself thinking new things, and one that I blurted out was: "Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth."

Even as I said it I wondered if it was an overstatement, so this edition of the newsletter is an effort to interrogate that claim, not to mention an homage to the great Tadej Pogacar, who grabbed control of the Tour de France on Thursday with a truly remarkable climb up a couple of Pyrenean peaks, blithely adapting to the 100-degree heat. If he can do it, why not the rest of us?

The Economist updated an October article this week that began in much the same tone: “Forget EVs,” the headline read. “Cycling is revolutionizing transport.” And really, they began in the right place: even before we get to e-bikes, bikes themselves are a magical technology, according to one recent reckoning from Anthony Blazevitch four times more efficient than walking. (Here’s the chart from Scientific American that more or less proves it).

As the Economist account pointed out,

Though robotaxis have notched up impressive growth, they look ploddingly pedestrian compared with far zippier pedal-powered rivals. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving taxi firm, proudly proclaims that its cars do around 250,000 trips a week. Yet in New York alone that number of trips is made every three days using the city’s bike-share scheme.

In London cyclists now outnumber cars in the City, the financial district, by two to one. Paris, where they now outnumber motorists across the whole city, is catching up with Europe’s traditional bike capitals, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, though cycling is still growing in those cities, too. In Copenhagen, the Danish capital, bikes account for almost half of commuter journeys to work and school.

Even in Beijing, just 30 years after most cyclists were pushed off the city’s roads to make way for cars, the number of cyclists is rising again. Only these days they are more likely to be riding a fancy Brompton bike than a black Flying Pigeon, the ubiquitous pedal-powered ride in the years after the communist revolution.

Covid helped spark the bike boom—American bike trips increased 19% between the summers of 2019 and 2020—but the other factor has been the rapid development of e-bikes.

By giving cyclists a pedal assist, these open up riding to people who cannot comfortably squeeze themselves into slim-fit Lycra. Workers can turn up at a meeting without breaking a sweat or needing to change. They are especially useful for transporting children and groceries, which is hard going if done by pedal power alone. E-bikes have also massively accelerated the use of local bike-share schemes, and made them profitable. With Chicago’s “Divvy” bike scheme for example, e-bikes are now ridden 70% more than “classic” bikes, despite being a lot pricier.

It’s very hard to find up-to-date numbers, but as early as 2023 the estimates were already that e-bikes were cutting oil demand by a million barrels a day, probably more than EVs. There are now 400 million of them on the road in China. I can remember Beijing in the days when the bike was dominant, and “driver” was an occupation—a chauffeur for party higher-ups. Those days may be coming back, as people grow tired of traffic jams, and as Chinese cities make bike infrastructure ever-better. As Daizong Liu, Xianyuan Zhu and Alphonse Tam described a couple of years ago

Beijing put forth a comprehensive plan to make the city more cycling-oriented by 2035. Beijing began this work in 2019 by developing 6-metre-wide, elevated, bike-only lanes to help ease congestion between dense residential areas and busy office districts. The projects are already yielding results: according to ITDP’s analysis, e-bike riders in Beijing now represent approximately 23% of commuters who have shifted from driving and ride-hailing services as their primary transport mode. This shift has contributed to an annual reduction in fuel consumption of nearly 59.86 million litres and an estimated decrease in CO2 emissions of 240,000 tons.

If you broaden your scope a bit to include anything on two wheels, you can see even more progress. Delhi, which has replaced Beijing as the poster child for bad air, has just put up $2.5 billion to electrify more of its transport—two-thirds of the vehicles in the city are on two wheels, and plenty more are the three-wheeled rickshaws that once ran on pedal power but now belch smoke from inefficient engines.

There’s endless room for improvement everywhere. Writing in Streetsblog, Pete Tomao offers new calcuations for the borough of Queens.

Queens Community Board 1 — which encompasses a broad swath of Western Queens — contains roughly 44,749 cars. That’s about 0.49 cars for every household. If Western Queens matched Manhattan’s car ownership rates, there would be 21,000 fewer vehicles on local streets, enough to fill more than 80 football fields of parking space.

Here’s what that might look like. Curbside parking becomes rain gardens, and sidewalks are expanded. Some streets become permanent pedestrian plazas. Instead of hearing cars as you walk on busy streets, you hear your neighbors’ voices.

Medians turn into community gardens, and every intersection has finished crosswalks. All of this is possible. Other cities and countries have already done it.

Most people would look at that and say: Nice. But most people don’t take big contributions for the fossil fuel industry. Probably the easiest way to track the growing importance of bikes is by seeing the backlash they’re creating; around the world, the very worst politicians are making anti-bike crusades key parts of their propaganda. Nigel Farage (now locked in a tight electoral contest with a trash can) has called bike lanes evidence of “anti-car fanaticism,” and Ontario premier Doug Ford’s effort to rip up Toronto’s main bike lanes is currently under court review. But leave it to the Trump administration to escalate things one step further. Last week Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, (whose qualification for office was appearing on the RV-based “reality” show “Road Rules,” and who has just completed a similar gas-guzzling trip with his family sponsored by Toyota and Shell) declared that he was ending federal funding for bike paths because they were “DEI.” As Edith Olmsted reported, federal grants under Biden in 2021 2021 grants funding bike lanes noted that they would serve to “improve infrastructure, strengthen supply chains, make us safer, advance equity, and combat climate change.”

Upon hearing “equity,” President Donald Trump’s goons can’t help but get triggered into attacking any federal spending that won’t benefit them directly. In reality, those Biden-era grants directed funds to build a new transit center in North Carolina, replace bridges in New Mexico, extend streets in New Hampshire, install traffic lights and crosswalks in Missouri, and install bike lanes in Seattle, among other projects. Now the financial status of these projects is unclear.

If “goons” seems strong to you, note that the classy Duffy decided to mock his predecessor’s name in his announcement of the new policy

The thing that makes a bike lane “equitable” is that most people can afford a bike even if they can’t afford a car. If the Secretary of Transportation was actually interested in, say, transportation, then he could usefully occupy himself drawing up some new rules of the road. There are, for instance, “e-bikes” that work just by turning a throttle. These “e-motos” are far more like motorcycles than bicycles, they can go way too fast, and they should be regulated—a license, a helmet, kept to the road and not the bike path. Actual e-bikes—which help you pedal—might well be restricted to pushing you no faster than 20 mph, which would still move you far more quickly around most cities than you can travel in a car.

But that’s not, of course, what motivates the Trump administration. They don’t mind crashes—that’s why they keep making life easier for the bloated SUVs that make American roads ever more dangerous. They hate bikes and e-bikes because they don’t use oil, and all federal policy in this area is devoted to making us burn more, at all times.

It’s not going to work, I don’t think. Bikes are fun, bikes are cheap, e-bikes are super easy to recharge. They’re good for you. As Micah Toll points out, they’re especially good for teenagers, who can cruise the streets in something other than a car.

This type of group riding brings back real-world socialization, which is especially crucial right now. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, American teens are experiencing a “loneliness epidemic,” and much of that isolation has been linked to digital life. E-bikes can help counter that by encouraging face-to-face interaction, literally side-by-side, rolling down the street, talking and laughing the whole way.

People sometimes moan about the fact that we haven’t yet developed flying cars (and God help us if we ever do). But it turns out the transportation we needed was there all along, just waiting to get better. A bike is magic, and an e-bike is a bike without hills and showers. That’s enough miracle for now.

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In other energy and climate news:

+If you want to see what turns on folks like Sean Duffy, here’s perhaps the dumbest truck ad in the history of car ads, starring Trump pal Dana White who brought cage-fighting to the White House. It’s argument, in its entirety, is that the thing that’s good about RAM pickups is that they are very loud, and that if they weren’t loud they wouldn’t be American and hence…not good. It builds to a climax where he literally replaces God with Noise:

Something to ride? Ride it straight into the history books, because quiet won't get you anywhere. In this country, in loud we trust.

Meanwhile, if EVs were feeling a little slighted by my bike advocacy above, good news on that front: Mack Hogan, one of the country’s big-time car reviewers, says they’re progressing much much faster than their noisy counterparts:

When I left Road & Track to join InsideEVs, my car enthusiast friends were surprised. I was trading in the glamorous world of six-figure supercars and earth-shaking monster trucks for the practical business of charging infrastructure and battery chemistry. Why would I bother, they asked, when even the mightiest EV was less exciting and heavier than a run-of-the-mill sports car?

The answer was hard to explain in the present tense. I was tired of living in a world where the past was celebrated as somehow pure, and the future tinged with anxiety about emissions and regulation. I wanted to get excited about the future again, and as I saw gas cars stagnate, I knew that I had to turn the page.

So I did. In the two and a half years since, I can say with certainty that I’ve seen more exciting progress in the EV sector than I have in the last ten years of internal-combustion development. And the party’s just getting started.

It’ll only get better from here. As the North American battery supply chain gears up, prices are falling quickly, and automakers are iterating constantly. Battery breakthroughs like high-silicon anodes, lithium-manganese rich chemistry, and solid-state technology promise to further drive down costs while improving range and longevity. Meanwhile, EVs are getting simpler due to the proliferation of software-defined vehicle architectures, which make them cheaper to build, easier to service, and simple to update.

There are no equivalent gasoline breakthroughs on the horizon. After 150-odd years of iteration, we have already taken the easy money off the table. You’re not going to double MPG without adding a battery, and you’re not going to drive down costs far below today’s figures without major sacrifices. The technology is nearing the end of the line.

Meanwhile, the Chinese (of course) are figuring out cool electric cargo ships

Electric cargo ships are entering real-world operation at a rapidly growing pace (Figure 1). In 2022, there were only four electric cargo ships in China; by 2025, this figure had increased by 950%, to 42.

Ship types have diversified, from bulk carriers and container ships to multi-purpose cargo ships. At the same time, vessel sizes have grown significantly, with the maximum deadweight tonnage (DWT) rising from around 3,000 tonnes in 2022 to approximately 14,000 tonnes in 2025.

This indicates that China is testing the feasibility of electrification for increasingly larger ships. Although battery capacity constraints continue to limit sailing range per charge—which typically hovered between 150 km and 400 km from 2022 to 2025—trends show steady improvement; by 2025, electric cargo ships with a range of up to 500 km were already in operation in China.

+Accounts of the great European heatwave (still ongoing in many places) continue to trickle in, with the Guardian doing the best job of both chronicling the disaster and linking it to its causes. Here’s their account of what schools are like

Teachers say they have been desperately trying to keep children safe, with some covering younger pupils in wet paper towels as they lie on the floor, while older students have been given trays of water under their desks to put their feet in.

Staff say learning on the hottest days is almost impossible, with pupil behaviour and attention deteriorating rapidly.

Some teachers and pupils have fainted, while others say they have had to buy fans and window shades out of their own pockets to try to keep themselves and their pupils safe.

And just in case you’re wondering what a record heatwave feels like on London’s Tube, Rosie Peters-McDonald has the answer:

A quick glance at the thermometer I’m carrying on this unscientific investigation shows that the station is about 30C. On the platform and tube it crawls up to 32C, and then at the Victoria line platform at Finsbury Park it hits 34C. In the UK, it is illegal to transport cattle above 30C; transporting people at 34C, though, might be becoming the norm.

Asher Minns, executive director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a partnership across several UK universities, says that tube tunnels are “basically radiators”, taking on the heat of the clay and concrete around them. The carriages, platforms and surrounding tunnels are also warmed by the hundreds of kilowatts of heat the trains produce while breaking. And the warmer it is outside, the worse it gets underground.

But Minns adds that the infrastructure is difficult to adapt because of its age and the surrounding clay. It will likely be years before the network is better suited to dealing with the heat, so for now he says the focus needs to be reducing risks to passengers.

+Portland, Oregon’s climate fund is working so well that…politicians want to raid it for other purposes. Jamie Parfitt has the story:

In November 2018, Portland voters overwhelmingly approved a tax on large retailers to fund clean energy and job training projects. It was the work of longtime climate activists and leaders in communities of color.

Measure 26-201 instituted a 1% Clean Energy Surcharge on gross revenue from retail sales in the city for companies with total annual revenue above $1 billion and in-city revenue over $500,000. Proceeds would go toward the new Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund, or PCEF, to support those climate-related projects.

Eight years later, the PCEF has amassed at least $1.7 billion — all of it already allocated, either through community grants or long-term strategic initiatives. But in a cash-strapped city facing pressing needs beyond climate change alone, that growing war chest has increasingly invited proposals for other uses.

To Mayor Keith Wilson, it’s a way to bankroll renovations to the Moda Center and keep the Trail Blazers in Portland. To some city councilors, it’s one way to undo job cuts in the budget they just reluctantly adopted. To the city’s police union, it’s a way to boost the Portland Police Bureau’s budget and hire several hundred more officers.

+Writing at the National Catholic Reporter, Sabrina Danielson and Ellie Simmons have the scoop on why nuns are so much more environmentally engaged than priests, bishops, etc. (something I have seen in many places)

Research shows that the top U.S. Catholic leaders, U.S. bishops, have largely approached climate change with ambivalence and denialism, and have largely avoided engaging in significant climate action, despite their power to do so within their local dioceses. This is likely due to their ties to Republican individuals and organizations.

In contrast, Catholic sisters, who have little formal power within the U.S. Catholic Church, are leading on environmental issues at many levels of society and within the Catholic Church.

Our research finds that 1) key qualities of sisters' avowed religious life facilitate their environmental leadership and 2) bishops and diocesan priests' environmental leadership may be inhibited by their power and money interests, as well as their isolation from community…

Many sisters perceived U.S. bishops and diocesan priests as being resistant to environmental activism because they were more focused on maintaining their institutional power. For example, one sister described bishops as “hesitant to move on any area that is controversial.”

Here, some sisters discussed bishops and diocesan priests as not wanting to anger conservative financial donors or parishioners. This aligns with findings that political conservatives are more skeptical of climate change. The sisters noted that “money does talk” and some “have outsized influence in some of their dioceses because of the amount of money that the family has.” Diocesan priests were described as “trying to please the people and not rile them, and they don’t want their money to go down.”

+Here’s an interesting two-fer: the face of a big Swiss dam now studded with solar panels. Apparently they work best in winter, because these alpine dams are often. up above the cloud layer.

I visited Omsk once, or at least its airport; we were en route from Moscow to Ulan Ade on the Mongolian border, and the Aeroflot flight landed there to refuel. (It was a memorable journey; this was still the Soviet Union, and on boarding for the full-day flight, the stewardess handed each passenger a baggie with a scrawny chicken drumstick). All of which is to say, I’m equipped to pronounce, with the gravitas proper to a pundit, that Omsk is long ways from anywhere else.

Including the Ukrainian border, which makes it remarkable that Zelensky’s drone specialists managed to fly a whole squadron of their craft more than 2,500 kilometers from home and bomb the heck out of Putin’s largest oil refinery. It was the high point of an ongoing campaign designed to highlight what may be Russia’s greatest weakness: that it, like a number of other countries, is heavily dependent on oil.

Just as Donald Trump has proposed building American prosperity on the back of “energy dominance" via “liquid gold,” oil was supposed to be Russia’s strength, the source of its greatest riches. (John McCain memorably called it a “gas station with nukes.”) And indeed in the early days of the war Russia flexed its hydrocarbon muscle, threatening to cut off Europe’s gas supply. Throughout its invasion of its neighbor, Russia has relied on the often-covert export of oil via its fleet of “shadow tankers” to keep revenue flowing. Trump of course made this easier and more profitable for his buddy by temporarily lifting sanctions in the wake of our own ill-advised attack on Iran.

But if our attack on Iran has made other nations demonstrably more nervous about relying on the import of hydrocarbons, Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s petroleum network should make them nervous about depending on the stuff even if they don’t have to bring it in from afar. It turns out that in the drone age it’s a very risky business, because it relies on colossal pieces of infrastructure that can’t be easily defended.

One of those is the supertanker—there’s one on fire today in the Gulf, apparently hit by an Iranian missile because it strayed from the Tehran-approved shipping lane. Ukrainian drones attacked another yesterday in the Sea of Azov, crippling the vessel. There’s essentially no defense for these slow-moving giant ships if an adversary with a few drones wants to take one out—they are, after all, a floating pool of flammable liquid.

Another vulnerability is the terminal where you load and unload the crude—Ukraine got one of those yesterday too, in occupied Crimea

The facility serves as a major logistics hub for petroleum products on the occupied peninsula, handling the receipt, storage and transfer of oil between rail infrastructure, storage tanks and tankers

And a third—and perhaps most exposed—is the refinery. An oil refinery is one of the most specialized pieces of equipment humans have ever built; anyone who’s ever driven by one on the highway will recognize that the tangle of pipes and tanks that makes each so complicated. It’s an industry truism that no two are alike.

That means that they’re highly vulnerable. If you aim your drone well, maybe it will smash, say, the ELOU-AVT-11 Unit, which at Omsk is what they call the thing that does the initial distillation and desalination of the crude. Without it, the secondary units that produce, say, gasoline and jet fuel have nothing to work with. And this is highly complicated equipment not easy to replace—given western sanctions, the current guess is six months to a year. And it’s not as if Ukraine has hit just that refinery—in fact, it was one of the last squares on a drone pilot’s bingo card. As Illia Kabachynskyi reports

It's also worth remembering that Ukraine has already hit all ten of Russia's largest refineries, some of them more than once. That means it's no longer a single plant waiting for repairs—it's effectively all of them at once, which piles additional pressure on repair crews and on the supply of replacement parts that are hard to source under sanctions.

