This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There’s no question that the forthcoming return of Donald Trump and his willful disregard for science, truth, and basic empathy is a massive step backward in the struggle toward a world built on justice, equity, and a stable climate. Trump has promised to re-exit the Paris Climate Accord, all but ending any realistic hope of a truly global climate effort before the world reaches the 1.5 C threshold.

Here at home, Trump’s plans for the environment range from heavy-handed (massively downsizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA) to selfish (creating tax breaks for oil companies in exchange for campaign contributions) to downright bizarre (abolishing regulations for low-flow showerheads). As veteran climate champion Bill McKibben said in a statement on Wednesday, the consequences of this election will likely be measured in geological time.

And yet: I think it’s important to say that all the collective work pushing for a greener world for the past 50 years has also measurably altered the trajectory of our civilization away from a worst-case climate scenario and toward a more verdant world. Along the way, there have been many other huge steps backward—some that came well before the first national park was established, or the first Earth Day was celebrated. Like I told my kids the morning after the election, when you’re going on a long walk in the woods, sometimes you get lost.

While Trump was elected on a “burn it all to the ground” platform, he will not be able to undo everything we’ve gained on climate. A particular bright spot is the global surge in renewable energy: I don’t think it is at risk of slowing anytime soon—no matter what Trump does.

Solar is now all about saving money. People buy rooftop solar because it’s cheaper, period.

Trump may gut environmental regulations, but even without them wind and solar are now the cheapest source of new energy in the world, period. Even in China and India, wind and solar are now much cheaper than coal. China alone is on pace to add twice as much wind and solar this year as the rest of the world combined.

Wind and solar now make up 15 percent of the world’s energy mix, up from just 1 percent only 10 years ago. They are now consistently eating away at the share held by fossil fuels—a trend that will continue all the way to net zero. Basically: We did it. We’ve secured a clean energy future for ourselves. The only question remaining is how fast this future will become reality.

With years of major wind and solar projects in the pipeline and with renewable-friendly policies designed to last, these facts will continue to be even more true in the future, even if Trump tries to undo Biden’s signature climate laws. Clean energy tax credits are in place until 2030; they will stick. The vast majority will continue going to Republican districts, which will help protect them into the future.

I recently spent six months selling solar door-to-door, partly to learn more about the industry, partly out of desperation as an underemployed writer. Here’s what I saw: On the fast-growing outskirts of Minneapolis, most new-build neighborhoods had energy-efficient features that were designed to reduce energy costs and keep families safe and comfortable during the long Minnesota winters. These brand-new developments were flooded with folks working from home, wanting to live near nature, and just trying to make ends meet.

The conversations I had were fascinating. There were plenty of libertarians aspiring to live off the grid, but also many recent immigrants living in multigenerational homes, and newlyweds just starting out and wanting to focus on their work and their family.

And they all wanted solar.

In my training, there was no mention of climate at all. Solar is now all about saving money. People buy rooftop solar because it’s cheaper, period.

The even better news is that utility-scale solar and wind farms are even cheaper to operate than rooftop systems. Scale that fact up from neighborhoods to cities, corporations, and the military, and you can quickly get why, in the words of Kamala Harris, we are not going back.

That’s a good thing for climate: The renewable energy boom has become something much more than just a way to reduce carbon emissions. It has become a pathway to prosperity. Now that renewable energy is the world’s cheapest energy source, it transforms the politics around a key piece of climate action. Wind and solar are not just for fringe environmentalists. They’re for everyone. The renewable revolution is inevitable.

Now, the focus for activists will be on making sure this happens as quickly as possible. There’s no time to waste in speeding the transition to a zero-carbon global economy. This year is now virtually certain to end up as the hottest year in human history yet again, and what’s more, there’s fresh evidence that long-feared climate tipping points are finally arriving. New data show that not only did global forests absorb very little carbon last year, but also wetlands are now emitting methane—a greenhouse gas dozens of times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

There will be plenty of opportunities to mourn environmental losses under Trump, but climate warriors should be unquestionably praised for the fruits of their years of efforts. Because literally every solar panel and wind turbine matters more now than ever before.

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hurricane Milton has rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane. This happened in just over 24 hours—it’s one of the fastest rates of strengthening ever observed on Earth. Meteorologists have even begun to speculate that Milton could approach the theoretical maximum intensity for a hurricane in the Atlantic basin of 195 mph, challenging the record set by Hurricane Allen in 1980.

