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Opinion
If We Want a Different Future, We Have to (Literally) Build It
We have a power imbalance in this country and a big part of that is that we no longer believe that we can demand a better life and it's a serious problem that we have too little skill in organizing ourselves and constructing the future we deserve.
May 02, 2026
When you grow up in this country one thing that’s wired into you early is that the government can’t do anything right. The free market is the only way things get done. Public is a dirty word. By the time you’re an adult, it sits in your head like it’s always been there. You don’t question it any more than you question gravity.
The problem is that it puts so many solutions out of reach and out of our imagination.
If we look around at the things that make our society work and our lives better, we can see we’ve been duped from the start. This didn’t all come from some pure, untouched version of the free market. Our roads, our bridges, libraries, fire departments, the internet, Social Security. All of these things happened because we came together as people and decided we wanted them.
These weren’t accidents. They weren’t side effects of private competition. They came out of a period when ordinary people had power. Real power. Power to demand that the systems they paid for actually delivered. The government was the instrument of that power. Not a side player. Not a check writer. Not a referee. A doer. A builder of things, on behalf of the people who built it.
In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals.
That’s the idea we don’t name anymore. The idea that the public has the right to organize, to own, and to demand. That’s the competing idea. And without it, the system has no counterweight.
That tension mattered. It forced decisions. It forced investment. It forced the country to build.
Now that pressure is gone. Not completely, but enough that it doesn’t function anymore. There’s no real counterweight shaping outcomes. And what you’re left with is a system that just expands in the direction of profit. Profit over efficiency. Profit over outcomes. Profit over people.
You can see it most clearly in healthcare. We spend nearly six trillion dollars a year on it. Six trillion. And we are not the healthiest country on earth. We are not even close. We are paying the most and getting the least. That’s not an efficiency problem. That’s a power problem.
We’ve run this experiment for decades now. Consolidation, extraction, pricing that has no relationship to reality. It’s not competitive in any meaningful sense. It’s a closed loop. The product isn’t working. People feel it every day. They don’t need a study to tell them.
And here’s the thing nobody remembers. We used to own a lot of this. In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals. States ran academic medical centers. The federal government ran the VA, military hospitals, the Indian Health Service. We the people owned the means of caring for ourselves.
That’s what made the whole system function. Not the charity of it. The leverage of it. We knew what it cost to set a bone. We knew what it cost to do a bypass. We knew what it cost to deliver a baby. Because we ran the hospitals where it happened. We paid the salaries. We bought the supplies. The numbers were public and the numbers were real.
You can’t lie to someone about the price of something they already produce. Public ownership wasn’t an alternative to the market. It was the thing that kept the market honest. It was the public’s seat at the table. It was the public’s power over the price. Strip it out and the private side stops competing and starts extracting. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what happened. We sold the seat. We lost the power. The bills came due.
There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons.
Today that public share is closer to 15%. Most of the rest has been sold off, shut down, or absorbed into chains. What’s left is doing the hardest work the private system refuses to do. Public hospitals still handle most of the trauma care and most of the burn care in this country’s cities. They are the safety net. They are also the proof that we know how to do this. We just decided to stop.
Same thing starting to happen with AI. Something as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, arguably bigger, is being built and controlled by a handful of private actors. Massive margins. Massive control. No real public stake. No real competition in the way we used to understand it. No seat at the table for the rest of us.
There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons. We didn’t let them build private armies with that kind of power. We understood the scale of the risk. The consequence of getting it wrong.
AI sits in that category. Healthcare sits in that category. These are not normal sectors. They shape everything else. And the question of who owns them is the question of who has power in the country that comes next.
It’s not about fairness. Fuck fairness. This is about power. About whether ordinary people have any leverage left in a system that has spent forty years stripping it from them. About whether the country we live in is something we shape or something that happens to us.
Here are the numbers. The top 20% of earners in this country now account for nearly 60% of all consumer spending. Consumer spending is about two-thirds of GDP. So a small slice of households is propping up the entire economy. And the jobs most exposed to AI displacement, finance, law, software, analysis, corporate work, are concentrated in exactly that slice.
The same people whose spending holds the economy up are the ones whose work is about to be automated.
