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electric vehicles
The Climate Crisis and Its Solutions, by the Numbers
So, to begin:
#76.9°Fahrenheit
That was the average temperature for the lower 48 states in July, according to just-released federal stats, making it the hottest month in American history, 3.3°F hotter than the 20th-century average. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Wyoming was the furthest above average for the month. Among other things, this development robs climate deniers of a cherished talking point. July 1936 had been the co-record holder. We understood why—in the words of climatologist Andrew Dessler:
During the early 20th century, aggressive plowing and the replacement of native grasses left Great Plains soils exposed. When drought conditions developed, those degraded soils dried out quickly, reducing evaporation and soil moisture and reinforcing the heat.
But try telling that to Fox News. Dessler, by the way, has had a fascinating three-part series on those century-old Midwestern extremes. But now it’s mostly academic; we’re living in a hotter country than any American has ever seen. And indeed a hotter world. As Jeff Masters reports, July 2026 tied for the warmest month in the planet’s history, with July 2024.
#3.6°F
That’s how much temperatures have risen on average in Europe since the 1960s, according to the new State of the Climate 2025 report, which veteran analyst Bob Berwyn broke down this week. Just think about that for a moment, because it helps you to understand the scale of what we’ve done. When you walk outside your home, in Europe or America, it’s 3°F hotter than it would have been a just few decades ago. Think of that amount of extra heat (and remember that ninety percent more is stored away in the oceans, waiting to be released).
Writing from Berlin, Jim Tankersley and Tatiana Firsova offer a vivid account of what that feels like in every day European life:
It’s changing the way children see summer.
“Some days it’s too hot, and the heat is just so oppressive. I’m more of a winter person,” said Sophia Nachtsheim, 15, who visited Krumme Lanke on Thursday with her mother and three younger siblings.
#$65 billion
That’s the windfall profit so far for the oil industry thanks to the Iran War, according to a new analysis from the folks at Oil Change International.
The five major international oil companies (IOCs) recorded massive jumps in profits in Q2 2026 compared to the same quarter of 2025. Their total adjusted net income amounted to $51 billion for the 3 months—that’s nearly $400,000 per minute. Meanwhile, people around the world are paying around 30% more for gasoline and diesel, with some countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, seeing increases of 80% or more.
It would of course make great sense to tax these windfall profits, earned entirely on the back of dead Iranians and Americans, and everyone who’s paying $4.50 a gallon at the pump. Portugal actually is, at a 33% rate. Exxon’s Darren Woods has responded to wider EU efforts with threats:
We canceled investments that we had planned for Europe based on the last time they passed a windfall profits tax. In fact, we’re suing the EU because we don’t think that’s a legal taking for the industry.
#4.8% of Global Energy-Related Carbon Emissions
So far the energy debate around AI has focused on how much electricity it takes to run data centers. But the number above comes from a different heretofore uncounted part of the problem: It’s what a new study says artificial intelligence could add to the atmosphere simply by making it easier for the fossil fuel industry to find and exploit oil and gas wells. Emily Atkin has a top-notch account of the new study, which makes it clear that a data center might as well have an oil derrick sitting on top. She includes these additional numbers:
Specifically, they found that Big Oil’s use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI’s data centers.
On the low end, these tools could enable additional yearly carbon emissions equal to Mexico’s, according to the research. On the high end, they could enable yearly climate pollution equal to Russia’s—the world’s fourth-largest emitting country.
Meanwhile, I mentioned this parenthetically last week, but it deserves more attention: Climate researcher Zeke Hausfather took the time to calculate how much energy is used when you really use AI “agents” for carrying out tasks. And the answer is: a lot. Asking Claude a question is not so energy-intensive, but as he explained to Robinson Meyer this week:
Increasingly AI is being used in an agentic form. And that more means that you give AI a set of instructions or a goal to achieve. And then AI goes off and does many, many, many, things to try to achieve that goal. AI agents are, at least in the corporate world and the software engineering and scientific world, the vast majority of AI use today. And those agents make both much more complicated calls than the prompts would suggest and many, many more calls. And so when you look at the actual energy use of these AI agents, it’s something on the order of 600 times larger per prompt than the traditional, like, type something in a chat box and got to get an immediate response. And so that does end up adding up. I actually looked at two months of my own AI use because I had local logs of all of the numbers there… I found that on average I was using about three kilowatt hours a day for my agentic energy use which is the equivalent of running two refrigerators.
