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renewable energy
As Trump Denies and Delays, the World Races to Meet the Climate Clock Deadline
It may sound like all is lost. On the contrary: Solutions abound, and there are many reasons for hope.
Jul 22, 2026
On July 22, the Climate Clock—whose numbers Greta Thunberg, King Charles III, and other climate champions have for years used to demand urgent action—will drop below three years for the first time, signaling a rapidly shrinking window to avert worsening Climate Catastrophe by preventing global warming from rising above 1.5°C. We will pass this critical climate red line before the next FIFA World Cup in 2030 and by the time this year’s cohort of undergraduate students earn their degree. This is not doomerism. This is simply what the world’s best science has been telling us, clearly and accurately, for nearly a decade.
It may sound like all is lost. On the contrary: Solutions abound, and there are many reasons for hope. But first we need to understand where we are and how we got here.
The anti-progress, self-sabotaging direction of the current US administration has now all but assured that the planet will blow past this critical global deadline in three years, setting the world on a dangerous track toward increased chaos and disruption, from extreme heatwaves to increased devastation by floods to collapsing food systems.
President Donald Trump has not done this alone. Under Trump, the federal government has acted as a direct appendage of the Fossil Fuel industry, seeking profits at all costs while sabotaging the most viable climate solutions and undermining any sustainable alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.
"The best time to avert climate disaster was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.”
This administration has ended clean energy tax credits, terminated emission standards for cars and trucks, and eliminated the scientific and legal foundation for federal greenhouse gas regulations by revoking the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. With a special spite, Trump has also forced money-losing coal plants to continue operating while cancelling perfectly good already 80% complete offshore wind projects.
And once again the world finds itself embroiled in yet another “War for Oil,” this time over the Strait of Hormuz with a running price tag of over $100 billion. The economic, social, and ecological costs of fossil fuels have become so great, that some have likened it to “Energy From Hell.”
Despite these frightening realities, there is a surprising amount of good news. While the US stumbles backward, the rest of the world races forward.
The pace of China's renewable energy growth has been staggering. China reached its 2030 wind and solar targets six years ahead of schedule. China installs 3 gigawatts of solar power per day—meaning it builds the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant worth of renewable energy every eight hours. Renewables now account for over 60% of China's total power generating capacity. Climate activist and author Bill McKibben describes China as the "Costco of energy"—its massive production of solar panels is one of the key drivers of the global solar revolution. In the race toward renewables, China is now kicking the United States butt outright, having installed five times the capacity of the US.
Riding the global glut of cheap Chinese solar panels, Pakistan is undergoing one of the fastest grassroots energy transitions in the world. In over just two years, ordinary citizens independently installed an estimated 27 gigawatts of solar capacity. This consumer-led boom made solar the nation's largest single source of electricity.
India’s renewable energy sector is the world's third largest, with non-fossil sources exceeding 51% of the country’s total installed capacity, hitting its 2030 targets five years ahead of schedule. Powered by offshore wind, Denmark leads Europe's remarkable green transition, now sourcing roughly 88% of its net electricity from renewables, and aiming for 100% renewable electricity by 2030. Uruguay now generates nearly 99% of its electricity from renewable sources. This massive transition slashed production costs by half, created 50,000 jobs, and allows the country to export surplus clean energy to Argentina and Brazil. Even the Vatican is getting in on the action, driving forward hard on an ambitious initiative to make Vatican City the world's first carbon-neutral state.
And in spite of Trump’s efforts to undermine it, the USA’s transition to renewables rolls forward. This May, for the first time in the USA, solar power generated more electricity than coal. A huge milestone. Despite the reduction in federal subsidies, demand by US consumers for renewable energy continues unabated, simply because it’s the most affordable option.
Over the last decade, solar energy has become 10 times cheaper, onshore wind three times cheaper. Renewable energy is now the cheapest source of new power in most markets. Falling prices mean renewables accounted for over 90% of total worldwide new electricity-generating capacity added, pushing renewables to account for roughly one-third of global power. In 2024 alone, global power generation from renewable sources saved US$467 billion in avoided fossil fuel costs.
If it wasn’t for the relentless deluge of Climate Denialism and anti-science rhetoric muddying our public discourse (much of it paid for by the Fossil Fuel industry), these incredible human achievements in the face of catastrophe would be sources of great national and international pride, akin to World Cup victories.
Just this spring, frustrated by the United Nation’s COP process that year after year has been undermined by petro states and fossil fuel lobbyists, 50 governments, including Colombia and the Netherlands (the birthplace of oil giant Shell), gathered for a First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. This "coalition of the willing” charted out concrete next steps to accelerate the global transition to renewables.
The renewables revolution being pursued across the globe is delivering real results. The most real result: Newsflash! we’re not going to go extinct!
Recently, scientists have determined that the most dreaded, worst-case scenario of a 4.5°C-plus global temperature increase is now, thankfully, off the table. Thanks to the combined efforts of governments, activists, scientists, engineers, and consumers, we have—for now—slowed the runaway climate train from crashing at full velocity into a horrific future. This is a massive success story of the global climate movement that has gotten far fewer headlines than it deserves.
Perhaps the part of this global crisis that future generations may have the hardest time understanding is how clear and doable the climate solutions we need are. While the rapid transition from Fossil Fuels to Renewable Energy is the foundation, other solutions reinforce the gains: Gender Parity in government (aka more women in leadership) delivers better, measurable pro-climate outcomes, while protecting 30% of our land by the year 2030 would maintain critical global biodiversity and mitigate climate impacts.
The Clock also tracks the dollar cost of inaction, currently $32 trillion! Yes, that’s right. According to an extensive recent study from the journal Nature, acting now to mitigate climate change would potentially prevent $32 trillion in damages by 2050. Meanwhile a new analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence reports that the US spends nearly $1T per year on climate damages, exceeding 3% of US GDP.
The Climate Clock has been doing it’s part to hasten progress, branching out from our monumental time keeper in New York City’s Union Square to dozens of countries, putting handheld clocks in the hands of hundreds of climate activists across the world to pressure leaders to take action. Climate champions from presidents to TV meteorologists have now used the clock to push for urgent implementation of the solutions.
The threats are very real and time is of the essence. But the solutions available to us are vast and achievable.
All these solutions are displayed on the Clock in real time, tracking our forward progress as the deadline counts down. The Climate Clock was never an “End of The World” clock, but a “How to Save The World” clock.
