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fossil fuels
A Global Fossil Fuel Phaseout Is a Challenge 'Big Enough to Solve'
The immediate challenge is to develop a global phaseout road map that’s ambitious enough to stabilize the climate system and equitable enough to drive a resilient, renewables-based development in even the poorest parts of the world
Jul 18, 2026
It’s no secret that the climate negotiations are failing. The simple fact is that the carbon concentration of the atmosphere continues to rise, rapidly and along a pathway that threatens—but does not yet guarantee—true catastrophe.
That said, there’s little agreement on why the climate negotiations are failing, or what their role would be in the emergency global transition that’s so desperately needed. Such a transition will have to be very widely accepted as fair if it is to have a chance of success, and the negotiations as we have them are hardly rising to the challenges of global climate justice. Is this likely to change soon? Perhaps not, but such a change is both necessary and possible, and the goal has to be to increase the odds.
One promising way of doing so is to concentrate effort on launching a global push to phase out fossil fuels—that is, a phase out of both fossil fuel extraction and consumption, and the simultaneous development and global deployment of a fossil-fuel free energy economy. Such a phaseout would not solve the whole of the climate problem, let alone the still larger ecological crisis, but it would make solutions possible. The phaseout challenge is one that, as Dwight D. Eisenhower used to say, is “big enough to solve.”
The Road to Santa Marta
The story of the climate negotiations can be told many ways. I like to tell it as a story of failure, and renewed effort, and late, inadequate, steps forward. Such a process gave us the foundational United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Paris Agreement, and the hard-won breakthrough at 2023’s COP28 in Dubai, where the world’s nations agreed to “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” The question is if the current impasse, which settled in after Dubai, will play out in similar fashion.
How rapidly can the world’s civilizational dependence on fossil fuels be broken?
But first, know that a great burst of joy accompanied the Dubai agreement’s inclusion of the words “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” It broke a firewall that had held for decades, one in which a blocking coalition led by the Saudis and the American oil companies, playing a long and Machiavellian game, was able to keep fossil fuels from even being mentioned in a formal COP decision.
This silence has long been excoriated by climate activists around the world, but its origins are too seldom brought to light. To see them, drop back to 1992, when the Framework Convention was being finalized. Back then, the world’s climate diplomats were able to make substantive decisions. Some of these, like the agreement that countries would act in proportion to their “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” were inspiring and visionary. But the founders fell short in at least one enduringly negative and perhaps fatal way—they were unable to agree to a majority, or even a super-majority “last resort” decision-making system. They got close, but the fossil coalition blocked all paths, and the result, by both default and design, was consensus decision-making.
Consensus decision-making, alas, is a special kind of problem. It appears to be a commitment to deep democracy, yet in practice it means everyone has a veto, which is not exactly what you want if you’re trying to negotiate a life-or-death global transition that requires the interests of wealthy and powerful minorities to yield to those of the global community as a whole. On the contrary, it empowers blockers, allowing them to endlessly force the deletion of ambitious text, and thus it keeps both fossil phaseout (which is blocked by the fossil cartel) and meaningful finance reform (which is blocked by the wealthy countries) forever off the table. Over time, it has driven the negotiations into a realm of shadow play far divorced from the realities of the actual world.
It is difficult to pinpoint the original sin here. The Saudis, after all, have a point. Their economy is indeed threatened by any phaseout of fossil fuels. So why should they not fight like hell to preserve their power and their privilege? Everybody else does. But there’s a deeper problem as well: the climate finance problem, which continues to loom forbiddingly over any possible international climate accord. Ultimately, the deadlock in the climate negotiations is defined by the intransigence of the Global Rich, most of whom reside in the Global North, on key justice questions—finance in particular. Bluntly, the rich refuse to pay their fair shares. This intransigence makes any real breakthrough impossible, in part by empowering blockers on all sides.
At COP30 in Brazil, push came to shove. After a large group of activist nations failed to land an agreement to negotiate a “roadmap” away from fossil fuels, those nations, many of them frustrated beyond words, made a new move. Led by Colombia and The Netherlands and with a great deal of support from civil society (the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative in particular), they forked off a more informal process, which launched the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, held in April 2026 in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Santa Marta seemed immediately to be a game changer. Here, for example, is Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Treaty Initiative: “After years stuck in endless debates about whether to phase out fossil fuels, finally we are focusing on the how. We are no longer fighting for recognition of the problem, but creating solutions. It’s like watching a dam break—all that pent-up experience, knowledge, and passion suddenly flowing into concrete ways to phase out dirty fuels. The hope is contagious.”
The hope is also strategic. With President Donald Trump’s people in control of the US government, and doing everything in their power to undermine both the Paris Agreement and the Framework Convention itself, everyone could sense the opening. Which is why Santa Marta, as climate diplomacy’s favorite play-by-play announcer Ed King noted, was “weirdly” optimistic. One observer even described it as an “euphoric” experience.
Beyond any review of the formal takeaways, Santa Marta was a conference of the hopeful: 57 countries (plus California) representing about a third of the global economy, were present, and they all represented countries, or factions within countries, that wanted to face the fossil energy challenge. The US government, obviously, was not among them. Neither were the Gulf oil states, or Russia, or (more controversially) China and India. There was no formal negotiating. Civil society had its venues and made its declaration (a heroic synthesis), the academics had theirs, and a high-level science panel set the stage. The official discussions were universally reported to be congenial, even when it came to the equity question, which is always a reliable source of inconclusive discord.
The second Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels will be chaired by Tuvalu and Ireland. It will be in 2027, after COP31 in Turkey, which one way or another will have to react to Santa Marta and its outcomes. Moving forward with the transition is now on the official diplomatic agenda. Formally, this means defining national phaseout road maps and a global phaseout road map to plug them into. In reality it means much more, because even good road maps will mean little unless they’re accompanied by the financial and institutional breakthroughs that could bring them to life.
The Santa Marta Breakthrough
How rapidly can the world’s civilizational dependence on fossil fuels be broken?
The good news is that the renewable energy revolution is finally arriving in force, and this has made countries of all kinds willing to countenance a sharp break with fossil energy. Thanks in large part to China’s immense commitments to electrification and mass manufacturing, the cost of wind and solar, and the batteries that convert them into “firm” baseload power sources, has plummeted.