#70%
That’s been the average growth in US battery installations over the last three years, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it’s continuing to accelerate. Here’s the chart:
Notice that it’s continuing to rise this year. And as long as we’re doing charts, here it is broken down by state, with batteries in lavender. You’ll note that only four or five states are really participating in the battery revolution so far, which leaves enormous room for rapid growth elsewhere. Batteries are the transformative technology for the second half of this decade, as sun and wind were for the first half. Note also the incredible damage the Trump administration has done to the wind industry.
#44%
That’s how much you’d save in carbon emissions by retiring your internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) and replacing it with an EV—even if it was only two years old, and taking into account the amount of energy used to build both vehicles. A new study in Science from G. Elliott Campbell attempts to answer a question that’s puzzled many good-faith people: Does it really make sense to get rid of my ICEV if I’m worried about the climate. It does, beginning the day you drive it off the lot. It’s somewhat more complicated if you sell your used gas-guzzler to someone else, but as Science editor Jesse Smith notes:
The energy impact benefits from swapping an EV for an ICEV begin to accrue as early as the first day of the life of the ICEV, and that replacement early in the life cycle consistently provides reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Financial considerations will also affect when people choose to make the replacement, of course, but from the perspective of emissions, it is almost never too soon to switch.
As Campbell explained to Tik Root:
“We’re trying to show that there’s not an environmental motivation for extending the lifetime of a gas vehicle,” he said. “Electric vehicles are a very clear winner.”
This isn’t true of everything you own, by the way. It basically depends on whether the carbon emissions of the thing mostly come from building it, or from powering it. Hence this chart that Professor Campbell sent me. Hold on to your cell phone another year!
#20 percent
That’s how much of French nuclear capacity is offline due to low river levels with the summer’s heat and fierce drought. (Oh, and a jellyfish invasion at a coastal plant, itself caused by warming seas). As Le Monde reports:
According to Agence France-Presse (AFP) calculations based on data published by energy group EDF since 2015, 20.4% of generating capacity was unavailable. Between 9:45 am and 10:00 am, EDF's nuclear fleet recorded a new peak in outages due to "environmental constraints" or "external environmental causes," both in terms of the number of reactors shut down or operating at reduced output and in terms of lost generating capacity.
The point is not to say "shut down nuclear power plants." It’s merely to point out that charge long leveled at sun and wind—that they provide “intermittent power”—is probably truer now of other energy sources (including the natural gas that can get shut down if, say, a war breaks out in the Strait of Hormuz). See the numbers on batteries above—I think it’s pretty clear that once you connect them to a solar or a wind farm you’ve got some of the world’s firmest power. By the way, that’s how BMW has kept its Hungarian plant churning out EVs even as the country’s lone nuke shut down, causing a cascading energy shortage across the country.
#22%
That’s how much domestic airline emissions have fallen in Austria over the last three years, since the government banned short haul flights to domestic destinations that were served by trains; something similar happened in France, which passed a more limited version of the same law. As Logan Varsano writes:
These initial successes in Austria and France are promising.
They also prompt a number of follow-on questions: What might be the climate benefit if such policies were more broadly adopted across Europe? What if they were implemented beyond Europe’s borders? What if they were applied to short-haul international flights, and not merely domestic routes?
Research published in 2021 found that, in Finland, replacing all short-haul flights with non-high-speed rail could cut emissions by 95%. One year later in 2022, different researchers took a broader look at commercial passenger flights across 31 countries. A 2023 study took a closer look at Spain's two busiest domestic corridors: Madrid-Barcelona and Madrid-Valencia. In 2024, data from IATA focused a lens back on France. And more recently, a September 2025 study on commercial intra-European aviation concluded that substituting short-haul flights with rail alternatives could reduce a trip's emissions by up to 97%, depending on the length of the trip.
