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

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going.”

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China, but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail, planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90 percent in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy, which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

Americans of a certain age tend to throw around the term “Orwellian” willy-nilly. But the expression really suits in describing the behavior of our felonious, twice-impeached president-elect.

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, a dictatorship represented by the all-powerful “Big Brother” dictates the reality its citizens must adhere to, however topsy-turvy. Official slogans include “ignorance is strength,” “freedom is slavery,” and “war is peace.”

In this context, another slogan comes to mind: “Drain the swamp.”

Trump didn’t invent this populist expression, but he made it a centerpiece of his first campaign—a vow to rid DC of the toxic influence of special interest money, lobbyists, etc. Of course, politicians of both parties have long railed, often without much credibility, against special interests in Washington, and the US Supreme Court’s trashing of campaign finance safeguards has indeed created a cesspool of oligarchic influence in DC that crosses party lines.

It’s not the slogan itself that’s Orwellian. The Orwellian part is Trump’s evocation of the Swamp as he appoints foxes to guard the federal henhouse yet again. It’s a trolling of the libs, but a trolling with potentially dire consequences—and a signal that our government is for sale, more openly now than ever.

Exhibit A: Trump’s selection of Chris Wright, the CEO of a Denver fracking services company called Liberty Energy, for the position of energy secretary. Wright has no government experience and certainly no experience related to the nuclear weapons whose oversight is a critical part of DOE’s role.

Meanwhile, as typical of Trump’s cabinet picks to date, Wright’s other qualifications for the job are—to use Orwellian “Newspeak”—doubleplusungood.

It has escaped nobody’s notice that Trump’s top consideration in doling out key positions is loyalty to the boss. For attorney general, he chose Matt Gaetz, an inexperienced lawyer (but fierce loyalist) who has been accused of sexual impropriety—no charges were ever filed—and is notorious for allegedly foisting upon House colleagues videos of women he’s bedded. For his director of national intelligence, Trump picked Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman my colleague Dan Friedman describes as a “uniquely bad choice.” Namely, she lacks intelligence experience and is so in sync with Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine that her nomination was even celebrated on Russian television. To oversee White House communications, he picked a bomb-thrower who cut his teeth at UFC. For Health, he chose Robert Kennedy Jr., a man with no academic expertise in the areas he would oversee, and whose views and priorities are far from the mainstream, as my colleague David Corn has reported. (In this administration, apparently, ignorance is indeed strength.)

Wright, too, is a loyalist, but this pick feels distinctly transactional—Swamplike. Trump, after all, met multiple times during his campaign with top fossil-fuel CEOs, promising that, if they gave him money and helped him get elected, they would be richly rewarded. Wright, who denies the climate crisis and completely dismisses the US clean energy transition—which is weird, because it is well under way, despite the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to thwart it—is the industry’s reward. As was Trump’s choice for Interior, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgham, who is apparently champing at the bit to expand drilling on federal land.

The New York Times reports that Wright’s wife, Liz, co-hosted a Trump fund-raiser in Montana, and that the couple donated a total of $350,000 to a Trump campaign committee. Most notably, Wright was the preferred choice of oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a major Trump donor and co-host of gatherings where candidate Trump wooed oil executives with what sounded suspiciously like a pay-to-play pitch.

Hamm has been playing the political money game for ages. As former Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson wrote in an early profile of the oilman, Hamm began supporting political causes in earnest starting in 2007, founding a group called the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance (slogan: “Good things flow from American oil”) and giving millions of dollars to candidates and right-wing causes supported by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch—including nearly $1 million to support Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 bid for the White House.

In his rush to exploit North Dakota’s Bakken Shale, Harkinson wrote in 2012, Hamm’s company, Continental Resources, “has ridden roughshod over environmental laws….

Documents acquired by ProPublica show that it has spilled at least 200,000 gallons of oil in North Dakota since 2009, far more than any other company. That year, in one of its few formal citations against oil companies, the state’s health department fined Continental $428,500 for poisoning two creeks with thousands of gallons of brine and crude, but later reduced the amount to $35,000. Around the same time, during a thaw, four Continental waste pits overflowed, spilling a toxic soup onto the surrounding land. The Industrial Commission said it would fine the company $125,000, but it ultimately reduced the sum to less than $14,000, since “the wet conditions created circumstances that were unforeseen by Continental.”

Hamm stepped up for Trump in 2016, securing a VIP seat at the 2017 inauguration and exerting his influence during Trump’s first term. From the Washington Post:

In early 2020, he lobbied Trump to help persuade Saudi Arabia and Russia to end a price war that had driven down the price of oil below $0 a barrel, causing Hamm to lose $3 billion in just a few days.

The effort appeared to pay off. In April 2020, under pressure from Trump, members of OPEC, Russia and other oil-producing nations agreed to the largest production cuts ever negotiated—nearly 10 million barrels a day—as oil demand collapsed during the pandemic. 

This time around, Hamm, now Continental’s executive chairman, and his fellow oil and gas executives, would love to see some of those pesky environmental regulations go bye-bye, including the fines imposed under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act on drillers who spew waste methane—a particularly potent greenhouse gas and primary component of so-called natural gas—into the atmosphere.