That’s not a labor problem. That’s a structural problem. You can’t retrain your way out of it. You can’t UBI your way out of it at the scale required. The CEOs warning you about 20-30% unemployment are running companies with 40% margins. They’re not wrong about the disruption. They’re wrong about it being something the private sector can absorb.
The market is facing a situation it cannot handle.
The market is the thing that brought us here.
Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.
Health. Wellness. Safety. Time. Travel. Freedom. Education. Meaning. Food. Clothing. Shelter. All high quality and abundant. Enough for everyone.
Most people want that. You can feel it when you talk to them. But they don’t say it plainly because it sounds naive. It sounds like something you’re supposed to grow out of. Like if you take it seriously, you won’t be taken seriously.
Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.
It reminds me a little of The Matrix. The idea that a version of the world that actually worked for people would be rejected because it didn’t match what they believed was real or possible. So instead, we settle into something worse and call it reality.
I grew up in East Tennessee, in the Bible Belt. And one of the things that always stuck with me was how religion was used. Not as a mission to improve people’s lives through effort and sacrifice, but as a way to sort people. To rank them. To separate. To justify who had what and why.
That same instinct shows up here. The idea that wanting a system that delivers for everyone is childish. That building something better is unrealistic. That you’re supposed to accept what exists and work within it, even if it’s clearly failing.
Here’s what gets forgotten. This country has done it before. Not once. Many times.
The New York City subway was built and is owned by the public. The interstate highway system is public. The Hoover Dam, the TVA, every river dam that powers the South and the West, public. The arsenal that won the Second World War was organized and largely paid for by the federal government. Rural electrification was a public project because no private company would run wire to a farmhouse for a price the farmer could pay. The internet started as a public research program. Public universities trained the engineers and doctors and scientists who built the modern American economy. Medicare is a public health insurance program that works better and costs less than what the private market offers people under 65.
Every one of those is a story about power. The public looked at a sector that mattered too much to leave to private capital, and the public took it. Owned it. Ran it. Set the terms. Made it deliver.
This is not foreign. This is not theoretical. This is the history of our country.
What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.
If we want a different future, we have to build it.
That’s not a metaphor.
We need hospitals, clinics, wellness centers. That means training tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, dentists, physical trainers. Not hoping the market decides to produce them. Deciding to produce them. Owning them. Running them. Setting the price by knowing the cost.
What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.
We need millions of homes. New cities. New towns. That means builders, electricians, plumbers, framers, engineers. It means supply chains based in America that can deliver materials at scale. It means breaking the leverage that landlords and developers have spent decades accumulating.
We need to transition energy. Renewable generation. Storage. Transmission. A modern grid that can handle it. High-speed rail. A competitive EV industry that isn’t just a handful of companies protected by scale and capital. Independence from utilities that have spent a century turning a public good into a private toll booth.
Every one of these is a sector where the public used to have power and gave it up. Every one is a sector where the public can take that power back, if it decides to.
There is more to build in this country than we currently have people trained to build it. The bottleneck is not technology. It is not money. It is the decision to organize the effort. Those decisions will never be made by the market.
Solutions are going to take public action and competition. A new way of thinking.
Real work. Coordination. Training. Time. Effort. Change.
It’s a shame but nobody is coming to do this for us.
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Civic Indicators Spell Danger for US Democracy
With the advent of dictator Donald Trump and his dangerously unstable, violent, egomaniacal personality, the resistance from civic society has not risen to the deadly challenge either quantitatively or qualitatively.
May 02, 2026
What are the indicators of a presumed democracy either faltering or fortifying itself against the buffeting or destructive forces of dictatorial autocracy, plutocracy, and oligarchy?
Certainly, the commercial or corporate economy has developed thousands of indicators to ascertain whether the overall economy or its many subeconomies are getting better or worse. Far more than GDP, employment, profits, or inventory levels, these indicators spot trends at astounding microlevels in real time.
Who is developing the indicators for the civic community? Some groups inform us about voter turnout in micro-terms or how much commercial campaign money is flowing to candidates, or the sinking levels of local journalism, etc. But these indicators are far too few and too inadequate.
