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
U.S., 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.
As
it happens, this is a free newsletter, which
is fine by me: crucial information should
be free. But boy am I grateful that some
people who can afford to do so take out a
modestly priced and voluntary subscription
to keep it all going!
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 Institue on what the climate crisis is
doing to the cost of “Five a day” in the UK
Heat
waves are projected to add around 11% to the
price of the UK’s top twenty 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
thirties today.
(A
note to the perplexed: “easy peelers” turns out to
be what Brits call mandarin oranges and
clementines. I like it.)
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 NRDC, 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 percent
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.
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 percent
from February to May. But that ability to
spend has limits. According to Dow Jones
Energy, consumption was 6.1
percent 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 percent 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
twenty-five 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.
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.
+Some
big wins for climate and energy in last night’s
New York voting. It looks like a lock that
former New York comptroller Brad Lander will be
headed to Congress, where he will instantly
become one of the House experts on the links
between big money and Big Oil. My hope is that
he’ll team with Sheldon Whitehouse in the Senate
to form a loud and constant chorus on the topic.
By the way, a useful video from the ever-candid
Whitehouse here
Meanwhile,
further up the Hudson River, Lisa Kaul won her
Democratic primary for state Senate in the
district around the town of Poughskeepsie.
Climate was a big element in her campaign, and
you can check out a quite powerful digital ad here—per the
discussion above, it’s focused on affordability.
+Fascinating
deep dive into
the economics of Enhanced Geothermal from the
straight-shooting Justin Mikulka. As he notes,
this technology—drilling a pair of holes deep
into the earth, pumping water down one so it
will pass through hot rocks, retrieving the warm
water from the other, and using the heat to turn
a turbine on the surface—has gotten a ton of
hype, and lots of expensive support from the
federal government, above all I think because it
is congenial to Big Oil (they know how to drill
stuff, after all). But will it produce
affordable electricity? Mikulka has
well-reasoned doubts
Fervo
describes its own power generation as “24/7
clean, cost effective, scalable.”
Fervo’s current $/KW costs are $7,000.
New
build gas is estimated at $2,300+
Solar
plus storage is at $2,100-$2,600
Now
Fervo claims that if everything goes right in
the future they will bring that down to $3,000.
So even in their best case scenario they will
not be competitive with solar plus storage which
is also expected to get much cheaper. And they
are a long way from their best case scenario and
none of this has been proven at commercial
scale.
Competing
straight-up against sun, wind, and batteries is
tough. If Fervo “works” it will be with massive
government subsidy, which would be better spent on
cheaper tech. Pipes and pumps and huge amounts of
water—these are increasingly the tools of the
past, up against the frictionless world of sun and
wind.
I
tend to think hydrogen falls into this same
category—expensive compared with the
straight-ahead application of electricity and
batteries. But there are places doing it right:
Lithuania just launched a ship
that runs on green hydrogen generated from solar
panels on its dock. As Luis Reyes writes
The
ship is called Rasa, and it was christened at
the Port of Klaipėda on June 18, 2026. This is
not a concept render. It’s a 42-meter tanker
that’s about to start collecting sludge,
sewage, stormwater and garbage from other
ships calling at the port. Glamorous work, no.
Technically interesting, very much yes.
+Some
of the bigger names in climate science,
including American Michael Mann, have joined in a call
to avoid solar geoengineering, centering their
argument on the risk of “termination shock.”
Recent
analyses demonstrate that it would take as long as two decades
to create the required infrastructure. By then
we would be completely reliant on maintaining
it – a tall task in a dangerous world with
global conflict. It would only temporarily
mask the pent-up warming implicit in the
ongoing buildup of carbon dioxide, and this
pent-up warming would be released in a
catastrophically rapid “termination shock” if
circumstances force the cessation of solar
geoengineering.
For
me, I think we can only talk coherently about
geoengineering in a world where the political
power of the fossil fuel industry has been
broken—one more reason why mass deployment of
clean energy around the globe over the rest of
this decade is so crucial.
+Check
out the trailer for
Josh Fox’s important new film, The Welcome
Table. It debuted on HBO yesterday, and it’s
about the surge of climate immigration already
underway on our overheating planet. Fox, of
course, is the independent filmmaker who brought
us Gasland, the most crucial document in the
fight against fracking. He’s got a good eye, a
good mind, and a good heart.
+John
Todd is one of those fascinating figures who
have been at it a lifetime—his New Alchemy
Institute became most famous for its Living
Machines, which use plants to clean wastewater.
Now he’s scaling up the concept—what
if we used old tankers to roam the oceans (under
solar power) just slowly cleaning up the seas?
