One
of the (many) curses of the Trump era is that he
keeps us fixated, hour by hour, on his latest
stupidity or fraud, a constant swirling game of
three-card monte that ends only when he robs
some more of our attention and money. So I will
try valiantly for a moment to escape his
asteroid belt of provocation (it’s not easy—did
you know that America decided this week to sink
a few billion into
promoting…coal) and try to think a
little more broadly.
This
step back is occasioned by Thomas Piketty and
his team at the World Inequality Lab in Paris,
who last week released the Global Justice
Report, subtitled “A Plan for Equality &
Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries.”
Piketty, you will recall, is the London-born
economist who in 2013 released his book Capital,
in many ways launching the ongoing critique of
global inequality and the generalized scorn for
the billionaire class. (At one point, remember,
America and the world generally admired
these people).
The
Crucial Years is freely given, and enough
people respond in kind—by taking out a
voluntary and modestly priced
subscription—to make it work. Thanks.
Now
he and his team has enlarged their analysis to
include the 21st century’s novel dilemma—that we
are steadily and rapidly overheating the
planet—and the result is this report, which I
read in certain ways as the data-rich companion
to Naomi Klein’s 2014 classic This
Changes Everything, an investigation
of whether it is possible to imagine prosperity
without ruinous growth. Much has changed in the
years since those volumes—most importantly, the
plummeting price of solar and wind energy and of
batteries to store that power has opened up a
much larger escape hatch. And it’s from that
premise that Piketty’s new work really proceeds.
The
Global Justice Project says that rapid
decarbonization is a must, and that it needs to be
paid for by the rich, and that that payment should
come in the form of a global wealth tax and a
global income tax, which funnel fairly large sums
of money from the north to the south. They aim for
a “sufficiency” world, in which all have enough
and where the share of wealth owned by the richest
one percent drops dramatically—a kind of
globalized Sweden, I’d say, in which people work
half the hours we do at present, and consume more
education and health care and less stuff. They
view it as an alternative to “degrowth” scenarios,
and also to our current unrestrained growth model,
and say that it leaves the world with lower
temperatures than either of those schemes.
To
avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency
is required: a structural transformation of
the economy involving shorter working hours, a
lower material footprint, a shift from
material-intensive sectors toward relatively
immaterial sectors such as education and
health, and major changes in food systems and
land use. Rapid decarbonization
of energy systems is also necessary,
as is the sharp compression of
income and wealth inequality.
This compression is both a social justice
objective and a condition for financing
necessary climate investment and human capital
expenditure and for sustaining political
support from bottom- and middle-income classes
in both the North and the South.
Here’s
a little diagram they provide of the basic outline
I
have a certain sympathy for the argument—expressed
most pithily by David Roberts on Bluesky—that this
kind of sky-castle architecture doesn’t amount to
much; I too am more fascinated by the daily
drumbeat of technological innovation. And I think
that the accumulation of that innovation may
undermine part of Piketty’s argument; I have a
feeling that the investment required for
decarbonization is going to be easier to come by,
as the price for good stuff just keeps falling,
and the economic logic of paying for fossil fuel
becomes ever smaller.
But
I also think that the climate crisis is not the
only ecological threat we face, nor indeed the
only threat period. I think it’s pretty clear that
democracy can’t survive inequality; there’s an
ever-better case for taxing the hell out of
billionaires even if all you do is bury the
resulting money in a hole in the ground. One
possibility is that the mega-rich will succeed in
their current project of deliberalizing the
planet, and we’ll all get to live in our own nasty
little sovereignties; another is that the Bernie
Sanderses resident in most parts of the world will
figure out how to combine their efforts and that
over time we’ll get something that looks a bit
like what Piketty (or for that matter Kim Stanley
Robinson in Ministry for the Future) imagines. One
tell for me that this team is not entirely
politically detached came in this paragraph about
what would happen if America (or China)
predictably refused to join in such a scheme:
If
necessary, the Global Justice Platform can be
implemented with an incomplete coalition of
countries, including the absence of the US
and/or China. According to our projections, the
climate damages imposed by the US on other
countries would be about 3% of world GDP per
year, on average, over the 2026-2100 period if
the US does not participate in the GJP. Under
simplifying assumptions, other countries should
impose a corrective tax of approximately 80% on
all US exports to collect tax revenues
approximately equivalent to the damage. Given
the projected decline of the US share in world
GDP – from 30% in 1945 to 15% in 2025 and 5-10%
by 2100 – it is likely that such tariffs would
induce the US to join the GJP. The same
conclusion applies to the case of China, but
with a higher tariff (180% or more).