To paraphrase an old saying: "The best time to avert climate disaster was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.” Every fraction of a degree counts. It’s never too late to fight for people and the planet. Even as the Clock ticks toward zero, we must—and can—act in time.
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Donald Trump: An Atomic Bomb of a President
If his dreams (oh, sorry, nightmares) come true, he will certainly be known historically (if, of course, there is any “historically” then) as the president of the United States who did his best to end it all.
Jul 21, 2026
Let’s face it: Donald Trump should be considered an atomic bomb of a president—potentially all too literally, even if in slow motion, thanks to climate change. When it comes to actual atomic weaponry, he’s been threatening for a while first to restart the testing of nuclear weapons, which the US stopped 33 years ago, and then (at least implicitly) to use just such a weapon against the Iranians. In April, in fact, he insisted that, if Iran refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back”—only to later deny that he meant he would ever consider using an atomic weapon against that country.
Of course, once upon a time in school (think the 1950s), the young Donald Trump, like me, must have “ducked and covered“ under his desk in preparation for a potential Soviet atomic attack on our city (New York). During those Cold War years, of course, atomic testing was considered normal, while our country and the Soviet Union were indeed facing off globally in a remarkably threatening fashion. But no ducking and covering now, not from our president anyway.
Once upon a time, in the last century when I was an editor at Pantheon Books, I published Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. Then, at the invitation of the Japanese editor of that book, I actually visited Hiroshima and went to the museum there dedicated to my country’s nuclear devastation of that city and Nagasaki to end World War II. I’ll never forget that dead 12-year-old’s charred lunchbox or that human shadow etched in stone by the atomic blast. Of course, as a boy, I had all too typically grown up dreaming (in the sense of a nightmare) about mushroom clouds exploding over New York City.
But in all those years, I never quite imagined that there might be a slow-motion version of atomic warfare on this planet, which we’ve come to mildly label “climate change.” (It should, of course, be called something more like “climate catastrophe” or “climate hell.”) Nor had I ever quite imagined that we would elect a president seemingly intent on making it happen ever more quickly and severely. After all, he’s pushed remarkably hard to further fossil-fuelize our world. As Juan Cole noted all too aptly at his Informed Comment website, just as the 250th anniversary of this country’s founding was passing, “Trump’s promotion of coal burning and cancellation of wind turbines makes him the Benedict Arnold of America’s current struggle.”
When it comes to him and the possibility of either a potentially devastating nuclear war or a fossil-fuelized heat war on this planet, he seems perfectly willing to engage in world-ending activities.
These days, of course, nine countries have nuclear arsenals (enough weapons to wipe out any number of Earth-sized planets), and Donald Trump has recently been at war with Iran, the country he feared might become the 10th. And yet, in the 80 years since my country ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people (including an estimated 38,000 children), consider it a miracle that another of those weapons (now horrifically more powerful) has never been used, although since the first nuclear test in 1945, there have been more than 2,000 other “tests” in which such weapons were exploded, which have, of course, sent cancer-causing radiation across the planet.
But don’t push that miracle idea too far, since it turns out that we humans proved all too capable of coming up with another way to devastate this planet, a distinctly slow-motion version of atomic warfare. In fact, at this very moment, I’m sitting in an air-conditioned room writing this piece, while the world more or less burns outside my window. Recently, high temperature records were tied or broken across 21 states in my country, including my own state, with worse potentially still to come in our future. (The same, by the way, has been true across much of Europe, the part of the planet reputedly heating fastest in this increasingly strange world of ours, with Spain only recently topping a record 113°F.) I’m thinking, of course, of climate change and, sadly, at this very moment, when it comes to that version of warfare—and it should indeed be thought of as a form of warfare!—against this planet, there really is no ducking and covering (unless you count air conditioning, which uses electricity and so only makes matters worse). If you happened to live in Europe recently or in the Midwestern and Eastern parts of the United States where temperatures rose to striking heights or simply went crazy (including hitting 104°F in my hometown, New York City), you would certainly know that.
In short, it’s increasingly hot, hot, hot, damagingly so on this planet of ours, and Donald Trump, the second time around, not only doesn’t give a damn (an all too appropriate term under the circumstances) but seems remarkably intent on making this planet hotter still. At least, to look on the bright side, climate change did make something of a mess of his celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, or was that the 250th anniversary of Glorious Donald? When it comes to him and the possibility of either a potentially devastating nuclear war or a fossil-fuelized heat war on this planet, he seems perfectly willing to engage in world-ending activities as long as they’re in slow motion and, at 80 years old, he (like me) won’t be around to experience the resulting holocaust, which he has, of course, termed a “green energy scam” and a “hoax.”
Yes, make no mistake about it, while he’s officially ended that 33-year moratorium on nuclear testing, that may be the least of our problems. Whatever other recent presidents have (or haven’t) done in terms of climate change, he seems remarkably intent on doing so much worse by wildly promoting fossil fuels, while doing everything he can to dismiss anything that might make this planet less hot, including wind and solar power of any sort. (In the process, he’s giving imperial decline a new meaning by turning what’s left of imperial power on this planet over to China, which now controls so much of green energy development and production.)
If his dreams (oh, sorry, nightmares) come true, he will certainly be known historically (if, of course, there is any “historically” then) as the president of the United States who did his best to end it all (even if in slow motion).
Under the circumstances, we should consider Donald Trump the human equivalent of a slow-motion atomic bomb.
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Electricity Costs Up 18% as Trump's Self-Imposed Deadline to Cut Household Bills in Half Passes
"Time’s up, and so is your bill."
Jul 21, 2026
President Donald Trump's trade war, demand for the rapid expansion of energy-sucking artificial intelligence data centers, and cancellation of renewable energy projects have all gotten in the way of his ability to deliver on his promise to slash household electricity costs, according to US Energy Information Administration data released as the president's self-imposed deadline for cutting rates by 50% came and went this week.
The latest data from the EIA shows residential rates as recent as this past April, and finds that households paid an average of 18.83 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) that month compared with 17.55 cents in April 2025.
Since January 2025, when Trump entered office for his second term, prices have gone up by more than 18%, according to the EIA.
The data comes as the president reached the 18-month mark of his second administration—the deadline he gave himself to cut electricity rates in half.
"Under my leadership, the United States will commit to the ambitious goal of slashing energy and electricity prices by half at least,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina in August 2024. “We intend to slash prices by half within 12 months—at a maximum 18 months.”
"Every single thing that I promised, I produced," he added.
As Democratic research group American Bridge 21st Century said Tuesday, "Time's up, and so is your bill."