Let’s try one category of indicators that could be very useful for an introspective civic community and its supporters. The question is: “When conditions worsen, does the resistance get stronger or comparatively weaker?” Democracy in its concrete manifestations for people’s livelihoods, preparedness, and posterity decays or recovers and deepens, depending on the answer.
Space precludes citing more instances of civic resistance getting weaker while the exploiters and greedhounds get bolder, richer, more ravaging, and out of control.
The outlook is not good. With the advent of dictator Donald Trump and his dangerously unstable, violent, egomaniacal personality, the resistance from civic society has not risen to the deadly challenge either quantitatively or qualitatively.
Examples: Are many more new citizen groups (call them startups) forming all over the country to push for the removal of Trump from office via Impeachment? Are there expanding demonstrations of massive revulsions over Trump wrecking, weakening, and endangering America and the world? No. Three demonstrations with the weak moniker of No Kings, without follow-up civic mobilizations in congressional districts, doesn’t cut the mustard.
A detailed report in March by the respected V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden concluded that Trump and his administration are dismantling democracy in the US at a speed that “is unprecedented in modern history.” (See Common Dreams: “Trump Is Dismantling US Democracy at a Speed ‘Unprecedented in Modern History’: Watchdog”.)
The institutional resistance of checks and balances collapsed before January 20, 2025, but has worsened continually since that woeful day—Congress, the Supreme Court, and many state governors and legislators AWOL or actually enabling Trump.
Let’s get into specifics on the ground. Advertising dollars are controlling more content on and access to the media than ever, with fewer public critiques, regulatory action, or resistance from civic watchdog groups.
More programming and promotions are harming children (via smartphones especially) through direct marketing to children bypassing parental control than ever, yet there are few adequately staffed civic groups or parents countering this assault. There are outcries in the media, state legislatures, and congressional hearings, but the intensity of these electronic child molesters (pushing violence, pornography, junk food and drink, and mental anguish) continues without countervailing enforced regulations and substantial powerful civic and educational responses and protections of our vulnerable children.
Our public airwaves and public lands are under more corporate dominance than ever, yet the Federal Communications Commission, the federal forest and land management protectors are either asleep at the wheel or they are supporting corrosive corporatism. The public interest watchdog presence is almost zero on the public’s access to radio and television, and is overwhelmed by the relentless encroachment on the public lands by fossil fuel, mining, timber, and other commercial predators.
A swollen, unaudited Pentagon budget fueling the ever more aggressive American Military Empire has too few civic organizations resisting the annual violation of federal law requiring all federal agencies to provide an annual auditable budget to Congress.
The burgeoning corporate welfare subsidies, handouts, and taxpayer bailouts (government-guaranteed capitalism) are running amok. Large companies and mismanaged corporations go to Washington, not to bankruptcy court, which is the common option for small businesses. The conservative National Taxpayer Union reflects passivity.
More dark money PACs corrupting electoral campaigns has not provoked new civic groups of any size to stop this devastating selling of our elections that twists people’s votes and blocks progressive agendas. Even though 842 local government resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United have been passed since the 2010 Supreme Court Ruling; 22 States and Washington DC have called for a Constitutional Amendment; and 121 Members of Congress are co-sponsoring legislation to overturn Citizens United, much more needs to be done.
Gambling is now accessible everywhere and spreading from college and professional athletics, to youngsters’ smartphones. The greedy “gaming” industry and its recent sleazy cousin—the “predictions market”—are a menace and out of control. Where is the countervailing civic power to oppose this decaying of our culture? Organized religion—long the bulwark—mostly gave up its role in countering the gambling craze years ago.
After 12 students and one teacher were killed in 1999 at the Columbine Colorado High School many American families demanded gun safety controls. The story of this tragedy was all over the media for days. Now there is an average of one mass shooting a day while Congress yawns. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence, “In 2022, 48,204 people died due to gun violence in the US, the second highest total ever recorded. Each day, an average of 132 people died from gun violence—one death every 11 minutes.” Again, no new powerful civic organizations are being started.