The
report concludes that
“A
habitable, equal 21st century is materially
possible. What stands in the way is not
technical impossibility but political choice and
the hard but crucial work of building a
coalition behind it.”
I
think that’s a worthy goal to keep in the back of
our minds as we proceed with the daily work of
building the infrastructure for this new world;
every election is a chance to get us a little
closer, by electing the kind of people who
understand the need for this kind of compression
of wealth.
But
the infrastructure is the part we can do something
about right now, and on that score there’s some
equal mix of encouraging maddening news, all of it
again on a large scale.
On
the one hand, our farcical war in the Gulf
continues to serve as the recruiting sergeant for
the renewable revolution. As a Bloomberg team
reports in a long and important essay, the Gulf
War has been “Asia’s Ukraine.”
About
two hours from Manila there’s a solar power
plant capable of powering 60,000 homes.
Surrounded by fields growing okra and eggplant,
it had been sitting idle since August, waiting
for a connection to the grid — stuck in a queue
just like many other renewable energy facilities
around the world as power networks struggle to
catch up with rising electricity demand.
Then
the Iran war cut off the Philippines’ supply of
imported liquefied natural gas. Immediately, the
government cut fuel taxes and offered free bus
rides to the public. Then a few weeks later, as
the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked, officials
began deploying policies toward a deeper, more
structural plan to reduce the country’s
dependence on fossil fuels.
One
strategy was to fast track more than 30
renewable plants by the end of April. One of
those was that 125-megawatt solar plant, built
by Citicore Renewable Energy Corp, which is now
supplying clean energy to the grid. It is “good
timing,” said Joselito Ernst Cañete, operations
manager at Citicore, just as electricity demand
increases to power air conditioners during the
peak summer months.
What
happened in the Philppines isn’t an isolated
example. With their energy supplies
threatened, countries across Asia and Europe
have chosen to speed up deployment of
renewables and electrification.
Meanwhile,
the cheerful solar guru Danny Kennedy chimed in from
a conference in Singapore where he found the
western politicians and analysts way behind the
Asian curve. I will quote from his account at
some length because it’s important
Philippines.
After declaring a national energy emergency in
March, the government activated a
whole-of-government mandate for energy
security. Regulatory bottlenecks for
renewables are being dismantled. Rooftop solar
inquiries are up 500% since the crisis began.
This is not a green ambition. This is a
survival response.³
Vietnam.
The country has revised its power development
plan, targeting a minimum of 47% renewable
electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam is
already the region’s largest EV market, and
its government has expanded EV tax incentives
in direct response to the Iran War’s impact on
fuel prices.³ HSBC recently extended $4
billion in clean-tech financing to Chinese
firms, much of it flowing into EV and solar
exports to Vietnam and ASEAN.⁴
Indonesia.
Beyond the factory I visited in Batam, the
government is engineering a broad fiscal shift
— expanding EV incentives with a target of 2
million electric cars and 12 million electric
two-wheelers on the road by 2030. With the
world’s largest nickel reserves, Indonesia is
positioning itself to replace diesel imports
with a domestic battery ecosystem. The logic
is national sovereignty as much as climate
policy.³ We’ve also talked about their 100GW
solar archipelago plans.
Thailand.
Advanced its net zero target by 15 full years,
to 2050. Solar generation surged 72% in 2025.
The country is adding 50 GW of renewables and
14 GW of energy storage by 2037. A major 1 GW
module supply deal between China’s GCL-SI and
Thailand’s Getz Energy was just signed to
support that buildout.⁵ ⁶
Singapore
itself.
Already scaled solar to 1.7 GW and is
executing multi-gigawatt cross-border subsea
clean electricity cables from Indonesia,
Cambodia, and Vietnam — with a requirement
that developers bundle storage at origin for
24/7 firm power delivery. Singapore, to its
credit, is acting. The conference, perhaps,
just needed a bigger window.³
We
already know China and India — the two largest
energy consumers in Asia — reached a historic
tipping point together in 2025. For the first
time, fossil fuel generation fell
in both countries simultaneously: China down
0.9%, India down 3.3%.³ These are not small
numbers. These are inflection points.
And
yet even as this good news is happening, the
Chinese are also beginning to shutter many of
the solar panel factories that are at the heart
of this revolution, because they’re not making
enough money. This is, on the hand,
understandable, and on the other entirely
maddening—these factories are the single most
important industrial asset on earth—they are
factories for lowering the temperature of the
earth. As readers are doubtless painfully aware,
I’ve been beating this drum for a good long
while, but I’m glad to see others joining in.