The 7.3% increase in the average electricity bill over the past 12 months alone shows costs soaring at roughly double the rate of inflation, reported 24/7 Wall Street.
The largest grid operator in the country, PJM Interconnection, reported a capacity price of $16.4 billion for power delivery in the 2028-29 period, according to the outlet. Reason also reported that data centers' electricity use added $6 billion to PJM's capacity auction, which utilities pay to guarantee future power supplies, with the costs flowing to ratepayers.
In the second quarter of 2026, utilities filed $9.2 billion in requests for rate hikes, up 26% from the same period in 2025, according to 24/7 Wall Street.
The EIA projected in May that residential electricity prices would rise by about 5% this year, with costs soaring the most in East Coast states.
Trump's deadline for slashing prices—a promise he made as families were also struggling with rising grocery and housing prices—came as The Century Foundation (TCF) released a report titled "Power Failure: Rising Energy Debt Is Climbing into the Middle Class."
According to the report, energy bills have increased three times faster than the inflation rate since Trump took office for the second time, with the national average utility bill reaching $280 in early 2026—a 12% increase since the end of 2024.
The average household in 18 states is now paying more than $280 per month for utilities, and average costs have gone up by more than 20% in 10 states since Trump began his second term.
In March 2026, the national average overdue utility balance for a household was $817, said TCF.
"The Trump administration’s policies are actively contributing to and worsening the energy cost crisis," reads TCF's report. "The effects of the Iran war will only further increase household utility costs, while runaway data center expansions account for 63 percent of electricity generation capacity costs in the nation’s largest power market. Meanwhile, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed clean-energy tax credits that would have lowered household electricity bills and aid programs to help low-income families afford their energy bills."
Without citing evidence, Trump's energy secretary, Chris Wright, claimed last week that AI data centers "are the greatest tool we have right now to stop the rise of electricity prices," but numerous analyses have tied the rapid growth of the sector—pushed by the White House—to higher household costs, as a typical "hyperscale" data center can use as much as 100 megawatts, the same amount of electricity as 100,000 households.
Trump has also made components of energy infrastructure more expensive, while the think tank Energy Innovation found in a recent analysis that the president's cancellation of solar and other renewable energy projects could leave households paying an additional $460 per year in energy costs by 2035.
"The bottom line is what the data shows," wrote Joel South at 24/7 Wall Street. "The specific promise, cheaper power by mid-2026, was not met."
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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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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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Big Oil Is Heating Us to Death and Telling Us It's Our Fault
The time has come for us to rise up against this deceptive and powerful industry, to finally kick them out of spaces with influence. It is high time for us to stop being manipulated by fossil fuel companies that are only out to make a profit and harm us.
Jul 09, 2026
Temperatures have soared globally this summer. And far from simply being uncomfortable, it’s killing people.
This past July 4 was one of the hottest in US history. While Americans gathered to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, dozens died from extreme heat—and the toll may still rise. In Europe, which has seen its own devastating heatwave, some 3,700 people have died. And the heat has become so extreme in Pakistan that people’s teeth are literally dissolving in their mouths.
This is only the beginning of extreme heat this summer—and if we don’t stop the climate crisis, for the rest of time. Scientists are warning that this marks “uncharted territory” in rising temperatures.
The good news? We know the solution. To build a better world, with cheaper and cleaner energy, we have to phase out fossil fuels and transition to green energy. This process is easier and cheaper than ever. Some 90% of renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels, and renewables don’t heat our planet the way that fossil fuels do.
As temperatures rise, we are now in a battle of people vs. fossil fuels.
The bad news? Fossil fuel companies, and the politicians who support them, are trying to block this transition. Companies like Exxon have known for over 50 years that fossil fuels cause climate change —and that rising temperatures would cost lives. But they’ve tried to bury this information, stall the transition, and deceive the public that fossil fuels aren’t responsible.
I’ve seen this play out firsthand.
When I was 17, I spent a sunny week in Dubai at the 28th United Nations annual climate conference (COP28). I was so excited to attend the conference. I met other activists passionate about renewable energy and taking down the fossil fuel industry. I even attended lobbying meetings with the lead US negotiators, Trigg Talley and Sue Biniaz.
Everything in Dubai felt larger than life—from the Burj Khalifa to the massive dome in the middle of the conference center. But over the week, the conference began to feel more and more dystopian. The fossil fuel industry had sent 2,456 lobbyists to that COP—and despite the loud cries of activists and scientists, their voices drowned ours out.
At the end of the conference, we had a small win—fossil fuels were mentioned in a COP text for the first time ever. But the language was so weak that the statement felt almost meaningless. The text did nothing to change the trajectory of the climate crisis.
The fossil fuel industry has propagated lies about climate change for years. They’ve tried to convince us that climate change is our fault instead of theirs, with campaigns around “carbon footprints”—a concept created by BP—and recycling, which was popularized by the plastics industry but has never managed to efficiently recycle plastics themselves.
They have also spent hundreds of millions of dollars on influencing climate decision-making spaces—from United Nations conferences to Washington, DC. Big Oil spent $445 million during the 2024 elections—and in return has gotten $40 billion in fossil fuel subsidies from the Trump administration.
The time has come for us to rise up against this deceptive and powerful industry, to finally kick them out of spaces with influence. It is high time for us to stop being manipulated by fossil fuel companies that are only out to make a profit and harm us.
As temperatures rise, we are now in a battle of people vs. fossil fuels. We must win—it’s a matter of life and death.
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Drone Warfare Turns Oil From a Resource Into a Liability
A Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's largest oil refinery highlights the inherent vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure, especially when compared with renewable alternatives.
Jul 08, 2026
I visited Omsk once, or at least its airport; we were en route from Moscow to Ulan Ade on the Mongolian border, and the Aeroflot flight landed there to refuel. (It was a memorable journey; this was still the Soviet Union, and on boarding for the full-day flight, the stewardess handed each passenger a baggie with a scrawny chicken drumstick). All of which is to say, I’m equipped to pronounce, with the gravitas proper to a pundit, that Omsk is long ways from anywhere else.
Including the Ukrainian border, which makes it remarkable that Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s drone specialists managed to fly a whole squadron of their craft more than 2,500 kilometers from home and bomb the heck out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s largest oil refinery. It was the high point of an ongoing campaign designed to highlight what may be Russia’s greatest weakness: that it, like a number of other countries, is heavily dependent on oil.