The US-Israeli war against Iran has accelerated the renewables buildout, by convincing countries to prioritize domestic energy production. Fadhel Kaboub, a prominent southern observer of today’s geopolitical ferment, put it well: “A world less dependent on oil would be less vulnerable to the weaponization of tanker routes, refinery disruptions, and sudden fuel-price shocks,” adding that “a renewables-based system does not make peace automatic, but it does make energy blackmail much harder.”
To avoid a future in which vast areas of the Earth become almost uninhabitable, the world’s governments will have to pick up the pace.
Further, the global renewables boom, which began before the war, may well be reaching its own inflection point. Solar evangelist Danny Kennedy cites 2025 as the big year, because that’s when China and India—the two largest energy consumers in Asia—together reached a historic tipping point. “For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%. These are not small numbers.” Then, in 2026, as the war dragged on, China’s solar exports hit all-time records. “This is not charity. It is commerce. It is nations choosing energy security, economic agency, and lower costs over the inherited architecture of fossil fuel dependency.”
There are provisos. China and India still struggle to avoid new coal even as they scale up renewables. Also, China’s clean energy technology dominance, coupled with the Global North’s political inability to adopt robust industrial policies, seems destined to deepen deindustrialization and despair, particularly in the United States and Europe. But, though critical, these remain only provisos, because China’s mass manufacturing prowess shows a way forward. In fact, as the cost of electrification has dropped, it’s become difficult for the fossil cartel to convince the world’s people that their dreams of prosperity—or even stability—depend on the continued burning of coal, gas, and oil.
Alas, technology alone will not stabilize the climate in time. Renewables are displacing coal in particular, but the oil and gas story is more mixed. Thinktank Ember’s view is authoritative: “if demand and clean electricity growth continue at their recent pace, then fossil fuel generation will plateau before starting to decline consistently from the early 2030s.” Which is great, but not even close to fast enough to hold the 1.5°C line. To do better, it’s also necessary to stop fossil fuel extraction—drilling, fracking, and mining—as the second front in the phaseout battle, the second blade of the scissors.
This imperative has been obvious for decades. In 1998 at COP4 , Oilwatch, Amazon Watch, the Rainforest Action Network, and Project Underground launched a campaign to stop new exploration to avoid breaching the 1.0°C limit. The difference, 28 years later, is that the world has retreated to a far more dangerous 1.5°C goal, and could well retreat again. Moreover, the demand to “keep it in the ground” is now coming from the main stage. At Santa Marta, the science panel’s “action recommendations” included “halting all new fossil-fuel expansion” and “prohibit[ing] fossil fuel advertising.”
It’s easy to see why local communities that directly suffer the pollution, corruption, and abuse that typically accompany fossil fuel extraction have long been demanding its abolition. But why did it take so long for global actors to come to the table, and does their arrival indicate that the tide has definitively turned?
Probably not.
Pause to consider how the goal of “halting all new fossil fuel” investment would sound among the good citizens of Houston, or Oslo, or Riyadh, or Basra, or Moscow. What’s the way forward for nations whose economies are deeply entangled with fossil fuel revenues, or people whose lives are dependent on fossil fuel jobs? Such questions could be glossed over at Santa Marta, but they cannot go forever unanswered.
At Santa Marta, the signs were, as Orwell used to say, in front of your nose. Colombia represented the Global South and its co-host The Netherlands represented the Global North, but both countries will have very difficult times escaping their entanglement with fossil fuels. Colombia exemplifies the predicament of poorer fossil exporters: Over 75% of its energy demand and 35-50% of its export revenues are met by fossil fuels. The Netherlands, for its part, is far richer, and is not a fossil fuel exporter, so it will be far easier for it to extricate itself from its fossil entanglements. Easier but not easy: The Netherlands relies heavily on fossil fuel distribution and refining—the port of Rotterdam is Europe’s primary oil and gas gateway.
To avoid a future in which vast areas of the Earth become almost uninhabitable, the world’s governments will have to pick up the pace. At an absolute bare minimum this means eliminating the subsidies that promote fossil fuels. In practice, however, even this entirely rational reform slams directly into the stranglehold that fossil capital has on all countries. One excellent example is the so called investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows fossil fuel companies to sue governments for lost future profits if they move, however timidly, to regulate away even odious advantages that these companies have built over the years to maximize their profits. It’s an absurd and entirely corrupt legal and economic barrier to phasing out fossil fuels and, incidentally, it’s one that The Netherlands helped create in the 1960s. The ISDS was explicitly on the Santa Marta agenda, but was reduced to one meaningless sentence in the formal takeaways: ISDS “by some were perceived as creating barriers, while the extent to which these barriers are perceived varies.” Asked to explain this rather evasive blather, Dutch Minister and co-host Stientje van Veldhoven said. “This was not a negotiating conference, and therefore different parties, different countries have different positions.”
Sooner or later, a serious negotiating conference will have to take meaningful positions on ISDS, economic diversification, external debt, and many other difficult issues. To that end, it will have to distinguish the core problem of extractor dependence—especially in poorer extraction nations—from the broader problem of economic entanglement. Because all nations, rich and poor alike, are entangled with fossil fuels. The crucial step is to put the interests of the poor ahead of the entanglement of the rich, even as the world’s people struggle to face the realities, and the necessities, of climate stabilization.
One immediate question, as Tuvalu and Ireland prepare to host the follow-up conference in 2027, is which countries to invite. Santa Marta was widely praised as a leadership conference, but its attendees included countries, including co-host The Netherlands, that do not seem likely to halt fossil fuel expansion anytime soon, at least not voluntarily. And this while China, the undisputed leader of the clean energy transition, was not on the invitation list. Which is why one well-known, long-time activist (anonymously) suggested to me that the recent UN General Assembly vote on the International Court of Justice climate ruling might offer a convenient and logical first screen for admission to future conferences. Only signers would qualify. Eight countries, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, voted against the ruling, but another 28, including India, Turkey, Qatar, and Nigeria, abstained.
Sorting out this problem would be a step forward. But the real game changer would be for a wealthy major extractor to repudiate fossil fuel expansion. One would do, though such a repudiation would ideally be followed by a working consensus that fossil fuel extraction (and not just its expansion) must end first in the rich world. Alas, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Norway, The Netherlands, and Brazil, all countries that attended Santa Marta, continue to expand domestic extraction, while the UK, France, and Italy are home to major corporations with growing international operations. All this must stop, and soon, and there will be no real breakthrough until it does.