There are more tax escapes for big business and the super rich than ever. Major profitable corporations, like Tesla, paid no federal income tax last year. Meanwhile the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) budget shrinks, and demands for rigorous congressional hearings and investigations go nowhere. No start-up civic groups, other than Patriotic Millionaires. Where are the new start-ups to join with existing tax reform groups to stop the attack on the IRS? Candidates for office don’t spend much time talking about these gigantic tax escapees to mobilize focused public opinion to stop tax abuses by corporations and wealthy individuals which expand deficits and starve public budgets.
Space precludes citing more instances of civic resistance getting weaker while the exploiters and greedhounds get bolder, richer, more ravaging, and out of control.
Our Ralph Nader Radio Hour will soon devote a program to the absence of civil society indicators and the collapsing civic resistance to the overthrow of representative government by the corporate state.
Stay tuned and, by your questions and demands, get your politicians to make this deterioration front and center in their campaigning for this November’s election.
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Will Trump's Deeply Flawed Iran War Bring Down the US Empire?
Is the attack on Iran a Suez moment for the United States?
May 02, 2026
The Suez crisis in 1957 was the end of the road for Britain’s 200-year role as a global rule-maker. From then on, it became a rule-taker. The recent political nostalgia for a different England pedalled by Brexiteers, that elegiac world of warm beer, sandwiches and Spitfires, was the world before Suez. The crisis was a monumental cock-up involving Britain, France and Israel, and a botched attack on Egypt to ensure European control over the critical Suez Canal. The fiasco resulted in the Egyptian nationalist leader, Gamal Nasser, having full authority over the canal.
Following a dressing down by new kid on the block the US, Britain and France withdrew with their tails between their imperialist legs. In the story of the global fight against colonialism, Suez was a famed victory for the colonised. It constituted the ultimate asymmetric war story where, like Iran and the Straits of Hormuz today, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Geography was on the Egyptian side.
Suez changed the global view of Britain for good. From then on, the risk of being associated with or adjacent to Britain in everything from geopolitics to finance increased. For more than 100 years, the UK had been a sure thing: the City of London was the epicentre of global finance; sterling was the world’s reserve currency; and the interest rates on UK gilts—the interest at which the UK government borrowed—was regarded as the global risk-free rate of return.
This meant that whatever else happened in the world, the UK government was seen as always good for its money, and would never default. With sterling pre-eminent, investors could shove their money into UK gilts and go on holiday, safe in the knowledge that it was a risk-free bet. In short, the UK manufactured sterling assets and the rest of world bought them, without question.
In finance, this extraordinary privilege is called credibility. After Suez, UK credibility gradually eroded, politically and financially—not overnight, but slowly and surely.
Could something similar happen to the US following Donald Trump’s war on Iran?
Let’s focus on finance.
Over the past few decades, despite all this talk of trade wars and the US’s inability to manufacture merchandise that the world wants, there is one product, made in the US, which the world wants in huge quantities: the American dollar. The Americans know the rest of the world wants American assets – stocks, bonds, companies and real estate. All of these are priced in dollars, so the Yanks are simply printing dollars and the world is buying those greenbacks. The process works like a resource find.
Other countries find oil that the rest of the world wants. The Americans have dollars, which they print for free and the world buys. Manufacturing these dollars is similar to turning on an oil spigot. Foreign money buys dollars to buy US assets, in the same way as foreign money flows into Saudi Arabia to buy oil. US government debt is above $31 trillion (€26.5 trillion), and foreigners hold about $9.5 trillion of US Treasuries. In order to get their hands on these American assets, foreigners must keep dollars handy, and therefore the US dollar still makes up 56.77 per cent of all official reserves all over the world.
After Suez, UK credibility gradually eroded, politically and financially—not overnight, but slowly and surely. Could something similar happen to the US following Donald Trump’s war on Iran?
Over a few decades, this process has led the dollar to be higher in value than it would otherwise be, plus it means the returns to US financial assets and its adjacent industries rise relative to other American industries. In time, finance elbows out manufacturing at home, while the expensive dollar makes it profitable for corporate America to relocate its industry overseas to cheaper and more tax-friendly locations, such as Ireland. Everyone wins—from the finance bros to the corporate leaders, the shareholders, and the real estate owners in urban America where the finance industry is based. Everyone, that is, but the blue-collar workers made redundant in the hollowed-out rust belt cities. They reacted slowly, but when they did a new political movement was born.