Just as US President Donald Trump has proposed building American prosperity on the back of “energy dominance" via “liquid gold,” oil was supposed to be Russia’s strength, the source of its greatest riches. (John McCain memorably called it a “gas station with nukes.”) And indeed in the early days of the war, Russia flexed its hydrocarbon muscle, threatening to cut off Europe’s gas supply. Throughout its invasion of its neighbor, Russia has relied on the often-covert export of oil via its fleet of “shadow tankers” to keep revenue flowing. Trump of course made this easier and more profitable for his buddy by temporarily lifting sanctions in the wake of our own ill-advised attack on Iran.
But if our attack on Iran has made other nations demonstrably more nervous about relying on the import of hydrocarbons, Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s petroleum network should make them nervous about depending on the stuff even if they don’t have to bring it in from afar. It turns out that in the drone age it’s a very risky business, because it relies on colossal pieces of infrastructure that can’t be easily defended.
Once you can run cars and heat pumps and cooktops off the power those panels and turbines generate, then you’re far more protected against attack.
One of those is the supertanker—there was one on fire Tuesday in the Gulf, apparently hit by an Iranian missile because it strayed from the Tehran-approved shipping lane. Ukrainian drones attacked another Monday in the Sea of Azov, crippling the vessel. There’s essentially no defense for these slow-moving giant ships if an adversary with a few drones wants to take one out—they are, after all, a floating pool of flammable liquid.
Another vulnerability is the terminal where you load and unload the crude—Ukraine got one of those Monday too, in occupied Crimea:
The facility serves as a major logistics hub for petroleum products on the occupied peninsula, handling the receipt, storage, and transfer of oil between rail infrastructure, storage tanks, and tankers
And a third—and perhaps most exposed—is the refinery. An oil refinery is one of the most specialized pieces of equipment humans have ever built; anyone who’s ever driven by one on the highway will recognize that the tangle of pipes and tanks that makes each so complicated. It’s an industry truism that no two are alike.
That means that they’re highly vulnerable. If you aim your drone well, maybe it will smash, say, the ELOU-AVT-11 Unit, which at Omsk is what they call the thing that does the initial distillation and desalination of the crude. Without it, the secondary units that produce, say, gasoline and jet fuel have nothing to work with. And this is highly complicated equipment not easy to replace—given Western sanctions, the current guess is six months to a year. And it’s not as if Ukraine has hit just that refinery—in fact, it was one of the last squares on a drone pilot’s bingo card. As Illia Kabachynskyi reports:
It's also worth remembering that Ukraine has already hit all 10 of Russia's largest refineries, some of them more than once. That means it's no longer a single plant waiting for repairs—it's effectively all of them at once, which piles additional pressure on repair crews and on the supply of replacement parts that are hard to source under sanctions.
Russia started this energy war, of course—over the years of the conflict it has targeted heating plants and the like, trying to freeze the fighting spirit out of the Ukrainians during their long winters. It’s been effective at producing cold, but not at winning the war; along with the attacks on schools, hospitals, and other civilian targets it seems to have helped reinforce the Ukrainian will to resist.
Now—with far more attention to avoiding civilian casualties—the Ukrainians are striking back, at defense plants, and especially at refineries. As Zelensky said Tuesday morning:
The very idea of Russia having a strategic rear is gone. For a long time, Russia believed it had territorial advantage no one else possessed, a deep rear, where it could safely keep everything its war depends on, believing no one could reach them. We have reached them.
But of course what’s at stake here is not just the oil that the Russian war machine runs on. In Russia, as in America, almost everything runs on oil. I remember that the one and only time that I sat down with former President Barack Obama, the first thing he told me was that “the price of gasoline is the most salient fact in American politics.” If that’s even close to the case in Russia, Putin better watch out: in occupied Crimea, gas prices are going above $10 a gallon. The government is desperately trying to import gasoline from as far away as India. As Pjotr Sauer reported Tuesday morning, police are having to draw guns to quell disturbances at gas stations where lines can stretch for kilometers, “fuel tourists” are crossing the borders with China and Kazakhstan to fill their tanks, and as a result:
“Mass fatigue with the war is turning into mass irritation,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst. Even so, he said the shortages were unlikely to trigger widespread protests in Russia’s tightly controlled political system. “There is certainly shock, but the lack of any real means of influencing the situation—and the risks associated with trying to do so—make protests unlikely.”
This seems likely to get worse. Here’s a social media post from an Omsk resident watching the drone strikes: "Don't waste any time right now. Anyone with a car who's watching me—head to the gas station! The lines are about to get crazy."
And here’s an account of how Russian horse breeders are reporting a surge in sales because a steed is now cheaper to maintain than a car; check out the video of the equestrian cantering past the endless line at the gas station.
Ukraine has stood up to Russia’s attacks on its energy infrastructure mostly by starting to diversify: as Paul Hockenos reported last winter, the country is undergoing a rapid renewables revolution:
According to estimates from the Solar Energy Association of Ukraine, the nation installed at least 1.5 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2025—enough to power roughly 1.1 million homes—and grid operators intend to almost double the country’s renewable energy production over the next four years.
“Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy, and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”
In the most basic terms, a single missile can take out a gas-fired power plant. But as Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor, explains:
“You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”
Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.
That’s because sun and wind and batteries are not like oil—they are small, interchangeable pieces of infrastructure, easily subbed in. There aren’t choke points like refineries and tankers and terminals; there’s no cascading failure. My roof is covered with solar panels, and I suppose a saboteur could put a ladder against the wall and climb up there with a hammer and do some damage. But it wouldn’t shut down the electric grid across New England; it would be a problem, not a crisis. Which in turn is why no rational saboteur would ever bother.
And once you can run cars and heat pumps and cooktops off the power those panels and turbines generate, then you’re far more protected against attack. If Vladimir Putin had an electrified Russia he would worry far less about Ukrainian drones. Of course, if the world ran on electricity Russia would never have built up the treasury required to act like a bellicose beast.
Look, world leaders should be moving quickly to clean energy because it’s the one scaleable weapon in the war against climate change. But I’ll take any motivation—and I’ll count it as a real bonus if a cleaner world is also one where it’s harder to attack your neighbors because they don’t have vulnerable infrastructure. The peace dividend from sun and wind could be very real.
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As High Heat Cancels July 4 Plans, US Must 'Declare Our Independence From Fossil Fuels'
"How we confront the climate crisis will determine a lot about the next 250 years of American history, including if we make it that long," one climate advocate said. "The revolution we need today is the clean energy revolution."