Russia started this energy war, of course—over the years of the conflict it has targeted heating plants and the like, trying to freeze the fighting spirit out of the Ukrainians during their long winters. It’s been effective at producing cold, but not at winning the war; along with the attacks on schools, hospitals, and other civilian targets it seems to have helped reinforce the Ukrainian will to resist.

Now—with far more attention to avoiding civilian casualties—the Ukrainians are striking back, at defense plants, and especially at refineries. As Zelensky said this morning,

The very idea of Russia having a strategic rear is gone. For a long time, Russia believed it had territorial advantage no one else possessed, a deep rear, where it could safely keep everything its war depends on, believing no one could reach them. We have reached them.

But of course what’s at stake here is not just the oil that the Russian war machine runs on. In Russia, as in America, almost everything runs on oil. I remember that the one and only time that I sat down with Barack Obama, the first thing he told me was that “the price of gasoline is the most salient fact in American politics.” If that’s even close to the case in Russia, Putin better watch out: in occupied Crimea, gas prices are going above ten dollars a gallon. The government is desperately trying to import gasoline from as far away as India. As Pjotr Sauer reported this morning, police are having to draw guns to quell disturbances at gas stations where lines can stretch for kilometers, “fuel tourists” are crossing the borders with China and Kazakhstan to fill their tanks, and as a result

“Mass fatigue with the war is turning into mass irritation,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst. Even so, he said the shortages were unlikely to trigger widespread protests in Russia’s tightly controlled political system. “There is certainly shock, but the lack of any real means of influencing the situation – and the risks associated with trying to do so – make protests unlikely.”

This seems likely to get worse. Here’s a social media post from an Omsk resident watching the drone strikes: "Don't waste any time right now. Anyone with a car who's watching me - head to the gas station! The lines are about to get crazy."
And here’s an account of how Russian horse breeders are reporting a surge in sales because a steed is now cheaper to maintain than a car; check out the video of the equestrian cantering past the endless line at the gas station.

Ukraine has stood up to Russia’s attacks on its energy infrastructure mostly by starting to diversify: as Paul Hockenos reported last winter, the country is undergoing a rapid renewables revolution

According to estimates from the Solar Energy Association of Ukraine, the nation installed at least 1.5 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2025 — enough to power roughly 1.1 million homes — and grid operators intend to almost double the country’s renewable energy production over the next four years.

“Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”

In the most basic terms, a single missile can take out a gas-fired power plant. But as Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor, explains,

“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.

That’s because sun and wind and batteries are not like oil—they are small, interchangeable pieces of infrastructure, easily subbed in. There aren’t chokepoints like refineries and tankers and terminals; there’s no cascading failure. My roof is covered with solar panels, and I suppose a saboteur could put a ladder against the wall and climb up there with a hammer and do some damage. But it wouldn’t shut down the electric grid across New England; it would be a problem, not a crisis. Which in turn is why no rational saboteur would ever bother.

And once you can run cars and heat pumps and cooktops off the power those panels and turbines generate, then you’re far more protected against attack. If Vladimir Putin had an electrified Russia he would worry far less about Ukrainian drones. Of course, if the world ran on electricity Russia would never have built up the treasury required to act like a bellicose beast.

Look, world leaders should be moving quickly to clean energy because it’s the one scaleable weapon in the war against climate change. But I’ll take any motivation—and I’ll count it as a real bonus if a cleaner world is also one where it’s harder to attack your neighbors because they don’t have vulnerable infrastructure. The peace dividend from sun and wind could be very real.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Guy Trebay reports that for the rich climate change is less of a problem—they’re installing “snow rooms” in mansions and on yachts.

A snow room is more or less the opposite of a sauna — a cavelike space of ice and snow. In some, white flakes descend gently from the ceiling to create the feeling of being inside a snow globe.

The petrochemical billionaire Mukesh Ambani had one installed in Antilia, the skyscraper in Mumbai, India, that his family calls home. The 440-foot superyacht Serene, owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, also has one.

I’ll just note that these are precisely the people that have driven the temperature through the roof.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the new accessory every “hot girl” wants is a vintage gas-guzzling SUV, for which they’re willing to pay top dollar.

In wealthy zip codes and tony beach towns, shiny new luxury cars have taken a back seat as a status symbol. Instead, young women are pining for throwback, off-road SUVs. They’re “hot girl” cars—accessories meant to be flaunted on social media.

“I’ll just sit in a coffee shop and watch a million girls take a photo in front of my car,” said Tezza Barton, a 35-year-old content creator and founder in Los Angeles who got a brown 1995 Mercedes-Benz 230GE soft top SUV last year for about $100,000. “It’s the perfect backdrop.”

Classic cars have always enthralled collectors. Now interest in vintage Jeeps, Land Rover Defenders and Ford Broncos is surging for women who will pay top dollar for old cars, never-ending upkeep be damned. Kendall Jenner has a 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser. Sydney Sweeney has been spotted in Los Angeles driving a 1969 red Bronco she restored herself. Mega influencer Alix Earle often posts photos inside vintage pickup trucks and Broncos.

In this case I’ll just note that if they keep it up, they will be hot girls in more ways than one

+Andy Revkin has the tale of the Clearwater—the late Pete Seeger’s wonderful Hudson River sloop—being booted from a tall ships parade for daring to raise the idea of climate change

Clearwater was removed from the Sail4th 250 Parade of Sail by the USCG and escorted out of the Exclusion Zone by the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and NYPD.

Captain Rory Kane inquired why, and was informed the removal was due to the presence of banners reading: ‘Save the Clean Water Act and Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions’”.

A representative from Sail4th 250 informed the Captain the decision was ‘above them.’

+Just to get the numbers on the record, Trump’s efforts to stifle solar and wind projects are putting at least 92 gigawatts of clean cheap power on the shelf, Catherine Boudreau reports

More than $121 billion worth of early-stage renewable energy projects are at risk of getting caught up in the Interior Department’s permitting blockade, according to a Wood Mackenzie analysis.

That total represents a pipeline of 92 gigawatts of solar, wind, and battery storage projects planned on federal and private lands through 2029. They could be subject to heightened scrutiny by DOI under five policies published last year — including one that requires Secretary Doug Burgum’s office to sign off on permits rather than career bureaucrats. Wood Mackenzie’s analysis doesn’t include the some 29 gigawatts of onshore wind projects that the Pentagon is also holding up, citing national security concerns.

How much will that cost us? New modeling shows that meeting rising electric demand with renewable energy would save the country $5 billion a year compared with using fossil fuel.

Meanwhile, a new study shows that the costs of using gas to generate electricity are consistently underestimated. As Cassady Craighill writes

While utilities often seek approval for new gas plants based solely on their upfront construction costs, a new analysis by Current Energy Group and GridLab reveals these “sticker prices” omit a slew of hidden infrastructure costs, including mandatory, long-term contracts for firm pipeline transportation, gas storage and gas processing equipment.

Accounting for these fixed, decades-long fuel liabilities routinely inflates a project’s true cost to consumers by roughly 30%, significantly altering its economic competitiveness against cleaner energy resources. That’s like budgeting for the price of a new house and a new car next year, but failing to account for the closing costs and realtor fees, utility bills, moving expenses, insurance, taxes, gas and maintenance.

+As extreme heat waves plague much of the planet, Cam Fenton has a remarkable anniversary account of what may be the greatest heat dome anomaly yet, the 2021 catastrophe that saw temperatures reach 121 F in British Columbia

For most paramedics in Vancouver, shift change happens around 6:00 am, as the night crew leaves and the day shift takes over. It’s usually cool, especially in Vancouver, where the ocean breeze helps moderate the temperatures. But on June 28, 2021, it was already 22 C and rising when Jayne Hamilton started her shift.

“I knew it was going to be hot, I knew it was going to be miserable,” she explains. “I didn’t, even with that, have an understanding of how hot it was going to be.”

Like Ackerman, Hamilton was immediately dispatched to a cardiac arrest. By the time she cleared from that one, she was sent to another.

“Somewhere between the second and third one, we started commenting out loud that ‘this is not normal,’ ” she says. “When you’ve made it to three cardiac arrests before 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s odd.”

Hamilton is an advanced care paramedic. A specialist dispatched to the most serious emergencies, she has more training than the primary care paramedics who make up the bulk of the ambulance service. But even with that focus, Hamilton says “a heavy week of cardiac arrests” would be three in a four-day work block. But on June 28, she says she responded to 11 of the 27 that came across her dispatch computer.

“It seemed endless, like just an endless avalanche,” she says.

+The ten new winners of the Keeling Curve Prize were announced last week. They included Barefoot College International, which is training rural women to be solar engineers.

+From Brandon Loomis, an excellent piece in the Arizona Republic detailing just how bad things are getting on the Colorado River

The natural flow — a term for what likely would pass Lees Ferry if not for the dam and other impoundments above it — averaged 15.2 million acre-feet in the 20th century, according to Brad Udall, a climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center.

In this century so far, it has averaged just 12 million. The difference adds up to 80 million acre-feet over the 27 years since the reservoir last oscillated near capacity in the 1990s — a volume of lost water since 2000 that could have filled Lake Powell’s storage capacity more than three times over.

The average yearly flow during the worst 27-year period of the 20th century was more than a million acre-feet higher than during this megadrought. The last seven years have been bleaker still, averaging just 10.2 million acre-feet. Even stacked against the worst seven-year stretch of the 20th century, the last seven have brought an annual deficit of 1.7 million, a loss that’s more than five times the water that Phoenix, America’s fifth-largest city, supplies to its customers.

and there’s no big secret what’s going on

The Colorado River Basin is warming at a rate of 3 degrees Celsius per century, Udall said, compared with a global average rate of 2 degrees. Each degree Celsius is expected to reduce Colorado River flows by another 9% from increased evapotranspiration, he said, citing 2020 research by U.S. Geological Survey scientists published in Science magazine.

+Emily Pontecorvo reports on the Trump administrations latest efforts to permanently end efficiency standards for appliances

The Process Rule changes threaten the potential to create significant consumer savings, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. The group estimates that based on recent technological advances, the DOE’s next round of standard updates could save the average U.S. household $160 per year on their utility bills, and businesses a collective $15 billion in annual operating costs over 20 years. The group also projects that updated standards have the potential to reduce summer peak electricity demand 34 gigawatts by 2040, which would be like taking New York City off the grid. There are climate benefits, too, of course — an estimated reduction of 800 million metric tons of carbon emissions through 2050.

+Online screening tonight of the important new documentary Vs Goliath, about the epic fight to head off more dangerous development in Cancer Alley

+We’re used to thinking of the dark satanic mills as the places where fossil fuel consumption really took off, but a new book argues it was really in people’s homes, especially in the Low Countries. Wout Saelens draws on

probate inventories, household manuals, personal journals, medical treatises and contemporary artwork to reveal how households in the early modern Low Countries embraced peat and coal to fuel new standards of warmth, light and domesticity.

+The Glacier Challenge is underway, and if you win you could become one of 18 people traveling to Colombia to work on glacier restoration

+Fascinating new study finds a tight link between gas stoves and asthma

At baseline, 10 individuals (11.8%) had an emergency room visit or hospitalization in the past 4 weeks. At follow-up, 3 individuals (3.5%) had an emergency room visit or hospitalization in the past 4 weeks (absolute difference -8.2%, 95% CI -16.2% to -3.4%). There were also significant improvements in missed work or school days. Indoor NO₂ levels decreased from 21.0 to 6.3 ppb (change -14.7, 95% CI -20.8 to -8.7).

+If you still think of it as “alternative energy,” high time to update your priors. The indefatigable Mark Gongloff chronicles the sheer size of the green economy

A recent report from the London Stock Exchange Group Plc (LSEG) found that “green economy” companies, or those that derive a significant portion of their revenue from stuff like clean energy, efficiency and water management, now have a total stock market value of $10 trillion. If this were a standalone sector, it would be bigger than healthcare and third in the world only to technology and industrials.

Since 2008, valuations for these companies have grown by 18% a year, compared with 12% for the broader market, the report found. Their stocks have outperformed global equities by 133%. A representative sample of these companies, the FTSE Environmental Opportunities All Share Index, topped the FTSE Global All-Cap Index by 12% last year.

In fact, this stealth sector just had one of its best years on record despite many of the world’s governments and the corporate sector abandoning their pre-Trump pledges to zero out carbon emissions to stave off the worst of global heating. Green revenues grew 5.3% last year, the fastest since 2022, the year of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Evidence keeps mounting that the green economy has entered a new phase, one where its rapidly improving economics give it lasting immunity from fickle political sentiments. Even as the dreams of the 2015 Paris Agreement, net zero, the IRA and more have crumbled, the technology with the power to make some of those dreams come true has only gained momentum.

“What the LSEG data shows us is that the green economy’s resilience is no longer dependent on politics,” Matthew Roling, founding executive director of the Abrams Climate Academy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Energy security, grid reliability and supply chain security are now the primary drivers. Those are arguments that resonate in boardrooms. That’s a materially more durable foundation than the Paris Agreement consensus ever was.”

+Ketan Joshi has the numbers on just how fast the big tech companies are running up their electricity use to keep AI providing us with all the hallucinations we could ever want:

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Google’s latest climate report, but holy hell, I did not expect this.

The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever, and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now.

That is to say, Google is using more juice than New Zealand or Nigeria or Morocco.

Google doesn’t even bother to pretend to be on track for its climate goals. Mix the foolish decision-making of FOMO-ridden executives with the most stunningly inefficient software tool big tech has ever created and you end up with a formerly efficient company turned into a blunt Bitcoin-style climate bomb, weirdly still convinced they’re saving the planet.

+Just to wrap up where we started, a kind of beautiful story out of Ukraine. It turns out that when the Netherlands (which has some history with windmills) replaces its wind turbines with more modern models, it is sending the old ones to embattled Ukraine, since they still have many years of life left. As Yuri Zoria reports

A Ukrainian entrepreneur named Serhii has already bought six of them. He runs a factory in the south that presses seed oil for the world market, and he wants nine turbines standing on a nearby hill by year’s end. His power supply is the reason. The grid gives him roughly two hours of electricity, then ten hours without. A single Dutch turbine can change that math.

The war reaches the machines too — Russian attacks target not only substations and conventional power plants but also solar and wind arrays. A Russian drone hit the blades of one, Serhii said, and his crew set about repairing it. He plans to order three more before the year is out.

And that bad mood was deepened by some truly remarkable reporting that began dropping late last week, from a combined team at Pro Publica and Drilled that included the truly vital freelance reporter Amy Westervelt. It concerned a paper by two Princeton professors, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, from the summer of 2004, 22 years ago. A two-decade-old academic paper does not seem all that crucial—but it played a huge role in setting the terms of the climate and energy debate, one that endures to this day. And it illustrates exactly how wasteful much of our current federal effort has become. So—even though it’s infuriating—it’s a story very much worth recounting. Settle in.

This paper quickly became known as “Wedges.” It emerged at one of the low points in the climate cycle that I referred to last week, the post-Kyoto pre-Inconvenient Truth period when Dick Cheney was driving federal energy policy and not much was happening, and so people were grateful for the assertion from these two climate academics that

Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50years and limit atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration.

They went on to outline a series of fifteen “wedges”—everything from substituting natural gas for coal to inreasing fuel efficiency for cars—that they said would add up to enough emissions reductions to stabilize global temperatures. And crucially they said that that none of this was pie-in-the-sky.

Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.

Because it told people what they very much hoped to hear, it became an instant sensation—when Al Gore’s remarkable movie came out in 2006, for instance, it ended on a positive note.

Americans need not despair, he said, because “we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” Behind him as he spoke, the opening words of Socolow and Pacala’s paper — the same ones Mottershead had suggested moving to the top — appeared on a screen.

I remember hoping that much of this paper would turn out to be true—at least it gave people something to work on. And hey, it was coming from respected, independent researchers, right? Why not give them the respect they seemed to deserve.

But the paper’s scientific validity began to erode pretty fast. For one thing, they’d picked a comparatively easy baseline, plotting to hold atmospheric concentrations of co2 to 550 parts per million, or double the level before the Industrial Revolution. Already by 2004 that number was seriously in question; by then more and more scientists were murmuring about 450 ppm, and in 2008 Jim Hansen published a landmark paper putting the safe maximum at 350 ppm. (I remember this well, because we built the planet’s first big global grassroots climate campaign on the back of that number).

There were plenty of other things that seemed unlikely, and that turned out to be wrong. For instance, they were big on biomass (and when I mean big, I mean they proposed using one sixth of the planet’s cropland to grow stuff you would then burn). They wanted to produce massive amounts of hydrogen for use in fuel cell cars, a technology that’s gone nowhere. The word “batteries” goes unmentioned. But these are mistakes—they couldn’t have known then how these technologies would develop, though their guesses were staggeringly wrong, despite being delivered with absolute Ivy League assurance.

Their biggest “mistake” was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas—indeed they wanted to quadruple the amount of natural gas. It was a few years later that scientists led by Bob Howarth at Cornell began to explain exactly what folly this was—that you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane—but by then it was too late, and we were deep into the fracking era whose final chapter (overseas export of liquefied natural gas) is now the main goal of the fossil fuel industry.