MAGA was birthed by the death of American manufacturing, itself destroyed by the expensive dollar, itself the result of foreigners’ insatiable demand for particular American assets and successive US administrations preferring to bet on things rather than make things. The US swapped manufacturing stuff for manufacturing dollars. The end result is that the US is both strong and weak, robust and fragile, stable and unstable, at the same time. A huge amount of the world’s capital is now over-concentrated in the US, as it used to be in Britain, and it remains there based on the assumption that American credibility will remain unimpeached.
The world has bet big time on the US. But as anyone who knows the form will attest, when you get an overconcentration of bets on one horse, your risk increases exponentially, while your potential return also diminishes significantly.
All this money flowing into the US, and all that buying of American dollars has led to the unsustainable situation whereby the US accounts for about 60 per cent of global listed equities, about half of private capital and 40 per cent of global bond markets. Yet it represents only about 4 per cent of the world’s population, 2 per cent of the global population under the age of 18, about 9 per cent of global growth, 13 per cent of world trade and one-sixth of world GDP. Something must give.
It is not that the finance world will turn on the US, but any risk assessment suggests that not having all your eggs in one basket is a good idea. Even before the Iran war, the supportive reasons for betting big on the US were beginning to wane. For years, the country was supported by falling interest rates, lower taxes, quantitative easing and falling wages relative to profits. All these factors made the US a place to park money. Profits rose and valuations soared, attracting in yet more capital. All this drove the return on US equities above US GDP, seducing foreign investors. In the years since 2008, foreigners have tripled down on US stocks, investing about $20 trillion in US companies. As the dollar rose on foreign exchanges, profits from the US expressed in foreign currencies exploded.
At the same time as foreigners increased their bets on the US in general, the country increased its bets on a particular domestic sector: tech. We have seen a doubling concentration of global risk in a few companies. Since the end of the pandemic, just seven companies account for more than half of total US stock market returns. The top 10 stocks now make up 40 per cent of the index.
One of the central assumptions underlying all this movement of money into the US was that the people who are making the big decisions about where the US is going are sensible, rational and informed. They wouldn’t start an unwinnable war without clear objectives or an extra strategy. They wouldn’t be accused of insider trading, betting personally on the timing of an airstrike that they were about to order. They wouldn’t risk the US’s military reputation by being seen to do another country’s dirty work. When they start a war, surely they’d win it? And if they didn’t, would they blame their staunchest allies, against whom they have already started a trade war?
When such questions are being asked, with so much foreign capital overinvested in America, the US’s credibility begins to erode. Once this starts, as the UK experienced after Suez, it’s almost impossible to recover.
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As Santa Marta Leads the World Into the Energy Future, the US Clings to the Past
A global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels has coincided with rising gas prices caused by Trump's Iran War, motivating many leaders to embrace renewables. Unfortunately, US policymakers aren't following their example.
May 02, 2026
Many of the people who’ve been working for years on climate issues assembled this week in Santa Marta, Colombia for a conference on how to get off fossil fuels. Sponsored by the Colombians and the Dutch, it was an outgrowth of December’s unhappy COP negotiations in Brazil: the 50 or so nations that actually wanted to move decisively past coal, gas, and oil scheduled a meeting of their own. By all accounts it was a kinder, gentler version of the regular climate talks, in part because fossil fuel lobbyists (who have become the largest “country” at the regular negotiations) were not welcome. The wonderful Irish diplomat Mary Robinson put it well: “COPs are more formal, negotiators have their lines and they will not cross them and it’s so different here,” she said, adding that participants “have felt more human together.”
By lucky accident, the gathering took on extra meaning because it coincided with President Donald Trump’s absurd misadventure in Iran. All of a sudden there was a new reason, past the destruction of the planet, for getting off fossil fuel: Gas is too damn expensive, assuming you can get it all. What we’ve done in the Strait of Hormuz is one of those accidents that changes history: As the head of the International Energy Agency, the venerable Fatih Birol, said last week:
The vase is broken, the damage is done—it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.