Jul 04, 2026
The US reliance on and promotion of fossil fuels is interfering with its ability to celebrate its 250th birthday, as several July 4 events were canceled due to a dangerous, record-breaking heatwave in the Central and Eastern US that scientists say would have been "virtually impossible" without the climate emergency.
As millions of people sweltered under heat alerts, extreme heat and humidity led to the cancellation of both Washington, DC and Philadelphia's Independence Day parades. Nearly 30 other events in states including Alabama, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were modified, postponed, or canceled, according to USA Today.
I'm just saying, it seems like a signwww.cbsnews.com/philadelphia...
[image or embed]
— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben.bsky.social) July 3, 2026 at 1:12 PM
"The US having to cancel major 4th of July celebrations because of extreme heat is almost too spot on as a metaphor for the country’s failure to combat global warming," Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn told Common Dreams. "How we confront the climate crisis will determine a lot about the next 250 years of American history, including if we make it that long. The revolution we need today is the clean energy revolution so we can finally declare our independence from fossil fuels."
Happy Independence Day!🇺🇸🎆
A prolonged, dangerous heat wave will persist through the Independence Day weekend across the Ohio Valley, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic. Numerous temperature records are expected. 🥵
Clusters of severe thunderstorms will move across parts of the… pic.twitter.com/hz4vSz40Z4
— National Weather Service (@NWS) July 4, 2026
Temperature records were tied or broken in 22 locations on Thursday and 17 on Friday, according to CNN, with DC breaking a 120-year record on both days with temperatures above 102°F.
The heat forced the temporary closure Friday afternoon of the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, and seven attendees required "advanced life support," probably due to heat exposure, according to CNN.
Matt Rein, the Democratic National Committee's influencer and creative partnerships director, reported from the state fair on Saturday that local emergency workers said guests were "dropping like flies" due to the heat.
This is the scene here at one of the cordoned off medical area inside a main tent.
They keep having to make more space as more people are brought in.
There is no AC. https://t.co/eVVpqwHiMJ pic.twitter.com/Rmyg4YW1r2
— Matt Rein (@MatthewARein) July 4, 2026
Meanwhile, one group who tried to draw attention to the climate emergency at a July 4 event was evicted for its efforts by the US Coast Guard, as the Times Union reported. The nonprofit Hudson River Sloop Clearwater had attempted to join Saturday's Sail4th 250 parade of tall ships to New York Harbor when its sailboat was removed by the guard. The Coast Guard later said it was due to banners the boat was displaying reading, "Save the Clean Water Act” and “Indigenous rights, racial justice, climate solutions,” despite the fact that the group had the event organizer's permission to participate.
A sailboat, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, was removed from the Sail4th 250 Parade of Ships for displaying banners about climate justice and clean water.
Source: ig/jackiemarieburton, ig/sloopclearwater pic.twitter.com/kJoS4RLgAQ
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) July 4, 2026
The heat dome that has settled over the Central and Eastern US over the July 4 weekend is so dangerous in part because it includes high humidity along with high heat, with heat indexes of 105-115°F expected in some places. This corresponds with a Wet Bulb Global Temperature (WBGT)—a measurement that accounts for heat, humidity, and air flow—of 28-30°C, at which point it is dangerous for even healthy people to be physically active outdoors. According to World Weather Attribution, the current heatwave broke regional records for WBGT.
"It is still a relatively rare event even in today’s climate, that has warmed by 1.4°C due to the burning of fossil fuels. In a 1.4°C cooler climate, WBGTs as high as those forecast in early July 2026 would have been so extreme as to be virtually impossible," the group wrote on Friday.
Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London, told CNN, “When a historic 4th of July celebration is disrupted, and World Cup matches are played in conditions that are unsafe for players and fans, it shouldn’t take another scientific study to wake people up."
Otto continued, "Climate change is here, it’s already impacting the things we enjoy in our everyday lives, and it will continue to get worse the longer we drag out the inevitable transition to net zero emissions.”
Climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe encouraged people to use this opportunity to talk about the climate emergency to their friends and family:
Heatwaves aren't new. But I'm a climate scientist, and I can tell you heatwaves like this are virtually impossible without fossil fuel pollution. Not only that, but when extreme weather hits, research shows that connecting it to climate change helps people understand why it matters. And you know who the most trusted people to do that are? Not scientists. You! Yes, people we know are the most effective messengers to have these conversations. So if you're worried about what's happening and how extreme heat puts us at risk—talk about it!
While the US is the world's leading historical emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, and its military is the No. 1 institutional climate polluter, the Trump administration in particular has taken steps to accelerate the climate emergency by increasing oil, gas, and coal production while hindering the development of renewable energy.
"Trump’s promotion of coal burning and cancellation of wind turbines make him the Benedict Arnold of America’s current struggle, not its George Washington."
Just two days before the nation's birthday, Energy Secretary and fracking CEO Chris Wright bragged on social media that the Trump administration would end subsidies for new wind and solar on July 4.
Climate scientist Rebekah Jones shot back: "During a record heatwave, no less. Fossil fuel industries have received $549 BILLION in direct subsidies, and $7 TRILLION in tax benefits. They average $30 billion per year in upfront taxpayer money. All of renewable energy recieved $400 million per year from 1994-2009."
Tennessee state Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-20) also called out the move: "Talk about 'slugs for salt’—it's 119 degree heat index in the Eastern US this week—these guys are all in on the rapture."
In a July 4 post, scholar Juan Cole argued that President Donald Trump's climate policies were tantamount to treason.
"Since 2018, some 13,000 Americans have died from heat," he said. "Trump’s promotion of coal burning and cancellation of wind turbines make him the Benedict Arnold of America’s current struggle, not its George Washington."
Cole pointed out that the current heatwave was part of a pattern of hotter summers in the nation's capital due to the climate emergency, noting that the last decade was its hottest on record.
He continued:
The bad news is that this is only the beginning. Summers in the capital are going to be more dangerous every decade unless we halt dangerous carbon emissions.
The average summer temperature in DC could be 97°F in the 2080s if we go on farting out CO2 at our current rate. Humidity will also increase, as the Atlantic heats up and puts more water vapor in the atmosphere. The ability of the atmosphere to hold water vapor increases 7% with every 1°C increase in temperature.
That combined with more frequent storms and sea-level rise opens up the possiblity that DC "will be unlivable in the summers within the lifetime of my younger readers," he wrote.
"Trump is helping climate change accomplish what British military might could not, putting in question the future of America in places like Washington, DC and Baltimore, at least in the summers," Cole said.