The purpose of regulating the fossil fuel industry is to ensure Americans clean air and water and at least some hope of escaping the worst ravages of a warming planet. Killing such regulations, and preventing new ones that cost his donors money, is a big part of what this second Trump administration—not to mention the US Supreme Court, with its decisions crippling the automony of federal agencies—is poised to deliver.

Call it Swamp 2.0.

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

For people involved with research and advocacy about climate change, the results of last week’s presidential election sting.

To get a sense of what’s to come and what’s needed to ensure domestic climate action continues, I spoke with Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and author who teaches at Texas Tech University and is chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.

She is one the country’s best-known communicators about climate change and often talks about how her religious faith informs her views about protecting the environment. Her 2021 book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, was not written for this moment, but might as well have been.

She specified that she was speaking for herself and not for her employer or any organization. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you feeling about the election results?

Disappointed and concerned. I was a lead author of the National Climate Assessment under the last Trump administration, and, as you know, I am firmly of the conviction that a thermometer does not give you a different answer depending on how you vote. A hurricane does not knock on your door and ask you which political party you’re registered with before it destroys your home.

Climate change is no longer a future issue. It’s already affecting us today. It’s affecting our health. It’s affecting the economy, which was a big factor in this election. It’s affecting the safety of people’s homes, the cost that they’re paying for insurance and for groceries, and it’s putting our future and that of our children on the line.

I want to see politicians arguing over who has the best solutions to climate change. I want them arguing over how to accelerate the clean energy transition. I want them to have competing proposals for how to build resilience and how to invest in the infrastructure and the food and the water systems that we need to ensure that people have a better and more resilient future. And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what we’re going to see with this administration. Of course, I would be absolutely delighted to be proved wrong.

What’s a good mindset going forward for people who care about supporting the energy transition?

That’s a great question, because our mindset really determines what we focus on and what we can accomplish. So in terms of our mindset, I am an advocate for recognizing, first of all, that the situation is dire, and on many fronts. It’s already getting worse. People might be surprised to hear me say that, because often I’m tagged as a relentless optimist. But for me, hope begins with recognizing how bad the situation is, because you don’t need hope when everything’s fine. And I’m a scientist, so I have a front row seat to what’s happening in terms of climate impacts, and the biodiversity crisis, the pollution crisis and more. So our mindset has to begin with a realistic look at what’s happening and how it is already affecting us. We cannot sugar coat it.

But that is only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin has to be focused on what real solutions look like. And when we lose hope, we tend to look for silver bullets, for one solution that if everybody did this, it would fix the problem. There are no silver bullets, but there’s a lot of silver buckshot, so to speak. If we put it all together, we have more than enough of what we need.

And often, too, when we lose hope and when we’re discouraged and frustrated, I see a tendency to turn on each other, to say, ‘Well, you know, you’re not doing exactly what I think should be done, so I’m not going to talk to you or even work with you. I’m going to criticize what you’re doing.’ Now, more than ever, is a time to come together, to focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, to be focused on what we can accomplish together, even if different people come at it for different reasons. 

I really feel like, in the next four years, we need to lean into collaborations and partnerships and solutions that have multiple wins for both people and the planet. So one group of people might be advocating for solutions because it has an immediate health benefit. Others might see the immediate economic benefit. Others might see the benefit for nature. For too long, we’ve worked in silos, and now we don’t have time for single wins. We need multiple wins. We need partners that are in it for multiple reasons, and the more we focus on what we can accomplish together, I think the more positive outcomes we’re going to see, and the more allies we’re going to gain, especially at the local to regional level.

You’ve talked about your faith and how it informs your thinking about climate. Does that help when facing the potential for adversity like we’re seeing now?

Oh yes, it definitely does. If you’re familiar with the Bible, you know that there are many, many passages that talk about incredibly negative circumstances and our mindset when confronting and addressing those. All through the Bible, whether you’re looking at David or whether you’re looking at the apostle Paul, there are so many stories and histories of people who confronted suffering and felt discouraged and frustrated at the situation that they were in.

I love the fact that you’re bringing up mindset multiple times. The most important part of my faith is not what it says about nature, but what it says about our attitudes and our mindsets. For example, there’s this one verse in Second Timothy, where Paul’s writing to Timothy, who he mentored, and he says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, rather a spirit of power, of love and a sound mind.” And for me, that’s so impactful, because when I start to feel overcome or overwhelmed by fear, as many of us do when we’re dealing with these situations, I remind myself that that’s not coming from God.

What God has given us is a spirit of power, which is a bit of an old-fashioned way to say that we should be empowered, because research shows that when people are overwhelmed with fear it will paralyze us, and that’s the last thing we need right now. We need to be empowered to act.

The second part is the spirit of love, because love considers others. It’s not just about ourselves, it’s not selfish. It’s about other people and other things that are being affected, in most cases, more than we are.

And then the last part is about a sound mind. Our sound mind can use the information that we have to make good decisions, and so that is really my own litmus test for how I’m making decisions…not out of fear, but out of power, love and a sound mind.

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

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going.”

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China, but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail, planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90 percent in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy, which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

I meet Baba Anwar in a crowded, chaotic market in the city of Lagos, Nigeria. He claims he’s in his early 20s, but he looks 15 or 16. Maybe all of 5 feet tall, he’s wearing plastic flip-flops, shorts, and a filthy “Surf Los Angeles” T-shirt and clutching a printed circuit board from a laptop computer, which he says he found in a trash bin. That’s Anwar’s job, scrounging for discarded electronics in Ikeja Computer Village, one of the world’s biggest and most hectic marketplaces for used, repaired, and refurbished electronic products.

