Here’s
how Lee Raymond’s hometown paper, the Houston
Chronicle, remembered him this morning.
The
Texas paper was more direct, and more accurate,
than anyone else covering the story. The Times obit gave top
billing to the fact that he led the acquisition
of Mobil and “cut costs relentlessly;” the Wall
Street Journal waited till
paragraph six to note that he was “openly
skeptical” of climate science (much like the
Wall Street Journal). But the Chron had it
right—when people think back in a hundred years
or a thousand or ten thousand, the one thing
worth remembering about him will be the crucial
role he played in holding back action on climate
change.
I’ve
lived with Lee Raymond’s decision to deny
climate change my whole working life; I wish
I’d had his billions to tell the truth, and
I’m grateful for the people who volunteer
the resources to get the word out by taking
out a voluntary subscription to this
newsletter.
I’m
going to recount the lowlights of the story here,
and add one that gets very little notice in the
obituaries, but that ties directly to the ongoing
crisis.
Raymond
was a research engineer who spent his whole
career at what was then the world’s largest
company. He joined its board in 1984, already a
leading candidate for CEO, which means he was
near the top during the 1980s, the period when
(as we now know thanks to great investigative
reporting) the company’s scientists
correctly identified the dangers of global
warming and linked them directly to Exxon’s
products. That research, as Inside Climate News
reported in 2015,
laid
the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer
on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared
by its environmental affairs office. Marked
“not to be distributed externally,” it
contained information that “has been given
wide circulation to Exxon management.” In it,
the company recognized, despite the many
lingering unknowns, that heading off global
warming “would require major reductions in
fossil fuel combustion.”
Unless
that happened, “there are some potentially
catastrophic events that must be considered,”
the primer said, citing independent experts.
“Once the effects are measurable, they might not
be reversible.”
This
was, of course, the same decade when Jim Hansen
was carrying out his groundbreaking research at
NASA (and I was writing The End of Nature). Exxon,
as it turns out, was on precisely the same
wavelength. Here’s, to me, one of the great
historical what-ifs: imagine that, on the night
that Hansen made his remarks to Congress, an Exxon
exec like Raymond had gone on the evening news and
told Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, or Peter Jennings
that “our research shows pretty much the same
thing.” No one would have accused Exxon of climate
alarmism; instead, we would have gotten to work as
a civilization.
Instead,
they chose denial. And it was Raymond who played
a lead role, as Exxon helped form the Global
Climate Coalition, first of the obfuscation
fronts. He became the spokesman for anti-science
in many ways: in 1997, as the world approached
the first global climate talks in Kyoto, he gave
what may be a speech second only in importance
to Hansen’s original testimony. Speaking in
Beijing to the Worl Petroleum Congress, he contended that
the world was cooling, that there was no way to
know if co2 was to blame, and that in any event
“it is highly unlikely that the temperature in
the middle of the next century will be
significantly whether policies are enacted now
or twenty years from now.”
These,
of course, were exactly the things Exxon’s
scientists had told them were not true. Indeed,
they’d been explicitly warned that
man
has a time window of five to ten years before
the need for hard decisions regarding changes in
energy strategies might become critical.
And
Exxon had believed its scientists. As a 2015 Los
Angeles Times report made
clear, they’d begun building drilling rigs
higher to counteract rising sea levels, and
plotting out what parts of the Arctic might be
prime for oil drilling once they’d helped melt
the ice.
Exxon,
more than any single force on earth, made sure
that the planet didn’t address climate change
while it had time. Given what it knew in the
1980s Exxon could have had a head start on
building and owning the solutions like sun and
wind. But, as one of Raymond’s successors said two years ago,
that didn’t happen because “we don’t see the
ability to generate above-average returns for
our shareholders” with clean energy. And he was
right. You can make money putting up solar
panels, but you can’t make Exxon money, because
the sun delivers energy for free. It
doesn’t offer the same scope for greed.
And
greed was the word here. For his role in helping
wreck the earth’s climate system, Exxon paid him
$686 million, or $144,573 a day during his tenure
as CEO. His retirement package was $400 million.