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The Climate Crisis Won't Let the Political Cycle Ignore It for Too Long
A record-breaking European heatwave is one event that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse, and the coming El Niño will have the same effect.
Jun 28, 2026
One benefit of having watched the climate story from the start is that I tend not to panic when “climate” is temporarily eclipsed as an issue, almost always thanks to the hard work of Big Oil. It happened at the end of the 1980s after the initial furor over the newly public “greenhouse effect,” and again after the Kyoto climate talks; when Al Gore made global warming a central issue in the oughts, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks put it on the back burner. Many of us built the movement that pushed it back to the front again in the oughts, culminating in the Paris accords; when momentum wavered Greta Thunberg and her colleagues emerged, building the consensus that took us through the Inflation Reduction Act.
At the moment, of course, a resurgent fossil-funded right wing has killed off that landmark legislation, and done all it can to destroy clean energy in the US; America is out of the global climate talks; around the world various strongmen have made protest far more difficult. The new authoritarians have managed to intimidate many of the centrist pols in much of the world who are no longer willing to talk much about “climate;” indeed, there’s a closet industry of pundits and consultants advising them not to.
But it’s never occurred to me that this state of affairs would last very long—physics is running this show, and it won’t be long denied. And now I think we can see the next of these cycles firing off—and this one, I think, will be climactic. We have a chance to insure that civilization comes out of this one focused on the physical world.
The politics of climate begins with… climate. Perhaps you’ve heard that Europe spent the past week suffering through a truly remarkable heatwave, with France reaching a new all-time record temperature, the UK recording its hottest day ever, Spain smashing all its old marks. It’s truly brutal—and it recalls, for Europeans, the heatwave of 2003, which ended up killing 70,000 people. Even today, the continent is ill-prepared for extreme heat—in France, for instance, Angelique Chrisafis reports that:
The impact of the heatwave has been made considerably worse by the high proportion of French buildings and infrastructure not designed to cope with high temperatures. Paris, one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, known for its poorly insulated housing stock, has for years been considered to have the highest heatwave mortality risk of any capital on the continent. The French government has been criticised for a lack of preparation and for cutting funding for projects designed to adapt infrastructure to the climate crisis.
Half of all French homes have insufficient protection from high temperatures, leaving inhabitants dangerously overheated, a report for the NGO Fondation pour le Logement (Foundation for Housing) found this month. About 66% of French people struggle to tolerate the heat in their homes.
Maïder Olivier, the head of climate advocacy at the NGO, said France had a “massive and worsening problem of heat-trap housing.” She said climate inequality in France was growing, with low-income, suburban housing estates suffering the worst from heatwaves.
Apparently English homes, especially modern ones, aren’t much better. And the heat has caused a surge in British hospital admissions, even as it’s damaged hospital equipment. Andrew Gregory writes:
Several NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents as a direct result of the extreme heat. One hospital had done so after its machines failed in multiple areas, a doctor said. Labs used for testing were also affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures.
The doctor said that although they were working in a relatively new care setting, it was “tacked on to an old Victorian hospital,” creating severe infrastructure challenges. “It’s hopeless, really,” they said.
The doctor also said their NHS trust had faced “major issues” with IT servers overheating on Wednesday. “We thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights.”
But it’s not just dialysis machines going down—in France, nuclear reactors had to be taken offline because the river water used for cooling was getting too warm. Also, save some tears for the poor American tourists complaining to The Wall Street Journal that European restaurants offer too few ice cubes in their drinks.
Look, there’s no doubt why these records are being smashed—as Bob Henson writes at Eye on the Storm:
Extreme heat is among the most-studied consequences of human-caused climate change, and the connections between a warming planet and amplified, localized extreme heat are not only intuitive but well documented.
In this case the jet stream—powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, and unsettled by the melt up north—has gone kaflooey, producing what’s called an “omega block” for its distinctive shape. The sun beating down on this heat dome is relentless. As Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News:
“There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Imperial College London who leads the World Weather Attribution, a group that works to link weather events to climate change, said in an email. “Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.”
I could of course go on and on about the heat; it’s wretched. (And remember that we’re paying attention in part because there’s lots of media, some of it English-speaking, in Europe; similar hideous heatwaves have been plaguing much of Asia this spring). But what I really want to talk about is its political meaning—I think this heatwave is one of those events that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse.
Britain will be an interesting test case. Its politics have been roiled for the last two years by the odd static incompetence of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, now about to be replaced by the Andy Burnham government. A key question for that new administration will be the role of Ed Milliband, who has been serving as the energy secretary, and may be in line for a job as chancellor. He’s been (almost uniquely) effective in his role, moving fast to boost clean and cheap renewable energy in the UK.
But that’s roiled the fossil fuel industry, which is putting big money behind the right-wing Reform Party, which, according to an April investigation by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett, has collected two-thirds of its funding from oil interests. Together with the always vile Murdoch press, they’ve mounted a full-on attack on “Net Zero” policies, alleging—a la Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in this country—that they’re responsible for rising energy prices in the UK.
The entire status quo is in on this fight—including British labor unions. They aren’t venal the way oil companies are, but they are fighting against change, in the name of their current members. And they’ve focused their fire on Milliband. Sharon Graham, head of the giant UNITE union, has said:
Jobs in Britain are important. We need someone in that role [chancellor] who understands that, and at the moment that isn’t Ed Miliband… It’s been floated that Ed Miliband would be chancellor, that would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs.
Happily, we’re starting to see serious pushback to this endless irresponsible climate delayism. It begins with scientists. In France eminent climate researchers have started speaking out to Le Monde, complaining about the inability of scientists to effectively connect the dots between climate change and heat for the public. British scientists have gone one better: Nine of them wrote the agency responsible for regulating the press to complain about the lame coverage:
News stories about heatwaves often do not mention the influence of climate change or the burning of fossil fuels on increased temperatures—for example, 3 in 5 stories during the May heatwave did not—while two-fifths of those about net zero make no mention of climate change. In this context, it is unsurprising that the public often do not understand these issues or the connection between them.
I think my favorite was a letter to the London Times from the veteran climate research Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London, which I reprint here just because I like its cadences:
The sentence “net zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics” should be a watchword in the years to come.