The market fills blocks and blocks of narrow streets, all swarming with people jostling for access to hundreds of tiny stalls and storefronts offering to sell, repair, or accessorize digital machinery—laptops, printers, cellphones, hard drives, wireless routers, and every variety of adapter and cable needed to run them. The cacophony of a thousand open-air negotiations is underlaid with the rumbling of diesel generators, the smell of their exhaust mixing with the aroma of fried foods hawked by sidewalk vendors. Determined motorcyclists and women in brightly colored dresses carrying trays of little buns on their heads thread their way through the crowds.

It’s no place for an in-depth conversation, but with the help of my translator, local journalist Bukola Adebayo, I gather that Anwar arrived here about a year before from his deeply impoverished home state of Kano. “No money at home,” he explains. In Lagos, a pandemoniac megalopolis of more than 15 million, he shares a room with a couple of friends from home, also e-waste scrappers. On a good day, he says, he can make as much as 10,000 naira—about $22 at the time of my visit.

Thousands of Nigerians make a meager living recycling e-waste, a broad category that can consist of just about any discarded item with a plug or a battery. This includes the computers, phones, game controllers, and other digital devices that we use and ditch in ever-growing volumes. The world generates more than 68 million tons of e-waste every year, according to the UN, enough to fill a convoy of trucks stretching right around the equator. By 2030, the total is projected to reach 75 million tons.

Only 22 percent of that e-waste is collected and recycled, the UN estimates. The rest is dumped, burned, or forgotten—particularly in rich countries, where most people have no convenient way to get rid of their old Samsung Galaxy phones, Xbox controllers, and myriad other gadgets. Indeed, every year, humanity is wasting more than $60 billion worth of so-called critical metals—the ones we need not only for electronics, but also for the hardware of renewable energy, from electric vehicle (EV) batteries to wind turbines.

Millions of Americans, like me, spend their workdays on pursuits that lack any physical manifestation beyond the occasional hard-copy book or memo or report. It’s easy to forget that all these livelihoods rely on machines. And that those machines rely on metals torn from the Earth.

Consider your smartphone. Depending on the model, it can contain up to two-thirds of the elements in the periodic table, including dozens of metals. Some are familiar, like the gold and tin in its circuitry and the nickel in its microphone. Others less so: Tiny flecks of indium make the screen sensitive to the touch of a finger. Europium enhances the colors. Neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium are used to build the tiny mechanism that makes your phone vibrate.

Your phone’s battery contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Ditto the ones that power your rechargeable drill, Roomba, and electric toothbrush—not to mention our latest modes of transportation, ranging from plug-in scooters and e-bikes to EVs. A Tesla Model S has as much lithium as up to 10,000 smartphones.

The millions of electric cars and trucks hitting the planet’s roads every year don’t spew pollutants directly, but they’ve got a monstrous appetite for electricity, nearly two-thirds of which still comes from burning fossil fuels—about one-third from coal. Harvesting more of our energy from sunlight and wind, as crucial as that is, entails its own Faustian bargain. Capturing, transmitting, storing, and using that cleaner power requires vast numbers of new machines: wind turbines, solar panels, switching stations, power lines, and batteries large and small.

You see where this is going. Our clean energy future, this global drive to save humanity from the ever-worsening ravages of global warming, depends on critical metals. And we’ll be needing more.

A lot more.

In all of human history, we have extracted some 700 million tons of copper from the Earth. To meet our clean energy goals, we’ll have to mine as much again in 20-odd years. By 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, global demand for cobalt for EVs alone will soar to five times what it was in 2022. Demand for nickel will be 10 times higher. Lithium, 15 times. “The prospect of a rapid increase in demand for critical minerals—well above anything seen previously in most cases—raises huge questions about the availability and reliability of supply,” the agency warns.

Metals are natural products, but the Earth does not relinquish them willingly. Mining conglomerates rip up forests and grasslands and deserts, blasting apart the underlying rock and soil and hauling out the remains. The ore is processed, smelted, and refined using gargantuan, energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing machines and oceans of chemicals. “Mining done wrong can leave centuries of harm,” says Aimee Boulanger, head of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, which works with companies to develop more sustainable extraction practices.

“The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies.”

The harm is staggering. Metal mining is America’s leading toxic polluter. It has sullied the watersheds of almost half of the rivers in the American West. Chemical leaks and mining runoff foul air and water. The mines also generate mountains of hazardous waste, stored behind dams that have a terrifying tendency to fail. Torrents of poisonous sludge pouring through collapsed tailings dams have contaminated waterways in Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere and killed hundreds of people—in addition to the hundreds, possibly thousands, of miners who die in workplace accidents each year.