And
even when he finally left Exxon in 2005 he
continued on doing damage—this is the often
overlooked part of his story. He was the lead
independent director at JP Morgan Chase, which
had been the Exxon house bank, and which, as I chronicled for
Rolling Stone in 2020, became the fossil fuel
industry’s biggest lender—the “doomsday bank.”
Many
of us ginned up a campaign to get him off that
board (along with Rev. Lennox Yearwood and other
protesters, and with Jane Fonda looking in
through the glass windows, I was arrested at a
DC Chase branch to help kick off that fight in
2020). It was eventually successful—that summer
he was demoted as lead director, and left the
board in December.
But
Raymond’s legacy lives on. Just as Exxon has
gone on pumping out oil (and climate nonsense),
Chase has kept pumping out money. As the brand
new edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report pointed
out last week, Chase remains the number one
financier of fossil fuels around the world,
besting Mitsubishi, Citigroup, and Bank of
America; since 2021 they’ve pumped a
quarter-trillion dollars into this effort. Asked
by the Guardian for a comment, a Chase spokesman
said
Asked
for comment about its fossil fuel lending, a
JPMorgan Chase spokesperson said: “As one
of the world’s largest financiers of energy, we
support the full range of energy solutions and
technologies, with a focus on reliability,
affordability, security and long-term
resilience.” That kind of bland corporate-speak
hides an almost unimaginable multitude of sins.
Like
a great many Christians,
I don’t believe a loving God consigns people to
eternal damnation. But I do believe that Lee
Raymond, Exxon, and Chase have helped send the
rest of us to a kind of hell. As Jeff Masters
just reported
The
world recorded its highest burned area
for any January-May during the past 15 years,
with more than 150 million hectares burned
globally – 22% higher than the previous high
set in 2020 and about double the recent
average for this period. In the U.S., the
burned area so far in 2026 has been the
highest for at least the past 10 years — about
double the 10-year average — according to the
National Interagency
Fire Center.
Share
In
other climate and energy news:
+Let’s
take the bad taste out of our mouths with a new
book from
Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao that argues that
the most effective ways to fight climate change
are also things that make people happy, from
changing diets to changing vacations.
Leave
The Lights On boldly reframes climate action not
as a burden, but as an opportunity to build a
brighter future—without guilt, and without
giving up the things that make life worth
living. With warmth, clarity, and a refreshingly
optimistic voice, Zhao and Dunn explain what it
means to “do your part.” Because sustainability
doesn’t lie in doing everything, it lies in
doing something, joyfully.
+Earlier
this year I told you about claims from a
Scandinavian battery maker that they had
invented a solid-state battery with remarkable
storage capacity, and promised to follow up. It
now appears to be, as I suggested, too good to be true,
and Finnish authorities are on the case.
However, as Fred Lambert reports,
I
hope it doesn’t cool people on the technology,
because solid-state batteries do appear to be
genuinely, finally coming. Toyota has invested
over $15 billion and targets production vehicles
by 2027-2028. Samsung SDI has the world’s
largest pilot solid-state production line and
plans mass production by 2027. These are real
programs from companies with real technical
credibility. Solid-state is coming — just not
from Donut Lab, and not with the impossible
combination of specs they promised.
Meanwhile,
here’s something quite real and remarkable, and
just a little further south. The almost
unbelievably adaptive Ukrainian defense industry
has just rolled out an
electric motorcycle that carries two soldiers in
full gear at 80 kilometers an hour, and with a
range of a hundred kilometers. What does the
Ukrainian army want with this? Well, it produces
no noise, and no heat signature for drones to
hone in on.
Motorcycles
have become one of the most operationally
critical vehicle classes on the Ukrainian
frontline, where small mobile groups,
reconnaissance teams, and casualty-evacuation
crews need to move quickly through terrain
impassable to heavier vehicles.
Meanwhile,
the Chinese also seem to be hard at work on
new battery technology that may hold even more
promise than solid-state batteries:
Unlike
traditional lithium-ion batteries, which rely on
heavy metal compounds like nickel, cobalt, and
manganese to “house” lithium ions, lithium-air
batteries utilise lithium metal as the anode and
oxygen from the air as the cathode reactant.