And here’s my guess: Milliband will be vindicated, landing in an important new job. Despite the complaints of union leaders, Britain’s green economy is one of the few things that’s booming on the island. He’s not backing down: At a press conference last week he heralded the fact that more than a hundred billion pounds in private clean energy investments had been made during his term:
Experts told The Guardian that the new investment data, as well as previous findings by the Confederation of British Industry that the UK’s net zero economy had grown faster than the rest of the economy and generated higher-paying jobs… [contradicted the claims of union leaders]
Miliband said: “I’m proud to have led a pro-business, pro-growth department in these last two years. This achievement didn’t happen by accident, but because of clarity of mission, government investment, and building not blocking. As we have shown in energy, progressive government in hard times requires partnership with business to secure economic growth, built on an active industrial strategy.”
Indeed, 40 progressive economists in the UK wrote to the labor leaders this week, rejecting their attack on Net Zero:
There is no alternative to the green transition. The effects of climate change are with us now. Miliband is right to oppose further expansion of North Sea oil and gas.
If Burnham were to back off the Net Zero pledges, he’d be disappointing the 60% of Brits who like the strategy. Starmer staggered in part because he took right-wing positions on immigration, giving the Green Party an opening; that door will grow much larger if he backs off on climate policy, so I suspect he won’t.
And the heatwave will give him political cover to do the right thing. As the head of Greenpeace UK said last week:
The only way off this hellish treadmill is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Our next prime minister needs to act on the evidence outside their window, and the advice of their scientific advisers, and stay the course on climate policies. The alternative is parched reservoirs, unaffordable food, shuttered hospitals and schools, and wildly fluctuating bills each time a new oil war is kindled.
My further guess is that the coming El Niño will have the same effect on global climate politics—and maybe even in our caboose of a nation. We enter this new warming spell in rough shape: Recent data shows the heat content of oceans at all-time highs. Things are grim enough that one (ghoulish?) investor has launched a fund designed to make money off the coming crisis:
Hedge fund Moreton Capital Partners is targeting $500 million for a special-purpose vehicle to trade multiple commodities that stand to be impacted by the weather phenomenon, including South African corn, Malaysian palm oil, and Australian wheat. The markets are underestimating risks, according to Moreton’s co-founder Les Finemore.
“We think it’s going to be a dramatic reshaping of the global food situation,” Finemore said in a video interview from Mexico City. “We feel like today the market is seriously mis-pricing that risk.”
American politicians may feel that the easiest course for the short term is to back off on climate talk—and the green movement is perhaps inclined to let them get away with it through the midterm elections, which will be fought largely as a referendum on the mendacity of the Trump administration. (Though it’s political malpractice not to be calling out Trump’s incredibly unpopular attacks on solar and wind energy). But next year, as primary season begins in earnest, El Niño will insure climate is firmly back on the agenda. And given the explosion in clean energy, the case will be easy for smart candidates to make.
That this cycle has gone on since the 1980s does not mean it can go on forever. We’re clearly reaching desperate physical tipping points. So this had better be the last turn of the wheel—by the end of the decade we need to have decisively broken the political power of the fossil fuel industry, so we can get on with the energy transition, and with building a world that can survive the damage Big Oil has inflicted.
It starts now.
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Good Climate Policy Is Also Affordability Policy
As the cost of clean energy keeps plummeting, it gets more and more obvious how much money we waste, and how much financial risk we incur, by staying with fossil fuel.
Jun 26, 2026
Beginning next week, Australians across a huge swath of the continent will begin getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon—to charge their cars, runs their dishwashers, fill up a storage battery to run the house at night. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t belabor it here, except to say that humans have spent the last 1.79 million years (according to new research last week) working hard for energy: spending time gathering firewood, spending time working to pay the power bill. Now, in one large part of the Earth, for one large part of the day, electricity will be too cheap to meter. You want some abundance? Here you go.
So it seems like a good time to dig in to the larger questions of energy, climate, pollution, and money—an interrelated set of issues, and one where the numbers are shifting quickly and dramatically almost every month. Here’s the bottom line, which I think is beginning to drive public policy almost every place except the US, where we have lots and lots of work to do: As the cost of clean energy keeps plummeting, it gets more and more obvious how much money we waste, and how much financial risk we incur, by staying with fossil fuel.
Let’s start first by talking about the climate crisis, and the ways it’s rapidly becoming an economic crisis. My old colleagues at 350.org have been publishing a series of quite brilliant reports on the subject in recent weeks. One, for instance, is on the insurance crisis, which is growing across the planet. This is from Risalat Khan and Kenny Stancil:
In the United States, homeowner insurance premiums increased by 29% from January 2021 to January 2026, and personal auto insurance rose nearly 25% over the same period. These mounting costs are among the biggest contributors to overall inflation.
France raised its mandatory natural catastrophe surcharge on property insurance from 12% to 20%, effective January 2025. In northern Australia, premiums climbed more than 130% in real terms between 2007 and 2022, a 6% growth year on year.
Across most low- and middle-income countries, insurance coverage is usually less than 10%, and sometimes far less, leaving uninsured communities and businesses to bear most of the risks and losses from climate disasters.
Somewhat karmically, a new report from risk analysts First Street finds that… data centers face much of this risk from extreme weather:
Approximately 54% of global data center capacity operates in markets facing elevated chronic heat or drought stress, while 79% is exposed to significant acute hazards such as flood, wind, or wildfire. For many markets, climate risk should now be considered part of the base case rather than a tail-risk scenario.
But most of us only buy insurance once a year, and it’s such a depressing task that we try to forget about it immediately. Groceries are different, and as Nicole Pita points out, the link to climate change is pretty clear.
Droughts in the US Midwest and Canada destroyed harvests in 2022. Floods in India and South Asia pushed up rice prices in 2023 and 2025. The climate crisis is affecting crop production itself, making food harder to grow. The irony is that food systems produce one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, making them both a victim and a driver of the crisis.
And it will get worse. Here’s a new report from the Autonomy Institute on what the climate crisis is doing to the cost of “Five a day” in the UK:
Heatwaves are projected to add around 11% to the price of the UK’s top 20 fruit and vegetables by 2035 and around 68% by 2050 under a high emissions scenario, on top of normal inflation. Imported tropical fruit such as melons, oranges, bananas, easy peelers, and grapes will rise 12% to 14% by 2035 and 80% to 93% by 2050 on these climate grounds alone.
• Compounded with estimated normal inflation, total average shelf prices of the overall basket of fruit and veg will reach upwards of 170% above today’s level by 2050.
• This means that climate-flation will be contributing 40% of total inflation across the basket of basic goods by 2035 and over 60% of it by 2050. Climate change will have gone from a junior contributor to the dominant driver of shelf-price inflation on fresh produce inside the working lifetime of someone in their 30s today.