To get what they’re after, mining companies devour natural resources on an epic scale. They dig up some 250 tons of ore and waste rock to get just 1 ton of nickel. For copper, the ratio is double that. Just to obtain the metals inside your 4.5-ounce iPhone, 75 pounds of ore had to be pulled up, crushed, and smelted, releasing up to 100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Mining firms also suck up massive quantities of water and deploy fleets of drill rigs, trucks, diggers, and other heavy machinery that collectively belch out up to 7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

These operations are not popular with the neighbors. Irate locals and Indigenous communities at this moment are fighting proposed critical-metal mines across the United States, in addition to Brazil, Canada, the Philippines, Serbia, and many other countries. At least 320 anti-mining activists have been killed worldwide since 2012—and they are just the ones we know about.

All this said, while researching my book Power Metal, I was surprised to learn that the mining industry no longer gets away—not easily, anyway—with much of the nasty behavior it has been known for. Some collateral damage is inevitable, but a growing awareness of the industry’s history of human rights abuses and dirty environmental practices—as well as public pressure on consumer-facing companies like Apple and Tesla to clean up their supply chains—has made for some real improvements in how big mining firms operate.

Yet even these beneficial developments come with an asterisk: In the 1950s, it took three or four years to bring a new copper mine online in the United States. Now the average windup is 16 years. “The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies,” the International Energy Agency warned in 2022.

If this demand can’t be met, the agency added, nations will fail “to achieve the goals in the Paris Agreement,” the 2016 UN treaty aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (and from which President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw—again—during his second term).

And then we’re really in trouble.

It’s a vexing conundrum. In my reporting, I have talked to a wide range of people who are deeply and justifiably concerned about the threats our new mining frenzy will pose to the environment. While acknowledging their fears, I would always ask, “Yes, but what’s the alternative?”

Their answer, almost always, was, “Recycling!”

That may sound straightforward. It isn’t. Metal recycling is a completely different proposition from recycling the paper and glass we toss into our home bins for pickup. It turns out that retrieving valuable raw materials sustainably from electronic products—toasters, iPhones, power cables—is a fiendishly complex endeavor, requiring many steps carried out in many places. Manufacturing those products required a multistep international supply chain. Recycling them requires a reverse supply chain almost as complicated.

Part of the problem is that our devices typically contain only a small amount of any given metal. In developing countries, though, there are lots of people willing to put in the time and effort required to recover that little bit of value—an estimated tens of thousands of e-waste scavengers in Nigeria alone. Some go door to door with pushcarts, offering to take or even buy unwanted electronics. Others, like Anwar, work the secondhand markets, buying bits of broken gear from small businesses or rescuing them from the trash. Many scavengers earn less than the international poverty wage of about $2.15 per day.

I ask Anwar where he’s planning to take his circuit board. “To TJ,” he replies, as if I’d asked him what color the sky is.

TJ is Tijjani Abubakar, an entrepreneur who has built a thriving business turning unwanted electronics into cash. His third-floor office, in a dingy concrete building across a roaring four-lane road from the Ikeja market, is a charnel house of dead mobile phones. At one end of the long, crowded room, two skinny young men with screwdrivers pull phone after phone from a sack and crack them like walnuts. Their practiced fingers pull out the green printed circuit boards and toss them with a clatter onto a growing heap at their feet.

Thousands of such boards gleam flatly under the glaring LED ceiling lights. More young men sit around on plastic stools sorting them into piles and pulling aside those with the most valuable chips. The air is thick with sweat despite the open windows.

At a scuffed wooden desk sits Abubakar himself—a big man with a steady demeanor, lordly in an embroidered brown caftan, red cap, and crisp beard. I await an audience as he fields calls and messages on three different phones and a laptop while negotiating a deal with a couple of visiting traders over an unlabeled bottle of something.

Abubakar, who looks to be in his mid-40s, has been in the trade nearly 20 years. He, too, hails from Kano, where his father sold clothes—“not a rich man,” he tells me in his even baritone. He earned a business degree from a local university and made his way to Lagos, where a friend introduced him to the e-waste business. “We started small, small, small, small,” he says. But getting a foothold was easier then. Scrap was cheap, even free, because few people were willing to pay for it. Then, as the trade mushroomed, deep-pocketed foreign buyers—from India, Lebanon, and, above all, China—began flocking to Nigeria in search of deals.

“Now everybody knows the prices,” Abubakar says. But his business has flourished. He exports several shipping containers full of e-waste every month to buyers in China and Europe. He’s grown wealthy enough to donate textbooks, meals, and cows to families back in Kano. Dead cellphones converted into education and food. Trash into possibilities.

In 2022, some 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded globally. Placed end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back.

Abubakar handles all manner of e-waste, but the phones are his specialty. There is just shy of one mobile account for every one of Nigeria’s 220 million people. “What do I see here?” he asks, indicating his roomful of workers. “I don’t know whether any of these people have a computer. But I know all of them have a phone.” And all of those phones will one day wear out, malfunction, or get tossed by someone eager for a newer model. In 2022, an estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded worldwide. If you put them end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back.

Abubakar deploys a vast network of buyers and pickers to source spent phones from Nigeria and neighboring countries, and occasionally as far away as France. They arrive by truck, train, and in sacks carried by people like Anwar. These precisely engineered products were manufactured in sophisticated, high-tech factories under ultra-clean conditions. Here, they are eviscerated by hand on a grimy concrete pad.

Abubakar estimates he has about 5,000 workers bringing in millions of phones each year. When I express polite skepticism, he rises and gestures for me to follow. A door in the back of the office leads into a warren of rooms filled either with enormous sacks stuffed with phones, people cracking and sorting phones, or bales of circuit boards ready for shipping.