This design significantly reduces weight and
complexity, earning them the nickname
“breathable batteries.”
The
theoretical energy density of lithium-air
technology is staggering, reaching up to 12,000
Wh/kg—a figure comparable to gasoline (approx.
13,000 Wh/kg). While current laboratory
prototypes have achieved over 1,200 Wh/kg, this
is already more than four times the 250–270
Wh/kg capacity of mainstream lithium-ion
batteries and significantly higher than the 500
Wh/kg expected from solid-state batteries.
+Michigan
politicians—Democrats in the lead—are so scared
of EVs that they literally want to ban Canadians
and Mexicans who have brought Chinese models
from driving them across the border.
“We’re
gonna be aggressive here because Michigan jobs
are on the line, but also so is national
security. So close our border to Chinese
vehicles and Chinese technology in the vehicles,
even for day trips. That’s how aggressive we
believe we need to be right now,” Rep. Hailey
Stevens (D-Mich) said while speaking at a policy
conference.
Something
tells me this is not the smartest way to protect
autoworkers. Maybe instead they could take a
clue from Mexico, where president Claudia
Sheinbaum just unveiled an
electric van designed and built in the country
and available for under ten grand. Here’s what
the future looks like—her name is Olinia and
she’s undeniably cute
By
the way, Democrats like Slotkin are among those
pushing more
use of ethanol, which is a terrible idea.
As David Widawsky points out
Producing
ethanol requires substantial fossil fuel inputs,
including fertilizer, processing energy and
transportation. But the larger problem is land
use: when crop production is diverted from the
food supply into fuel production, forests and
grasslands somewhere else get converted into new
agricultural land to replace the lost food. That
conversion releases massive stores of carbon
into the atmosphere. Globally, the emissions
from these land-use changes often outweigh the
tailpipe emissions reductions ethanol is
supposed to achieve.
+From
Toby Couture and David Jacobs in PV magazine, a
fascinating look at what’s
happening in Africa, where solar is being led by
installations on stores, warehouses, and
factories.
The
logic of the African solar market differs
fundamentally from that of European or North
American markets. In countries like Nigeria,
solar energy does not primarily compete with
cheap grid power. It competes with gasoline or
diesel generators.
In
many African countries, power outages are a
daily occurrence. The result is that for years,
businesses, hospitals, hotels, and manufacturing
plants have had to purchase (and service)
expensive back-up generators—often at enormous
cost. Diesel power is expensive, noisy,
maintenance-intensive, and dependent on volatile
import prices.
Against
this backdrop, solar-plus-storage systems are
fundamentally changing the economic equation.
With pay-back times of one to two years in
certain parts of the continent, a market is
emerging that is not reliant on subsidies but
instead that is driven by commercial
self-interest.
This
also explains the market’s remarkable structure:
According to AfSIA, around 85 percent of newly
installed solar capacity is in the commercial
and industrial (C&I) sector. Private
households have so far played only a minor role.
The driving forces are companies whose business
models depend on a reliable power supply. For
such companies, solar is increasingly becoming a
matter of competitiveness and operational
reliability.
Mini-grids,
battery storage, and private solar systems can
scale much faster and more cost-effectively than
traditional power plants and grid expansion
plans. This does not mean that central grids
will become obsolete.
However,
their role is likely to change: away from being
the sole backbone of the supply system, toward
becoming part of an increasingly hybrid energy
system.
+The
invaluable Emily Pontecorvo has a new report on
the growth of clean energy manufacturing across
the U.S., which includes some heartening news:
The
U.S. saw 30 new utility-scale solar factories
and 30 new battery factories come online last
year alone, according to ACP. The country now
has the capacity to meet average domestic demand
for storage systems through 2030, and can
produce enough solar panels to satisfy demand
two times over.