If you’ve been paying attention, most of these mistakes pointed in the direction of continuing to burn stuff. And it turns out that was no mere mistake—it was pretty much the goal. Because as Westervelt and the Pro Publica team have now uncovered, the tiny-print final footnote to the paper was the most misleading thing in it

The authors thank J. Greenblatt, R. Hotinski, and R. Williams at Princeton; K. Keller at Penn State; and C. Mottershead at BP. This paper is a product of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) of the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University. CMI (www.princeton.edu/cmi) is sponsored by BP and Ford.

In fact, BP was no footnote to this study—the paper had been a joint production of its authors and British Petroleum, whose chairman, John Browne, literally came up with the phrase (“wedges”) that would define the paper.

“We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want,’” Pacala remembers thinking. “‘You’re paying the bills, buddy.’”

The enterprising reporters have tracked down the voluminous correspondence between the oil company and the scientists, and god it’s damning. Here’s a note from a BP executive to the researchers, for instance

The pro-fossil fuel slant of the Wedges paper was no accident. Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative was funded by BP, and the reasons were quite explicit. Here’s the most damning exchange the reporters uncovered, in my opinion

In an email to Socolow after the paper’s submission, Mottershead celebrated, writing that the target meant that “around 50% of primary energy could still come from fossil fuels.”

This, Mottershead wrote, was “THE key piece of the framework for politicians and business, in my view.” Socolow acknowledged, in another subsequent email, that the figure would keep the fossil fuel industry a “part of things for at least another 50 years.”

This commitment was unblushing in ways that blow my mind.

When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,” the renewal document said. “This is still our job.”

And of course if your plan for dealing with global warming was to keep burning lots of fossil fuel, you were going to have to figure out how to deal with all the carbon that would therefore pour into the atmosphere. By default, one—or really, three—of the wedges would have to be carbon capture and sequestration. And in order to make the case that this was a viable technology, the authors had to—well, they had to massage the truth way past the point where they should have.

“We were CCS enthusiasts,” Socolow said in an interview.

But the researchers appeared to be stretching their own parameters to make carbon capture and storage fit. The “Wedges” framework was supposed to be made up of “ready to deploy” technologies. Yet carbon capture and storage had barely been tested, and no experts interviewed could recall a commercial power plant using it.

Still, the Princeton group kept it at the center of the mix.

The effect of this paper can be felt today. When the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in the Biden years, it contained desperately needed funding for sun, wind, and batteries. But Joe Manchin, who had taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in DC (including from BP’s North American Political Action Committee) traded his decisive vote for a grab bag of gifts for the fossil fuel industry—including huge amounts of federal money for carbon capture and sequestration.

I remember a conversation with Mark Jacobson—the unbought Stanford researcher who figured out that sun, wind, and batteries were the wedges that would count—shortly after the IRA passed. Jacobson (who had been attacked by a committee of 21 luminaries for insisting that renewable energy was the best way out of the climate mess) was lamenting the waste of money on carbon capture, and I was dutifully explaining that it was the pound of flesh that had been necessary to get the money for the actual energy transition. Jacobson, as it turns out, had the last bitter laugh—when the Republican congress gutted the IRA last year, the carbon capture part was one of the few things they left intact. It’s an ongoing pointless effort whose only purpose is to continue providing some kind of cover for burning more fossil fuel. A government that doesn’t believe in global warming is nonetheless paying the oil industry incredible sums to pretend to capture carbon.

And when I say pretend, that’s what I mean. The Pro Publica crew simultaneously published another piece demonstrating quite conclusively that two decades later Socolow’s “enthusiasm” for CCS was a dead end. As they write, “right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.” Here’s the key chart from that paper

If you look at it closely, the blue lines show the projections made by the various groups that followed Socolow and Pacala for how much carbon we’d capture, compared with the brown line at the bottom, which shows how much we actually do capture. Which is, to a rounding error, none. The second chart shows all the projections for how much solar power we’d generate, none of which came even close to capturing how fast this technology would explode.

Give Jacobson the last laugh here. As he pointed out last week, “replacing gas with renewables for California’s electricity has reduced twice the carbon as all the world’s carbon capture projects.” That is, a few years work in one of the fifty states in one of the 200 countries on earth has done more than the thing that the fossil fuel industry has based its whole climate rationale on.

A couple of final footnotes here, which really get at the perfidy of all of this.

In the same year that BP was rewriting the Princeton paper, they were also using one of the world’s biggest ad agencies, Ogilvy and Mather, to spread the idea of the “carbon footprint,” which is to say the idea that it’s all your fault, not BP’s. (Read Rebecca Solnit’s account. It’s a hard call but I’d say their pollution of the world’s information system outranks even their pollution of the Gulf of Mexico).

And last month Princeton became the first of the Ivies to renege on their pledge to divest from fossil fuels. Why? Because according to their investment manager, fossil fuel companies “will necessarily play a significant role in the clean-energy transition we want for our nation and for the Earth.” Hey, put a Tiger in your tank. At intellectually corrupt Princeton, and among the nation’s intellectually corrupt elites, too little ever changes.

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In other energy and climate news:

+One of the better accounts of Europe’s extreme heat came from the Wall Street Journal, which interviewed lots of Americans and expats

Americans in Europe have been getting the shock of their lives this summer as temperatures soar to new records across the continent. Highs have approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the U.K. this week, and topped that level in cities like Paris.

Expats and tourists from some of the hottest, muggiest U.S. states are bewildered: How has a lifetime of sweltering heat not prepared them for this?

“I did get humbled,” said Marissa Parks, a 30-year-old nurse who moved to London last year from Houston. “Being a Texan, it feels kind of embarrassing to be in London and be like, ‘I can’t handle the heat here.’”

But if you want a real, sweaty feel, you need to read Sarah Wilson’s Parisian chronicle in her This is Precious substack.

My apartment is currently 43C. It drops to 38C overnight. I slept in a tent in a forest for a few nights. I tried three nights in the apartment. Each night I would wander the city with my laptop, hopping from a workspace to a hotel foyer to a gym (where I’d take a cold shower in my bra and undies and dry myself with my dress; my soggy outfit would keep me cool for another hour or so). I sat in parks, my feet in the fountain, talking to family and friends in Australia until 1am when it was safe(ish) to head upstairs.

After opening the window, I turned on the fan, putting a wet towel over the top. I showered with my sheet and another towel and got into bed, wearing frozen socks (a tip from a WhatsApp group), the wet sheet and towel over my body, and holding two ice bricks. Within two hours everything was dry and hot again and I repeated the process.

There has been much pointless social media back-and-forth about air conditioning in Europe, which of course we need now. (We need it even more desperately in Asia, South America, and Africa). And the good news is that it comes most easily and efficiently from the device—the heat pump—that we’ve been advocating for nonstop since this newsletter started. (Thanks again to all of you, who spearheaded our successful effort to get a quarter billion dollars from the Defense Production Act under Biden for boosting their production). My only addition to this debate would be to point out that on an overheating world we might be better off calling them ‘cold pumps.’ In fact, Dan McCarthy reported over the weekend that whatever you call them, these devices are about to surpass air conditioners in total American sales

+Boy oh boy do they work fast in China, where in a matter of months sodium batteries have gone from cool new innovation to being tested—successfully—in long-haul 18-wheelers. As Jo Borrás reports:

Chinese heavy truck brand FAW Jiefang recently completed a full-condition, systematic test that ran for nearly seven months and covered more than 15,000 km (~9,350 miles). The tests closely tracked its electric truck fleet’s real-world operations in both extreme heat and cold, relying on continuous service-style operations (as opposed to laboratory test cycles) that exposed the sodium-ion battery packs to the kinds of stresses electric trucking fleets actually face on a daily basis: long-haul runs, repeated charging sessions, and constant exposure to changing road and weather conditions.

At -40°C, the 339 kWh sodium-ion battery pack co-developed by FAW and battery supplier Zhongke Haina retained more than 90% of its usable capacity – more than enough to ensure it can reliably meet the freight needs in the coldest regions of northern China, where nighttime temperatures can frequently plummet to -20°C in areas like Harbin and Shenyang.

Meanwhile, Chinese carmaker BYD froze one of its luxury EVs at -22F for 24 hours just to show it wouldn’t matter. And as Iulian Dnistran reports, when they plugged it in the “car’s state of charge went from 20% to 97% in 12 minutes, just like BYD claimed when it debuted its latest battery tech, making the range meter read nearly 626 miles (1,009 kilometers).” I know you well enough to know that you would like a picture

.

+What happens when you pretend climate change doesn’t exist? In Corpus Christi, as Dylan Baddour describes, they’re finding out:

Climate scientists have concluded that the Earth’s warming atmosphere has made droughts worse over the past 25 years and will continue to do so over the next 25.

But that isn’t reflected in Texas’ water plans. “Climate-related projections are not something that any of Texas’ state water plans have included,” a spokesman for the Texas Water Development Board said, referring questions about climate to the Office of the State Climatologist.

“The majority of factors point toward increased drought severity,” said an assessment of weather trends by the climatologist’s office in 2024, Corpus Christi’s hottest year on record. “Future rainfall deficits comparable to those earlier in the 20th century will have greater impacts due to higher temperatures.”

As a result, the city very nearly ran out of water this spring.

+A Pakistani dentist, Zain Ashar, was noticing huge levels of tooth decay in many of his patients who were outdoor laborers. And he figured out why, in a story that gives you some deep sense of just how much we’re pushing the limits of the planet and of ourselves.

Like most outdoor laborers during peak season, Rashid drinks 15 to 20 liters of water daily to survive the relentless heat. (While this can seem like an excessive amount of water, a worker can sweat as much as 1 to 1.5 liters an hour from heavy labor in 45°C temperatures. To compensate for the loss of electrolytes through sweat, workers here consume yogurt and lime drinks with added salt, and eat pickles and other salty foods.) By mid-morning, sweat soaks through his clothes as his body’s cooling mechanism works overtime. He chews on sugarcane during breaks, which provides quick calories — an ancient practice that sustained ancestors but now compounds health problems. Nothing about his general health seemed unusual at first. But when I asked about saliva — that often-overlooked component of oral health that most people never think about — there was a long pause.

“My mouth is always dry,” he said quietly in Urdu. “Even when I drink water until I feel sick. My mouth stays dry.”

That’s when something clicked into place that would fundamentally reshape my understanding of what I’d been observing in my practice. I’d documented this pattern of tooth decay in 37 patients by this point, all agricultural workers, all from the same climate-ravaged zones in the central-eastern state of Punjab. I just hadn’t connected the dots to heat-induced dehydration and its catastrophic effects on oral chemistry. Their mouths weren’t just dry — external climate forces were fundamentally turning them into hostile environments for their own teeth. I realized I was witnessing something far more systemic and urgent than a collection of individual dental problems. This was environmental collapse writing itself directly into human biological systems.

SALIVA IS NOT just moisture. It’s a physiological fortress, a sophisticated system that most people take entirely for granted until it fails them. For anyone, but especially for people doing physically demanding work in extreme conditions, saliva performs three critical functions that are absolutely essential to tooth survival: It buffers acids from food and stomach reflux that would otherwise erode enamel; it holds calcium and phosphate minerals, which actively remineralize tooth enamel when microscopic damage occurs; and it contains enzymes and antibodies that fight bacteria, helping prevent infection and decay. Without adequate saliva flow — and I mean genuinely adequate, not just the minimal amount needed to swallow — teeth begin to demineralize within weeks, a process that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

+An Italian windfarm took down its older generation of windmills, replacing them with newer models—and as Reuters reports, even though the number of turbines fell by 73 percent, the farm is now producing two and half times as much electricity.

Edison ​said updating ⁠plants could play a major role in Italian wind power growth, noting that those ​suitable for upgrades account for around 6 ​GW of ⁠the country’s 13.5 GW of installed wind capacity.

Modernisation of existing wind sites could potentially add more than 13 GW ⁠of ​renewable capacity, helping meet Italy’s national ​target of 26 GW of installed wind power by 2030.

+Dan Gearino has a cheery account of the dawn of the plug-in solar era in America where (and huge shout out here to Michael Richardson and his Third Act crew) ten states have now approved the new technology this spring. He talks with Craig Morris, head of Germany’s plug-in solar association:

Morris explained that the main benefit he sees with plug-in solar is that consumers are taking greater control of their energy costs and becoming participants in the transition to clean energy. He views this as part of creating and maintaining a political consensus that supports the transition, which is good for everyone.

He also sees land-use benefits, with plug-in solar occupying otherwise unused spaces in yards and on roofs and balconies. His organization has calculated that widespread adoption of plug-in solar would meet about 2 percent of Germany’s electricity demand.

+Interesting new book from Will Hackman, who makes the case that we need to be using different language

Let’s talk about public health. Let’s talk about pollen counts, allergies, lung inflammation, asthma and other conditions made worse by climate change. Let’s talk about hurricanes, floods and fires, but not only from 30,000 feet. Let’s talk about what happened in those communities and what it took for people to rebuild.

There are so many ways to make this more specific to humans. It is not about saving the planet. It is about saving us. It is not just a climate crisis; it is a humanity crisis.

I have found that this approach can be received well by Republicans and conservatives. I live in a rural and conservative part of Virginia. When you start talking to people about what climate change means to them personally and locally — why they have a self-interest in the issue — they respond.

+This is disgusting: Kylie Mohr documents the upsurge in betting on wildfires in prediction markets like Polymarket

In January 2025, Polymarket listed almost 20 questions, created by the platform’s “markets team,” related to the wildfires burning up Southern California. How many acres will the Palisades Fire burn by Friday, three days after it ignited on a Tuesday? Will the Palisades Fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisades fire be 50% contained? Will the Palisades and Eaton fires be contained before February?

People spent $1.2 million betting on these queries, according to Aeon Magazine.

Aside from the moral problem, as Mohr points out this creates a lucrative incentive for arson.

+Sudarshan Varadhan, Ruth Chai and Adrian Portugal bring the good news that the Philippines may be the new Pakistan when it comes to ultra-rapid solar deployment. In the wake of the Iran war,

People in the Philippines are flocking to install solar power ​on rooftops and escape the burden of soaring electricity prices, making it the world’s biggest spender on solar panels since ‌the war in Iran started.

Top power distributor Meralco has raised prices by 10% since the Middle East conflict began in late February. Now, a median household spends around 12% of monthly income on electricity, assuming it consumes 200 kilowatt-hours — approximately the monthly average for three people.

Adrian Sabatera, a 39-year-old software engineer, thought about getting solar for years but found it too ⁠costly. That changed as costs came down and electricity prices kept rising.

“I wouldn’t be shocked if a third of the middle-class population eventually finds ​their way to this setup,” Sabatera said after recently pulling the trigger on a 570,000 peso ($9,300) installation at the Manila house he shares with ​three others.

One benefit of having watched the climate story from the start is that I tend not to panic when “climate” is temporarily eclipsed as an issue, almost always thanks to the hard work of Big Oil. It happened at the end of the 1980s after the initial furor over the newly public “greenhouse effect,” and again after the Kyoto climate talks; when Al Gore made global warming a central issue in the oughts, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks put it on the back burner. Many of us built the movement that pushed it back to the front again in the oughts, culminating in the Paris accords; when momentum wavered Greta Thunberg and her colleagues emerged, building the consensus that took us through the IRA.

At the moment, of course, a resurgent fossil-funded right wing has killed off that landmark legislation, and done all it can to destroy clean energy in the U.S.; America is out of the global climate talks; around the world various strongmen have made protest far more difficult. The new authoritarians have managed to intimidate many of the centrist pols in much of the world who are no longer willing to talk much about “climate;” indeed, there’s a closet industry of pundits and consultants advising them not to.

But it’s never occurred to me that this state of affairs would last very long—physics is running this show, and it won’t be long denied. And now I think we can see the next of these cycles firing off—and this one, I think, will be climactic. We have a chance to insure that civilization comes out of this one focused on the physical world.

The politics of climate begins with…climate. Perhaps you’ve heard that Europe spent the past week suffering through a truly remarkable heat wave, with France reaching a new all-time record temperature, the UK recording its hottest day ever, Spain smashing all its old marks. It’s truly brutal—and it recalls, for Europeans, the heatwave of 2003, which ended up killing 70,000 people. Even today, the continent is ill-prepared for extreme heat—in France, for instance, Angelique Chrisafis reports that

The impact of the heatwave has been made considerably worse by the high proportion of French buildings and infrastructure not designed to cope with high temperatures. Paris, one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, known for its poorly insulated housing stock, has for years been considered to have the highest heatwave mortality risk of any capital on the continent. The French government has been criticised for a lack of preparation and for cutting funding for projects designed to adapt infrastructure to the climate crisis.

Half of all French homes have insufficient protection from high temperatures, leaving inhabitants dangerously overheated, a report for the NGO Fondation pour le Logement (Foundation for Housing) found this month. About 66% of French people struggle to tolerate the heat in their homes.

Maïder Olivier, the head of climate advocacy at the NGO, said France had a “massive and worsening problem of heat-trap housing”. She said climate inequality in France was growing, with low-income, suburban housing estates suffering the worst from heatwaves.

Apparently English homes, especially modern ones, aren’t much better. And the heat has caused a surge in British hospital admissions, even as it’s damaged hospital equipment. Andrew Gregory writes

Several NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents as a direct result of the extreme heat. One hospital had done so after its machines failed in multiple areas, a doctor said. Labs used for testing were also affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures.

The doctor said that although they were working in a relatively new care setting, it was “tacked on to an old Victorian hospital”, creating severe infrastructure challenges. “It’s hopeless, really,” they said.