I’d just add: City center to city center trains are infinitely nicer than dealing with airports, at least for me. Until we get the blimps up and running, more rail please!
#5.5°C vs 2°C
This last one is a little complicated, but it underscores the most important point I keep trying to make in this newsletter: We must act fast!
It comes from a new study about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Currents, or AMOC, the most important heat distribution on planet Earth, and one we’re threatening to wreck by raising temperatures. What the study—out Thursday in Nature—calculates is the risk of raising the temperature fast, which is what we’re doing now. On a “slow ramp,” this computer model shows that the currents stay stable until temperatures are raised 5.5°C—which is a lot of breathing room. But if you ramp up the temperature quickly, going past 2°C can shut them down. Rosa van den Dool interviewed one of the study’s authors:
The explanation lies in how the ocean is able to adjust to change. “Under slow warming, the entire ocean, from the surface down to its deepest layers, has time to gradually reorganize and adapt to the changing conditions,” says co-author Henk Dijkstra, professor of dynamical oceanography. “Under faster warming, the ocean simply can’t keep up.”
According to the researchers, the critical warming rate lies around 0.3°C per decade, a pace the world is already approaching. Van Westen compares it to driving a car: “If you’re driving toward a wall, it makes sense to steer around it. To do that, you need to brake, otherwise you fly off the road. When it comes to global warming, the world is still pressing extra hard on the accelerator right now.”
Math can’t tell us everything we need to know about the climate crisis. At some level, the crucial calculation is about the size of the human heart, and whether we’re ready to really press for the change that’s required. But math illuminates the parameters that humans must live within, and it shines a light on our possibilities. Above all it explains why these are the crucial years: Temperatures and solutions are rising at the exact same moment. Our job is to see if we can nudge the odds in this race.
And we can, so we must. Thank you for being part of the fight!
Choking on Trump's Gas Prices? Electric Vehicles Are the Heimlich Maneuver
Donald Trump’s brilliant idea of joining the blockade of that Strait should be considered the equivalent of coming to the aid of a strangulation victim by pressing a pillow over his or her face. The shortages hit first in Asia (particularly reliant on fuel flows from the Strait of Hormuz) and Africa and then in Europe. The German air carrier Lufthansa only recently cut 20,000 summer flights for fear of fuel shortages (and it will undoubtedly prove all too typical). Nor will the U.S., despite having its own supplies of oil, escape such negative developments. While there have been oil price crunches before, as in the 1970s and 1980s, this one is different. It’s a watershed moment globally, heralding the Ragnarök — the Norse “twilight of the gods” — of petroleum.
Forced to Run on One Engine
While American drivers have been complaining this spring about high prices at the pump, in the Netherlands and Denmark consumers are already paying the stunning equivalent of around $10 a gallon. In Asia, where reliance on petroleum that travels through the Strait of Hormuz is enormous, the situation is far worse, since there are already distinct shortages of fuel of a staggering and still growing kind. Philippines President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., recently declared a national energy emergency, as his country had only a little over a month’s worth of petroleum left. Hundreds of gas stations, nearly 3% of the country’s total, announced temporary closures, resulting in long lines at those that remained open.
South Korea, which unwisely dragged its feet when it came to turning to green energy, is now scrambling to find just three months’ supply of petroleum from non-Hormuz sources, but the world’s 10th-largest economy faces a potential economic cataclysm. The government has already restricted parking for commuters. The rise in gasoline costs has led many consumers to simply stay home if they can, spurring a buying spree of novels and video games. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, a human rights lawyer, implicitly blamed Israel’s blatant disregard for International Humanitarian Law for the calamity, engaging in a days-long internet flame war with Tel Aviv in early April.