Adam Tooze, the interesting bricoleur in charge
of the Chartbook newsletter, wrote in the FT
this week, it would be understandable if we were
talking about some mundane commodity like
cement.
But
solar panels? Since when were solar panels just
another commodity? They are a technological
miracle. They make us into farmers of the sun.
For the past half century, research labs around
the world, starting in the 1970s with Nasa
spin-offs and the big US energy research push
under Jimmy Carter, have been straining to reach
this point. Together with batteries, which are
also rapidly approaching the point of excess
supply, they are the key to a sustainable
future.
As
Tooze points out, it cost China very little in
subsidies ($18 billion) to build this behemoth
(though one should probably add in the subsidies
that, say, Germany provided to its citizens to buy
the early models, underwriting the startup of
China’s engineering miracle).
I’ve
long argued that on a rational world, trying
everything it could to head off the worst of
global warming, we would “globalize” these
factories, running them 24/7 and then piling up
the panels on every railroad siding and wharf on
the planet so that people could come take them
away. This would be, I think, a backdoor way of
achieving a fair amount of what Piketty has in
mind, far messier than his global scheme but
somewhat more plausible. By some calculations, ten
years production from those plants would produce
enough panels to provide all the power the world
currently uses.
If
my sense that the coming El Niño will revive the
world’s focus on the climate crisis—well, this is
the easiest possible route forward. And it comes
not just with more power, but with different
power. Elon Musk may be rushing his IPO for data
centers in space or whatever the heck he’s
currently selling, but some of us will hole up
here on earth, quite sufficient with the solar
panels in our yards.
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In
other energy and climate news:
+Along
somewhat these lines, very worth reading the
Volts interview with
James McGinniss, an entrepreneur pushing small
battery systems to tenants and small holders—in
the case of his company, mostly business like
laundromats and small groceries. He argues that
cumulatively they’re going to be…very important
What
we’ve found is — this is another mind-blown
moment for me — when you look at the National
Electric Code and UL certification and how,
outside of whatever jurisdiction that you’re in,
just what is safe physically to do, you can do
hundreds of kilowatt-hours in buildings because
there’ll be multiple 200- to 400-amp panels.
Each of those — there’s the 120 rule — and you
can push a lot more power into them than you
think, not just these little batteries. We’re
keeping things small because of the current
environment that we live in.
The
physical, safe way to do it — I see paths to
having, imagine in every panel on a commercial
building you have a stack of these batteries
like a server rack, and they are all plug-in
based. You are not just doing one giant system
on the roof, which has totally different safety
and weight considerations and needs permits,
etc. When you think about these metropolitan
areas, you could imagine solar on every balcony,
solar on the roof, storage on every panel, and
they are all plugged in.
You’re
talking about megawatt-scale deployments.
+I’ve
spent what seems like months of my life trying
to dispel the notion lodged in American minds
that China is undercutting the climate by
endlessly building coal plants; as it happens,
China is decreasing its coal use. But not the
U.S. (see above); indeed, new data shows that
America is now investing more in fossil fuel
than the vastly larger People’s Republic. From
Josh Gabbatiss:
High
demand for electricity to power these data
centres has led to companies rushing to build
new gas-fired power plants across the country.
This
trend, combined with “soaring”
gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase
in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the
IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.
As
the chart below shows, Chinese investment in
coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop
this year, amid domestic policy changes
and the Iran war
sending gas prices spiralling.
Together,
these trends mean the IEA expects US investment
in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake
China’s in 2026.
Happily,
as Haley Zaremba points out, the
solar boom in the U.S. is also continuing
despite Trump’s best efforts
Newly
released data from the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission (FERC) shows that at the
close of last year, solar energy additions
were the single largest form of new energy
capacity installations for the 28th straight month,
starting in September of 2023. In fact, in
spite of a broad rollback of Biden-era clean
energy incentives since Trump resumed office
in January of last year, renewables
represented a whopping 88 percent of energy
additions in 2025, with utility-scale solar
alone counting for 72.6 percent of U.S.
electricity additions.
This
massive growth trend
has caused solar power’s share of the United
States energy mix to surpass that of wind
power, nuclear power, and hydropower. And
while many if not most of these renewable
projects were greenlit and funded before Trump
took office and rolled back tax cuts and
subsidies for solar and wind projects, experts
say not to expect a major cooldown any time
soon.
In
fact, FERC projections show that solar energy
installations will continue to grow by 86
gigawatts over the next three years, at which
point the sector will surpass coal as well,
Trump’s $700 million plan
to revive coal production notwithstanding.