The doctor also said their NHS trust had faced “major issues” with IT servers overheating on Wednesday. “We thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights.”

But it’s not just dialysis machines going down—in France, nuclear reactors had to be taken offline because the river water used for cooling was getting too warm. Also, save some tears for the poor American tourists complaining to the Wall Street Journal that European restaurants offer too few ice cubes in their drinks.

Look, there’s no doubt why these records are being smashed—as Bob Henson writes at Eye on the Storm,

Extreme heat is among the most-studied consequences of human-caused climate change, and the connections between a warming planet and amplified, localized extreme heat are not only intuitive but well documented.

In this case the jet stream—powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, and unsettled by the melt up north—has gone kaflooey, producing what’s called an “omega block” for its distinctive shape. The sun beating down on this heat dome is relentless. As Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News

“There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Imperial College London who leads the World Weather Attribution, a group that works to link weather events to climate change, said in an email. “Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.”

I could of course go on and on about the heat; it’s wretched. (And remember that we’re paying attention in part because there’s lots of media, some of it English-speaking, in Europe; similar hideous heatwaves have been plaguing much of Asia this spring). But what I really want to talk about is its political meaning—I think this heatwave is one of those events that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse.

Britain will be an interesting test case. Its politics have been roiled for the last two years by the odd static incompetence of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, now about to be replaced by the Andy Burnham government. A key question for that new administration will be the role of Ed Milliband, who has been serving as the energy secretary, and may be in line for a job as chancellor. He’s been (almost uniquely) effective in his role, moving fast to boost clean and cheap renewable energy in the UK.

But that’s roiled the fossil fuel industry, which is putting big money behind the rightwing Reform Party, which according to an April investigation by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett, has collected two-thirds of its funding from oil interests. Together with the always vile Murdoch press, they’ve mounted a full-on attack on “Net Zero” policies, alleging—a la Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in this country—that they’re responsible for rising energy prices in the UK.

The entire status quo is in on this fight—including British labor unions. They aren’t venal the way oil companies are, but they are fighting against change, in the name of their current members. And they’ve focused their fire on Milliband. Sharon Graham, head of the giant UNITE union, has said

Jobs in Britain are important. We need someone in that role [chancellor] who understands that, and at the moment that isn’t Ed Miliband. … It’s been floated that Ed Miliband would be chancellor, that would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs.

Happily, we’re starting to see serious pushback to this endless irresponsible climate delayism. It begins with scientists. In France eminent climate researchers have started speaking out to Le Monde, complaining about the inability of scientists to effectively connect the dots between climate change and heat for the public. British scientists have gone one better: nine of them wrote the agency responsible for regulating the press to complain about the lame coverage.

“News stories about heatwaves often do not mention the influence of climate change or the burning of fossil fuels on increased temperatures – for example, three in five stories during the May heatwave did not – while two-fifths of those about net zero make no mention of climate change. In this context, it is unsurprising that the public often do not understand these issues or the connection between them.”

I think my favorite was a letter to the London Times from the veteran climate research Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London, which I reprint here just because I like its cadences:

The sentence “net zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics” should be a watchword in the years to come.

And here’s my guess: Milliband will be vindicated, landing in an important new job. Despite the complaints of union leaders, Britain’s green economy is one of the few things that’s booming on the island. He’s not backing down: at a press conference last week he heralded the fact that more than a hundred billion pounds in private clean energy investments had been made during his term.

Experts told the Guardian that the new investment data, as well as previous findings by the Confederation of British Industry that the UK’s net zero economy had grown faster than the rest of the economy and generated higher-paying jobs… [contradicted the claims of union leaders]

Miliband said: “I’m proud to have led a pro-business, pro-growth department in these last two years. This achievement didn’t happen by accident, but because of clarity of mission, government investment and building not blocking. As we have shown in energy, progressive government in hard times requires partnership with business to secure economic growth, built on an active industrial strategy.”

Indeed, forty progressive economists in the UK wrote to the labor leaders this week, rejecting their attack on Net Zero.

“There is no alternative to the green transition. The effects of climate change are with us now. Miliband is right to oppose further expansion of North Sea oil and gas.”

If Burnham were to back off the Net Zero pledges, he’d be disappointing the sixty percent of Brits who like the strategy. Starmer staggered in part because he took rightwing positions on immigration, giving the Green Party an opening; that door will grow much larger if he backs off on climate policy, so I suspect he won’t.

And the heatwave will give him political cover to do the right thing. As the head of Greenpeace UK said last week

The only way off this hellish treadmill is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Our next prime minister needs to act on the evidence outside their window, and the advice of their scientific advisers, and stay the course on climate policies. The alternative is parched reservoirs, unaffordable food, shuttered hospitals and schools and wildly fluctuating bills each time a new oil war is kindled.

My further guess is that the coming El Niño will have the same effect on global climate politics—and maybe even in our caboose of a nation. We enter this new warming spell in rough shape: recent data shows the heat content of oceans at all-time highs. Things are grim enough that one (ghoulish?) investor has launched a fund designed to make money off the coming crisis

Hedge fund Moreton Capital Partners is targeting $500 million for a special-purpose vehicle to trade multiple commodities that stand to be impacted by the weather phenomenon, including South African corn, Malaysian palm oil and Australian wheat. The markets are underestimating risks, according to Moreton’s co-founder Les Finemore.

“We think it’s going to be a dramatic reshaping of the global food situation,” Finemore said in a video interview from Mexico City. “We feel like today the market is seriously mis-pricing that risk.”

American politicians may feel that the easiest course for the short term is to back off on climate talk—and the green movement is perhaps inclined to let them get away with it through the midterm elections, which will be fought largely as a referendum on the mendacity of the Trump administration. (Though it’s political malpractice not to be calling out Trump’s incredibly unpopular attacks on solar and wind energy). But next year, as primary season begins in earnest, El Niño will insure climate is firmly back on the agenda. And given the explosion in clean energy, the case will be easy for smart candidates to make.

That this cycle has gone on since the 1980s does not mean it can go on forever. We’re clearly reaching desperate physical tipping points. So this had better be the last turn of the wheel—by the end of the decade we need to have decisively broken the political power of the fossil fuel industry, so we can get on with the energy transition, and with building a world that can survive the damage Big Oil has inflicted.

It starts now.

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In other energy and climate news:

+From Michael Coren, a fascinating column about emerging new models for affordable solar leasing schemes.

A new model from an upstart company called Terra Energy is shaking things up in Florida, Texas and soon California. After subscribing for three years, customers can cancel and have the panels removed from their roof free of charge. If they keep them, they lock in a low, predictable electricity rate relative to their local utility, like any other leasing model…

The elimination of a 30 percent tax credit for homeowners in the One Big Beautiful Bill last year effectively raised the cost of the average home solar system by $8,000.

While homeowners lose out, businesses enjoy the solar investment tax credit through 2027, making leases and PPAs more attractive. That’s scrambling two decades of “own, don’t lease” advice because only businesses like Terra and others can pass on the tax credit to homeowners.

Third-party ownership now makes up the majority of new residential solar sales, according to Wood Mackenzie, an energy research firm, up from a minority share last year.

“Our view has historically been that ownership is the best path,” said Thompson of EnergySage. “But not everyone can pony up $30,000 or get a loan. New leasing models are a vehicle that gives people the opportunity.”

Meanwhile Jeff St. John describes how Sunrun, Tesla and RenewHome are teaming up to make a really big virtual power plant out of all those home batteries. The three companies Wednesday

announced an agreement to ​“deliver more than 16 gigawatts of flexible energy capacity” to tech giants and utilities around the United States. Those gigawatts will be produced by hundreds of thousands of home battery systems managed by Sunrun and Tesla, as well as more than 8 million smart thermostats and devices managed by Renew Home.

These batteries and smart thermostats are already installed in homes and businesses across the country, Paul Dickson, Sunrun’s president and chief revenue officer, told Canary Media. Some are enrolled in utility or grid programs that call on batteries to discharge, or thermostats to turn down energy use, during the handful of hours per year when grid demand is at its peak, he said.

But he noted, ​“Most of the constructs for these distributed power plants are tapping into the resources a fraction of the time they could be realized.” This new partnership is meant to ​“further legitimize these devices as core dispatchable, capable resources.”

+Climate activist and writer Mike Tidwell’s recent book The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue will be part of a novel PBS series called “Sacred Ground with Tim Daly” that focuses on the heroic work of several North American climate activists. Episode two stays true to Tidwell’s chronicle of the impacts of climate change on his one DC-area street, from dying trees to Lyme disease to constant flooding. It also captures the inspiring work of people fighting back like Tidwell’s neighbor and climate activist Congressman Jamie Raskin. (You can also see some very vintage footage of…me.)

+Hannah Story Brown has an epic account of the epically foolish plan to build a new LNG pipeline 800 miles across the middle of Alaska

By pipeline company Glenfarne’s projection, construction of Alaska LNG could cost up to $55 billion. The real cost, if built, is likely to be much higher. A new report from Public Citizen analyzing the final cost of constructing operating LNG terminals in North America found that the average cost overrun was 59.7 percent. LNG Canada, the project most comparable to Alaska LNG for requiring a custom-built pipeline over hundreds of miles of challenging terrain, ran more than 130 percent over budget. As report authors Lois Parshley and Mekedas Belayneh note, “Alaska’s proposed pipeline route traverses a longer distance, and more severe terrain, in a labor market that is structurally thinner [than LNG Canada].”

Then there is rapidly escalating competition from renewables. Global electricity generated from wind and solar has increased by more than 350 percent since just mid-2020, and surpassed generation from natural gas for the first time in history in April this year. Nations around the world are frantically investing in green energy and industry to defend themselves from energy price shocks; any gas from this pipeline might go begging by the time it’s completed.

+Meanwhile, you know what actually makes money? Windpower. Here’s Paul Lovell’s update from Iowa, center of the midwestern breeze belt:

Consider Howard County. With a population of just under 9,400, limited commercial development and an economy heavily dependent on agriculture, Howard County saw its first wind farm in 2008. Today, the county hosts 147 wind turbines with a total capacity of 244 megawatts — enough to power about 50,000 homes — with two more projects in development.

These turbines have a total taxable valuation of over $115 million. This past year alone, they generated $2.7 million in tax revenue, representing 14.5 percent of the county’s total tax budget.

This revenue is critical. New property tax legislation signed into law this year limits growth in county and city general levies to about 2 percent per year. With inflation for materials and labor continuing above that rate, Iowa counties face painstaking budget choices. Expanding the tax base through wind development offers a practical solution to maintain quality public services.

Before the wind projects, Howard County could replace only one or two bridges per year, and rural gravel roads suffered from severe deferred maintenance. To turn things around, Howard County used tax increment financing, using future property tax growth from turbines to fund infrastructure bonds. Since 2010, TIF has helped the county replace more than 30 bridges, pave 20 miles of road, and purchase critical maintenance equipment. Road maintenance agreements with developers meant wind companies, not taxpayers, covered the costs of upgrading local gravel roads during construction.

Nova Scotia seems to have gotten the message, and is betting big on wind—not just to supply its one million residents, but to export power to the States, where Trump is preventing eastern seaboard states from setting up wind farms of their own. Emma Graney reports

The $60-billion project could generate as much as 40 gigawatts of power if all phases are developed. The first stage, at 5,000 megawatts, would produce roughly 24 terawatt hours of power each year – around twice the output of the Sir Adam Beck Hydro complex at Niagara Falls.

Wind West would initially provide electricity to Atlantic Canada, Quebec and perhaps Ontario, but Mr. Houston believes transmission cables carrying wind-produced power will one day run from Nova Scotia into the United States.

“The world has to change a little bit for that to happen, but it will,” he said.

Already, the province has made tentative overtures to its southern neighbours.

In February, Mr. Houston signed an agreement with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey to work toward supplying the state with clean energy from offshore wind. He said New England and New York are interested in similar agreements.

+Great news from France, where a court has ruled that the fossil giant TotalEnergies is responsible for the emissions from its customers burning its products, a kind of liability the oil majors have done their best to dodge.

“Extracting, refining and marketing of a barrel of oil inevitably leads to its combustion,” the court said in detailing why Total played a role in ​clients’ emissions.

+New from Jason Dove Mark, a fascinating book about shifting baselines, and how they skew our sense of change. I just got to spend a few wonderful days with Jeremey Jackson, the ocean scientist who first popularized the concept; I’m glad it’s getting more and more attention.

+A new kind of travel show, that doesn’t burn any jet fuel. Check out Parke Wilde’s “Adventures of the Not Jet Set.” I hope everyone is enjoying some low-carbon adventure—my mantra is, despite all the damage this remains a beautiful world, and one of our jobs is to simply witness its beauty. It’s a task I take seriously! I’ll leave you with a picture I took last week at Shelburne Farms, one of Vermont’s most beautiful places. I was giving a talk there, but took a stroll beforehand, gazing out across Lake Champlain at my beloved Adirondacks. Sometimes people ask how I keep going year after year in this work, and this is a big part of the answer

Beginning next week, Australians across a huge swath of the continent will begin getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon—to charge their cars, runs their dishwashers, fill up a storage battery to run the house at night. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t belabor it here, except to say that humans have spent the last 1.79 million years (according to new research last week) working hard for energy: spending time gathering firewood, spending time working to pay the power bill. Now, in one large part of the earth, for one large part of the day, electricity will be too cheap to meter. You want some abundance? Here you go.

So it seems like a good time to dig in to the larger questions of energy, climate, pollution, and money—an interrelated set of issues, and one where the numbers are shifting quickly and dramatically almost every month. Here’s the bottom line, which I think is beginning to drive public policy almost every place except the U.S., where we have lots and lots of work to do: As the cost of clean energy keeps plummeting, it gets more and more obvious how much money we waste, and how much financial risk we incur, by staying with fossil fuel.

Let’s start first by talking about the climate crisis, and the ways it’s rapidly becoming an economic crisis. My old colleagues at 350.org have been publishing a series of quite brilliant reports on the subject in recent weeks. One, for instance, is on the insurance crisis, which is growing across the planet. This is from Risalat Khan and Kenny Stancil:

In the United States, homeowner insurance premiums increased by 29% from January 2021 to January 2026, and personal auto insurance rose nearly 25% over the same period. These mounting costs are among the biggest contributors to overall inflation.

France raised its mandatory natural catastrophe surcharge on property insurance from 12% to 20%, effective January 2025. In northern Australia, premiums climbed more than 130% in real terms between 2007 and 2022, a 6% growth year on year.

Across most low- and middle-income countries, insurance coverage is usually less than 10%, and sometimes far less, leaving uninsured communities and businesses to bear most of the risks and losses from climate disasters.

Somewhat karmically, a new report from risk analysts First Street finds that…data centers face much of this risk from extreme weather:

Approximately 54% of global data center capacity operates in markets facing elevated chronic heat or drought stress, while 79% is exposed to significant acute hazards such as flood, wind, or wildfire. For many markets, climate risk should now be considered part of the base case rather than a tail-risk scenario.

But most of us only buy insurance once a year, and it’s such a depressing task that we try to forget about it immediately. Groceries are different, and as Nicole Pita points out the link to climate change is pretty clear.

Droughts in the US Midwest and Canada destroyed harvests in 2022. Floods in India and South Asia pushed up rice prices in 2023 and 2025. The climate crisis is affecting crop production itself, making food harder to grow. The irony is that food systems produce one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, making them both a victim and a driver of the crisis.

And it will get worse. Here’s a new report from the Autonomy Institue on what the climate crisis is doing to the cost of “Five a day” in the UK

Heat waves are projected to add around 11% to the price of the UK’s top twenty fruit and vegetables by 2035 and around 68% by 2050 under a high emissions scenario, on top of normal inflation. Imported tropical fruit such as melons, oranges, bananas, easy peelers and grapes will rise 12% to 14% by 2035 and 80% to 93% by 2050 on these climate grounds alone.

• Compounded with estimated normal inflation, total average shelf prices of the overall basket of fruit and veg will reach upwards of 170% above today’s level by 2050.

• This means that climate-flation will be contributing 40% of total inflation across the basket of basic goods by 2035 and over 60% of it by 2050. Climate change will have gone from a junior contributor to the dominant driver of shelf-price inflation on fresh produce inside the working lifetime of someone in their thirties today.

(A note to the perplexed: “easy peelers” turns out to be what Brits call mandarin oranges and clementines. I like it.)

Here’s how Emma Court and Kyle Kim summed it up in a comprehensive Bloomberg account

Extreme weather also makes growing crops more expensive. For example, Del Monte Corp., which sold more than $4 billion of bananas, pineapples, avocados and other food products last year, has been investing in measures to shield crops from rising temperatures and sun damage. This includes covering them with shade cloth and spraying them with a reflective layer of so-called plant sunscreen. The company is also paying more for cooling throughout its supply chain, including by requiring upgrades in fruit-processing plants in the Midwest that were originally designed for lower temperatures.

The effects of climate on pricing are difficult to capture, because they build gradually, says Hans Sauter, Del Monte’s chief sustainability officer. But lower yields, increasing disease threats and higher costs can all contribute to more expensive produce. “This is part of our DNA. We have been dealing with climate events forever,” he says. “But these new circumstances are making it more expensive.”

Regions where temperatures are already warm will likely be the most exposed to climate inflation, in part because additional heat can more readily slash agricultural harvests. Among the worst-off are countries in Africa and South America, which also tend to have lower incomes, with less infrastructure and fewer resources to guard against climate change.