In Bangladesh, the state-owned Eastern Refinery has been forced to close due to a lack of crude oil to process. Meanwhile, the government has allowed gasoline and diesel prices to rise by 11% to 15%, putting pressure on the costs of transportation, agricultural production, and consumer items, while creating endless lines for what gasoline remains. With boat operators, ferries, and fishing boats unable to secure enough diesel fuel for their motors, a whole range of livelihoods are being hurt. As Al Jazeera reported, Bangladeshi ferry operator Abir Hussain typically offered this complaint: “We are struggling to maintain our regular schedule. We are forced to run on just one engine to conserve diesel, due to the fuel shortages.”Heavily dependent on fossil gas for its electricity plants, Bangladesh has already suffered widespread outages, harming factories and schools — and, of course, even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen soon, the pain throughout Asia is likely to be long-lasting.
Stagflation
Oil price crises are hardly new. Because of a boycott of Europe and the United States by Arab oil producers during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the rising power of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel, the price of petroleum actually quadrupled between 1970 and 1980. That energy crisis produced economic malaise in the United States, where the economy became afflicted with “stagflation” — both stagnation and inflation, two phenomena not usually found together.
So much capital flowed to the oil states of the Persian Gulf then, particularly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran, that President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger schemed to avoid deflation in the U.S. by pressuring those countries to buy enormous amounts of American military equipment. Over the decades, that oil-arms nexus would drive the United States toward ever more ruinous conflicts in the Gulf region, since arms manufacturers and oil companies, two of the more influential corporate sectors in American politics, had a motive for lobbying repeatedly to get Washington to intervene there. And of course, their behind-the-scenes pressure to continue the country’s forever wars in that region would be bolstered by the Israel Lobby.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-1979, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Gulf War of 1990-1991, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were all further shocks to the energy system. The major industrialized countries responded to such challenges by increasing their fuel efficiency, while switching to nuclear power, coal, and natural gas for ever more of their electricity and heating. In the U.S., in part because of government regulation, the average passenger car went from a fuel efficiency of 13.5 miles per gallon in 1975 to 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985, while global per capita use of petroleum declined after the 1970s oil shock and has never recovered.
The Great Hormuz Fuel Crisis
The Great Hormuz Fuel Crisis of 2026 has the potential to permanently reduce petroleum demand far more radically. The deadlock in the Strait of Hormuz has all the hallmarks of a chronic ailment. After all, Israel and Iran have struck each other four times now — in April and then October 2024, in the 12-day war of June 2025 (when President Trump joined in), and again this spring. None of those four military actions successfully established Iranian deterrence, leaving Tehran eternally vulnerable to further Israeli and U.S. strikes.
And yet Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s determination to destroy Iran’s industrial base has also failed so far. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Israeli elite won’t try again once their country and the U.S. have built back up their depleted stores of interceptors and so become more confident that Tel Aviv will be able to withstand further Iranian ballistic missile and drone barrages. In addition, Iran’s new claim that, from here on in, it will have the right to charge tolls for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, though it may have some support in international law, is unacceptable to the U.S., the Arab Gulf states, and Israel, and so forms an irritant likely to lead to further conflict.
In short, Israel and the United States have destabilized the Persian Gulf and global oil and natural gas supplies for the foreseeable future.
How different today’s crisis is from the Middle Eastern one set off by Washington’s Operation Desert Storm, aimed at expelling the Iraqi military from Kuwait in 1991. Since the strength of Baathist Iraq then lay in its armored forces, the U.S. and its allies could use their own armor and air power to bottle them up inside Iraq and deny that country’s military the ability to further destabilize the Persian Gulf region.
In contrast, since then Iran has put much of its military energy into ballistic missile and drone production, weapons that, no matter what the U.S. and Israel do, can continue to strike sites across the Middle East. While petroleum prices doubled during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990, they quickly fell once it was over. Subsequent losses from sanctions on Iraq and oil fires in Kuwait were offset by increases in OPEC production, especially in Saudi Arabia. That country is, in fact, one of the few major swing producers left in the world. The U.S. and Russia still produce a great deal of crude oil, but they use most of it themselves. On the other hand, because of its vast oil fields and small population, Saudi Arabia can vary its production, lowering it when the price falls too low for its liking and increasing it substantially during a crisis.