In response to Milton, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is directing millions of people to leave their homes and head to safety—the state’s largest evacuation since Category 5 Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Milton is expected to make landfall just north of Tampa Bay, its powerful wind and waves fueled by record-hot Gulf of Mexico waters. Though Milton could weaken or end up striking elsewhere, the track it’s currently on is remarkably similar to the 1921 Tampa Bay hurricane—the most recent major hurricane to make landfall in that specific region.

This all comes just on the heels of Category 4 Hurricane Helene, which struck Florida at the end of September. Though it made landfall considerably farther north, it produced “several million cubic yards” of storm debris in the Tampa region. Thousands of beachfront shops and homes were damaged, and the wreckage was jumbled together by record floodwaters. Now, Milton’s approach is creating surreal scenes: Tampa Bay Times reporter Max Chesnes posted a video to X showing one side of a street with piles of debris from Helene. On the other side was a blocks-long line to pick up sandbags to prepare for Milton (sandbags can help block water).

Whether Milton will play out this exact worst case scenario is to be seen—but it is currently poised to be very, very bad either way.

Though it wasn’t a direct hit, Helene was still the worst hurricane the Tampa Bay region has experienced in more than 100 years and added to the damage done by Category 1 Hurricane Debby earlier this year. That already makes for a hellish hurricane season in Florida. But the worst could still be yet to come with Milton.

As of Monday morning, Milton’s peak storm surge forecast by the National Hurricane Center for Tampa Bay was 8 to 12 feet, and almost surely will be revised higher. That would double Hurricane Helene’s record-setting water levels. It would also eclipse the surge the region faced in the 1921 hurricane.

That Tampa has gone more than 100 years without a Category 3 or greater landfall is a coincidental fluke not lost on regional planners. Four years ago, Tampa-area municipalities did a tabletop exercise to simulate the response to a hurricane eerily similar to Milton, called Hurricane Phoenix.

The fictional Hurricane Phoenix even had its own terrifying cinematic trailer, created by the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council:

According to a 10-year-old estimate by Karen Clark and Co., a Boston-based catastrophe modeling firm, a direct hit on Tampa Bay by a Category 5 hurricane could produce upward of $175 billion in damage and potentially kill thousands—a Hurricane Katrina–scale disaster, or even worse. And that’s just on its own.

But this hurricane isn’t even happening in isolation. The one-two punch from Helene and Milton is what climatologists call a “compound event.” With little to no time to prepare between landfalls, human misery becomes greater than the sum of the two storms separately. It’s something that was highlighted as a symptom of climate change in the most recent National Climate Assessment published by the Biden administration last year. As sea level rises and floods become more frequent, folks in Tampa are already fearing the effect of a further rise in housing costs that this year’s storm season will likely bring.

Driven in part by the decades-long streak of good luck with hurricanes—the bulk of the damage happening elsewhere in the state—urban west-central Florida has rapidly expanded. Over the past 50 years, the Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater metro area added nearly 2.5 million people, a growth of 187 percent.

A century’s worth of frantic beachfront development led to irrational choices, the epicenter of which is low-lying Pinellas County. A million people live there, crammed into a narrow peninsula jutting into the Gulf and encompassing a chain of 11 barrier islands. If Milton hits as currently forecast, Pinellas County will never be the same.

Tampa Bay’s ocean bathymetry makes the region uniquely vulnerable to the effects of a direct hit from a hurricane. The shallow estuary acts to funnel flood waters into the bay, making the metro area one of the most at-risk places in the world for storm surges. Though the current forecast is lower for now, in theory, a worst-case major hurricane landfall like Milton could cause 20 or 30 feet of storm surge, on the order of Hurricane Katrina. A direct hit by a Category 5 slightly north of Tampa Bay would maximize the amount of storm surge; if—when—such a situation occurs, it is projected to be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Whether Milton will play out this exact worst-case scenario is to be seen—but it is currently poised to be very, very bad either way.

The reality of climate change is bad enough without late-stage capitalism and MAGA making it worse. For folks in Milton’s path, the Centers for Disease Control maintains a disaster distress hotline if you need someone to talk to.