The Structure of the Challenge
Santa Marta launched three work programs:
- Develop national fossil-fuel phaseout road maps;
- Transform the global financial system to support the transition away from fossil fuels; and
- Advance toward a fossil fuel-free trade system.
The details are many, but the real challenge is that any program must be executed within a profoundly divided world that is pressing hard against physical planetary limits.
Given this, any workable phaseout strategy will stretch the politics of the possible to the breaking point. How could it not when the climate system is already destabilizing? Much of the relevant science leverages the notion of the remaining emissions budget—the total amount of carbon dioxide that the world can still emit before crossing a given temperature threshold—and, for any Paris-compliant temperature, this remaining budget is perilously small and rapidly shrinking. Indeed, fossil-fuel emissions must very quickly be drawn down to “real zero” and this will be impossible unless the extraction of fossil fuels ceases.
The second challenge is extreme inequality, which comes to us in two dimensions: between rich countries (the Global North) and poor countries (the Global South) and also between rich and poor classes, in all countries. Yet everything will nevertheless depend on an ability to cooperate in a robust solidarity that can resist the attacks of the fossil cartel and survive even as climate-driven damage and destruction decisively increases. Such cooperation to navigate the turbulence of the climate transition is unlikely without meaningful steps toward a global safety net and paths forward for the world’s poor.
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.”
Chidi put his answer in concrete terms. “People are going to lose their jobs… How are you trying to re-engage them in other sectors?” he said, before stressing the need for debt reform and other financial assistance to make such change possible. Countries that are highly dependent on extraction will need more time to disentangle their societies from fossil fuels and build new economies. This will be extremely difficult even in rich countries like the United States and Saudi Arabia, but far harder in poor countries such as Nigeria, Iraq, and South Sudan, where fossil fuels account for large fractions of national revenue.
Given these challenges, what’s the way forward? This is the central question of phaseout justice. Fortunately, this question, too often treated as subsidiary, was taken seriously at Santa Marta:
The countries present in Santa Marta still have structural dependencies to overcome, including fiscal dependencies, debt constraints, the dependence of the financial architecture on fossil fuels and the need to enable fossil fuels-free trade systems...Transitioning away from fossil fuels is more than replacing one energy source with another. It requires broad economic transformation to overcome structural dependencies, overcome debt constraints, expand reliable energy access, and support diversified, resilient economies. This must be planned with workers and communities, ensuring a transition that is fair, rights-based, and delivers tangible benefits for marginalized groups.
To give poor extracting countries a chance to rapidly phase down, rich extracting countries must very quickly phase out. In fact, to hold to the 1.5°C limit—really, to minimize the time spent in 1.5°C overshoot—the richest fossil fuel extractors like Canada, the United States, Norway, Australia, and the UK must abandon extraction by the very early 2030s. This logic is inexorable; it holds unless you’re prepared to accept a catastrophic level of warming or assume a magical level of carbon dioxide removal. To hold the 1.5°C, or anything close to it, even poor fossil fuel extractors will have to phase out quickly, which they will not be able to do without support from the rich world.
System Change
In his speech to the Santa Marta plenary, Colombia’s former President Gustavo Petro went beyond the usual practice of reading out a bill of complaints against fossil interests. ”There is inertia in the power and the economy of this archaic form of energy—fossil fuels—that lead to death. Undoubtedly, that form of capital can commit suicide, taking with it humanity and [other] life,” he said, going after fossil capitalism itself. “The question that needs to be asked is whether capitalism can truly adapt to a non-fossil energy model.”
This is exactly right.
The world is threatened by a suicidal form of capitalism, yet it is simultaneously clear that the reforms necessary to stabilize the climate, while momentous, do not demand wholesale revolution. Mandatory extraction limits, in particular, do not require an end to private property, though states strong enough to direct investment do seem to be necessary. Those devices must prove sufficient because there simply is not time to shift to a post-capitalist world. The goal has to be to shift to another, non-suicidal form of capitalism, assuming that such a thing exists.
Fossil capitalism will have to be forced from the stage, and to that end everything must be done.
The immediate challenge is to develop a global phaseout road map that’s ambitious enough to stabilize the climate system and equitable enough to drive a resilient, renewables-based development in even the poorest parts of the world. To that end, there is much to reconsider, beginning with the global finance architecture and, just as fundamentally, the fact that so many countries, so many elite cabals, and so many techno-economic systems have long co-evolved with the fossil cartel, and have become inextricably entwined with it.
Ultimately, because it is essentially political, the climate challenge is solvable. Formal negotiations could indeed push further the ball Santa Marta set into motion, and by so doing restore faith in multilateral governance, without which there’s no chance of success. But the truth is that the Tuvalu-Ireland meeting could just as easily degenerate into another pointless talking shop that fails to take any meaningful, galvanizing steps. This outcome must be avoided at almost any cost.
Fossil capitalism won’t yield to half measures. Neither market signals nor pipeline protests will reduce emissions at the necessary pace. Fossil capitalism will have to be forced from the stage, and to that end everything must be done. Technology, science, industrial policy, and global climate justice are going to have to line up on the same side, and even then something else—international solidarity—will also be required. But given that under capitalism money makes the world go round, there will be no meaningful international solidarity without international finance.
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We're Choking on Smoke—Where Do We Go From Here?
Everyone needs to consider spending at least some time every year doing what they can to improve the climate or soon events like this week’s convergence of bad global warming outcomes will become both commonplace and unstoppable.
Jul 18, 2026
Many older environmentalists, myself included, have been trying to warn our fellow human beings about the danger of global warming since the 1980s.
Back then, there were fewer signs that what the vast majority of climate scientists were already saying about the then-looming crisis would come true.
Over the years, we’d be more likely than people around us to worry about summers getting hotter than they had been in our childhood. Or storms getting more intense. Or getting less rain where there used to be more and more rain where there used to be less. And so on. But the real dangers were still in the future, and many people have trouble processing dangers that are not in the present, we understood.
And we did what we could for 40 years.
We have a Republican administration, working more directly for the fossil fuel industry and other related destructive and antiquated industries than any other to date, that seems determined to do as much damage to the planet as it possibly can while in power.
And it wasn’t enough.
And now global warming is definitely here. And it’s gotten so bad so fast that this week many of us on the East Coast were treated to two major manifestations of the climate crisis that is upon us like a wolf burying its fangs in our collective neck: Another of the increasingly frequent “heat domes” that translate to increasingly horrendous heatwaves plus terrible smoke from wildfires in Ontario.