In
both industries, nearly all of that capacity has
been added since 2022, when the Inflation
Reduction Act created new subsidies for domestic
manufacturing. The advanced manufacturing
production tax credit incentivized not just
solar and battery factories, but also all the
production of components that go into these
technologies, including solar and battery cells,
polysilicon, wafers, and anodes. On top of these
direct subsidies, the IRA generated demand for
U.S.-made products by granting bonus tax credits
for utility-scale solar and battery projects
built with domestically produced parts.
+Pontecorvo’s
HeatMap colleague Katie Brigham calculates that
with all the new tech IPOs this week, there will
be lots of AI wealth that some of its holders
may want to devote to climate philanthropy
“It
is not lost on the people who are working on AI
that there are big environmental impacts
associated with data centers,” Lara Pierpoint,
managing director of Trellis Climate, told me.
Her organization helps philanthropists and
foundations invest in first-of-a-kind climate
infrastructure projects that wouldn’t move
forward without their support. She expects that
the “strong outdoor and environmentally-focused
culture” of the Bay Area will also hold sway
over these emerging philanthropists.
Nan
Ransohoff, Stripe’s head of climate, laid out
the scale of this coming capital influx in a recent Substack post:
“The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI,
worth about $220 billion at today’s valuation.
Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to
give away 80% of their wealth and have
instituted the most aggressive donor matching
program for employees in tech history,” she
writes.
Whether
it will be enough to make up for the damage the
wealthy do is a different question. A new report deepens
the longstanding claim that the wealthiest do
hugely outsized climate damage, but it turns out
it’s less their yachts than their investments.
As Fiona Harvey explains
Through
their ownership of companies and private
financial and physical assets, from oil
producers to property developments, the
super-rich are responsible for an outsized slice
of the greenhouse gases that are overheating the
planet. The top 1% of people by wealth, through
their shareholdings and investments, control
about a quarter of global annual emissions in
total.
Greenpeace
has calculated the “climate debt” of these high
net worth individuals, by attributing to them
their share of the damage done to the climate by
the assets they own. By this reckoning, the
world’s richest cause nearly $1tn a year of
damage to the climate.
+As
it gets hotter, the air gets dirtier. New data
shows LA began the year with its five smoggiest
months in a decade
So
far this year, the South Coast air basin, which
includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San
Bernardino counties, has seen 39 days when the
concentration of lung-irritating ozone (commonly
known as smog) exceeded the federal standard,
according to preliminary state air quality data.
That’s
even worse than the infamously hot and hazy
2017, when Greater Los Angeles had 36
unhealthful air days by June 4 and ultimately
saw 145.
+I
have a feeling that extreme heat may turn out to
be one of the stories of the 2026 World Cup
(along with the incredible thuggishness of
American authorities). Happily, some activists
will be there to explain why: protests are scheduled
outside five venues sponsored by the fossil fuel
industry. As the Sierra Club reports
The
growing global movement against sportswashing
surged to new heights in May when 2026 World
Cup player Morten Thorsby of Norway joined
footballers around the world in signing a petition
urging FIFA to adopt stronger heat protections
and drop fossil fuel sponsors. Now, Brent Suter
of the L.A. Angels has become the first active
Major League Baseball player in the game’s
history to speak out.
“As
an athlete, I care a lot about promoting
companies that share my values, and I also
care a lot about our planet,” Suter, a longtime
environmentalist, told the campaign.
“Have I used and directly benefited from
fossil fuels in my life? Absolutely. Do I
believe that continuing to fully depend on
fossil fuels as a society is dangerous?
Absolutely. We need to find ways to power our
society in cleaner ways, and I want to
represent companies that want to be part of
the solution.”
Sammy
Roth has more here
+The
great climate scientist and activist Peter
Kalmus has left NOAA, as he explains in the
latest installment of
his newsletter
Yesterday,
Monday, June 8, was my last day doing climate
science for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
after 15 years of service. I’ve been a remote
worker in North Carolina since the summer of
2022, and I was forced to resign due to a
mandate to return to in-person work.