The most desirable components are those circuit boards, etched with copper and often precious metals, including gold, that carry signals among the soldered-on chips and capacitors. The chips are removed for assessment. If they still work, they can be sold for use in refurbished phones. Abubakar shows me a lunch bag-sized sack of Android chips with serial numbers so tiny I can barely make them out. “This bag is worth around $35,000,” he says. A sack of phone cameras—consisting of the lens you see from the outside attached to a strip of metal foil on the inside—is also valuable. Abubakar trains security cameras on his workers to discourage pilfering. He fired someone the week before for stealing chips, he tells me.

None of the phones were made in Nigeria, and their remains won’t stay here either. Extracting the metals therein requires sophisticated and expensive equipment that no facility in Africa has, so Abubakar sells to recyclers in China and Western Europe that do.

The problem of rich countries “dumping” e-waste on poorer ones has received plenty of attention over the past couple of decades. But in West Africa and other parts of the developing world, most e-waste is now generated domestically. The gadgets passing through Abubakar’s facility were largely imported as new or refurbished products, sold to Nigerian consumers, and later discarded. Relatively little goes to waste. If you live on $2 a day, after all, making a dime from a discarded electric toothbrush is worth your effort. The result is that about 75 percent of Nigeria’s e-waste is collected for some kind of recycling. In nearby Ghana, estimates run as high as 95 percent.

The landscape is different in the United States, where fewer than 1 in 6 dead mobile phones is recycled. The same stat holds in Europe, where roughly two-thirds of all e-waste never makes it into official recycling streams. This is “surprising,” says Alexander Batteiger, an e-waste expert with the German development organization GIZ, “because we have fully functioning recycling systems.”

Or maybe not so surprising. Nobody in the rich world, after all, goes house to house asking for old iPhone 6s or Bluetooth speakers. Sure, there are e-waste collection drives at schools and churches, and you can take old electronics to Best Buy or the local hazardous waste facility—but few people bother. Instead, countless millions of phones and laptops and blenders and microwaves accumulate in attics, closets, junk drawers, garages, and, all too often, the dump.

In Africa, businesses like Abubakar’s keep countless tons of toxic trash out of landfills, reduce the need for mining, and create thousands of jobs—hardly a trivial consideration in a nation where nearly two-thirds of people live in poverty. There’s much to celebrate here. But neither is it the whole story.

An hour’s drive from Abubakar’s office, through a maelstrom of Lagos traffic, sits the Katangua dumpsite, a sprawling, teeming maze of tiny workshops, scrapyards, wrecking zones, and slums, loosely built around a mountain of trash at least 20 feet tall.

This colossus is surrounded by a corroded tin fence held up with bits of scrap wood. Plumes of thick black smoke wend upward from within. The squalor here is unfathomable. The ground underfoot consists of churned-up mud and trampled-in plastic trash. Barefoot children wander among shacks of cardboard, plywood, and plastic sheeting. Adebayo, the local journalist helping me out, and I pick our way around huge puddles, following men and women carrying sacks of discarded metals, all of us retreating to the roadside as trucks piled high with aluminum cans and other scrap wallow past.

Practically every type of metal and e-waste is recycled somewhere in this labyrinth. The resourcefulness of the people is as astonishing as the conditions are appalling. At one yard, owner Mohammed Yusuf proudly shows me his aluminum recycling operation. Pickers bring him cans from all over the city, 2 or 3 tons a day. At the rear of the yard, there’s a covered area with a brick-lined, rectangular hole in the ground about the size of a bathtub, and a smell reminiscent of rotting chicken.

At night, Yusuf tells me, his workers fill the hole with cans, melt them down with a gas-powered torch, then scoop the molten metal into molds using a long ladle. This results in silvery, 2-kilogram ingots pure enough to sell to a manufacturer that makes new cans. The process generates intensely toxic fumes and dust, and his workers wear protective masks. “What about the others nearby?” I ask him. Yusuf nods sagely. That’s why they do it at night, he explains, when the people who live near the yard are asleep in their shacks.

Later, squeezing through a gap in the ragged fence, Adebayo and I find ourselves in an open area at the base of the towering garbage pile. There, four young men are tending small fires, burning the coatings off piles of wire to get at the copper inside. The flames are beautiful—deep cupric blues and greens licking up amid the orange. The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system. The men are wearing shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops—no respirators or other safety gear in sight.

The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system.

Between the open-air smelting, wire burning, and other miscellaneous wrecking, I’m horrified by the thought of how thoroughly poisoned Katangua must be. “Do you worry about breathing the smoke?” I ask one of the burners, a muscular 36-year-old named Alabi Mohammed. He shrugs: “We don’t know any other job. We don’t have any other option.” He’s been living here since he was 8, he says.

There are other harmful recycling practices I don’t see at Katangua. Scrapped circuit boards are a good source of palladium, gold, and silver—according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, a ton of circuit boards contains from 40 to 800 times the amount of gold found in a ton of ore. You can run them through a shredder and ship the fragments to special refineries, typically in Europe or Japan, where the gold is extracted with chemicals. “It’s a precise, mostly clean method of recycling, but it’s also very, very expensive,” author Adam Minter explains in his 2014 book, Junkyard Planet. In many developing countries, he notes, the gold is “removed using highly corrosive acids, often without the benefit of safety equipment for the workers. Once the acids are used up, they’re often dumped in rivers and other open bodies of water.”