And the smoke was so bad that it actually mitigated the heatwave. Something so messed up that few of us who aren’t, say, trained geophysicists have ever conceived that such a thing could happen outside of a major volcanic eruption in our hemisphere… like the big one in Iceland in 2010.
So where do we go from here? Well, things aren’t looking good.
We have a Republican administration, working more directly for the fossil fuel industry and other related destructive and antiquated industries than any other to date, that seems determined to do as much damage to the planet as it possibly can while in power. We have a Democratic Party that is better on global warming, but not that much better, hoping to retake the federal government. We have other political forces more committed to bringing the “drill baby drill, burn baby burn” crowds to heel—like the Green Party and Democratic Socialists of America. But they remain very small relative to the population (outside of DSA’s impressive base in New York City thus far) and hemmed in on every side by the major parties. And most of the largest environmental organizations have simply run out of steam.
Major advances in several areas of science and technology are likely sufficient to allow humanity to at least blunt the worst effects of global warming. And some countries are funding such research and working to meet self-imposed climate targets. But most are not, least of all the United States. Which “is the second-highest climate polluting country, responsible for around 12% of global emissions,” according to Yale Climate Connections. The highest being China, a nation that is also doing much more to remediate global warming than the US. Nor is the best science useful if it’s not deployed. Even as the pollution responsible for warming continues to get worse year by year.
Do I know some magic path out of this morass? No. But I will tell you this: Everyone needs to consider spending at least some time every year doing what they can to improve the climate or soon events like this week’s convergence of bad global warming outcomes will become both commonplace and unstoppable.
Just like all of us environmentalists have been saying all along. In the public interest. Not for personal gain. Unlike what the climate scofflaws profiting from the destruction of human civilization have all-too-successfully propagandized far too many Americans into believing.
Mull that over while you wait for the smoke to clear and heat to subside… until the next “smokewave” and the next heatwave.
And the next and the next and the next and the next…
The original version of this article ran on July 17, 2026 at BINJ.News.
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Out-of-Control Canadian Wildfires Prompt Calls for 'Nuremberg Trials for Big Oil'
“Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. The fossil fuel industry are arsonists at a global scale. It’s their pollution that’s fueling these horrific wildfires," one climate advocate told Common Dreams.
Jul 16, 2026
As wildfires raged across Canada on Thursday, sending dangerous smoke across the border into major US cities, climate advocates called for accountability for the fossil fuel industry, which knew for decades that its products were largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet chose to push climate denial instead.
While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of Canada's boreal forests, the heating of the atmosphere due to the burning of oil, gas, and coal has made fires more frequent and extreme.
"We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil," the youth-led Sunrise Movement wrote on social media in response to the fires.
We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil. https://t.co/nHhbDXB06X
— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026
Climate Defiance agreed, posting, "Nuremberg-style trials are in order for the fossil fuel executives who knew what they were doing to our children’s futures and did anyway."
There were 884 fires burning in Canada on Thursday, with 124 out of control, according to the country's national wildland fire summary. Over 100 fires were raging in Ontario alone, where they have forced the evacuation of at least 15 rural communities; destroyed homes in the Indigenous community of Collins First Nation, or Namaygoosisagagun; and polluted the skies over parts of the upper Midwest and Northeastern US.
As of Thursday evening Eastern time, the four cities with the worst air quality in the world were Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Toronto, according to IQAir.
People have shared dramatic footage of the fires on social media. One video shows a train moving through a blaze near Armstrong, Ontario. Thankfully, all crew members were evacuated safely, The Guardian reported.
This is near Armstrong, Ontario.
When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0
— Sol Mamakwa (@solmamakwa) July 14, 2026
Indigenous photographer Nadya Kwandibens shared images of flames rising over a lake with the words, "“My family hometown, Collins Ontario, is GONE."
Residents of the community fled the blaze in boats before the flames damaged and destroyed several homes and other structures, according to CBC News.
“Collins has burned to the ground. This is a tragedy and we are grateful that everyone got out safely,” Lise Vaugeois, the provincial representative for the region, said, as The Guardian reported. “Fires are part of a natural cycle, but the extreme temperatures we are experiencing across the county and the growing severity of weather events are indicators of climate change.”
Laura Chasmer, a professor of geography and the environment at the University of Western Ontario, noted that fires in Canada like the ones raging across Ontario have increased since 2015.
"This is associated with some of the extreme climate warming that we've been seeing, and the atmospheric drying of the surface," she told BBC News.
Brandi Morin, a Cree-Iroquois-French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, noted in her Substack that Canada was warming at twice the global average. Despite this, the Canadian government has made progress on three major fossil fuel pipelines this July.
"Every barrel these new pipelines are built to move adds to the exact warming that’s turning our boreal forests into tinder," Morin wrote.
On the other side of the border, Michigan regulators late Wednesday approved important permits from the controversial Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.
Political leaders and climate advocates responded to the fires and smoke with calls to abandon fossil fuel projects, transition to renewable energy, and hold oil and gas companies accountable for the harms they have caused.
"We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly. The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns," the Sunrise Movement said.
We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly.
The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns. https://t.co/6oqGxoC8m3
— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026
As smoke drifted over Boston on Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote on social media: "Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal."
Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal. https://t.co/pXo5XOOt0q
— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) July 15, 2026
“Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. The fossil fuel industry are arsonists at a global scale. It’s their pollution that’s fueling these horrific wildfires," Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, told Common Dreams. "Instead of approving new pipelines, the Canadian government should be holding the industry accountable and using their record profits to help communities on the frontlines of this crisis.”
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US Gov Report Details 'Robust' Ties Between Climate Crisis and Extreme Weather Events
“The next time your community is hit by a heatwave or flash flood, lay some blame with Big Oil. This report is yet another sign that we need to break away from this dangerous, polluting industry,” one scientist said.
Jul 16, 2026
A landmark report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Thursday concludes that the science of linking individual extreme weather events to fossil fuel-driven climate change has advanced considerably in the past decade, findings that bolster the efforts of communities to hold oil and gas companies accountable for climate damages.
The report follows on the heels of deadly heatwaves in Europe and the US that were both deemed to be "virtually impossible" without the climate emergency.