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hurricane Milton has rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane. This happened in just over 24 hours—it’s one of the fastest rates of strengthening ever observed on Earth. Meteorologists have even begun to speculate that Milton could approach the theoretical maximum intensity for a hurricane in the Atlantic basin of 195 mph, challenging the record set by Hurricane Allen in 1980.

In response to Milton, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is directing millions of people to leave their homes and head to safety—the state’s largest evacuation since Category 5 Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Milton is expected to make landfall just north of Tampa Bay, its powerful wind and waves fueled by record-hot Gulf of Mexico waters. Though Milton could weaken or end up striking elsewhere, the track it’s currently on is remarkably similar to the 1921 Tampa Bay hurricane—the most recent major hurricane to make landfall in that specific region.

This all comes just on the heels of Category 4 Hurricane Helene, which struck Florida at the end of September. Though it made landfall considerably farther north, it produced “several million cubic yards” of storm debris in the Tampa region. Thousands of beachfront shops and homes were damaged, and the wreckage was jumbled together by record floodwaters. Now, Milton’s approach is creating surreal scenes: Tampa Bay Times reporter Max Chesnes posted a video to X showing one side of a street with piles of debris from Helene. On the other side was a blocks-long line to pick up sandbags to prepare for Milton (sandbags can help block water).

Whether Milton will play out this exact worst case scenario is to be seen—but it is currently poised to be very, very bad either way.

Though it wasn’t a direct hit, Helene was still the worst hurricane the Tampa Bay region has experienced in more than 100 years and added to the damage done by Category 1 Hurricane Debby earlier this year. That already makes for a hellish hurricane season in Florida. But the worst could still be yet to come with Milton.

As of Monday morning, Milton’s peak storm surge forecast by the National Hurricane Center for Tampa Bay was 8 to 12 feet, and almost surely will be revised higher. That would double Hurricane Helene’s record-setting water levels. It would also eclipse the surge the region faced in the 1921 hurricane.

That Tampa has gone more than 100 years without a Category 3 or greater landfall is a coincidental fluke not lost on regional planners. Four years ago, Tampa-area municipalities did a tabletop exercise to simulate the response to a hurricane eerily similar to Milton, called Hurricane Phoenix.

The fictional Hurricane Phoenix even had its own terrifying cinematic trailer, created by the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council:

According to a 10-year-old estimate by Karen Clark and Co., a Boston-based catastrophe modeling firm, a direct hit on Tampa Bay by a Category 5 hurricane could produce upward of $175 billion in damage and potentially kill thousands—a Hurricane Katrina–scale disaster, or even worse. And that’s just on its own.

But this hurricane isn’t even happening in isolation. The one-two punch from Helene and Milton is what climatologists call a “compound event.” With little to no time to prepare between landfalls, human misery becomes greater than the sum of the two storms separately. It’s something that was highlighted as a symptom of climate change in the most recent National Climate Assessment published by the Biden administration last year. As sea level rises and floods become more frequent, folks in Tampa are already fearing the effect of a further rise in housing costs that this year’s storm season will likely bring.

Driven in part by the decades-long streak of good luck with hurricanes—the bulk of the damage happening elsewhere in the state—urban west-central Florida has rapidly expanded. Over the past 50 years, the Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater metro area added nearly 2.5 million people, a growth of 187 percent.

A century’s worth of frantic beachfront development led to irrational choices, the epicenter of which is low-lying Pinellas County. A million people live there, crammed into a narrow peninsula jutting into the Gulf and encompassing a chain of 11 barrier islands. If Milton hits as currently forecast, Pinellas County will never be the same.

Tampa Bay’s ocean bathymetry makes the region uniquely vulnerable to the effects of a direct hit from a hurricane. The shallow estuary acts to funnel flood waters into the bay, making the metro area one of the most at-risk places in the world for storm surges. Though the current forecast is lower for now, in theory, a worst-case major hurricane landfall like Milton could cause 20 or 30 feet of storm surge, on the order of Hurricane Katrina. A direct hit by a Category 5 slightly north of Tampa Bay would maximize the amount of storm surge; if—when—such a situation occurs, it is projected to be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Whether Milton will play out this exact worst-case scenario is to be seen—but it is currently poised to be very, very bad either way.

The reality of climate change is bad enough without late-stage capitalism and MAGA making it worse. For folks in Milton’s path, the Centers for Disease Control maintains a disaster distress hotline if you need someone to talk to.