The latter poses clear health and environmental hazards, but it’s cheap and easy, just as extracting copper from plastic-coated wires requires no special equipment—only gasoline and matches. Which is why low-wage laborers around the globe risk their lives burning old extension cords or dousing circuit boards with chemicals to retrieve metals that other low-wage workers risked their lives to dig up in the first place. In Guiyu, home to China’s biggest e-waste recycling complex, studies have found extremely high levels of lead and other toxins in the blood of local children. A 2019 study by Toxics Link, an Indian nonprofit, identified more than a dozen unlicensed e-waste recycling “hotspots” around Delhi employing some 50,000 people—unprotected workers exposed to chemical vapors, metallic dusts, and acidic effluents—and where hazardous wastes were improperly dumped.

Spent lithium batteries present their own recycling challenge. They are potentially among the world’s best sources for critical metals—one study found that battery recycling theoretically could satisfy nearly half of global demand for certain metals. Yet only about 5 percent of them get recycled because they are uniquely hard to handle—and dangerous.

Nigeria, for example, is awash in lithium-ion batteries, but no place on the continent recycles them. They need to be exported. Shippers don’t want to take them, however, because of their disturbing tendency to burst into flames when punctured, crushed, or overheated. Battery fires can exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They also emit toxic gases and are very hard to extinguish. American consumers are asked to bring unwanted lithium batteries to a domestic recycler or a hazardous waste site, and for good reason. Every year, batteries from everything from old Priuses to sex toys cause hundreds of fires in US scrapyards, landfills, and even on garbage trucks, causing millions of dollars in damage. Residents of Fredericktown, Missouri, even had to evacuate their homes earlier this month when a local battery recycling facility exploded dramatically into flames.

Even in developing countries, unwanted batteries often end up in local landfills, where, beyond the fire risk, they leak toxic chemicals. Or unscrupulous exporters mislabel them, bribing port officials to not examine their shipments too closely. “I’ve heard there’s a major fire every six months,” says Eric Frederickson, vice president of operations at Call2Recycle, America’s largest battery-collection organization, “but you never hear about most of them, because they just tip the container over the side of the boat.”

Reinhardt Smit is trying something different. He’s the supply chain director for Closing the Loop, a Netherlands-based startup that aims to recycle phones from Africa using certifiably sound environmental and social methods: no burned cables, battery fires, trashed plastics, or unprotected workers—every step of the process done responsibly, the way Western consumers like it.

In a 2021 pilot project, Closing the Loop collected and sent 5 tons of phones—plastic, batteries, cables, and all—from Nigeria to a Belgian recycler in what it claims was the first such legally sanctioned shipment ever. The project succeeded from a sustainability standpoint, but it was a money-loser. Clean recycling, it turns out, is hideously expensive.

The phones were sourced from Hinckley Recycling, one of Nigeria’s two (yes, only two) fully licensed e-waste handlers. At Hinckley’s compound on the outskirts of Lagos, workers dismantle phones, computers, and TVs in a clean and well-lit warehouse, wearing reflective vests and protective gloves. It’s clearly a safer and more humane workplace than the others I witnessed, but that adds to the cost.

Convincing a shipper to transport the batteries also required a pricey workaround: They were removed from the phones and placed in barrels filled with sand, eliminating the fire danger. But that meant Closing the Loop had to pay extra to transport hundreds of pounds of sand per shipment.

“It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius noted in 2021.

Dealing with unwanted materials was another cost. “If I recycle every component in a phone, I lose money,” explains Adrian Clewes, Hinckley’s managing director. Everyone wants copper, for instance, but phones are mostly plastic, which Closing the Loop must pay a recycler to take. Clewes talks about “positive” and “negative” fractions, meaning the profitable components vs. those that cost him money.

Some fractions toggle between positive and negative depending on the prevailing prices. Say you want to sell a bag of circuit boards containing a total of 1 pound of copper. And say it will cost the smelter $2 to extract the metal. If copper is selling for $4 a pound, the smelter can buy the boards for $1 and make a tidy profit. If copper drops to $3, the deal’s off and the boards are sitting in your warehouse. If you have ample space, you can wait for prices to bounce back. If not, maybe you’re tempted to bring those boards to the dump.

Finally, you have your administrative costs. Global regulations preventing rich countries from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones have, ironically enough, made it harder to get waste out of the poor countries. The Basel Convention, for one, requires any ship carrying e-waste to get approval from the exporting and importing countries and consent from any country where it might dock en route. This creates oceans of red tape. “Observing the Basel notifications can be painful. It takes months,” says Batteiger, the German e-waste expert. “The Basel Convention is valuable—without it, there would be more dumping—but it has the side effect of blocking exports from the developing world to industrialized countries.”

All told, the cost of doing things by the book makes it almost impossible to turn a profit. Smit’s idea is to get green-minded corporations to cover the difference by paying him to recycle one dead African phone for each new phone it buys.