But the fossil fuel that drives climate change raises costs in other ways too. The most obvious is their effect on public health. It’s hard, of course, to calculate this with precision, but the attempts leave us with staggering numbers: the NRDC, five years ago, demonstrated that fossil fuel pollution was costing America $820 billion a year. (That’s nearly a Musk). The numbers elsewhere are much higher.

Sometimes, though, it’s easier to see them in reverse. A new study this month, described by Gary Fuller, finds that when London cut down sharply on urban air pollution with its congestion pricing zone, remarkable things followed:

Low emission and clean air zones attract controversy whenever they are proposed, but there is growing evidence that they work in improving air quality. The Bradford zone was followed by a reduction of about 25% in GP visits for heart and breathing problems and survey data shows that the central London zone was followed by a reduction in the likelihood of a person taking sick leave…

The researchers looked at emergency admissions to hospital, excluding cases such as accidents, burns, drug overdose, poisoning or self-harm. For people living in the central London zone, admissions increased at 3% per year before the schemes started. After their launch this trend was altered, with a 3% reduction in annual trends for emergency admissions, including an 8% reduction for heart problems and a 6% reduction for breathing problems.

That adds up to real money. Not only that, but people can breathe, always a plus!

If you try to add all this up, you get some interesting numbers. As Kate Yoder reports

“What’s striking is that already, households are bearing serious costs,” said Kimberly Clausing, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She co-authored a paper from earlier this year finding that families were paying between $400 and $900 more each year because of the effects of climate change, with the costs above $1,300 in the 10 percent hardest-hit counties, many of them found in Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and California.

What’s more, people are figuring all this out.

Two-thirds of US voters agree that global warming is affecting the cost of living to some degree, according to new survey data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, including most Democrats and moderate Republicans. Of those two-thirds, a majority of them said that climate change was driving up what they pay for groceries, utility bills, and home insurance.

And then there’s the sheer cost of energy itself—of the need to keep paying for coal and gas and oil while the far-cheaper sun and wind goes to waste. We’re stuck in a political moment when feckless Democratic politicians (paging Kathy Hochul) are making “affordability” their excuse for going along with Big Oil. But in fact one example after another is making it clear that, as Ray Wills writes, “what is making us poorer is not the move to clean energy – it is doing the transition slowly and badly. His examples are back in Australia

The Australian Energy Market Commission’s latest Residential Electricity Price Trends work is blunt: accelerating renewable generation, transmission and battery storage is ‘essential’ to keep electricity prices affordable over the next decade.

In scenarios where new wind, solar and transmission arrive on schedule, household bills fall compared to today. When those projects are delayed, prices remain higher for longer because the system leans more heavily on expensive gas and unreliable old coal.

Independent modelling tells a similar story. Analysis for the Clean Energy Council shows that if Australia stalls the rollout of renewables, household bills in 2030 could be around 30% higher than on a timely transition path – roughly $449 a year extra for a typical household, and even more for small businesses.

Nexa Advisory’s work finds that transition delays that lock in more gas-fired generation could add about $115.7 billion to wholesale costs between now and 2050.

Individuals can and do figure out some of the ways to lower their own costs. Not surprisingly, the spike in gas prices for Americans during our farcical Iranian excursion convinced some to change their habits or their technology. Lydia DePillis looked at the numbers:

Americans are powerfully attached to their cars, and their spending at gasoline stations jumped 21 percent from February to May. But that ability to spend has limits. According to Dow Jones Energy, consumption was 6.1 percent lower in May from a year earlier. Some of that is a long-running trend owing to the increasing efficiency of passenger vehicles, said Denton Cinquegrana, the company’s chief oil analyst, and about half is probably a consumer response to higher prices.

But much of the real work needs to be done by governments: nothing people can do by themselves will have much affect on the cost of food, healthcare, or energy. And when governments do their job well, the results can be amazing. I began with Australia and its free afternoon electricity; let’s close with Europe. As Jan Rosenow points out, the continent’s commitment to energy efficiency is paying off: it’s spending 29 percent less on energy than it would have if consumption had kept growing this century.

Importantly that is energy nobody had to generate, import or pay for. It built up slowly, over twenty-five years, across 27 countries, in warmer buildings, more efficient factories, better appliances, the switch to LED lighting and steadily more efficient transport. At any given price Europe now pays around a third less than it would have without those gains.

This shield holds whichever direction the next shock arrives from. If anything, the figure undersells the benefit, because it counts only the energy saved and not the power stations, pipelines and grid connections nobody had to build. It is one of the most effective protection measures against future energy crisis: the energy not consumed cannot be withheld, weaponised, or made more expensive by a supplier you do not control.

As he points out, there’s vast room for expansion:

A heat pump in a well-insulated home on clean electricity cuts the energy the building needs, replaces the gas boiler, and runs on a grid that keeps getting cleaner. That single device also pulls the household out of the gas import chain for good, and as a side effect keeps it cooler through the sort of summer Europe now gets most years.

In the Netherlands, for instance, you can sign up for free clothes-washing, drying, and dishwashing between noon and five p.m., part of a scheme from a company called CoolBlue.

People are quickly figuring all this out across much of the world. It remains for a savvy American politician to really lay out the case. But when she does the rewards will be high. “Free” would be a popular thing.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Some big wins for climate and energy in last night’s New York voting. It looks like a lock that former New York comptroller Brad Lander will be headed to Congress, where he will instantly become one of the House experts on the links between big money and Big Oil. My hope is that he’ll team with Sheldon Whitehouse in the Senate to form a loud and constant chorus on the topic. By the way, a useful video from the ever-candid Whitehouse here

Meanwhile, further up the Hudson River, Lisa Kaul won her Democratic primary for state Senate in the district around the town of Poughskeepsie. Climate was a big element in her campaign, and you can check out a quite powerful digital ad here—per the discussion above, it’s focused on affordability.

+Fascinating deep dive into the economics of Enhanced Geothermal from the straight-shooting Justin Mikulka. As he notes, this technology—drilling a pair of holes deep into the earth, pumping water down one so it will pass through hot rocks, retrieving the warm water from the other, and using the heat to turn a turbine on the surface—has gotten a ton of hype, and lots of expensive support from the federal government, above all I think because it is congenial to Big Oil (they know how to drill stuff, after all). But will it produce affordable electricity? Mikulka has well-reasoned doubts

Fervo describes its own power generation as “24/7 clean, cost effective, scalable.”

Fervo’s current $/KW costs are $7,000.

New build gas is estimated at $2,300+

Solar plus storage is at $2,100-$2,600

Now Fervo claims that if everything goes right in the future they will bring that down to $3,000. So even in their best case scenario they will not be competitive with solar plus storage which is also expected to get much cheaper. And they are a long way from their best case scenario and none of this has been proven at commercial scale.

Competing straight-up against sun, wind, and batteries is tough. If Fervo “works” it will be with massive government subsidy, which would be better spent on cheaper tech. Pipes and pumps and huge amounts of water—these are increasingly the tools of the past, up against the frictionless world of sun and wind.

I tend to think hydrogen falls into this same category—expensive compared with the straight-ahead application of electricity and batteries. But there are places doing it right: Lithuania just launched a ship that runs on green hydrogen generated from solar panels on its dock. As Luis Reyes writes

The ship is called Rasa, and it was christened at the Port of Klaipėda on June 18, 2026. This is not a concept render. It’s a 42-meter tanker that’s about to start collecting sludge, sewage, stormwater and garbage from other ships calling at the port. Glamorous work, no. Technically interesting, very much yes.

+Some of the bigger names in climate science, including American Michael Mann, have joined in a call to avoid solar geoengineering, centering their argument on the risk of “termination shock.”

Recent analyses demonstrate that it would take as long as two decades to create the required infrastructure. By then we would be completely reliant on maintaining it – a tall task in a dangerous world with global conflict. It would only temporarily mask the pent-up warming implicit in the ongoing buildup of carbon dioxide, and this pent-up warming would be released in a catastrophically rapid “termination shock” if circumstances force the cessation of solar geoengineering.

For me, I think we can only talk coherently about geoengineering in a world where the political power of the fossil fuel industry has been broken—one more reason why mass deployment of clean energy around the globe over the rest of this decade is so crucial.

+Check out the trailer for Josh Fox’s important new film, The Welcome Table. It debuted on HBO yesterday, and it’s about the surge of climate immigration already underway on our overheating planet. Fox, of course, is the independent filmmaker who brought us Gasland, the most crucial document in the fight against fracking. He’s got a good eye, a good mind, and a good heart.

+John Todd is one of those fascinating figures who have been at it a lifetime—his New Alchemy Institute became most famous for its Living Machines, which use plants to clean wastewater. Now he’s scaling up the concept—what if we used old tankers to roam the oceans (under solar power) just slowly cleaning up the seas?

For example, a large — but by no means the biggest class of — oil tanker, can hold around 80 million US gallons of liquid fuel, or other liquids. including sea water. There will be enough potential treatment capacity within the ships’ hold spaces to house eco-machines large enough to make a positive impact on surrounding waters

+Many thanks to the good folks at CarbonBrief for Cosmos, a database of the world’s climate research, currently containing 1.8 million studies

+Fascinating commentary from Jérôme Pinti on the role that animals play in regulating carbon and climate, citing a new consensus report from 300 researchers:

A 2023 paper in Nature Climate Change estimated that protecting and restoring wild animal populations and their ecological roles could increase carbon dioxide uptake by an additional 6.41 gigatons per year. Numbers like that show why animals belong in climate conversations, and how they can be part of climate solutions, with different roles in different ecosystems.

For example, in forests, animals such as elephants disperse seeds and influence where trees grow. In grasslands, grazers such as bison can affect plant growth, nutrient cycling, and fire dynamics. In soils and sediments, burrowing animals can change oxygen and nutrient availability and store energy as they hibernate during tough winter months.

The same is true for the ocean, which is Earth’s largest carbon sink. Marine organisms are active agents of resilience: They transport carbon, build habitats with carbon-rich materials, and tie up carbon in extensive food webs. In my Biological Oceanography Lab at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, we aim to quantify the importance of zooplankton and fish in the ocean’s biological carbon pump, a process where marine species, from plankton to whales and everything in between, move carbon from the ocean’s surface into the deep sea through a variety of processes.

On a more tragic note, one wildlife lover—a woman named Mona Khalil—was killed last week while pursuing her life’s work of safeguarding sea turtles laying their eggs. An Israeli airstrike wrecked her home on Mansouri Beach, and she subsequently died of her wounds. As Rhett Ayers Butler writes,

She had not set out to become a conservationist. Born in Lagos to Lebanese parents, she later left Lebanon during the civil war. In the Netherlands she worked as a porcelain restorer, a trade that required patience, precision, and care for damaged things. She could have remained there. Instead she kept returning to the family land on Lebanon’s southern coast.

One night in 1999, while walking near the shore, she heard a sound in the sand and saw a turtle coming up to lay her eggs. She learned that the beach was one of the last important nesting places in southern Lebanon. In 2000, after Israel withdrew from the area, she returned more permanently. With Habiba Fayed, she restored the family farmhouse and began protecting the nests.

And while we’re on animals, a new study finds that solar panels on barn roofs help lower thermal stress on cows during hot afternoons. As Lior Kahana reports,

To assess the impact of PV modules on roof heat flux, the team conducted field measurements at a naturally ventilated dairy barn in Shandong Province, China. The barn measures 32 m in span, 372 m in length, and has an eave height of 4.5 m. It features a south-facing gable roof with a 17.17° pitch and a single-layer profiled steel sheet construction without insulation.

The facility was divided into two zones. One section was left without PV installation, while the other was fitted with 1,152 PV modules with a total capacity of 299.52 kW. The modules were installed parallel to the roof slope, maintaining a 0.10 m ventilated air gap between the panels and the roof surface, and covered 60% of the south-facing roof area. The two zones housed 164 and 316 dairy cows, respectively.

“Linear mixed model analysis revealed that PV panels significantly reduced roof heat flux during daytime (57.7% influence weight, p < 0.001), with the strongest reduction occurring during peak solar radiation between 11:00 and 13:00,” the researchers said. “This effect was primarily attributed to shading, photovoltaic conversion, and convective cooling within the ventilated air cavity beneath the modules.”

“PV panels significantly lowered indoor temperatures during daytime (8.7% influence weight, p < 0.05), achieving a maximum reduction of approximately 2.3 C during the critical afternoon heat stress period (14:00–16:00),” they added.

+It’s always important to get hyperlocal perspectives on global crises: there have been lots of pictures of houses falling into the ocean on the barrier islands of North Carolina, but local resident and journalist Pat O’Keefe offers an in-depth and passionate discussion of the the many forces at work. One thing he notes is that the devastation of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina made it easier for legislators to sympathize with the plight of those along the coast.

+Rameen Siddiqui notes that the world continues to fall behind on the Sustainable Development Goals, even as the 2030 deadline approaches.

Less than four years from the deadline, and only 16% of the targets are going to be met. The 11th edition of the Sustainable Development Report, released today by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, is the sort of statistic that ought to be raising much more alarm. The 2030 Agenda was supposed to end extreme poverty, preserve the oceans, build peaceful institutions, and put the global economy on a sustainable path. With 2030 in sight, 84% of these commitments are going downhill.

The reason the 2026 SDR is worth reading with care is not the rankings, although those are important. It is the timing. UN talks begin this year on the future beyond 2030. In 2027, a new Secretary-General will be elected. The framework that replaces the current agenda is being shaped in conversations happening right now, and the SDR’s argument, that implementation has been the missing piece throughout and must be the organizing principle of whatever comes next, lands at the precise moment when that argument can still influence the design of the successor framework.

+Jeff St. John contends that we have superb new acreage for solar panels—on top of warehouses around the world

In a sense, warehouse rooftops are like open fields in dense urban landscapes, with acres of flat space available for solar panels.

Ava has awarded Prologis a contract to build nearly 7.3 megawatts of solar on sprawling roofs across five sites, enabling about 3,000 residents to see lower bills. Keefer previously worked for Clean Power Alliance, another California community energy provider, which is building 9 megawatts of warehouse-rooftop community solar with Prologis…

His company’s analysis of federal data indicates U.S. commercial, industrial, and institutional rooftops could host 581 gigawatts of solar, enough to provide the lower bounds of the country’s overall electricity demand. Similar data from a 2023 study by the Environment America Research and Policy Center found that warehouses across the U.S. have nearly 16.4 billion square feet of rooftop space, capable of hosting enough solar to power more than 19 million homes.

+The estimable Yessenia Funes has an excellent account of why voting rights have lots to do with climate justice.

Leslie Fields has a background in civil rights and voting rights work. She worked at the NAACP, where she discovered environmental justice as a focus in Texas. Now, she is the chief federal officer of the Harlem-based environmental justice advocacy group WE ACT.

WE ACT has been responding to the nationwide consequences of the Voting Rights Act’s rollback. Section 2, in particular, is about voters electing the representatives they want. It’s about the people choosing the person they trust to lead.

“If we don’t have the representatives we need, who come from the community and are accountable to the community, then you’re going to have terrible decisions being made on the local level and all the way up regarding the environment, regarding communities’ sustainability, regarding where investments are being made,” Fields said.

“Some of the states that we’ve lost billions of dollars in Justice40 funds from the Biden administration to support climate resilience and adaptation,” she added, “won’t have the leadership to represent them, and we’re still fighting to get that funding back.”

+More money coming from the World Bank for Africa solar, as Antony Sguazzin explains

WeLight, which operates more solar mini-grids in Africa than any other company, said the International Finance Corp. bought a stake in the business, backing its expansion into Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The firm, which currently operates in Madagascar and Mali, said it raised €27 million ($31 million) from the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm and founding shareholders. Axian Group Ltd., Sagemcom SAS and Norfund AS established WeLight in 2018 to provide electricity to rural communities that don’t have access to national networks. It runs almost 190 mini-grids, serving more than 800,000 people.

+Finally, a shout out to the good people of Matinicus, the island furthest out in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. I was visiting my fisherman brother there over the weekend, and found that locals had spent the year installing a truly remarkable solar system that powers most of the island and has cut its use of diesel for electric generation by two-thirds. This is a relatively poor rock out in the Atlantic Ocean, and if it can build—mostly with local expertise—a truly state-of-the-art solar system, it should be a good spur for communities everywhere. Energy independence, not to mention lobster! This system may allow the community to survive into the future—Eva Murray’s excellent chronicle can be found here

On February 28, a few hours after President Trump launched his absurd war against Iran, I used this newsletter to note that it was yet one argument for clean energy, for “building out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.” A few days later I tried to lock that point into the public discourse by observing that though sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.

Those points have by now become the commonplace wisdon—note, for instance, Paul Krugman’s fine column this morning. It would be pleasurable to wallow a bit in the president’s disgrace, but not productive. So, as the war fitfully winds down, with the remaining question being just how expensive our surrender will turn out to be, it’s time to peer a little further out into the future and try to figure out how the quite different postwar world might use this opportunity to make rapid progress.

I think the first thing to remember is that the war was launched against a backdrop of already ongoing energy transition. As a rollicking new report out today from the thinktank Ember makes clear, the move towards power from the sun and wind was well underway, predicated by a fear of climate change that helped produce the investments that drove the cost of clean energy inexorably down. The report’s authors remind us where the bottom line sat as of the beginning of the war:

Around 80% of the global population can get 80% uptime solar-plus-storage power for less than $100/MWh, and half can get it for below about $80/MWh. That is already competitive with average fossil generation costs today, typically around $100/MWh.