Meanwhile,
out in Trump’s favorite parts of the world,
solar spending in Africa is also outpacing
fossil fuels. As Allan Olingo chronicles
Of
the 322 energy projects announced across Africa
in 2025, 173 were solar projects, followed by
hydropower at 46, wind at 34, gas at 22 and
hybrid energy projects at 14, according to the
energy research firm Electron Intelligence.
“Africa
is not on the periphery of the global energy
transition, it is sitting at its center,” said
Mugwe Manga, climate finance lead at FSD Kenya.
“The continent holds the world’s best renewable
resources, and the economics have now decisively
turned in favor of clean energy.”
According
to Olamide Niyi-Afuye, CEO of the Africa
Minigrid Developers Association (AMDA), the
continent is undergoing a broader strategic
shift in how energy infrastructure is being
developed, with an emphasis on systems that can
be deployed faster and expanded gradually with
flexible financing.
+Thanks
in no small part to James Talarico (and that Leo
fellow), it’s a good season for rethinking the
basics of Christian theology. Talarico has
reminded us that kindness is somewhat more
Scriptural than cruelty; now a California
pastor, Jeff Spencer, has written a nifty sermon arguing
that the creation story in Genesis was really
the first incarnation. And he quotes that
California mystic (who knew, thanks to his
fundamentalist father, every word of the Bible
by heart), John Muir.
“The
earth, he said, is a divine ‘incarnation.’ Here,
Muir uses a word that most of Western
Christianity has reserved exclusively for Jesus.
Muir applies it not just to Jesus, not even just
to humanity and the creatures, but to the matter
of earth itself. Even earth’s geological
formations, he says are ‘heaven incarnate’; the
rocks can be called ‘instonations’ of God.
Everything is in essence spirit, incarnated in
flesh, in leaves, in rocks. All these varied
forms of matter ‘are simply portions of God,’
wrote Muir. They are all of ‘the God essence.’”
I can’t help but wonder if this long thread of
Christian thought, typically suppressed and
condemned by the gatekeepers in the church,
influenced Father Richard Rohr when he wrote
much more recently, “When Christians hear the
word ‘incarnation,’ most of us think about the
birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated
God’s radical unity with humanity. But I want to
suggest that the first Incarnation was the
moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined
in unity with the physical universe and became
the light inside of everything.”
+Annals
of divestment: Quebec’s pension fund reports that
getting out of fossil energy and into the clean
stuff made it a lot of the green stuff.
La
Caisse — the Quebec pension fund managing the
retirement savings of six million Quebecers —
confirmed this month that its exit from oil has
paid off financially.
Since
launching its climate strategy, its energy
investments returned 10 per cent annually,
compared to 8 per cent from a global oil index —
a gap that amounts to almost $4 billion above
what investing in oil companies would have
generated.
+You’ve
heard about urban legends, but one rural
legend—fanned by the same fossil fuel disinfo
experts that have been hard at work for decades—is
that farmers should reject solar panels because
they might shed glass that would somehow end up in
future crops. As Austyn Gaffney reports:
In
January, Michigan Republican state Rep. Cam
Cavitt posted a 51-second clip
to Facebook labeled “Solar Farm
SECRET.” In the segment, he claimed that
farmers in his district couldn’t grow potatoes
on land where solar developments were sited.
“Frito
[Frito-Lay] did the same with the potato growers
up by us,” fellow Michigan Republican Rep. Dave
Prestin told Cavitt in the clip. “Any field
that had solar panels installed on it will never
be allowed to grow potatoes for human
consumption due to the leaching.”
Shockingly,
this isn’t true.
PepsiCo,
which owns Frito-Lay, told Canary Media that the
company “has not issued blanket guidance to
growers that fields with solar installations
will not be accepted.”
Nor
is there any published evidence that solar farms
have a negative impact on potato farming,
according to experts consulted for this story.
On the contrary, there is agrivoltaics research
showing that potatoes—and many other crops—can
benefit from growing alongside shade-making
solar panels.
+Denmark
is out with its new climate policy, and where
others (New York!) are in cowardly retreat, they
have decided that
they will go to 110% emissions reductions by
2050 (funding work elsewhere to make up for past
emissions). I predict that this will end up
making them richer, not poorer. They’re also
introducing a tax on private jets and cruise
ships. Creeping Pikettyism!
Meanwhile
in Scandinavia, the Finns are putting huge
storage batteries outside a new Microsoft data
center that will allow them to capture the
excess heat from the facility and use it to warm
almost half the house in a large district. As
Patrick Jowett writes,
Peter
Strannegård, Fortum’s Executive Vice President,
Renewables and Decarbonisation, said that once
fully implemented, data centre waste heat is
expected to cover approximately 40% of the total
2 TWh annual district heating demand of the
250,000 heat users in the area.