The concept is akin to selling carbon offsets, and it’s gaining some traction. Closing the Loop now operates in some 10 African countries and has collected several million dead electronic devices. Its near-future target is 2 million phones per year, though that’s admittedly a drop in the bucket. “There are 2 billion phones sold every year,” concedes founder Joost de Kluijver. “We can’t collect all that.”

Comparing the efforts of companies like Closing the Loop and those of the “informal” sector in Nigeria and elsewhere, which provides jobs for thousands of desperate people, it’s hard to say which is better. One might ask, better for whom? Unregulated dumping, wire burning, and the lack of safety equipment don’t meet Western environmental and labor standards. But those standards aren’t top of mind for people who can barely feed and house themselves.

There are other geopolitical aspects to the race for critical metals. Russia, for example, is a prodigious exporter of copper, nickel, palladium, and other metals so crucial that they were spared from international sanctions after Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine. And then there’s China, which—via its own resources, lax standards, diplomatic clout, and overseas investments—has come to dominate the global supply chain.

Regardless of origin, most critical metals will at some point pass through China, which controls more than half of global refining capacity for cobalt, graphite (another battery ingredient), and lithium, and almost as much for nickel and copper. Using those metals, its factories pump out most of the world’s solar panels, a hefty share of its wind turbines, and a majority of its EVs. It also produces nearly three-quarters of lithium-ion batteries and recycles far more of them than any other nation. A subsidiary of CATL, China’s biggest battery maker, can now recycle up to 120,000 tons per year and is investing billions in new plants.

Congress, having deemed China’s dominance in these sectors a threat “to economic growth, competitiveness, and national security,” has responded by sinking money into alternative sources. The 2022 infrastructure bill included $7 billion to develop a domestic supply chain for battery minerals, and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the same year, unlocked billions more to subsidize batteries and EVs manufactured with domestically sourced metals—though some of the funds may be clawed back or left unspent under the new Republican leadership.

“The economics are very challenging…There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.”

In the United States and elsewhere, major automakers are partnering with recyclers and even building their own plants, recognizing that old batteries are a cheaper, cleaner, and more appealing source of critical metals than mining is. “It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius said at a 2021 climate summit. In remote Nevada, a company called Redwood Materials has built an enormous EV battery recycling operation. Redwood has inked deals with Tesla, Amazon, and Volkswagen and has attracted nearly $2 billion in capital.

Redwood’s main rival is Canada-based Li-Cycle, which had more than 400 employees at the time of my visit. The company partners with commodities giant Glencore and boasts facilities in Arizona, Alabama, New York; Kingston, Ontario; and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Li-Cycle secured a $475 million line of credit from the Department of Energy. It is now capable of processing about 53,000 tons a year of shredded battery material, which consists mainly of copper and aluminum flakes, plus a grainy sludge known as “black mass” that contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel.

At the company’s Kingston headquarters, I get a tour from Ajay Kochhar, a chemical engineer with neatly combed black hair who co-founded Li-Cycle in 2016 with a metallurgist pal. “We heard lots of people say, ‘You guys are too early,’” he tells me with a smile. The company produced its first batch of shredded battery material that year. “It took us three months to get 20 tons,” Kochhar says. Five years later, his company went public at a valuation of almost $1.7 billion. (As of this writing, the number is considerably lower.)

On the day of my visit, an aggregator had delivered a truckload of batteries from laptops, cellphones, and power tools. I watch as the batteries are loaded onto a conveyor belt, where workers strip off plastic casings and packaging and check labels to make sure they are indeed lithium-ion batteries. Further along, the batteries are dumped into a column of water leading to a shredder whose mighty steel teeth rip them into tiny pieces. Any remaining plastic floats to the surface and is skimmed off. The metals are separated in further steps. Breakfast-cereal-sized flakes of copper and aluminum are poured into large, heavy plastic bags, leaving the black mass behind. Li-Cycle currently sells the former metals to companies like Glencore, which make them into ingots. The black mass goes to other firms that use chemicals to extract the remaining metals.

Perhaps the biggest immediate challenge for companies like Li-Cycle, oddly, is a dearth of batteries to shred. It’s mostly pre-consumer factory scrap and defective batteries from manufacturers keeping their conveyers busy. EVs are so new to the market that few have been junked—and even those are often snapped up for uses such as off-grid power storage. Most consumer lithium batteries aren’t collected at all. “We’ve looked at doing the collection ourselves, but the economics are very challenging,” Kochhar told me. “There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.”

The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, which grows on the nickel-rich island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel.

So how can more e-waste be brought into the reverse supply chain? One approach is to shift the onus onto the firms that manufactured the gadgets in the first place, a policy known as “extended producer responsibility.” China and much of Europe have codified this policy in laws that govern not only e-waste, but also glass, plastics, and even cars. Sometimes, it just means charging manufacturers a fee to help cover the downstream recycling costs. In the EU, though, carmakers are responsible for collecting and recycling their own dead vehicles. China, which since 2018 has required manufacturers to collect and recycle lithium-ion batteries, also mandates that new batteries contain minimum amounts of certain recycled materials.

China now recycles at least half of its batteries, according to CATL. “In North America, it’s mainly us and Redwood,” Kochhar says. “There are many more in Europe.” But what’s happening in China, he says, “is way ahead of what we’re doing here.”