The pieces of that broken vase are scattered across the planet, especially in Asia and Africa, where fuel prices are soaring and fertilizer made with fossil fuel is suddenly either unavailable or ruinously expensive. As Reuters reported this week:
Agricultural bodies, including the International Grains Council, are already cutting their forecasts for the next harvests. And the United Nations, which is trying to negotiate shipping access for fertiliser through the Gulf, has sounded the alarm over food security in developing nations.
In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, high fertiliser costs contributed to exacerbated hunger in poor, import-dependent countries, and analysts say regions like East Africa are again vulnerable.
Australia may offer an early indication of the impact on production of global staples.
In the bread-basket state of Western Australia, one industry group now expects the wheat planting area to drop by 14% as growers shift away from the fertiliser-intensive, low-margin grain.
But the good news, of course, is that these countries are rapidly putting together a new and sturdier vase, this time based on energy from the sun and wind that doesn’t need importing. The Santa Marta conference focused on the financing needed to make this switch work—a very real problem, but in the face of the desperation caused by events in the Mideast those who can are going ahead. As Wing Kuang reported, “Chinese EV manufacturers reported an 82.6% rise in month-on-month sales in March.” As the business pages of the India Times reported yesterday:
Increasing penetration of EVs, especially two- and three-wheelers, and rapid deployment of Battery Electric Solar Systems across Southeast Asia and South Asia is now viewed as guaranteed by those in the industry.
The optimism was palpable at this week's Asia Battery Raw Materials & Recycling Conference in Hanoi, where much of the discussion among delegates was more how the region was going to source sufficient raw materials to make batteries, rather than how to increase demand from current levels.
That all this counts as irony is the one delicious lining to all the pain and suffering. Donald Trump, purchased underling of the fossil fuel industry, has managed through his own colossal incompetence and ego to nip the hand that feeds his bank account. Yes, at the moment the industry is soaring: BP reported the kind of grotesque returns Thursday that should have any rational government reaching for a windfall profits tax:
Maja Darlington, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said the war had been “an entirely predictable disaster for everyone except the oil industry. BP’s profits are booming, with Trump’s bombs bringing billions for them and bigger bills for us.”
But those billions are in the here and now; in the slightly longer term the opposite is happening. Big Oil’s only real growth strategy has been exporting liquefied natural gas to Asia. Bloomberg checked in the other day on how that’s going:
The near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the serious damage sustained by Qatar’s LNG export plant has sent prices higher and buyers scrambling for alternatives. Gas’ reputation as a reliable and affordable energy source has taken a serious hit, and plans for its speedy adoption in Asia’s developing nations have been derailed, with potentially long-lasting consequences.
“Every day this is extended, prices elevate, the market tightens, and demand destruction happens,” said Masanori Odaka, an analyst at Rystad Energy. “The longer this lasts, the more structural it becomes.”
Bloomberg News spoke to more than two dozen executives, traders, and analysts across Asia, who painted a picture of a region that had been thought of as the future of LNG, but is now rapidly losing faith in the super-chilled fuel. Most requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to media.
Importers in India and Bangladesh are already rethinking whether to keep the fuel as a center piece in future strategies. Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines that were expected to become large growth markets, are looking alternatives. A planned gas power project in Vietnam is looking to switch to wind and solar plus batteries. In Thailand policymakers are pushing for more renewables.
This is an appropriate reaction. Cheap renewable energy had already begun to fuel the remarkable energy transition I’ve been chronicling over the last four years in these pages. Now it’s been supercharged by events, and responsible leaders around the world are drawing the obvious conclusions. As Selwin Hart, the UN’s envoy to the Santa Marta talks, put it in his address to the gathering:
Renewables offer something fossil fuels never did: stability and sovereignty. There are no embargoes, price shocks, or tariffs.
But that’s not been the reaction, of course, in this country, where energy policy just keeps getting stupider. Read, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterful takedown of Environmental Protection Agency commissioner Lee Zeldin:
In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the EPA from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters…The EPA has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, as pro-coal.