Phantasmagoric Assertions
At the moment, however, the Saudis can’t substantially offset the shortfall in crude oil through Hormuz because it’s caught up in the crisis itself and its pipeline to the Red Sea has limited extra capacity; nor, despite President Trump’s phantasmagoric assertions, can the U.S., since it’s not a net exporter but a net consumer of crude oil. It is, however, a net exporter of liquid hydrocarbons, including hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGLs), primarily propane, which make up about 25% of total U.S. gross “petroleum” exports. Propane, however, is mainly used for heating buildings and you can’t fill up on HGLs at the pump. Since gasoline and diesel prices are set by the world market, the U.S. production of crude will not keep American prices at the pump from rising.
The oil supply for vehicles is relatively inelastic. And yet a world that used roughly 104 million barrels a day of petroleum in 2025 has been limping along this spring with as little as 92 million barrels a day, while chronic shortages loom, even once the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, since numerous major refineries in the region have been badly damaged. Demand also will remain relatively inelastic as long as owners locked into vehicles with internal combustion engines have to keep on buying gasoline and diesel fuel (no matter how high the prices go) to get to work, ensuring that those prices will remain elevated until the supply increases substantially.
The Hormuz crisis, however, differs from past oil shocks in significant ways. As a start, it’s happening at a time when scientists are discovering ever more unsettling consequences from fossil-fuel-caused climate change — most recently, a potentially calamitous slowdown in or possibly even future collapse of the crucial Atlantic Ocean current system by midcentury, which could have a devastating impact on the planet. As a result, wise governments have an increasing motivation to enact policies encouraging the electrification of public transport of every sort and so much else as well.
In addition, the recent conflict in the Strait of Hormuz signals an ongoing geopolitical volatility in the heart of oil country that may not subside, even though the latest oil war has arrived at a time when there is an increasingly robust alternative to gas-powered transportation in the form of electric vehicles (EVs), to which consumers are already switching in striking numbers. Countries are also turning ever more to wind and solar power, no small thing since the crunch in the Strait also affects the global distribution of natural gas from Qatar. The five countries in the European Union with the most green energy are set to save nearly $10 billion more in costs than fossil-heavy EU countries.
The Elephant in the Showroom
In the United Kingdom, EV sales spiked a record 24% in March over the same month last year. Moreover, there was a potentially game-changing turning point there, as the average cost of an electric vehicle for the first time fell below that of a similar gasoline-powered car. Meanwhile, renewable energy generation in England also swelled strikingly.
Asia, however, was the place that saw the most dramatic changes. Vietnam now makes its own electric car, the Vinfast, and its sales skyrocketed by 127% in March. Some 40% of new vehicle sales there last year were already electric, a percentage that is expected to rise rapidly in the wake of the Strait of Hormuz disaster. Vietnamese schoolteacher Dao Thi Hue caught the mood of the moment while visiting a Vinfast dealership by saying, “Driving an EV is so much better than driving a petroleum vehicle, in terms of costs and also in terms of saving fuel, queuing to fill up.”
Of course, the elephant in the global EV showroom is China. In 2024, it produced more than 12 million electric, hybrid, and fuel-cell vehicles (also known as “New Energy Vehicles”). That figure amounts to 70% of global production and EVs accounted for 53% of new car registrations in China last year. Moreover, China already has the ability to produce 20 million EVs annually, so it is only producing at 65% capacity. And the rush to buy electric vehicles isn’t just focused on passenger vehicles but also on heavy trucks.
Although domestic sales in China faced some headwinds because government incentives for such purchases lapsed late last year, March sales of 1.25 million New Energy Vehicles there were up slightly from the previous year and recent sales were up 67% from this February’s. The big news, however, is that Chinese EV growth was driven primarily by exports, a record 371,000 units in March, a 130% increase over the same month in 2025. Chinese lithium battery exports were also up in the first quarter by 50.1%, a figure that is only expected to grow as the effects of the Hormuz blockade tear through the world economy. Overall, China’s Greentech exports are surging.