And they go on to remind us, even more crucially, that those numbers will keep inexorably moving

Today’s affordability map is therefore not fixed. As time moves on and electrotech costs continue to fall on learning curves, regions that are already cheap become cheaper, and regions just outside competitiveness cross the line. The global area where solar plus batteries can provide high-uptime electricity at low cost expands over time.

By 2030, our analysis suggests that more than three quarters of the world’s population can get 80% uptime solar-plus-storage power for less than $80/MWh, and 90% of the world for less than $100/MWh.

Another way to say it is, the fossil fuel industry was already on the back foot before all this began. Indeed, a way to understand the Trump presidency, including its “excursions” into Venezuela and Iran, is as a reaction against this new reality: the desperate attempt by Big Oil, and by a would-be Big Man, to assert what Trump keeps calling “energy dominance.” We were trying, as it were, to “roll coal” on the rest of the world, with war but also with Trump’s other tricks, especially tariffs. His bet was that America was so militarily powerful, and its market so attractive, that we could coerce other countries into going along with his vision of a 1950s world where America used its oil supremacy to keep atop the heap.

For a moment it seemed almost to be working. Faced with preposterous tariffs, a number of countries promised to buy large amounts of American liquefied natural gas in order to placate the administration and see their bill drop. But China, the big target, was unintimidated, fighting back with its control over critical minerals, and with the fact that it no longer feared disruption in global energy markets. That’s because, as David Fickling pointed out the other day, China had restructured its energy supply over the last three years, effectively going on an “oil detox.” The war, and its effect on prices, simply supercharged this, as one can tell from the easily available statistical evidence on things like how much people were charging their cars with electricity as opposed to pumping them full of gas.

Public charging in China in April increased 17% from the previous month, to hit 10.38 terawatt-hours, or TWh, similar to the electricity consumption of the Netherlands. Add the majority of charging that happens at home, and the increase from last year is probably about 8 TWh — equivalent to about 800,000 barrels per day of oil. Other data back this up: The decline in gasoline and diesel production during April, relative to the average over the previous three years, was almost identical, at 790,000 barrels per day.

But as Fickling also pointed out, the real threat for Big Oil is that China’s Asian neighbors, who are the remaining potential growth market for LNG, are watching closely and figuring this out. These are the countries that were supposed to be cowed by American might and then supplied by the new surge of gas from the fracking belt

The problem is that those rising middle powers do have alternatives to meet their energy needs, thanks to the growth of renewables. Asia’s LNG-to-power market was already being aggressively undercut on price by solar, batteries and wind. The war in Iran has demonstrated that clean energy is more reliable, too.

Indeed, just run the numbers and you get some pretty stark news:

A new gas-fired power plant in Asia needs to sell electricity for more than $100 per megawatt-hour to break even. Even existing plants, whose construction costs have long since been paid off, need $70/MWh or more if they’re fueled with LNG. Photovoltaic solar power, or PV, can be had for half the new-build price, at around $50/MWh or less. You can even add a battery and wind turbines and have round-the-clock clean electricity for less than what established gas plants are paying just for their fuel and maintenance.

This is why Trump’s failed war is so important. Those Asian leaders—who again represent most of the projected increase in demand for energy—would have slowly moved in the direction of cheap clean energy. But now they don’t have to go slowly, with one eye over the shoulder to make sure a wrathful America doesn’t punish them. They will now laugh at Trump all the way to the bank.

And all of this converges at the exact same moment with something even more important: the El Niño about to unleash itself on the planet. Political leaders here and abroad thought they had somehow bottled up the issue of climate change, that they could conveniently ignore it. Physics, as usual, has other ideas, and it looks as though those ideas will be expressed with…vigor. Essentially, an El Niño serves as a way for the ocean to release heat that has been accumulating in its waters, and as Tom Harris notes, there is a lot of that heat.

Global ocean heat uptake jumped by a staggering 23 zettajoules (ZJ) in 2025 alone. For context, 23 ZJ is roughly 200 times the total annual electricity generation of the entire human race. The 2025 ocean heat uptake represents an eight-fold increase over the 1958–1985 annual mean baseline

The degree to which we’ve been storing global warming in the oceans can’t be overstated, and now the door to that sauna is being flung open. You may recall the shock a few years ago when global temperatures started occasionally breaching the 1.5 Celsius mark; Harris cites predictions that we could see months in 2027 when we go past the two-degree mark. Jim Hansen and his team just published a new paper predicting that the El Niño is coming fast enough that 2026 will likely set a new record for global temperature

For the purpose of predicting temperature in the remainder of 2026, we note in Fig. 8 that global SST in 2026 has approximately “caught” the 2024 global SST in May (upper figure) and 2026 continues to be at least 0.1°C warmer than in 2023 (the last El Nino onset year). We expect that gap to be maintained, as the upcoming El Nino is at least as strong as the one in 2023. We note also that Earth’s energy imbalance for the last 15 months of data (January 2025 through March 2026) is 1.58 W/m2 , even higher than the prior decade (Fig. 4). The year 2026 should already exceed the 2024 record, with higher temperatures to come in 2027.

(And as Hansen notes, if his predictions are correct it will go some way towards rejiggering scientific assumptions about just how sensitive the climate is to our emissions—that is, recent celebrations in some quarters that the worst climate outcomes were off the table may well have been premature. Meanwhile, also worth reading Daniel Swain’s very detailed forecast for how it all may affect the West Coast)

We don’t know in advance all the ways that El Niño will manifest, but I confess to being fearful; we’ve been barely dealing with the stresses that temperature rise has already inflicted, and the soaring mercury will come as farmers are already facing the fertilizer shortage that Trump’s war provoked. The best we can hope for at this point, I think, is a year that stops a little short of cataclysmic; in any event, I believe it will be enough to produce a return to the politics of, say, 2020, when the world was more focused on the climate crisis.

We’ve been drifting away from that focus in this country, mostly because Democratic politicians began to lose their nerve in the face of ongoing attacks by the fossil fuel industry. But now is the time to regain that focus. As it turns out, new research makes it clear that Americans are in fact at least as worried about climate change as they ever were. Here’s a summary from David Gelles:

Take, for example, April research from Gallup, which found that 44 percent of U.S. adults “worry a great deal about global warming or climate change.” That’s among the highest percentages since 1989, and just short of the all-time high of 46 percent registered in 2020.

Another 22 percent of Americans worry “a fair amount” about climate change, meaning it’s an issue that is solidly on the radar for two-thirds of U.S. adults .

A survey last year from George Mason University also found that about 65 percent of Americans were “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about global warming.

And unlike in some previous studies, when climate change often ranked near last among voters’ major concerns, that poll found that the threats posed by a warming world were squarely in the middle of the pack, above issues like crime and health.

Democratic candidates in the primaries—which are not so far off—are going to have no choice but to grapple with the fact that

A full 72 percent of Democrats say they worry a great deal about the issue, the second-highest figure on record, according to Gallup

But really, it should be an asset, not a trouble. As a new study of climate communications makes clear across six countries makes clear

“By a margin of more than 4:1 we’ve seen people believe more clean is a better path to affordability than more fossil.”

As of now, with the Iran debacle receding and El Niño looming, we can say a few things with certainty:

1. The cheapest power on earth comes from the sun and wind, and everyone but us seems to have realized it

2. That clean power gives us some hope of dealing with the climate crisis that threatens our future, not to mention our insurance premiums

3. That clean power does not involve us in foreign wars

4. And the only important person on earth who does not agree with1, 2, and 3 is Donald Trump, who is being daily proven wrong on exactly everything. I mean, the man can’t fix the reflecting pool. So opponents should constantly identify Trump with climate denial and with solar denial; make him the face of our retrograde policy.

   How hard can that be?

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In other energy and climate news:

+The indefatigable organizer Pete Sikora offers a truly comprehensive lesson in effective (and ineffective) mobilization, by comparing the progress New York City has made with its law requiring big-building energy retrofits with the lack of progress that New York State has made on its climate laws. His diagnosis:

We are wildly unlikely to win with only small numbers of white progressives, while acting as if we also have deep, but unseen support in communities of color. Instead, we have to organize and mobilize strong support in enough places around the state to build a truly multiracial effort mobilizing working people.

A strong, diverse campaign ought to include low income whites in at least some rural places. It can’t happen without enough good, accountable paid organizers working to build support in diverse places and demographics, especially Black, Latino and Asian low income communities. We’ve got to find the money and build the organization or organizations to make it happen.

Meanwhile, there’s emerging evidence that good organizing is taking at least some toll on Trump’s crusade against the planet and the science that helps us understand it. As Justin Gerdes reports, the courts are starting to take apart Trump’s anti-wind efforts:

On June 6, a federal judge vacated guidance issued by the Treasury Department in August 2025 that had ended renewable energy project developers’ ability to prove their eligibility for federal tax credits by demonstrating they had already spent at least 5% of the total project cost.

Last week, the Justice Department gave up on defending President Trump’s wind permitting moratorium.

“The door to federal permitting is now unlocked again and each developer will be able to make the case for permitting their individual project based on the facts and the law,” Kit Kennedy, the managing director for power, climate, and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo.

This comes after federal judges this winter struck down all five stop-work orders issued by the Interior Department in December 2025 to block construction of East Coast offshore wind farms.

For clean energy companies, and their putative allies in Democratic state attorneys general offices, the message is clear: stay on offense.

And after a fearsome howl from critics, word came yesterday that the White House will back off the attempts I described last week to remove the system of buoys monitoring the flow of ocean currents. Maxine Joselow:

The National Science Foundation had said in May that it would begin removing hundreds of underwater instruments this month that collect data on coastal flooding, marine heat waves and other climate and weather events.

But the agency announced on Thursday that it will pause efforts to take apart the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, while convening an expert panel to determine its future.

“Effective immediately, N.S.F. will not proceed with further removal or de-scoping of equipment,” the agency said in a statement.

+A series of hot, dry summers have finally claimed one of England’s most iconic trees, a giant oak in Sherwood Forest that, as Patrick Barkham says,

was said to have provided a sanctuary for the outlaw and his gang when fleeing the tyrannical Sheriff

Elsewhere in the UK, more than 80% of peatlands have been degraded—and around the world these damaged ecosystems are producing as much as five percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas systems. So it’s good news that researchers and farmers are figuring out how to “re-wet” or flood the systems, and then use them for solar panels. As Stephanie Baum writes, researchers have foundthat

solar panels on rewetted peatland provide a unique habitat for bird species along with generating green energy and potentially locking up carbon…

Hanna Rae Martens, a peatland ecologist at the University of Greifswald and lead author of the study, said, “The presence of wetland species like reed bunting and the endangered meadow pipit shows that the solar park is truly re-wetted and has peatland species returning.

“But we also recorded species like Eurasian tree sparrow and tree pipit, which are not typically found in peatlands. They all appear to use the structure of the solar panels. When I’m out on site, I see a lot of meadow pipits sitting on the panels, flying off to catch insects and then flying back to their perch.”

+A big new solar panel factory in Cartersville, Georgia will soon be the country’s largest. As Michelle Lewis writes,

This isn’t just another factory; it’s the only place in the country where every major piece of a solar panel – from ingot to finished module – gets made under one roof. The module assembly side is already running at full capacity, turning out 16,700 panels a day.

“Producing the first solar cells at Cartersville is a milestone for Qcells and for American manufacturing,” said Andy Park, global CEO of Qcells. “A dependable domestic supply chain doesn’t just create thousands of good-paying jobs; it gives our customers greater certainty on price, supply, and tariffs, and a product they can trust from start to finish.”

Cartersville, by the way, is represented by a far-right climate-denying congressman, Barry Loudermilk, who has explained that wind and solar are not “mature enough” to be on the grid. Joe Biden did his darnedest!

+As I wrote about more than a year ago, Elon Musk is powering his peculiarly racist AI with a series of highly polluting engines around datacenters in Tennessee and Mississippi. The NAACP, noting that most of the damage is inflicted on Black neighborhoods, filed suit to make the world’s richest man comply with federal environmental law, but now the Trump administration has ruled that their single biggest donor can ignore those laws. The Southern Environmental Law Center is challenging that conclusion:

In the filing, the Department of Justice never disputes that xAI is pumping out unlawful and harmful pollution into Memphis and North Mississippi. Instead, the Department argues that it doesn’t matter whether xAI is breaking the law and threatening community members’ health if the Trump Administration blesses the lawlessness. While the Department points to vague national security concerns as its reason to let xAI continue to illegally pollute unabated, all companies, even ones that contract with the federal government, are required to follow the law

The attempted power grab by the Department of Justice has implications that go far beyond Memphis and North Mississippi. The Department is trying to dramatically undermine the longstanding right enshrined by Congress in federal law that allows impacted communities to file lawsuits—known as citizen suits—against polluters for violating the law. Citizen suits are an important part of the federal Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other bedrock environmental laws. They serve as an essential backstop—and often a last resort—for communities when government regulators fail to hold polluters accountable. The provision was passed by Congress with bipartisan support, and courts have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of citizen suits.

Elsewhere on the oligarch watch, Alex Cuadros reports that the Trump administration is rewarding another big donor by weakening restrictions on methane emissions.

Trump has since named a former Hilcorp lobbyist to a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting him in charge of an effort to unravel the methane rules with help from trade groups backed by [major donor Jeffrey] Hildebrand, a ProPublica investigation has found. That will bring a sweeping reprieve for the nation’s 700,000 stripper wells, boosting Hildebrand’s profits while saddling society as a whole with the climate fallout.

Stripper wells collectively contribute just 6% of the nation’s oil and natural gas. But in recent studies, scientists have identified them as the source of roughly half the sector’s methane emissions — in part because they tend to be thinly monitored, run-down and thus prone to leaking. As a result, these barely productive wells play an outsize role in climate change, disproportionately amplifying heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

+Kudos to my Third Act colleagues, the Sierra Club, and the Hip Hop Caucus for keeping pressure on the World Cup over its sponsorship from Saudia Aramco, world’s biggest oil company. As Dharna Noor reports,

This coming Sunday, protesters will demonstrate at or near five 2026 World Cup stadiums and six other major sporting arenas, chanting and holding signs calling for an end to fossil fuel sponsorships.

“People all over the world are watching the World Cup, which is a good reminder that we’re all in this together, that it’s one planet,” said Brent Suter, pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels of Major League Baseball and supporter of the campaign to end “sportswashing”. “It’s a good moment for a big message about the climate.”

+I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the rickshaws of Dhaka, mostly back in the day when they were powered by human muscle turning pedals. That was largely replaced by two-stroke engines, and more recently by batteries, and now there’s an emerging plan to use those batteries in the evening as a virtual power plant for the Bangladeshi capital. When rickshaws return for the evening with a third of their batteries still charged, SolShare is figuring out how to aggregate that power and sell it to the grid. Drivers should see a thirty percent increase in income.

+Finally, here’s your dose of over-the-top good news today. The French have launched a first-of-its-kind floating platform designed both to capture solar energy and to…farm oysters.

The result of several years of collective work and consultation between researchers, marine professionals and local stakeholders, this prototype represents a concrete response to several contemporary challenges: the energy transition , the preservation of the oyster farming sector in the face of climate hazards, and the sustainable development of lagoon areas.

I leave you with a picture of it being towed out to sea off the city of Sète

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.

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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.

One of the (many) curses of the Trump era is that he keeps us fixated, hour by hour, on his latest stupidity or fraud, a constant swirling game of three-card monte that ends only when he robs some more of our attention and money. So I will try valiantly for a moment to escape his asteroid belt of provocation (it’s not easy—did you know that America decided this week to sink a few billion into promoting…coal) and try to think a little more broadly.

This step back is occasioned by Thomas Piketty and his team at the World Inequality Lab in Paris, who last week released the Global Justice Report, subtitled “A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries.” Piketty, you will recall, is the London-born economist who in 2013 released his book Capital, in many ways launching the ongoing critique of global inequality and the generalized scorn for the billionaire class. (At one point, remember, America and the world generally admired these people).

Now he and his team has enlarged their analysis to include the 21st century’s novel dilemma—that we are steadily and rapidly overheating the planet—and the result is this report, which I read in certain ways as the data-rich companion to Naomi Klein’s 2014 classic This Changes Everything, an investigation of whether it is possible to imagine prosperity without ruinous growth. Much has changed in the years since those volumes—most importantly, the plummeting price of solar and wind energy and of batteries to store that power has opened up a much larger escape hatch. And it’s from that premise that Piketty’s new work really proceeds.

The Global Justice Project says that rapid decarbonization is a must, and that it needs to be paid for by the rich, and that that payment should come in the form of a global wealth tax and a global income tax, which funnel fairly large sums of money from the north to the south. They aim for a “sufficiency” world, in which all have enough and where the share of wealth owned by the richest one percent drops dramatically—a kind of globalized Sweden, I’d say, in which people work half the hours we do at present, and consume more education and health care and less stuff. They view it as an alternative to “degrowth” scenarios, and also to our current unrestrained growth model, and say that it leaves the world with lower temperatures than either of those schemes.

To avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency is required: a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems is also necessary, as is the sharp compression of income and wealth inequality. This compression is both a social justice objective and a condition for financing necessary climate investment and human capital expenditure and for sustaining political support from bottom- and middle-income classes in both the North and the South.