(A note to the perplexed: “Easy peelers” turns out to be what Brits call mandarin oranges and clementines. I like it.)
Here’s how Emma Court and Kyle Kim summed it up in a comprehensive Bloomberg account:
Extreme weather also makes growing crops more expensive. For example, Del Monte Corp., which sold more than $4 billion of bananas, pineapples, avocados, and other food products last year, has been investing in measures to shield crops from rising temperatures and sun damage. This includes covering them with shade cloth and spraying them with a reflective layer of so-called plant sunscreen. The company is also paying more for cooling throughout its supply chain, including by requiring upgrades in fruit-processing plants in the Midwest that were originally designed for lower temperatures.
The effects of climate on pricing are difficult to capture, because they build gradually, says Hans Sauter, Del Monte’s chief sustainability officer. But lower yields, increasing disease threats, and higher costs can all contribute to more expensive produce. “This is part of our DNA. We have been dealing with climate events forever,” he says. “But these new circumstances are making it more expensive.”
Regions where temperatures are already warm will likely be the most exposed to climate inflation, in part because additional heat can more readily slash agricultural harvests. Among the worst-off are countries in Africa and South America, which also tend to have lower incomes, with less infrastructure, and fewer resources to guard against climate change.
But the fossil fuel that drives climate change raises costs in other ways too. The most obvious is their effect on public health. It’s hard, of course, to calculate this with precision, but the attempts leave us with staggering numbers: The Natural Resource Defense Council, five years ago, demonstrated that fossil fuel pollution was costing America $820 billion a year. (That’s nearly a Musk). The numbers elsewhere are much higher.
Sometimes, though, it’s easier to see them in reverse. A new study this month, described by Gary Fuller, finds that when London cut down sharply on urban air pollution with its congestion pricing zone, remarkable things followed:
Low emission and clean air zones attract controversy whenever they are proposed, but there is growing evidence that they work in improving air quality. The Bradford zone was followed by a reduction of about 25% in GP visits for heart and breathing problems and survey data shows that the central London zone was followed by a reduction in the likelihood of a person taking sick leave…
The researchers looked at emergency admissions to hospital, excluding cases such as accidents, burns, drug overdose, poisoning, or self-harm. For people living in the central London zone, admissions increased at 3% per year before the schemes started. After their launch this trend was altered, with a 3% reduction in annual trends for emergency admissions, including an 8% reduction for heart problems and a 6% reduction for breathing problems.
That adds up to real money. Not only that, but people can breathe, always a plus!
If you try to add all this up, you get some interesting numbers. As Kate Yoder reports:
“What’s striking is that already, households are bearing serious costs,” said Kimberly Clausing, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She co-authored a paper from earlier this year finding that families were paying between $400 and $900 more each year because of the effects of climate change, with the costs above $1,300 in the 10% hardest-hit counties, many of them found in Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and California.
What’s more, people are figuring all this out:
Two-thirds of US voters agree that global warming is affecting the cost of living to some degree, according to new survey data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, including most Democrats and moderate Republicans. Of those two-thirds, a majority of them said that climate change was driving up what they pay for groceries, utility bills, and home insurance.
And then there’s the sheer cost of energy itself—of the need to keep paying for coal and gas and oil while the far-cheaper sun and wind goes to waste. We’re stuck in a political moment when feckless Democratic politicians (paging Kathy Hochul) are making “affordability” their excuse for going along with Big Oil. But in fact one example after another is making it clear that, as Ray Wills writes, “what is making us poorer is not the move to clean energy—it is doing the transition slowly and badly. His examples are back in Australia:
The Australian Energy Market Commission’s latest Residential Electricity Price Trends work is blunt: Accelerating renewable generation, transmission, and battery storage is "essential" to keep electricity prices affordable over the next decade.
In scenarios where new wind, solar, and transmission arrive on schedule, household bills fall compared to today. When those projects are delayed, prices remain higher for longer because the system leans more heavily on expensive gas and unreliable old coal.
Independent modelling tells a similar story. Analysis for the Clean Energy Council shows that if Australia stalls the rollout of renewables, household bills in 2030 could be around 30% higher than on a timely transition path—roughly $449 a year extra for a typical household, and even more for small businesses.
Nexa Advisory’s work finds that transition delays that lock in more gas-fired generation could add about $115.7 billion to wholesale costs between now and 2050.
Individuals can and do figure out some of the ways to lower their own costs. Not surprisingly, the spike in gas prices for Americans during our farcical Iranian excursion convinced some to change their habits or their technology. Lydia DePillis looked at the numbers:
Americans are powerfully attached to their cars, and their spending at gasoline stations jumped 21% from February to May. But that ability to spend has limits. According to Dow Jones Energy, consumption was 6.1% lower in May from a year earlier. Some of that is a long-running trend owing to the increasing efficiency of passenger vehicles, said Denton Cinquegrana, the company’s chief oil analyst, and about half is probably a consumer response to higher prices.
But much of the real work needs to be done by governments: Nothing people can do by themselves will have much affect on the cost of food, healthcare, or energy. And when governments do their job well, the results can be amazing. I began with Australia and its free afternoon electricity; let’s close with Europe. As Jan Rosenow points out, the continent’s commitment to energy efficiency is paying off: It’s spending 29% less on energy than it would have if consumption had kept growing this century:
Importantly that is energy nobody had to generate, import, or pay for. It built up slowly, over 25 years, across 27 countries, in warmer buildings, more efficient factories, better appliances, the switch to LED lighting, and steadily more efficient transport. At any given price Europe now pays around a third less than it would have without those gains.
This shield holds whichever direction the next shock arrives from. If anything, the figure undersells the benefit, because it counts only the energy saved and not the power stations, pipelines, and grid connections nobody had to build. It is one of the most effective protection measures against future energy crisis: The energy not consumed cannot be withheld, weaponised, or made more expensive by a supplier you do not control.
As he points out, there’s vast room for expansion:
A heat pump in a well-insulated home on clean electricity cuts the energy the building needs, replaces the gas boiler, and runs on a grid that keeps getting cleaner. That single device also pulls the household out of the gas import chain for good, and as a side effect keeps it cooler through the sort of summer Europe now gets most years.
In the Netherlands, for instance, you can sign up for free clothes-washing, drying, and dishwashing between noon and 5:00 pm, part of a scheme from a company called CoolBlue.
People are quickly figuring all this out across much of the world. It remains for a savvy American politician to really lay out the case. But when she does the rewards will be high. “Free” would be a popular thing.
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