“The new report makes clear that the science linking ever-worsening extreme weather events to climate change is rigorous and sound,” John Fleming, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a statement. “The next time your community is hit by a heatwave or flash flood, lay some blame with Big Oil. This report is yet another sign that we need to break away from this dangerous, polluting industry.”
The report from the National Academies, or NASEM builds on a 2016 report on the same subject and tracks the progress made since then in linking specific extreme weather events such as hurricanes or heatwaves to human-caused global warming—a field known as extreme event attribution (EEA). It found that a combination of improvements in tools, datasets, and methods had made such attributions increasingly reliable, especially for events clearly related to rising average temperatures such as heatwaves, cold spells, and heavy rainfall.
“The science is clear: The extreme heat killing thousands of people in the Northern Hemisphere this summer is neither an unpredictable event nor an accident—it is the result of corporate crime."
“Significant progress has been made over the last decade, with major advancements in methods and modeling that allow for more robust assessments of extreme events,” James Hurrell, who chaired the report committee and serves as the Scott presidential chair of Environmental Science and Engineering at Colorado State University, said in a statement.
EEA could still improve when it comes to analyzing the climate footprint on smaller-scale weather events like thunderstorms and tornadoes, as well as attributing events in parts of the Global South where climate data is less available.
Hurrell continued: "The field still faces challenges, and addressing them is necessary to fully realize the value of attribution science. We hope our recommendations will guide those efforts.”
Unaffiliated climate scientists and environmental advocates welcomed the report's findings.
"The robust conclusions that have been reached by the mainstream climate research community betray the dismissive claims that continue to be made by fossil fuel industry groups, right-wing think tanks, and Republican operatives who feel threatened by the scientific progress in this particular area," wrote climate scientist and University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann. "They have long understood... that Americans will increasingly demand meaningful policy action on climate as they come to understand the profound role that fossil fuel burning is playing in the worsening climate crisis."
Mann continued: "Nothing connects the dots better that the increasingly dangerous, damaging, and deadly climate change-fueled extreme weather events. As an aside, I could see and smell the hazardous wildfire smoke that blanketed the northeastern US while on vacation with my family in New Hampshire this week. Increasingly, Americans are connecting the dots between our reliance on fossil fuels and the hazards we face, whether its costly and dangerous wars of choice in far-flung lands like Iran, or the threat of increasingly extreme weather events."
Carly Phillips, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) who has co-authored attribution studies, said in a statement: “Attribution science confirms what billions of people around the world have experienced firsthand—deadly events like extreme heatwaves are occurring more often and tropical cyclones are more intense due to climate change. Despite efforts by the fossil fuel industry and its cronies to intimidate panelists and misrepresent the research, the academies’ report affirms the scientific consensus: Attribution science is based on rigorous peer-reviewed methods and provides critical information about how climate change is driving increases in the frequency or severity of extreme events."
The report is notable not only for its findings but for their context. It's publication comes amid the Trump administration's aggressive climate denial, including the Environmental Protection Agency's repealing of the so-called "endangerment finding" connecting carbon dioxide emissions to climate and public health harms.
At the same time, the fossil fuel industry and its right-wing political allies are scrambling to find a way out of the increasing number of lawsuits attempting to hold them accountable for the harms caused by the climate crisis. This has included pushing bills in the House of Representatives and Senate that would grant the industry immunity from any lawsuits over damages caused by the use of their products.
Both the fossil fuel industry and climate justice advocates see the NASEM report as a potential weapon in the fight over climate liability. Argus Insight, an opposition research firm co-founded by former Trump staffers that has a history of working to undermine climate lawsuits, sent at least nine records requests to public universities where NASEM report authors work, as Politico reported ahead of its release.
Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, advised that journalists covering the NASEM report "not frame any story as 'Can we believe extreme event attribution research?' The actual story is: Fossil fuel interests are wetting their pants about this and will do anything to try to stop it."
Yet climate justice advocates argue that the report gives the advantage to communities over the industry.
“For decades, Big Oil knowingly poisoned our atmosphere and deceived the public about the impacts of burning fossil fuels—all the while lining executives’ pockets as communities continue to suffer from extreme heat, floods, and fires," Stephanie Brancaforte, climate accountability campaign director with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, said in a statement.
Brancaforte added: “The science is clear: The extreme heat killing thousands of people in the Northern Hemisphere this summer is neither an unpredictable event nor an accident—it is the result of corporate crime. With the backing of the National Academies, survivors of climate catastrophes now have strong evidence to pursue justice against fossil fuel polluters to pay for the devastation they have unleashed.”
Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said: "The National Academies just gave courts, cities, and communities something they've long needed: the full weight of the country's most authoritative scientific body behind attribution science. It affirms what researchers and international bodies like the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] have long recognized—that we can say, with real confidence, which extreme weather events were made worse by fossil fuel pollution, and how much damage that pollution caused."
DiPaola continued: "The fossil fuel industry understands exactly what this means. That's why they've spent years trying to discredit attribution science as a field, and why they and their allies in Congress and state legislatures are racing right now to pass liability shield laws. They can't out-argue hundreds of peer-reviewed studies backed by the country's most respected scientific institution, so instead they're trying to make the law immune to the science. They know this research doesn't just describe a hotter world, but draws a line from their products to specific floods, heatwaves, and deaths, and from there to who should pay for the damage."
"Attribution science now underpins how cities plan for disaster, how insurers price risk, how public health officials prepare for heat deaths, and how courts weigh accountability," she concluded. "The only people with an interest in pretending otherwise are the ones being asked to pay for the damage they caused."
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Indigenous and Climate Campaigners Decry 'Deep Betrayal' as Michigan Issues Key Enbridge Line 5 Permits
State regulators said the permits for a tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac would have "significant impacts" on wildlife and sacred Indigenous burial grounds, but issued them nonetheless.
Jul 16, 2026
Anti-fossil fuel campaigners on Wednesday emphasized that Michigan state regulators had issued key permits for the Enbridge Line 5 tunnel in the Straits of Mackinac on the same day that "wildfire smoke from climate change blotted out the Mackinac Bridge from view" and as the US and other countries faced extreme heatwaves.
Despite the mounting evidence that—as energy and climate experts have long warned—continued fossil fuel extraction is heating the planet and causing dangerous extreme weather, Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy handed down a permit Wednesday to allow the Canadian company Enbridge to construct a tunnel that EGLE officials acknowledged will likely have "significant impacts" on threatened or endangered species and Indigenous burial ground in the Straits.