Here’s a little diagram they provide of the basic outline

I have a certain sympathy for the argument—expressed most pithily by David Roberts on Bluesky—that this kind of sky-castle architecture doesn’t amount to much; I too am more fascinated by the daily drumbeat of technological innovation. And I think that the accumulation of that innovation may undermine part of Piketty’s argument; I have a feeling that the investment required for decarbonization is going to be easier to come by, as the price for good stuff just keeps falling, and the economic logic of paying for fossil fuel becomes ever smaller.

But I also think that the climate crisis is not the only ecological threat we face, nor indeed the only threat period. I think it’s pretty clear that democracy can’t survive inequality; there’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground. One possibility is that the mega-rich will succeed in their current project of deliberalizing the planet, and we’ll all get to live in our own nasty little sovereignties; another is that the Bernie Sanderses resident in most parts of the world will figure out how to combine their efforts and that over time we’ll get something that looks a bit like what Piketty (or for that matter Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future) imagines. One tell for me that this team is not entirely politically detached came in this paragraph about what would happen if America (or China) predictably refused to join in such a scheme:

If necessary, the Global Justice Platform can be implemented with an incomplete coalition of countries, including the absence of the US and/or China. According to our projections, the climate damages imposed by the US on other countries would be about 3% of world GDP per year, on average, over the 2026-2100 period if the US does not participate in the GJP. Under simplifying assumptions, other countries should impose a corrective tax of approximately 80% on all US exports to collect tax revenues approximately equivalent to the damage. Given the projected decline of the US share in world GDP – from 30% in 1945 to 15% in 2025 and 5-10% by 2100 – it is likely that such tariffs would induce the US to join the GJP. The same conclusion applies to the case of China, but with a higher tariff (180% or more).

The report concludes that

“A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible. What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.”

I think that’s a worthy goal to keep in the back of our minds as we proceed with the daily work of building the infrastructure for this new world; every election is a chance to get us a little closer, by electing the kind of people who understand the need for this kind of compression of wealth.

But the infrastructure is the part we can do something about right now, and on that score there’s some equal mix of encouraging maddening news, all of it again on a large scale.

On the one hand, our farcical war in the Gulf continues to serve as the recruiting sergeant for the renewable revolution. As a Bloomberg team reports in a long and important essay, the Gulf War has been “Asia’s Ukraine.”

About two hours from Manila there’s a solar power plant capable of powering 60,000 homes. Surrounded by fields growing okra and eggplant, it had been sitting idle since August, waiting for a connection to the grid — stuck in a queue just like many other renewable energy facilities around the world as power networks struggle to catch up with rising electricity demand.

Then the Iran war cut off the Philippines’ supply of imported liquefied natural gas. Immediately, the government cut fuel taxes and offered free bus rides to the public. Then a few weeks later, as the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked, officials began deploying policies toward a deeper, more structural plan to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.

One strategy was to fast track more than 30 renewable plants by the end of April. One of those was that 125-megawatt solar plant, built by Citicore Renewable Energy Corp, which is now supplying clean energy to the grid. It is “good timing,” said Joselito Ernst Cañete, operations manager at Citicore, just as electricity demand increases to power air conditioners during the peak summer months.

What happened in the Philppines isn’t an isolated example. With their energy supplies threatened, countries across Asia and Europe have chosen to speed up deployment of renewables and electrification.

Meanwhile, the cheerful solar guru Danny Kennedy chimed in from a conference in Singapore where he found the western politicians and analysts way behind the Asian curve. I will quote from his account at some length because it’s important

Philippines. After declaring a national energy emergency in March, the government activated a whole-of-government mandate for energy security. Regulatory bottlenecks for renewables are being dismantled. Rooftop solar inquiries are up 500% since the crisis began. This is not a green ambition. This is a survival response.³

Vietnam. The country has revised its power development plan, targeting a minimum of 47% renewable electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam is already the region’s largest EV market, and its government has expanded EV tax incentives in direct response to the Iran War’s impact on fuel prices.³ HSBC recently extended $4 billion in clean-tech financing to Chinese firms, much of it flowing into EV and solar exports to Vietnam and ASEAN.⁴

Indonesia. Beyond the factory I visited in Batam, the government is engineering a broad fiscal shift — expanding EV incentives with a target of 2 million electric cars and 12 million electric two-wheelers on the road by 2030. With the world’s largest nickel reserves, Indonesia is positioning itself to replace diesel imports with a domestic battery ecosystem. The logic is national sovereignty as much as climate policy.³ We’ve also talked about their 100GW solar archipelago plans.

Thailand. Advanced its net zero target by 15 full years, to 2050. Solar generation surged 72% in 2025. The country is adding 50 GW of renewables and 14 GW of energy storage by 2037. A major 1 GW module supply deal between China’s GCL-SI and Thailand’s Getz Energy was just signed to support that buildout.⁵ ⁶

Singapore itself. Already scaled solar to 1.7 GW and is executing multi-gigawatt cross-border subsea clean electricity cables from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam — with a requirement that developers bundle storage at origin for 24/7 firm power delivery. Singapore, to its credit, is acting. The conference, perhaps, just needed a bigger window.³

We already know China and India — the two largest energy consumers in Asia — reached a historic tipping point together in 2025. For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%.³ These are not small numbers. These are inflection points.

And yet even as this good news is happening, the Chinese are also beginning to shutter many of the solar panel factories that are at the heart of this revolution, because they’re not making enough money. This is, on the hand, understandable, and on the other entirely maddening—these factories are the single most important industrial asset on earth—they are factories for lowering the temperature of the earth. As readers are doubtless painfully aware, I’ve been beating this drum for a good long while, but I’m glad to see others joining in. Adam Tooze, the interesting bricoleur in charge of the Chartbook newsletter, wrote in the FT this week, it would be understandable if we were talking about some mundane commodity like cement.

But solar panels? Since when were solar panels just another commodity? They are a technological miracle. They make us into farmers of the sun. For the past half century, research labs around the world, starting in the 1970s with Nasa spin-offs and the big US energy research push under Jimmy Carter, have been straining to reach this point. Together with batteries, which are also rapidly approaching the point of excess supply, they are the key to a sustainable future.

As Tooze points out, it cost China very little in subsidies ($18 billion) to build this behemoth (though one should probably add in the subsidies that, say, Germany provided to its citizens to buy the early models, underwriting the startup of China’s engineering miracle).

I’ve long argued that on a rational world, trying everything it could to head off the worst of global warming, we would “globalize” these factories, running them 24/7 and then piling up the panels on every railroad siding and wharf on the planet so that people could come take them away. This would be, I think, a backdoor way of achieving a fair amount of what Piketty has in mind, far messier than his global scheme but somewhat more plausible. By some calculations, ten years production from those plants would produce enough panels to provide all the power the world currently uses.

If my sense that the coming El Niño will revive the world’s focus on the climate crisis—well, this is the easiest possible route forward. And it comes not just with more power, but with different power. Elon Musk may be rushing his IPO for data centers in space or whatever the heck he’s currently selling, but some of us will hole up here on earth, quite sufficient with the solar panels in our yards.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Along somewhat these lines, very worth reading the Volts interview with James McGinniss, an entrepreneur pushing small battery systems to tenants and small holders—in the case of his company, mostly business like laundromats and small groceries. He argues that cumulatively they’re going to be…very important

What we’ve found is — this is another mind-blown moment for me — when you look at the National Electric Code and UL certification and how, outside of whatever jurisdiction that you’re in, just what is safe physically to do, you can do hundreds of kilowatt-hours in buildings because there’ll be multiple 200- to 400-amp panels. Each of those — there’s the 120 rule — and you can push a lot more power into them than you think, not just these little batteries. We’re keeping things small because of the current environment that we live in.

The physical, safe way to do it — I see paths to having, imagine in every panel on a commercial building you have a stack of these batteries like a server rack, and they are all plug-in based. You are not just doing one giant system on the roof, which has totally different safety and weight considerations and needs permits, etc. When you think about these metropolitan areas, you could imagine solar on every balcony, solar on the roof, storage on every panel, and they are all plugged in.

You’re talking about megawatt-scale deployments.

+I’ve spent what seems like months of my life trying to dispel the notion lodged in American minds that China is undercutting the climate by endlessly building coal plants; as it happens, China is decreasing its coal use. But not the U.S. (see above); indeed, new data shows that America is now investing more in fossil fuel than the vastly larger People’s Republic. From Josh Gabbatiss:

High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.

This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.

As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.

Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.

Happily, as Haley Zaremba points out, the solar boom in the U.S. is also continuing despite Trump’s best efforts

Newly released data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) shows that at the close of last year, solar energy additions were the single largest form of new energy capacity installations for the 28th straight month, starting in September of 2023. In fact, in spite of a broad rollback of Biden-era clean energy incentives since Trump resumed office in January of last year, renewables represented a whopping 88 percent of energy additions in 2025, with utility-scale solar alone counting for 72.6 percent of U.S. electricity additions.

This massive growth trend has caused solar power’s share of the United States energy mix to surpass that of wind power, nuclear power, and hydropower. And while many if not most of these renewable projects were greenlit and funded before Trump took office and rolled back tax cuts and subsidies for solar and wind projects, experts say not to expect a major cooldown any time soon.

In fact, FERC projections show that solar energy installations will continue to grow by 86 gigawatts over the next three years, at which point the sector will surpass coal as well, Trump’s $700 million plan to revive coal production notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, out in Trump’s favorite parts of the world, solar spending in Africa is also outpacing fossil fuels. As Allan Olingo chronicles

Of the 322 energy projects announced across Africa in 2025, 173 were solar projects, followed by hydropower at 46, wind at 34, gas at 22 and hybrid energy projects at 14, according to the energy research firm Electron Intelligence.

“Africa is not on the periphery of the global energy transition, it is sitting at its center,” said Mugwe Manga, climate finance lead at FSD Kenya. “The continent holds the world’s best renewable resources, and the economics have now decisively turned in favor of clean energy.”

According to Olamide Niyi-Afuye, CEO of the Africa Minigrid Developers Association (AMDA), the continent is undergoing a broader strategic shift in how energy infrastructure is being developed, with an emphasis on systems that can be deployed faster and expanded gradually with flexible financing.

+Thanks in no small part to James Talarico (and that Leo fellow), it’s a good season for rethinking the basics of Christian theology. Talarico has reminded us that kindness is somewhat more Scriptural than cruelty; now a California pastor, Jeff Spencer, has written a nifty sermon arguing that the creation story in Genesis was really the first incarnation. And he quotes that California mystic (who knew, thanks to his fundamentalist father, every word of the Bible by heart), John Muir.

“The earth, he said, is a divine ‘incarnation.’ Here, Muir uses a word that most of Western Christianity has reserved exclusively for Jesus. Muir applies it not just to Jesus, not even just to humanity and the creatures, but to the matter of earth itself. Even earth’s geological formations, he says are ‘heaven incarnate’; the rocks can be called ‘instonations’ of God. Everything is in essence spirit, incarnated in flesh, in leaves, in rocks. All these varied forms of matter ‘are simply portions of God,’ wrote Muir. They are all of ‘the God essence.’”

I can’t help but wonder if this long thread of Christian thought, typically suppressed and condemned by the gatekeepers in the church, influenced Father Richard Rohr when he wrote much more recently, “When Christians hear the word ‘incarnation,’ most of us think about the birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated God’s radical unity with humanity. But I want to suggest that the first Incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything.”

+Annals of divestment: Quebec’s pension fund reports that getting out of fossil energy and into the clean stuff made it a lot of the green stuff.

La Caisse — the Quebec pension fund managing the retirement savings of six million Quebecers — confirmed this month that its exit from oil has paid off financially.

Since launching its climate strategy, its energy investments returned 10 per cent annually, compared to 8 per cent from a global oil index — a gap that amounts to almost $4 billion above what investing in oil companies would have generated.

+You’ve heard about urban legends, but one rural legend—fanned by the same fossil fuel disinfo experts that have been hard at work for decades—is that farmers should reject solar panels because they might shed glass that would somehow end up in future crops. As Austyn Gaffney reports:

In January, Michigan Republican state Rep. Cam Cavitt posted a 51-second clip to Facebook labeled ​“Solar Farm SECRET.” In the segment, he claimed that farmers in his district couldn’t grow potatoes on land where solar developments were sited.

“Frito [Frito-Lay] did the same with the potato growers up by us,” fellow Michigan Republican Rep. Dave Prestin told Cavitt in the clip. ​“Any field that had solar panels installed on it will never be allowed to grow potatoes for human consumption due to the leaching.”

Shockingly, this isn’t true.

PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, told Canary Media that the company ​“has not issued blanket guidance to growers that fields with solar installations will not be accepted.”

Nor is there any published evidence that solar farms have a negative impact on potato farming, according to experts consulted for this story. On the contrary, there is agrivoltaics research showing that potatoes—and many other crops—can benefit from growing alongside shade-making solar panels.

+Denmark is out with its new climate policy, and where others (New York!) are in cowardly retreat, they have decided that they will go to 110% emissions reductions by 2050 (funding work elsewhere to make up for past emissions). I predict that this will end up making them richer, not poorer. They’re also introducing a tax on private jets and cruise ships. Creeping Pikettyism!

Meanwhile in Scandinavia, the Finns are putting huge storage batteries outside a new Microsoft data center that will allow them to capture the excess heat from the facility and use it to warm almost half the house in a large district. As Patrick Jowett writes,

Peter Strannegård, Fortum’s Executive Vice President, Renewables and Decarbonisation, said that once fully implemented, data centre waste heat is expected to cover approximately 40% of the total 2 TWh annual district heating demand of the 250,000 heat users in the area.

The recovery of waste heat from Microsoft’s data centre sites is scheduled to begin step by step next year, Fortum’s update adds, in line with Microsoft’s construction and commissioning schedule.

“As new phases of the data centres are completed, increasing volumes of waste heat will be available for the district heating customers,” the company said. “Waste heat recovery increases local heat production capacity, reduces exposure to fuel price volatility and helps maintain predictable district heating prices.”

Fortum also explained that the set-up of the plants allows heat production to respond flexibly to varying demand, strengthening reliability and price competitiveness of heat production for district heating customers in the area. “For the wider energy system, flexible heat production helps balance electricity demand, particularly during fluctuating renewable generation,” it said.

Meanwhile, as I noted above, the U.S. energy secretary has decided to invest in…coal

+New Zealand’s conservative government has not been particularly planet-friendly, but they are investing in putting solar panels on hundreds of schools

“Early modelling by Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) shows that solar panels are estimated to pay for themselves within five to seven years and a 30kW system - the standard size for a school - could save a school up to $8000 a year in electricity bills,” Energy Minister Simeon Brown said.

“Schools will also have options to sell energy back to the grid, generating an estimated $6.7m in revenue over 10 years.”

+Chelsea Harvey reports that municipal heat preparedness campaigns across the country are suffering from federal funding cuts

The federal government doesn’t define heat waves as a disaster, even as events with fewer victims, like hurricanes and floods, qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance. So money is short, no matter who’s president. But they said it’s gotten worse under the Trump administration, which has canceled grants ranging from long-term resilience funding from FEMA to tree-planting support from the Forest Service.

Those challenges roared to life at a disaster planning conference in Boston earlier this month. Heat officers from around the country were asked to respond to a fictional scenario in Phoenix, where an imaginary blackout silenced the thrum of air conditioners citywide as temperatures soared to 111 degrees.

Funding lapses were an urgent undercurrent, even as participants dreamed of expanding heat emergency plans and urban cooling projects.

“You can identify those big budget items, and you can advocate for them, but you’re not necessarily going to get them,” Jane Gilbert, a veteran official who has overseen heat programs in Miami, said at the two-day workshop attended by nearly two dozen officials from across the country.

But, did I note, we’ve got plenty of money to subsidize new coal power?

+Very good to see blue states suing the federal government over its dispersal of billions to buy back offshore wind rights. As Ella Nilsen writes,

New York Attorney General Letitia James called the March announcement an “illegal agreement.”

“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” James said.

The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. State attorneys general from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island argued on Tuesday the administration had violated the law when executing the March deal — failing to hold a hearing required by law to determine that keeping the offshore wind leases “would likely cause serious harm to life, property, national security, or the environment.”

+Finally some good news. The Trump administration is desperately trying to sell off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, but it’s almost impossible to find buyers. Only two companies put in bids on small corners of the acreage. Partly this is because campaigners—mostly native Alaskans—have made it toxic: not even Exxon wants to go dig up a wildlife refuge. And partly its because—can you imagine, in the 21st century, making money by digging up oil in the farthest corners of the earth, refining it, shipping it, and then selling it to…who exactly? As Dan McCarthy reported the other day, EVs are taking over the world

Nearly 60% of cars sold in China this year will be electrified.

EV sales are growing rapidly across the rest of Asia, too. This year, sales are expected to leap by over 50% across Asian countries other than China, IEA found, driven in large part by the availability of super affordable Chinese EV models.

In Europe, which has strong emissions standards that push consumers toward EVs, sales are growing especially fast. This year, EVs will make up one-third of new cars sold in the region, powered not only by EV-adoption poster child Norway but also by rapid uptake in Germany, the U.K., and Turkey.

There are moments when it feels like the president’s attention (as occasionally happens when we age) just keeps getting narrower and narrower—the things he really cares about (arch, reflecting pool, Kennedy Center, gilded horse statues) are all within a few miles of his home. He can barely be bothered to stay interested in the war he started in Iran; he’s more concerned with giving pretend tours of his imaginary ballroom. (“You come in, you have cocktails,” he explained to his daughter in law, interviewing him for Fox in true dear-leader fashion. “They they go through the door, in for dinner.”)