Periodic Shocks
Count on this: ever more consumers are likely to purchase electric vehicles globally, since they’re immune to the periodic price shocks caused by Persian Gulf instability. Moreover, their sticker prices continue to fall. New discoveries of lithium resources and new, less expensive batteries also promise to bring their prices down even further. Moreover, China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Company (or CATL), a giant battery manufacturer, has just announced that it has developed a new battery that will enable an electric vehicle to travel 932 miles on a single charge (which, by the way, would only take six and a half minutes to complete).
These are potentially internal-combustion-engine-killing developments. Governments of countries lacking significant oil resources like India are already committing themselves to vast build-outs of charging stations and creating ever more incentives to buy EVs and phase out gas-driven vehicles. Because the Hormuz crisis is hitting Asia (with its vast population of 4.8 billion people) hardest, the new and somewhat frantic commitment by so many of its governments and its consumers to the electrification of transport will have the effect of further dropping prices globally for electric batteries and other technology and so will be pivotal in the fight against climate change.
In short, count on one thing: however devastating the immediate effects of the disaster in the Strait of Hormuz, the latest horrific Iran war is also helping to change the world forever in ways that could prove positive indeed.
Can We Design a Green Transition That Doesn't Turbocharge Extraction?
Three years after I had first hypothesized that different transportation choices might require less mining, I stopped waiting for someone else to produce the data to put my hunch to the test. By that point, I had begun working with a climate think tank. I reached out to environmental engineers, transit wonks, and battery experts and asked if we could build a model from scratch. We were guided by an approach called “industrial ecology,” which studies industrial systems in terms of their material and energy flows. In this case, we were looking for the amount of lithium required to meet the needs of fully electric mobility. We pitted a scenario in which all traditional cars had been replaced with electric ones against a scenario in which more Americans rode to work, school, or shopping centers in clean energy buses or got around by bikes or by walking. In other words, and in sharp contrast to prevailing models, instead of comparing a zero-emissions world with one in which we continued to rely on fossil fuels, we compared multiple zero-emissions worlds with one another.
We didn’t stop there. Having set our imaginations free to roam, we tinkered with additional features of the worlds we were building. We imagined denser cities and suburbs, with less sprawl enabling less car use; cars with a range of battery sizes (American EV batteries are twice as large as the global median); high rates of mineral recycling and recovery. The futures we mapped out ultimately ranged from an electrified status quo to a fundamental shift in how Americans live and move. We did try to temper our dreaming with a healthy dose of realism. We only tested changes in the cities and suburbs, understanding the obstacles to rapidly building out mass transit in rural America. Even in our most transformative vision, the energy transition would still require tens of millions of EVs.
Achieving a globally just energy transition requires understanding supply chains in reverse, starting from what we produce and consume and working backward to their material inputs, and further still, to the relentless scramble for new extractive frontiers.
I expected these different green scenarios to entail distinct material footprints, measured in the total volume of lithium mining. But the results shocked me. The best-case scenario—smaller batteries, more recycling, denser cities and towns, and more mass transit use, walking, and cycling—requires 66 percent less lithium than the worst-case scenario (batteries get even bigger, suburbs stay sprawled, recycling is nonexistent).That percentage difference was based on a cumulative assessment across all the years we modeled (2023–2050). If instead we just look at 2050, the final year, the spread was more dramatic: the difference in lithium demand between the best- and worst-case scenarios was 92 percent. That’s in large part because recycling takes time to have an impact on reducing mining, with recycled feedstock increasing as the batteries from EVs purchased in the 2020s, ’30s, and ’40s reach the end of their life and become available for material recovery.
These findings put the supposedly zero-sum trade-off between climate action and protecting landscapes and communities from extraction in a new light. The futures we conjured showed that it is, in fact, possible to achieve climate targets without the alarming amount of mining predicted by all other forecasts. And there’s more: Increasing mass transit use and housing density will get us to zero emissions much faster than swapping every traditional car for an electric vehicle. To put it bluntly, a path to zero emissions that relies on electrifying individual cars is not only the most resource-intensive route to zero emissions, but also the slowest route to that urgent goal. We fully recognize that the political and even cultural obstacles to realizing our most ambitious scenario are formidable. But the prevailing approach not only requires much more extraction than socially necessary. It also runs afoul of climate science.