I
don’t have another job lined up. Instead, I’m
hoping to focus on my writing much more, and I’m
planning to continue doing heat science work as
a freelancer. I’m nervous about losing my salary
for my family, but I haven’t felt this free in a
long time, and I’m excited about what I can do
now. I’m already well on my way with a new
writing project (fiction for a change, and I’m
having a blast!). Also, both my sons will be at
UNC with in-state tuition in the fall, and we’ve
already saved for that. I think it will work
out.
In
fact, perhaps more than work out:
I’d
been very constrained at NASA for a long time. I
was arrested twice for climate civil
disobedience, but I was reprimanded and told
that a third arrest would lead to my termination
(I got arrested a third time anyway). At one
point, after jumping up on the stage at the AGU,
the biggest climate science conference in the
US, I was under review by the JPL Ethics Office
for a year. This was so stressful it gave me
health issues. My overarching goal has been, and
always will be, standing up for young people,
working class people, marginalized people, and
all of life on Earth, and standing against the
billionaire class and fascism. I think I can
probably accomplish this goal more effectively
without the Big Brother-like constraints of my
former job.
+From
China, the world’s first underwater data center,
cooled by seawater and powered by a wind turbine
that sits on the ocean surface. As Amy Hawkins
writes,
Located
more than 6 miles (10km) off the coast of
Shanghai, the datacentre is submerged 10
metres below the surface of the water and is
powered by a nearby offshore windfarm. According to the
Chinese government, the datacentre
reduces power consumption by more than
one-fifth compared with land-based
datacentres.
+You’ll
recall that the last edition of The Crucial
Years had a lot to say about the quickening pace
of electrification across Asia in the wake of
the Gulf War. (Actually, I guess not the wake,
since it’s still ongoing as of this morning).
Anyway, the good folks at Ember yesterday
published a massive report on the
subject, chock-full of interesting numbers.
Economics,
security and industrial opportunity now all
point in the same direction. Asia holds half the
world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but
three quarters of the electrotech factories that
can replace the fuel it lacks. The Great
Divergence was powered by the energy the West
mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the
energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be
the Asian century, its path will be electric.
+Sad
news from North Sumatra, where climate-driven
extreme rains have killed off
seven percent of an endangered orangutan species
in a matter of days. It’s a reminder that we’re
making a hell for everything, not just us.
Meanwhile,
record winter temperatures in the Antarctic are
raising yet
more fears about destabilizing the great ice
sheet. As Jonathan Watts reports
Temperatures
in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month,
shattering the previous winter heat record for
the usually frozen region and raising concerns
about the speed of climate breakdown.
The
new winter peak temperature was logged by the
Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity
peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave,
when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero
degrees for three consecutive weeks.
Scientists
said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record
set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is
absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an
Ecuadorian climate professor at the University
of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal
for this time of the year. That is a huge
anomaly.”
+One
more interesting solar breakthrough: panels that
can directly desalinate water. Aaron Greenbaum describes the
research
Recently,
researchers from the University of Rochester in
New York published a study in Light: Science
& Applications that outlined a new
desalination technique. The technique revolves
around an aluminum panel etched using
femtosecond lasers (lasers that pulse so fast
they can only be measured in one-quadrillionth
of a second). Thanks to the laser etching, the
aluminum panel not only absorbs light but also
becomes superwicked: It attracts water to an
almost supernatural degree.
When
the panel comes into contact with salt water, a
thin film of water is pulled up, completely
defiant of gravity, and evaporates using solar
energy, leaving behind crystallized salt and
other minerals. While the evaporated gas is
recollected as salt-free water, the superwicked
surface also moves salt crystals onto the edge
of the panel, keeping the main surface clean and
efficient. Not only is the process
self-sufficient, but it also solves the problem
of other desalination projects: It doesn’t
discharge brine (a highly saline water that is
poisonous to sea life).
That
comes as at least a slight bit of happy news,
after reports that the US has been blowing up Iran’s coastal
water systems, which if true is a
clear war crime.
I’ve
spent so many years fighting Lee Raymond
that his passing seems almost odd to me.
Thank you for bearing with my efforts to
chronicle it all.