For
example, a large — but by no means the biggest
class of — oil tanker, can hold around 80
million US gallons of liquid fuel, or other
liquids. including sea water. There will be
enough potential treatment capacity within the
ships’ hold spaces to house eco-machines large
enough to make a positive impact on surrounding
waters
+Many
thanks to the good folks at CarbonBrief for Cosmos, a
database of the world’s climate research,
currently containing 1.8 million studies
+Fascinating
commentary from
Jérôme Pinti on the role that animals play in
regulating carbon and climate, citing a new
consensus report from 300
researchers:
A
2023 paper in Nature
Climate Change estimated that
protecting and restoring wild animal
populations and their ecological roles could
increase carbon dioxide uptake by an
additional 6.41 gigatons per year. Numbers
like that show why animals belong in climate
conversations, and how they can be part of
climate solutions, with different roles in
different ecosystems.
For
example, in forests, animals such as elephants
disperse seeds and influence where trees grow.
In grasslands, grazers such as bison can affect
plant growth, nutrient cycling, and fire
dynamics. In soils and sediments, burrowing
animals can change oxygen and nutrient
availability and store energy as they hibernate
during tough winter months.
The
same is true for the ocean, which is Earth’s
largest carbon sink. Marine organisms are
active agents of resilience: They transport
carbon, build habitats with carbon-rich
materials, and tie up carbon in extensive food
webs. In my Biological Oceanography Lab at the
Gulf of Maine Research
Institute, we aim to quantify the
importance of zooplankton and fish in the
ocean’s biological carbon pump, a process
where marine species, from plankton to whales
and everything in between, move carbon from
the ocean’s surface into the deep sea through
a variety of processes.
On
a more tragic note, one wildlife lover—a woman
named Mona Khalil—was killed last week while
pursuing her life’s work of safeguarding sea
turtles laying their eggs. An Israeli airstrike
wrecked her home on Mansouri Beach, and she
subsequently died of her wounds. As Rhett Ayers
Butler writes,
She
had not set out to become a conservationist.
Born in Lagos to Lebanese parents, she later
left Lebanon during the civil war. In the
Netherlands she worked as a porcelain
restorer, a trade that required patience,
precision, and care for damaged things. She
could have remained there. Instead she kept returning
to the family land on Lebanon’s southern
coast.
One
night in 1999, while walking near the shore, she
heard a sound in the sand and saw a turtle
coming up to lay her eggs. She learned that the
beach was one of the last important nesting
places in southern Lebanon. In 2000, after
Israel withdrew from the area, she returned more
permanently. With Habiba Fayed, she restored the
family farmhouse and began protecting the nests.
And
while we’re on animals, a new study finds
that solar panels on barn roofs help lower
thermal stress on cows during hot afternoons. As
Lior Kahana reports,
To
assess the impact of PV modules on roof heat
flux, the team conducted field measurements at a
naturally ventilated dairy barn in Shandong
Province, China. The barn measures 32 m in span,
372 m in length, and has an eave height of 4.5
m. It features a south-facing gable roof with a
17.17° pitch and a single-layer profiled steel
sheet construction without insulation.
The
facility was divided into two zones. One section
was left without PV installation, while the
other was fitted with 1,152 PV modules with a
total capacity of 299.52 kW. The modules were
installed parallel to the roof slope,
maintaining a 0.10 m ventilated air gap between
the panels and the roof surface, and covered 60%
of the south-facing roof area. The two zones
housed 164 and 316 dairy cows, respectively.
“Linear
mixed model analysis revealed that PV panels
significantly reduced roof heat flux during
daytime (57.7% influence weight, p < 0.001),
with the strongest reduction occurring during
peak solar radiation between 11:00 and 13:00,”
the researchers said. “This effect was primarily
attributed to shading, photovoltaic conversion,
and convective cooling within the ventilated air
cavity beneath the modules.”
“PV
panels significantly lowered indoor temperatures
during daytime (8.7% influence weight, p <
0.05), achieving a maximum reduction of
approximately 2.3 C during the critical
afternoon heat stress period (14:00–16:00),”
they added.
+It’s
always important to get hyperlocal perspectives
on global crises: there have been lots of
pictures of houses falling into the ocean on the
barrier islands of North Carolina, but local
resident and journalist Pat O’Keefe offers an
in-depth and passionate discussion of
the the many forces at work. One thing he notes
is that the devastation of Hurricane Helene in
western North Carolina made it easier for
legislators to sympathize with the plight of
those along the coast.
+Rameen
Siddiqui notes that the
world continues to fall behind on the
Sustainable Development Goals, even as the 2030
deadline approaches.