“The magnitude of impacts to recognized historic and cultural values of this proposed project exceeds that of any other that EGLE has reviewed,” said EGLE in its statement on the permits.
Enbridge has sought to build a tunnel around its Line 5 pipeline in the Straits for years, following a massive oil spill from its Line 6B pipeline in the Kalamazoo River. Line 5 has been struck by ships' anchors numerous times, heightening concerns.
EGLE said in its explanation that the oil spill risk was found to be "unacceptable" and that the need for the tunnel outweighed its risks.
But opponents who have argued that Line 5 should be permanently shut down, including the Bay Mills Indian Community, condemned the agency for "rewarding" Enbridge with new permits even after its fossil fuel infrastructure has caused hazardous oil spills.
“Enbridge has spilled oil, committed safety violations, trespassed on lands, shattered ecosystems, pierced aquifers, violated our laws, and repeatedly shown contempt for tribal sovereignty," said Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community. "They have left devastation in their wake, and now they’re being rewarded with responsibility over one of the most precious and sacred resources in our state. The Great Lakes are not safe in their hands. This decision is a deep betrayal of our Great Lake State, and we will confront it immediately, fiercely, and without hesitation.”
The state Department of Natural Resources also issued a permit following EGLE's decision, granting permission for the tunnel despite its potential impact on rare plants and animal habitats.
According to Michigan Bridge, about 1.53 acres of wetlands in Mackinac County would be impacted by the tunnel project, as well as 0.17 acres of Lake Michigan bottomlands in Emmet County, where Enbridge is expected to build a water intake structure.
The environmental legal organization Earthjustice, which has helped represent the Bay Mills Indian Community in its legal challenges against Enbridge, said that with the permits, the company will "transform the Straits of Mackinac into an industrial construction zone for at least six years, destroying views, displacing wildlife, and interrupting tourism dollars."
“Our environmental laws, the looming climate crisis, and simple common sense tells us that an oil pipeline doesn’t belong in the Great Lakes,” said Earthjustice managing attorney Debbie Chizewer. “Today’s decision is a setback, but we’re not giving up. A future without oil in the Great Lakes is still possible.”
EGLE is also expected to rule by September 30 on an Enbridge request to discharge millions of gallons of treated wastewater per day into Lake Michigan while it is constructing the tunnel, and the Michigan Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit brought by four Tribal Nations, including Bay Mills, alleging that the Michigan Public Service Commission improperly issued a key tunnel permit in 2023.
The state is also fighting Enbridge over Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's 2020 order to shut down Line 5 over oil spill concerns. She had campaigned in 2018 on a promise to shut down the pipeline. A federal judge ruled last year that the state had no authority to terminate the use of the pipeline, and the state appealed that ruling.
Advocates expressed anger on Wednesday at Whitmer as her government issued the permits.
“It’s incredibly disappointing that a governor who ran on a commitment to the climate and protecting the Great Lakes has now decided to instead endorse a Canadian industrial tunnel project that still threatens the Great Lakes and will contribute fossil fuels to the climate,” David Holtz, coalition coordinator for the anti-Line 5 group Oil & Water Don’t Mix, told Bridge Michigan.
David Gover, managing attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said that "the Straits of Mackinac are not a piece of Enbridge oil infrastructure; they are the heart of creation for Anishinaabe people and a vital source of life for all who depend on the Great Lakes."
“We will pursue every legal avenue," Gover said, "to defend treaty rights, protect drinking water, and preserve tribal lifeways from another Enbridge disaster.”
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Whitmer’s Data Center Push Isn’t Just Bad for Michigan—It’s Bad for the World
Data center development depends on imported critical conflict minerals and massive amounts of electricity generated by fossil fuels, which contribute directly to US-backed conflicts and war.
Jul 16, 2026
“We’re used to people saying ‘fuck no’ and doing it anyway.” These words were seemingly spoken by our very own Gov. Gretchen Whitmer earlier this month, caught on a hot mic chatting with Oracle executive Clay Magouryk. The two were celebrating breaking ground on the controversial new AI data center in rural Saline, Michigan—currently the largest data center project in the country. Gov. Whitmer is apparently happy to sell Michigan out to military tech giants OpenAI and Oracle.
This is the latest in a series of data center projects being forced into communities that have made their opposition crystal clear. Michiganders are "fighting like hell" because they understand exactly what is at stake; Southwest Michigan residents have already filed a class-action lawsuit for the 24/7 noise nuisance that disrupts daily life and reduces property values.
The development of AI data centers creates harm and destruction. The companies that drive this development, such as OpenAI and Palantir, have contracts with the US military and government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Locally, the influx of these data centers provides infrastructure for mass surveillance and diverts municipal resources. Globally, the push for data center expansion demands massive amounts of minerals and fossil fuels from resource-rich countries in the Global South, which are obtained through US military intervention and US-backed militia groups. As such, we as Michiganders must continue to oppose these data center projects.
The harm these data centers inflict ripples across the world. Data center development depends on imported critical conflict minerals and massive amounts of electricity generated by fossil fuels, which contribute directly to US-backed conflicts and war on Venezuela, Iran, and in Congo. Tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, referred to as 3TG, are essential, and their extraction is linked to financing armed groups and militias. The struggle for control over mineral-rich areas has led to prolonged violence in Congo, contributing to millions of deaths and leaving entire regions destabilized.
Gov. Whitmer’s hot mic comment confirmed what we already suspected: Our voices and opposition are flat out ignored in favor of destructive corporations.
Detroit is becoming a hub for technology, manufacturing, and the military-industrial complex, where events like the annual Reindustrialize conference bring together defense contractors, surveillance firms, and policymakers to strategize a future built on automated warfare and mass data extraction. Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing attended, representing key pillars of the US defense and surveillance industry. Palantir’s Project Maven and Where’s Daddy track individuals and automate kill chain recommendations with little human oversight. Lockheed Martin and Boeing produce the missiles, bombs, warcraft, and strike systems that turn algorithmic targeting into genocide.
It’s understandable that some Michiganders might think the development of AI data centers is a good thing, or at least an inevitability. Gov. Whitmer, for one, claims that if Michigan does not lead the charge on these data centers, “they’ll be done elsewhere… with lower wages in a way that abuses the natural resources and jacks up energy prices.” Thus far, this seems to mean that companies that develop these data centers can receive tax breaks and circumvent public input, which sets a disadvantageous precedent.