The implications of this modeling exercise completely changed the way I viewed mining. It suddenly dawned on me that extraction is not a problem that can be addressed solely at the sites of mining alone. It is absolutely vital to govern extractive frontiers better, improving environmental regulations and enforcing Indigenous rights. But some of our most potent tools to reduce the harms of mining reside elsewhere, all the way at the other end of far-flung supply chains. These tools take the form of the policy choices, investment decisions, and built environments that shape how we cut emissions from polluting sectors like transportation. The responsibility for protecting the Atacama’s watersheds does not rest only with Chilean bureaucrats, nor should Atacameño communities have to shoulder the burden of standing up to multinational mining firms on their own. We in the United States are also implicated in the supply chains that start in Chile’s northern reaches. Achieving a globally just energy transition requires understanding supply chains in reverse, starting from what we produce and consume and working backward to their material inputs, and further still, to the relentless scramble for new extractive frontiers.
The task of achieving a just energy transition is daunting. But this holistic view also opens up possibilities for action, revealing multiple and dispersed levers for reducing mining’s harms. Policies that promote alternatives to car use, reduce sprawl, encourage more compact batteries, and require recycling would all reduce the scale of mining needed for carbon-free transportation.
Confronting emissions as a holistic problem, rather than a purely technical question about the fastest way to electrify an ever-growing fleet of personal automobiles, entails a leap of political faith. New models and forecasts like the ones my colleagues and I built at our think tank, the Climate and Community Institute, can help us tell galvanizing stories about the future we want. If we can see and feel that alternate future, desire and describe it, then we can commit to creating the foundations for it in the here and now. Forecasts chart a path from our present to the world we want to build. But seeing something and building it aren’t the same. Better research or data can only carry us so far; concrete, bold, even risky actions are the stuff of real change. What practical steps can we take today to call forth a different tomorrow?
We can start by demanding supply chains organized around justice for everyone they touch, rather than profits for just a few. Just as any workplace is simultaneously a site of exploitation and locus of worker power, and any mine is at once a setting for extraction and a potential scene of community resistance, the supply chains of green technologies are both a means of domination—of people and of nature—and fertile ground for making the world anew.
Supply chains are currently organized for profit, but they can nonetheless become arenas for grassroots organizing and unexpected alliances. Lithium battery supply chains don’t just link mines to factories to consumers, or upstream to downstream corporations. They also connect Indigenous land defenders and urban transit users, workers manufacturing e-bikes and battery recycling advocates, bus drivers and avid cyclists, and climate activists and promoters of dense, walkable cities and towns. These communities, workers, and advocates are already bound together by the global operations of green capitalism—and in many cases, are already organizing locally. What would it take for them to join hands and fight for globally just supply chains, together?
Today, a coalition like this may feel impossible. Electrifying the status quo to stave off the scariest warming scenarios already seems hard enough. Electrifying while also changing engrained habits, like car dependency and suburban sprawl, seems far-fetched, if not utopian. But fear of radical change is misplaced: Radical, turbulent, accelerating, and yes, frightening, change is already baked into the carbon in the atmosphere and in the reign of sclerotic elites, predatory corporations, and moribund institutions.
There is no escaping the harsh reality of mounting instability—political, economic, ecological. This turmoil touches everything, including the material underbelly of the energy transition. This is the paradox of extraction: It is at once the most enduring feature of the world order and among the most prone to disruptive conflict, whether between Global North and South, between geopolitical rivals, or between local communities and huge corporations. Such contests are asymmetric, yet over the past century have provided openings to challenge the entrenched power relations of our global economy.
Extractive frontiers are so sedimented that they may feel like second nature, but it is precisely from these frontiers that we must begin again, from the underground on up.
Adapted from Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism by Thea Riofrancos. Copyright ©2025 by Thea Riofrancos. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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