Less
than four years from the deadline, and only 16%
of the targets are going to be met. The 11th
edition of the Sustainable Development Report,
released today by the UN Sustainable Development
Solutions Network, is the sort of statistic that
ought to be raising much more alarm. The 2030
Agenda was supposed to end extreme poverty,
preserve the oceans, build peaceful
institutions, and put the global economy on a
sustainable path. With 2030 in sight, 84% of
these commitments are going downhill.
The
reason the 2026 SDR is worth reading with care
is not the rankings, although those are
important. It is the timing. UN talks begin this
year on the future beyond 2030. In 2027, a new
Secretary-General will be elected. The framework
that replaces the current agenda is being shaped
in conversations happening right now, and the
SDR’s argument, that implementation has been the
missing piece throughout and must be the
organizing principle of whatever comes next,
lands at the precise moment when that argument
can still influence the design of the successor
framework.
+Jeff
St. John contends that
we have superb new acreage for solar panels—on
top of warehouses around the world
In
a sense, warehouse rooftops are like open fields
in dense urban landscapes, with acres of flat
space available for solar panels.
Ava
has awarded Prologis a contract to build
nearly 7.3
megawatts of solar
on sprawling roofs across five sites, enabling
about 3,000
residents to see lower bills. Keefer
previously worked for Clean Power Alliance,
another California community energy provider,
which is building 9
megawatts of warehouse-rooftop community
solar with
Prologis…
His
company’s analysis of federal
data indicates U.S.
commercial, industrial, and institutional
rooftops could host 581 gigawatts of solar,
enough to provide the lower bounds of the
country’s overall electricity
demand. Similar data from
a 2023
study by the
Environment America Research and Policy Center
found that warehouses across the U.S. have
nearly 16.4 billion square feet of rooftop
space, capable of hosting enough solar to
power more than 19 million homes.
+The
estimable Yessenia Funes has an excellent account of
why voting rights have lots to do with climate
justice.
Leslie
Fields has a background in civil rights and
voting rights work. She worked at the NAACP,
where she discovered environmental justice as a
focus in Texas. Now, she is the chief federal
officer of the Harlem-based environmental
justice advocacy group WE ACT.
WE
ACT has been responding to
the nationwide consequences of the Voting
Rights Act’s rollback. Section 2, in
particular, is about voters electing the
representatives they want. It’s about the
people choosing the person they trust to lead.
“If
we don’t have the representatives we need, who
come from the community and are accountable to
the community, then you’re going to have
terrible decisions being made on the local level
and all the way up regarding the environment,
regarding communities’ sustainability, regarding
where investments are being made,” Fields said.
“Some
of the states that we’ve lost billions of
dollars in Justice40 funds
from the Biden administration to support
climate resilience and adaptation,” she added,
“won’t have the leadership to represent them,
and we’re still fighting to get that funding
back.”
+More
money coming from the World Bank for Africa
solar, as Antony Sguazzin explains
WeLight,
which operates more solar mini-grids in Africa
than any other company, said the International Finance
Corp. bought a stake in the
business, backing its expansion into Nigeria
and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The
firm, which currently operates in Madagascar
and Mali, said it raised €27 million ($31
million) from the World Bank’s private-sector
lending arm and founding shareholders. Axian
Group Ltd., Sagemcom SAS
and Norfund AS
established WeLight in 2018 to provide
electricity to rural communities that don’t
have access to national networks. It runs
almost 190 mini-grids, serving more than
800,000 people.
+Finally,
a shout out to the good people of Matinicus, the
island furthest out in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. I
was visiting my fisherman brother there over the
weekend, and found that locals had spent the
year installing a truly remarkable solar system
that powers most of the island and has cut its
use of diesel for electric generation by
two-thirds. This is a relatively poor rock out
in the Atlantic Ocean, and if it can
build—mostly with local expertise—a truly
state-of-the-art solar system, it should be a
good spur for communities everywhere. Energy
independence, not to mention lobster! This
system may allow the community to survive into
the future—Eva Murray’s excellent chronicle can
be found here
Newly
installed solar on Matinicus Island. Note that
because the rocky soil makes it hard to anchor
the panels into ground they’ve cleverly used
those rocks to ballast the system against the
wind. Old tech and new! Many thanks to Phil
Davies for a tour, and for his hard work to
get the system up and running
“Free”
should be the goal of many things in our
economy, and I’m glad this newsletter is
part of that gift economy. And proud that a
certain number of people who can do so
without financial strain make this gift
possible by taking out a voluntary and
modestly priced subscription