But the momentum behind the truly dangerous Project 2025 reordering of our society continues apace, even if—without Elon Musk to give it a face—we aren’t noticing. Late last week the White House announced plans for a major tightening of political control over research grants. Instead of relying on the advice of expert panels as to which research should be funded, as Kevin Bogardus explains

One or more senior political appointees designated by their agency head must conduct “a pre-issuance review” of all discretionary grants, making sure they follow several principles, including to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”

Since I enjoy making up new words (though surely someone has beaten me to this?) I’m going to call it “scilencing.”

The danger inherent in this should be entirely obvious. Jeff Mervis at Science interviewed a number of observers:

“What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management,” Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), writes in a Substack post. “It is a vehicle for complete political control of science … over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.” Representative Zoe Lofgren (D—CA), a leading critic of the Trump administration’s research policies, calls the proposal “a dystopian move that would destroy what remains of merit-based review.”

This would be a bad idea in a reason-based administration. In one that believes medieval nonsense about public health and that is eager to deregulate chemicals and end efforts to clean the air, it’s downright lethal.

And there is no doubt where the impulse really originated. The science the Trump administration really hates is climate science, because it threatens the “energy dominance” that the White House has made its basic foreign and economic policy, not to mention the profits of the fossil fuel industry that has been such an attentive donor. It’s not the first time that GOP administrations have tried to stymie climate science. Everyone remembers James Hansen’s crucial 1988 congressional testimony that global warming was underway; fewer recall that when he returned to Congress the next year the White House tried to rewrite and soften the conclusions in his testimony. That was under George H.W. Bush; under his son, in 2006, the White House tried again to rein him in. As he told Andy Revkin, NASA officials

ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. “They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” he said.

Hansen was crucial enough—the Paul Revere of climate change—and senior enough that he was able to keep working and speaking. And the scientific research money kept more or less flowing. But now, in this new bureaucratic play, the Office of Management and Budget is trying to make sure that such independence (the single most obvious requirement for scientific advance) is a thing of the past. As John Timmer wrote at Ars Technica

The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the “national interest.” The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.

It is, in short, a recipe for how the government can finish the job of crippling American science.

This is not yet a done deal. There is a 45-day comment period for letting the government know what you think of their plan, and 42 of those days remain. Here’s the place to have your say.

I’m not, I must say, convinced they’ll pay great attention to the comments, so it’s also crucial to be letting your congress people know what you think about this attack on science. The congress has so far been able to save at least some of the things Russell Vought has sought to kill: indeed, word came this week that the NOAA budget will include money to keep the carbon dioxide observatory at Mauna Loa (aka the world’s most important scientific instrument) up and running. That’s a direct result of Congress hearing outcry, so let’s keep it up.

Remind them that real leaders actually want to know what science can tell them—case in point, the remarkable new movie, Pressure, which tells the story of how General Eisenhower listened to the new and unorthodox science of meteorology to guide his D-Day decision making. (95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, for those of you who like numbers).

The good news, I suppose, is that on climate and energy the cat has largely escaped the bag. We do know what the problem is, even if the ramifications become more dire with each passing week. (Here’s a somewhat terrifying update on the prospects for this year’s wildfire season; meanwhile, Tom Harris has the new numbers on Antarctic melt.). And we know where the solution lies. Indeed, it too comes into clearer focus with each passing week. As I wrote earlier this year, the action in the next few years is going to be about batteries, and boy is that proving true. Bloomberg confirmed this week that 2025 was the first year the world installed more than a hundred gigawatts of battery storage, up 48 percent from the year before, and expected to grow another 46 percent this year.

South Australia held a big auction last week for “firm supply” across the territory’s electric grid. This is supposed to be the last place where fossil fuel is superior: always-on power. But all the low bids came from companies that wanted to (and now will) install big batteries. As Giles Parkinson reported

It is yet another sign of the growing dominance of battery storage technology in Australia’s main grids (and off grid).

Big batteries have dominated other long duration storage tenders, particularly in NSW, were it has sidelined pumped hydro projects, and battery storage has been steadily sending gas peakers to the sidelines, particularly in the demand peaks they used to dominate.

Indeed, Australia is emerging as the test case for just how fast and furiously you can switch a grid to clean renewables. Even as its government continues to mine huge amounts of coal to send abroad, it’s providing a generous domestic subsidy for Aussies who want to put smaller batteries in their homes. And that, in turn, is underwriting a revolution on the grid. As Adam Morton and Petra Stock wrote this past week

Nearly 60% of the household-scale battery capacity installed across almost 200 other countries this financial year will be in the southern continent, according to a recent analysis. Since July, about 415,000 have been connected – roughly one unit for every 25 Australian homes.

Previously, power prices would rocket in the evenings as gas-fired power – the most expensive form of energy generation on the Australian grid – was turned on to meet peak demand. With solar and wind now providing nearly half the electricity, and coal-fired power plants gradually closing, gas has been used to fill gaps after the sun sets.

But batteries are increasingly taking over that role. Total gas-fired generation was 24% lower across three months this summer compared with the year before. Tennant Reed, the climate change and energy director with the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says it has “completely changed how electricity prices are formed”.

I hope you’ll go back and read the sentence I italicized in the last paragraph: the use of gas to create electricity dropped 23 percent in a year. This is much like what’s happened in California, where Mark Jacobson reports that the world’s fourth largest economy is using 60% less gas to produce electricity than it did three years ago. That changes on this scale are possible is precisely what terrifies the fossil fuel industry, and in turn the Trump administration.

And the possibilities are everywhere. Canary Media’s Julian Spector wrote last week, a new global report shows that these so-called “firm renewables” (wind and sun coupled with batteries)

“has crossed the threshold of cost competitiveness with new fossil fuel generation,” in areas with plenty of sun or wind. ​“The central question is no longer whether firm renewables can compete on cost, but how quickly the structural conditions needed to realise their potential can be put in place across the diversity of markets and institutional contexts prevailing globally.”

China sets the bar with its shockingly low cost of firm renewables today.

IRENA looked at 252 solar projects that went online there in 2024 and found that many of them could be augmented with extra solar capacity and batteries to deliver power cheaper than the $100-per-megawatt-hour benchmark for new gas-fired plants. Almost all the modeled solar-battery plants could beat that cost for firm clean power 90% of the time; even at the higher reliability threshold of 99%, nearly half the projects remained competitive, and the lowest cost was $46 per megawatt-hour.

And would any of this be, I don’t know, politically popular?

Beginning one month from tomorrow, Australians, whether they have solar panels or batteries or none of the above will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon from noon to three. If you want to know why our government needs to shut up scientists and ward off engineers, that’s why.

Oh, they’re also trying to shut down the world’s central archive of disasters, which lets us learn from the past. I predict that will not slow the pace of trouble.

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In other energy and climate news:

+Science is constantly self-correcting, and now the big climate assessments will drop the RCP 8.5 “high emissions” scenario, because…we’re moving quickly towards lower emissions (see above). But that’s not “good news”—the current trajectory still has the planet warming 3.5 degrees Celsius before the century is out, which is more than enough to turn our civilizations upside down. In fact—as recent data about the great Atlantic currents has made clear—it’s becoming clear that we can do far more systemic damage to the earth at lower temperatures than we once thought; the earth is finely balance.

From the remarkable Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues, a new paper on the situation in the north Atlantic:

A region of the northern Atlantic–sometimes called the “cold blob”–has cooled since the 19th Century while the rest of the world has warmed. It is particularly the ocean which has cooled there. Scientists have been discussing whether this is because ocean currents bring less heat into this region, or because more heat is being lost through the sea surface there. An analysis of temperature data sets based on measurements show it is the former–changing ocean heat transport–which dominates heat content changes in the “cold blob.”

This is a sign that those great currents are slowing—not good news.

+Great reporting from Amy Westervelt and Geoff Dembicki about the “shadowy global network of right wing think tanks” that, among other things, works to make climate protest illegal

With more than 500 member think tanks globally, the network remains robust. Atlas members are in regular contact with each other, sharing ideas, tips, and strategies. (The network has even bragged about being an early adopter of the internet.) Representatives from member think tanks meet up at annual right-wing events in the U.S. and elsewhere. Ideas are shared between member think tanks via various publications, including the quarterly Freedom’s Champion magazine, a Latin America podcast, and various books in both English and Spanish (even a cookbook!).

Alejandro Chafuen, an Argentine American businessman who took over the Atlas Network presidency in 1991 and remained in charge until 2018, once described the network’s audience in one word: elites.

“To answer the question ‘Who is the real customer of a think tank?’” he said,” I will refer to the often ignored passage of Ludwig von Mises, in his book Bureaucracy. In it he describes a type of person—elite—who I believe is not only the real customer of Atlas and many think tanks, but also our ideal customer, who benefits us and is served by us.”

+A new study published this week estimates mortality from the growing number of savage heatwaves in India, and the news is… not good

We estimate that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally; a five-day heatwave causes nearly 30,000.

These findings have implications not only for India but also for other countries in South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa facing similar heat vulnerabilities, highlighting the global urgency of heat adaptation measures. With respect to heatwave frequency and temperature thresholds, these estimates are conservative lower bounds.

+Jan Rosenow offers a cheery update on just how fast we’re learning to use electricity to power industrial processes—that’s about a third of emissions, and even a couple of years ago we were thinking of those as “hard to abate.” No longer

Today, electricity meets only about a fifth of industry’s final energy. Across the full set of scenarios, the median rises to 35% by 2050. But that average hides the more interesting story. In the scenarios built around strong climate ambition, fast power-sector decarbonisation and supportive industrial policy, electrification reaches a median of 51% by 2050, with the upper tail going as high as 85%.

Electrification is a structural fossil fuel phase-out and decarbonisation lever, not a marginal one. Swapping an industrial gas boiler for a heat pump cuts emissions on day one, and then keeps cutting them automatically as the grid gets cleaner. Industrial heat pumps, electric boilers, electro-thermal storage and resistance heating can already replace large shares of low and medium-temperature heat.

A case in point: Carly Leonida, writing from this year’s Electric Mine conference in Lisbon, Portugal, has a compelling account of the way that electricity is coming to the world’s mines.

Miners presenting in Lisbon weren’t discussing pilot vehicles in isolated trial environments. Instead, they were talking about ventilation bottlenecks, charging strategies, battery swap logistics, productivity metrics and operational redesign.

At Eldorado Gold’s Lamaque Complex in Québec, for example, battery-electric equipment is no longer viewed primarily as a decarbonisation initiative. Instead, it has become a practical solution to a mine-planning challenge.

Speaking during the underground mining stream, Eldorado Gold’s Martin Pichette explained that the company’s electrification strategy was driven initially by the realities of deeper mining. As haul distances increase and mines extend further underground, ventilation infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to expand.

+A delegation of Texas community leaders has gone to Japan to ask them to stop financing a big new LNG terminal in Freeport. From Oil Change International:

This is the first time a community harmed by a Japanese-funded LNG project has filed a series of coordinated complaints against the whole chain of project financiers —targeting both Japanese public institutions JBIC and NEXI, private megabanks MUFG, Mizuho, and SMBC, and the Japanese power company JERA.

The complaints come as Japan faces mounting scrutiny of its fossil fuel dependency, with the soaring oil and gas prices due to the Hormuz crisis exposing the vulnerability of Japan’s long-term LNG strategy. In October 2025, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signed a $550 billion US investment commitment in a desperate attempt to mitigate tariffs and appease President Trump. Prime Minister Takaichi announced the first tranche with a $36 billion commitment to US oil and gas investments.

+Here’s a shocker. That good neighbor Elon Musk is adding a bunch more gas turbines to his AI factory in Mississippi.

Meanwhile, just in case you’re wondering if renewable energy is really cheaper, new data shows that the cost of natural gas power plants has gone up 68% in this country since 2023, largely thanks to the data center rush. As Josh Saul writes, this is

adding to customer and political concerns about rising power bills.

The average project expense for a gas power plant with combined-cycle turbines, the more efficient type, rose to $2,157 per kilowatt last year from less than $1,500 in 2023, according to a report from BloombergNEF.

+Florida is spending a lot of money on “beach renourishment”—but not enough to keep up with rising sea levels and growing storms. As Jack Randall reports:

On the Treasure Coast, renourishments have cost about $75.6 million in St. Lucie County, $40.5 million in Indian River County and $39.3 million in Martin County, according to TCPalm’s analysis of data that ends in 2025.

Dumping new sand on diminishing beaches is the prominent method federal, state and local governing authorities use to shore up erosion. It’s a strategy that has been criticized by researchers and environmentalists, who question its long-term efficacy as sea levels continue to rise.

Harold Wanless, a professor and researcher at the University of Miami, called the continued use of beach renourishment “ridiculous.”

“They never last,” Wanless said. “They don’t protect well, partly because of sea level rise.”

+Much of Europe just suffered through its greatest May heatwave ever. Among the casualties, competitors at the French Open tennis tournament. From Tumaini Carayol:

The 26th seed, Jakub Mensik, described the conditions as “insane to play in” after collapsing with cramps and having to be escorted towards the locker room in a wheelchair after his five-set second-round win over Mariano Navone on Wednesday.

Despite being well known for his durability, the two-time French Open finalist Casper Ruud completely overheated in the first round and looked on his way out before recovering in the fifth set to defeat Roman Safiullin. “I felt at times really dizzy and just really tired and walking around like a zombie almost,” Ruud said.

As Bob Henson reports, there’s nothing natural about the heat

“This is an unprecedented event with a one in 1,000 chance of happening at this time of year in the climate of 1979 to 2025,” climate scientist Christophe Cassou told Le Monde, referring to the heat wave in France. “It would have been virtually impossible in the preindustrial era.”

Many European schools were built in a much cooler era, and are paying the price. As Chico Harlan and Leontine Gallois write

Traditionally in Europe, schools were built to withstand cold, not heat, and air-conditioning was rarely necessary. But now the temperature extremes once associated with summer vacation are pushing into the academic year, creating stifling conditions and leading to criticism that Europe’s schools have been slow to contend with the shifting patterns of climate change.

This week, as May heat records tumbled across England and parts of France, a French teachers union shared an internal survey showing that temperatures had eclipsed 82 degrees Fahrenheit in 90 percent of middle and high schools. They accused some administrative districts of putting off investments to reduce heat exposure.

Meanwhile, as Joe Lo writes from the UK

In my neighbourhood, people are struggling to cope. The fish and chip shop has shut. My child’s teachers are battling to keep them in front of the air conditioner. And my evening football match was conducted at walking pace, with red-faced players hogging the shady side of the pitch.

And remember: this is May.

Meanwhile, a new report from the World Meteorological Organization on what to expect globally in the next five years. Not just that we’ll shatter global temperature records but also that

an overheating Arctic will warm nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.66 degrees Celsius) between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defenses to lessen human-caused climate change.

+Not surprising, but nonetheless grim: a new study finds that air pollution devastates young lungs. Gary Fuller describes the research:

They found that breathing more air pollution during pregnancy, infancy and early childhood can slow lung development all the way up to early adulthood. The greatest impact was during adolescence, which is the time when lung growth accelerates.

An earlier study found that air pollution was reducing the growth of children’s lungs in east London. Here, the average nine-year-old’s lungs were between 90 and 100 millilitres smaller than they should be. This is approximately the volume of two hen’s eggs.

+Interesting data from UMass Amherst finds that most big solar projects in the U.S. don’t meet much opposition at all

The study, published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, looked at 686 utility-scale solar projects that came online between January 2022 and November 2023. Researchers found that 56% of the projects fell into “no” or “low” conflict categories, while just 19% experienced high levels of conflict.

Larger solar projects were more likely to generate opposition, but one finding stood out: The political makeup of the surrounding community didn’t appear to make much difference. The study found no statistically significant link between the share of Democratic voters near projects and levels of opposition.

+And finally, good news from China about the return of bike culture.

When I first visited China many decades ago, it was predominartly a bike country. Even in Beijing, great waves of bicyclists silently crossed the city. In subsequent visits, it was painful to watch the rise of car traffic, and with it great traffic jams, not to mention crazy quantities of air pollution. When I’d meet with mayors, I’d say: don’t copy Houston. Copy Copenhagen. I think I had exactly zero influence, but now officials are making a concerted effort to push cycling. As the folks at the Dutch Cycle Network report

When the master plan for the brand new District of Tongzhou was being developed, the directive from the Beijing Mayor—who had just returned from a trip to the Netherlands—was clear: it must put cycling front and centre. At its spine: a 2.7 km corridor connecting its commercial and residential hubs.

In order to fulfil this vision of a world-class sustainable infrastructure project, they went to the Dutch Cycling Embassy; selecting the engineers at Haskoning (including Jasper Homrighausen and Wim van der Wijk) for their extensive experience with regional doorfiets (“non-stop cycling”) routes, to partner with a Beijing-based consultant.

Designed using best practice and principles straight out of the CROW Manual for Bicycle Traffic, the route features a five-metre width for safety, underpasses for directness, shade trees for comfort, and a series of bespoke light fixtures (inscribed with the words “all roads are connected”) for attractiveness.”

I’ll leave you with a picture of the new Beijing “cycle highway,” and a reminder to write your public comments to the Trump administration about the folly of scilencing, especially if we even want to compete with the Chinese…