These data centers, furthermore, are not an inevitability, and they can drastically impact resource usage in their regions. At the Saline data center, even with the closed-loop cooling system to reduce on-site water consumption, water will be consumed indirectly: Increased electricity needs increase the need for water and oil consumption for local power plants. There is also no guarantee that any jobs created will be given to local residents. None of the reported advantages are worth the imperialism needed to supply resources to these data centers, nor the mass surveillance apparatus that comes with them.
Gov. Whitmer’s hot mic comment confirmed what we already suspected: Our voices and opposition are flat out ignored in favor of destructive corporations. Michiganders across the state have stood up and said, "Fuck no" to data centers and more war, yet projects keep moving forward. Residents deserve better than politicians who prioritize tech billionaires and war profiteers over their own people.
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The Trump Energy Agenda Means Astronomical Bills and Smoky Skies
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.
Jul 16, 2026
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 3:00 am (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 New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s suggestion that during a heatwave 78°F 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 President Donald 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 wind power 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% in 2035 and 26% 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 US economy 820,000 jobs per year on average over the next decade, in addition to the 144,000 clean energy jobs lost 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 US 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 liquefied natural gas? 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 EU 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 CEOs 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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6 Things I Wouldn't Do If I Were President
From filling the Reflecting Pool with algae to creating a mess of the global economy by invading Iran, some of President Trump's choices have been questionable to say the least.
Jul 15, 2026
The first thing I swear I won’t do, if the American people were to elect me (at 82 years of age) president of these (dis)United States of ours is to put any more algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC, or, for that matter, any more millions of (our tax) dollars into making it ever greener (as Donald Trump has already done with $16.4 million of them).
Oh, and talking about that presidential algae, there may be a second thing (not) to do if Donald Trump manages to take away birthright citizenship from Washington’s algae, or for that matter if he manages somehow to get congressional Republicans to do the same for children born of immigrants to this country (despite the Supreme Court and our Constitution). Of course, that document couldn’t be clearer on the subject, though obviously not clear enough for “our” president. (”All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”)
As Trump put it recently, “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship.” And it’s a good point, right? Who wants the kids of immigrants born here to become citizens? In fact, inspired by Trump, I should email my long dead immigrant grandfather, who came from what’s today Ukraine, in heaven (or, for all I know, hell) and tell him not to have my dad because Donald Trump would never have considered him a citizen of the United States and would have expelled him—and, had that happened, who knows where I might have been born (if I were born at all). Of course, the same could be said for Donald J. Trump, since his mother was indeed an immigrant and, had he had the chance, he might well have chucked her out of the country, too (though, since she was a white Scottish immigrant, given how he feels about white South African immigrants, maybe he would have welcomed her instead).
Oh, and sorry, but here’s a third thing that came to mind not to do (if I were president): It’s not just a matter of being born here, according to the United States Constitution. Plenty of American citizens of every imaginable sort are going to suffer miserably from the fact that “our” president and congressional Republicans have managed to cut an estimated $536 billion (or is it a full trillion dollars?) from Medicare over the next decade. Of course, what could possibly go wrong with that, since it’s estimated that less than 12 million Americans, a mere drop in the bucket, will lose their Medicaid coverage and a mere 5 million more their health insurance in the years to come?
And on that he’s been proven right, I guess. It’s not an endless war (not yet anyway), just an endless mess, imperiling the global economy, and what in the world could be the harm in that?
And let me add something else as the fourth thing I wouldn’t do (or in this case, wouldn’t have done): I wouldn’t have attacked Iran out of the blue and for no imaginable reason, ensuring that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed and the global economy sent into a fossil-fuelized free fall (even if that free fall has, at least, lent a hand to a future green economy). I mean, honestly, how dumb was that for the man who once swore that “under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all”? I’m talking about the fellow who not so long ago walked out of an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, when faced with such statements of his own, saying, “First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war.” (Yes, he did!) And then, when it came to his war on Iran, he added, “So when you say I promised—I didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war.”
And on that he’s been proven right, I guess. It’s not an endless war (not yet anyway), just an endless mess, imperiling the global economy, and what in the world could be the harm in that?
As for the fifth thing I wouldn’t do—that I wouldn’t, in fact, have been faintly capable of doing—as The New York Times recently reported, Donald J. Trump pulled in approximately $2.2 billion as president in 2025 from the Trump family’s cryptocurrency businesses, his real estate holdings, and who knows what else (more money, in short, than he had been making as a private citizen). As the Times noted, “One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.” Oh, and don’t forget those “hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.” Clearly, my problem is that I don’t own any cryptocurrency. In fact, I’m so old that, unlike Donald Trump, who just turned a youthful 80, I’m at a total disadvantage, since—and I just checked my pockets—I don’t seem to have a single bit of cryptocurrency around. Of course, since I basically don’t know what cryptocurrency is, I have no idea whether it could even be in my pocket. (Sigh.)
Oh, yes, and here’s one more thing, a final sixth thing I wouldn’t do as president: On a planet where Europe has been sweltering; the world’s ocean surface temperatures have hit record highs (and last year, as The Guardian reported, “the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about... 11 Hiroshima explosions a second”); and Central Park in my own city of New York just officially hit 100°F as July began, I wouldn’t go out of my way to up the level of fossil-fuel use and take out after every windmill in sight.
But of course, that’s me and it’s true that I didn’t win the election of 2024 and become this country’s president a second time around. No such luck. So, of course, it matters not at all what I wouldn’t do on this distinctly imperiled planet of ours. Sigh...
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The US Kicks Off World’s Largest Naval War Games: RIMPAC, China, and the Cost of War
Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.
Jul 14, 2026
June 24 marked the start of the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, exercises, the world's largest international naval war games. Led by the US, the military exercises bring together 31 countries and include more than 25,000 personnel, 40 surface ships, five submarines, and 140 aircraft. The event, which will run until July 31, marks the newest escalation of US preparations for war on China, further militarizing the Pacific and normalizing the prospect of conflict through increasingly large-scale exercises and an ever-expanding web of alliances and military bases.
At the same time, the US and partner nations kicked off the 10-day Valiant Shield 2026 exercises across Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Japan, and surrounding seas, submerging the entire Pacific into an intensive military operation zone.