But here’s what’s astonishing. The person that Zeldin very nearly beat for governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has been embarked on an environmental demolition project of her own. At the precise moment that gas prices are soaring, and as a new and supercharged El Niño brings climate concerns back to the center of public consciousness, Hochul is doing her very best to sink New York’s landmark climate law and stick the Empire State with more expensive gas. She’s not showing the policymaking chops of her peers in far poorer places like Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Donald Trump, purchased underling of the fossil fuel industry, has managed through his own colossal incompetence and ego to nip the hand that feeds his bank account.
The background here is long, and like all things in New York politics, opaque. Suffice it to say that New Yorkers passed a reasonably ambitious climate law, and that the governor has not done much to enact it. If you want some background, the redoubtable David Roberts interviewed the equally redoubtable Pete Sikora, who explains:
The governor just took everything that the Climate Action Council came up with—her own appointees—and ignored it. That’s the capsule summary. They didn’t do the policies, they didn’t do the regulations, they didn’t do the things that would have implemented the law. They did a few things here and there, but by and large, nothing that would have implemented the law correctly was done. Little bits and pieces. For example, the state passed ending oil and gas in all new construction. That’s fantastic. That’s really good.
As you pointed out, distributed solar is a real bright spot. The numbers are moving there. It’s good. The CHPE project is about to connect. That’s a big transmission project from Canadian hydropower to New York City. Very cool too. There’s good things happening. But by and large, the long list of things in the climate plan was not done—90% of it not done. The centerpiece was Cap and Invest. The governor pulled that back at the last second the same way she did on congestion pricing. It’s in this weird limbo where it’s paused now.
If you want a comprehensive list of the opportunities she’s missed, try here. Most political pros I’ve talked to—and I talked to some more this week because I was in New York this week to lobby on the state’s solar laws—seem baffled by what Hochul’s up to. She’s not in a tough election fight—after Trump pushed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) out of the GOP primary she faces only a Zeldin-lite Long Island pol, and in a year when an onion bialy could win in blue New York. My guess is that she’s about a year behind on her talking points; in the wake of Kamala Harris’ loss, a certain kind of moderate Dem decided that “affordability” was the new watchword and brought the idea that talking about climate was a mistake. (Not everyone went along—Gov. JB Pritzker in Illinois, for instance, has kept up the state’s clean energy momentum).
In New York’s case this may have been magnified by the sudden rise of Zohran Mamdani, who talked about affordability—but with a particular set of policies attached to it that made it more than rhetorical. For Hochul, an all-out push for wind and solar and batteries would have been wise since they are in fact affordable, but it was easier to go with the fracked gas lobby. So she’s fast-tracking new pipelines—in essence building the very infrastructure that New Yorkers rejected when they shut down fracking in the state. It’s all a tragic muddle, benefiting only Big Oil. Indeed, as Colin Kinniburgh reported last month:
A national industry group, led by some of the country’s largest pipeline builders and a slew of other gas interests, has recently entered the fray, tapping former state politicians to help advance Gov. Kathy Hochul’s “all of the above” energy strategy. Top of their agenda: pressing pause on the state’s climate targets.
New Yorkers can do a couple of things. One is press their state legislators to resist Hochul’s gutting of the climate law. The other is to lobby those same legislators to pass the ASAP and SUNNY laws, which would at least speed up solar permitting and allow balcony solar in the state.
And all of us can do a better job of demanding real action from our blue state leaders. Because this drift is not confined to New York—in Hawaii, for instance, Democratic Gov. Josh Green has called for a huge new liquefied natural gas project to supply the state’s electricity, ignoring the fact that the Aloha State is bathed in sunlight and washed by the steady trade winds that make it so delightful. Again, this is exactly the opposite tack that leaders across the rest of the world are taking, and in both states it will saddle residents with gas projects for decades to come.
I wrote about “climate-hushing” last week, and decisions like this are the inevitable result—on purely political grounds alone they surrender the high ground on what will be the most important issue of our century. And they surrender the gift that cheap renewables provide to both planet and consumer. They are exactly the opposite of what scientists told the Santa Marta conference was required—an end to new fossil fuel expansion. The next time a climate disaster strikes these states their governors will mouth the usual pieties, but they won’t mean much.
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