The
recovery of waste heat from Microsoft’s data
centre sites is scheduled to begin step by step
next year, Fortum’s update adds, in line with
Microsoft’s construction and commissioning
schedule.
“As
new phases of the data centres are completed,
increasing volumes of waste heat will be
available for the district heating customers,”
the company said. “Waste heat recovery increases
local heat production capacity, reduces exposure
to fuel price volatility and helps maintain
predictable district heating prices.”
Fortum
also explained that the set-up of the plants
allows heat production to respond flexibly to
varying demand, strengthening reliability and
price competitiveness of heat production for
district heating customers in the area. “For the
wider energy system, flexible heat production
helps balance electricity demand, particularly
during fluctuating renewable generation,” it
said.
Meanwhile,
as I noted above, the U.S. energy secretary has
decided to invest in…coal
+New
Zealand’s conservative government has not been
particularly planet-friendly, but they are investing in
putting solar panels on hundreds of schools
“Early
modelling by Energy Efficiency and Conservation
Authority (EECA) shows that solar panels are
estimated to pay for themselves within five to
seven years and a 30kW system - the standard
size for a school - could save a school up to
$8000 a year in electricity bills,” Energy
Minister Simeon Brown said.
“Schools
will also have options to sell energy back to
the grid, generating an estimated $6.7m in
revenue over 10 years.”
+Chelsea
Harvey reports that
municipal heat preparedness campaigns across the
country are suffering from federal funding cuts
The
federal government doesn’t define heat waves as
a disaster, even as events with fewer victims,
like hurricanes and floods, qualify for Federal
Emergency Management Agency assistance. So money
is short, no matter who’s president. But they
said it’s gotten worse under the Trump
administration, which has canceled grants
ranging from long-term resilience funding from
FEMA to tree-planting support from the Forest
Service.
Those
challenges roared to life at a disaster planning
conference in Boston earlier this month. Heat
officers from around the country were asked to
respond to a fictional scenario in Phoenix,
where an imaginary blackout silenced the thrum
of air conditioners citywide as temperatures
soared to 111 degrees.
Funding
lapses were an urgent undercurrent, even as
participants dreamed of expanding heat emergency
plans and urban cooling projects.
“You
can identify those big budget items, and you
can advocate for them, but you’re not
necessarily going to get them,” Jane Gilbert,
a veteran official who has overseen heat
programs in Miami, said at the two-day workshop
attended by nearly two dozen officials from
across the country.
But,
did I note, we’ve got plenty of money to subsidize
new coal power?
+Very
good to see blue states suing the
federal government over its dispersal of
billions to buy back offshore wind rights. As
Ella Nilsen writes,
New
York Attorney General Letitia James called the
March announcement an “illegal agreement.”
“After
repeatedly losing in court, this administration
cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy
company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars
to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and
gas instead,” James said.
The
lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for
the District of Columbia. State attorneys
general from New York, New Jersey,
Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and
Rhode Island argued on Tuesday
the administration had violated the law when
executing the March deal — failing to hold a
hearing required by law to determine that
keeping the offshore wind leases “would likely
cause serious harm to life, property, national
security, or the environment.”
+Finally
some good news. The Trump administration is
desperately trying to sell off the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, but
it’s almost impossible to find buyers. Only two
companies put in bids on
small corners of the acreage. Partly this is
because campaigners—mostly native Alaskans—have
made it toxic: not even Exxon wants to go dig up
a wildlife refuge. And partly its because—can
you imagine, in the 21st century, making money
by digging up oil in the farthest corners of the
earth, refining it, shipping it, and then
selling it to…who exactly? As Dan McCarthy reported the
other day, EVs are taking over the world
Nearly
60% of cars sold in China this year will be
electrified.
EV
sales are growing rapidly across the rest of
Asia, too. This year, sales are expected to
leap by over 50% across Asian countries other
than China, IEA found, driven in large part by
the availability of super affordable Chinese EV
models.
In
Europe, which has strong emissions standards
that push consumers toward EVs, sales are
growing especially fast. This year, EVs will
make up one-third of new cars sold in the
region, powered not only by EV-adoption poster
child Norway but also by
rapid uptake in Germany, the U.K., and Turkey.
A
newsletter is not a solar panel—it shines
light instead of absorbing it. Still, it’s a
part of the energy revolution—and very
cheap! In fact, it’s free if you can’t
afford to pay for it.