At a moment of intensifying climate disasters and growing economic insecurity, the message from Washington is clear: There is always more money for war. RIMPAC comes as Congress is attempting to approve a staggering $1.5 trillion war budget, even as communities across the world are facing deadly heatwaves, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters.
This past week, while US military vessels practiced war off their coasts, super typhoon Bavi pummeled Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Coming only a week into the typical typhoon season, this is already the second major typhoon to hit the islands. Many locals were still without power from the last super typhoon Sinlaku, which killed 17 people and caused over $1.5 billion in damages.
Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.
Climate scientist Kristina Dahl remarked, “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths.”
These overlapping crises reveal a profound imbalance in priorities. As Pacific communities contend with increasingly severe climate disasters, the United States continues to invest staggering sums in military expansion and war preparations. The irony is especially stark given that the US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and one of the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitters, while decades of US military activity have caused lasting environmental and human harm across Pacific Island communities.
Instead of pouring resources into preventing climate change and protecting people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, the US continues to pump money into its bloated war budget. In the Pacific, military expansion is justified by the increasing push toward war on China. The 2026 National Defense Strategy committed to "deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through strength” by “erect(ing) a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” so that “Joint Force always has the ability to conduct devastating strikes and operations against targets.”
The US conception of “deterrence” is both illogical and hypocritical in nature. In the name of “protecting” the Pacific from a future imaginary threat, the United States is harming the very communities it claims to defend through military buildup, environmental degradation, and the transformation of islands into staging grounds for war. The narrative of an imminent Chinese takeover of the Pacific is often treated as a foregone conclusion despite there being no evidence that China seeks to invade or occupy Pacific nations. Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.
A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the US military's economic benefits to Hawaiʻi have been significantly overstated and that local communities bear enormous hidden costs from its presence. The report estimates that military demand for housing drove Oʻahu rents up by 7.1% in 2024 alone, costing non-military renters an additional $234.8 million. It also found that cleaning up PFAS contamination at just three military installations could cost at least $493 million, with broader health and environmental damages potentially reaching into the billions. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has leased more than 46,000 acres of Hawaiian land for just $1 leases, despite the land's estimated fair market value reaching as high as $133.7 billion. Far from protecting Pacific communities, the US military buildup has contributed to housing insecurity, environmental contamination, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Similarly, US militarization of Guam has severely impacted local communities. The US military controls roughly 27% of the island's land, while decades of military activity have left behind contaminated groundwater, hazardous waste, and damaged ecosystems. PFAS" forever chemicals" linked to military firefighting foam have been detected in Guam's drinking water wells, threatening the island's primary freshwater source. Military expansion has also endangered coral reefs, sensitive coastal habitats, and wildlife.
These events, which are just a few of many examples of the environmental and human costs of militarization, reveal the deep hypocrisy of the US strategy of "peace through strength." Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.
The proposed $1.5 trillion war budget will only deepen these harmful priorities, while large-scale military exercises like RIMPAC intensify US-China tensions, heighten the risk of dangerous encounters at sea, and increase the possibility of pulling the Pacific into a devastating war.
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'At the Behest of Polluting Corporations,' Trump Guts Two National Monuments
"Today’s proclamations are a slap to the face of public lands visitors across the country, as well as the local communities and tribes that have worked for years to protect these special places."
Jul 14, 2026
US President Donald Trump on Monday signed proclamations dramatically shrinking the size of two national monuments in Utah, eliminating roughly 3 million acres of protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante and potentially opening the beloved, wildlife-rich areas to industry exploitation.
Trump's proclamations, issued at the urging of Utah Republicans including Sen. Mike Lee, aim to reduce Bears Ears to just under 121,100 acres (down from nearly 1.4 million) and Grand Staircase-Escalante to 181,541 acres (down from 1.87 million). The president declared in his orders—which opponents say are unlawful—that the areas he's stripping of their monument designation contain "several resources that are vital to energy and resource independence," including silver, copper, uranium, and zinc.
The orders were met with immediate outrage from tribes, Democratic lawmakers, and conservationists. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement that the president has "illegally opened up two of the most extraordinary landscapes in America at the behest of polluting corporations who seek to ravage them for short-term profits."
"Trump has been selling out our public lands and waters since the day he took office," said Huffman, pointing to previous attacks on the monuments during the president's first White House term. "Trump tried this once before. We fought him then, and we are ready to fight him now, because no president should have the power to give away what belongs to the American people, including future generations. Keep public lands in public hands.”
Scott Braden, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said his organization "will challenge this unlawful decision in federal court" and expressed confidence that Trump's "reckless and unlawful acts will be rejected."
“Today’s action makes it clear that Utah is the epicenter of Republican efforts to dismantle and obliterate America’s system of public lands," said Braden. "President Trump’s outrageous attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments was taken at the urging of Utah politicians—Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis, Gov. Spencer Cox, and the others—who championed this action. These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation."
During a signing ceremony on Monday, flanked by Utah Republicans, Trump characterized his scaling back of monument protections as an effort to give land "back to the people of Utah." The president falsely claimed that people could "virtually not even walk on" the lands under the protections he targeted.
"You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing," the president said, incorrectly. "You can’t do anything."
Trump's proclamations cite authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which empowers the president to "reserve parcels of land as a part of the national monuments." But opponents of Trump's assault on the two Utah national monuments noted that the law does not explicitly authorize the president to scale back protections implemented by previous administrations.
In 2021, then-President Joe Biden restored protections to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante after Trump's first attempt to gut them in 2017. Trump's new assault on the two national monuments goes much further than the previous one. (The far-right Project 2025 agenda, which Trump has repeatedly tried to disavow despite his ties to its architects, called for the downsizing of national monuments and repeal of the Antiquities Act.)
"President Trump’s attack on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments is just as illegal today as it was in 2017,” Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain Office, said in a statement on Monday. "The Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to designate national monuments, not to destroy them. Today’s proclamations are a slap to the face of public lands visitors across the country, as well as the local communities and tribes that have worked for years to protect these special places. Earthjustice and our partners are prepared to vigorously defend the monuments once again."
Autumn Gillard, coordinator for the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, said Monday that "our tribes were not informed of or asked about this decision, and that’s unacceptable."
“Today’s action is a direct strike against the federal government’s duty to consult with tribes," said Gillard. "It also profoundly disrespects our intergenerational traditional knowledge by destroying a framework for tribal co-stewardship over our ancestral lands in which we invested years of effort. Today’s action cannot stand."
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