As a strictly economic proposition, it’s often cheaper to mine fresh metals than recycle them. And some of the relevant products are tremendously hard to recycle: Less than 5 percent of rare earth magnets are currently recycled, for example, and an estimated 9 in 10 spent solar panels—which cost roughly $20 to $30 to recycle vs. $1 to $2 to bring to the dump—end up in landfills. Ditto the massive blades on wind turbines, of which more than 720,000 tons are projected to be trashed by 2040. The bottom line is that meaningful e-waste recycling in the United States is probably going to require government support.

And why not subsidize? China, our biggest rival in the clean energy sector, offers tax breaks to metal recyclers, even as US taxpayers spend billions subsidizing fossil fuels and mining operations. Under the Biden administration, Congress directed some $370 billion to bolster renewable energy technologies, including nearly $40 billion for nuclear energy and more than $12 billion to promote sales and manufacturing of EVs and their batteries, but has included only a couple of billion toward recycling.

If you’re dissatisfied with your old iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in developing countries who would love to have it.

New technologies might help somewhat. British researchers are working on inexpensive reactors they hope can facilitate recovery of rare earths. In Texas, Apple is testing a robot that can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour to aid in recycling. Mining giant Rio Tinto is experimenting with ways to extract lithium that exists in boron mining waste, and a Canadian startup is working to recover rare earths from tin-mine tailings.

Scientists are even studying plants that can suck up trace metals through their roots and concentrate them in their sap, stems, or leaves. The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, a tree that grows on the nickel-rich Pacific island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel. Other “hyperaccumulators” slurp up cobalt, lithium, and zinc. Startups are springing up, hoping to capitalize on these special properties, which could also be used to clean up polluted soil.

None of this is a silver bullet. Even if humanity could recover all of the critical metals in use—and we can’t—we’d still have to mine more to meet rising demand. Consider that we now recycle less than 1 percent of the lithium used around the world, and we’ll be mining hard-to-recover rare earths for decades to come. “Nothing—nothing—is 100 percent recyclable, and many things, including things we think are recyclable, like iPhone touch screens, are unrecyclable,” Minter writes in Junkyard Planet. “Everyone from the local junkyard to Apple to the US government would be doing the planet a very big favor if they stopped implying otherwise, and instead conveyed a more realistic picture of what recycling can and can’t do.”

Recycling is important, yes. But it is also utterly insufficient to meet our needs. We tend to think of it as the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it often can be one of the worst. Consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to smash it to pieces, melt down the bits, and mold them into a whole new bottle—an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time, and expense.

Or you could just wash it and reuse it.

That’s a better alternative—and hardly a new idea. For much of the last century, gas stations, dairies, and other companies sold products in glass bottles that they would later collect, wash, and reuse.

Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to its constituent metals requires a great deal more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, unsafe labor than refurbishing that product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones, and even solar panels online and in some stores. But refurbishing is only really widespread in the developing world. If you’re a North American no longer satisfied with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less-affluent countries who would be happy to take it.

There are important lessons here, and perhaps the most important of all is this: As we look ahead, we will need to start thinking beyond merely replacing fossil fuels with renewables and increasing our supplies of raw materials. Rather, we will need to reshape our relationship to energy and natural resources altogether. That seems like a tall order, but there’s a range of things we can do—as consumers, as voters, as human beings—to assuage the downstream effects of our technological arms race.

Moving forward, our critical metals will come from all sorts of mines and scrapyards and recycling centers around the globe. Some will emerge from new sources, using new methods and technologies. And the choices we make about where and how we get those metals, and who prospers and suffers in the process, are tremendously important. But no less important is the question of how much of all these things we truly need—and how to reduce that need.

We’re lucky in one respect: We’re still only at the beginning of a historic worldwide transition. The key will be figuring out how to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of the last one.

Follow Vince Beiser’s ongoing reporting at powermetal.substack.com.

Americans of a certain age tend to throw around the term “Orwellian” willy-nilly. But the expression really suits in describing the behavior of our felonious, twice-impeached president-elect.

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, a dictatorship represented by the all-powerful “Big Brother” dictates the reality its citizens must adhere to, however topsy-turvy. Official slogans include “ignorance is strength,” “freedom is slavery,” and “war is peace.”

In this context, another slogan comes to mind: “Drain the swamp.”

Trump didn’t invent this populist expression, but he made it a centerpiece of his first campaign—a vow to rid DC of the toxic influence of special interest money, lobbyists, etc. Of course, politicians of both parties have long railed, often without much credibility, against special interests in Washington, and the US Supreme Court’s trashing of campaign finance safeguards has indeed created a cesspool of oligarchic influence in DC that crosses party lines.

It’s not the slogan itself that’s Orwellian. The Orwellian part is Trump’s evocation of the Swamp as he appoints foxes to guard the federal henhouse yet again. It’s a trolling of the libs, but a trolling with potentially dire consequences—and a signal that our government is for sale, more openly now than ever.

Exhibit A: Trump’s selection of Chris Wright, the CEO of a Denver fracking services company called Liberty Energy, for the position of energy secretary. Wright has no government experience and certainly no experience related to the nuclear weapons whose oversight is a critical part of DOE’s role.

Meanwhile, as typical of Trump’s cabinet picks to date, Wright’s other qualifications for the job are—to use Orwellian “Newspeak”—doubleplusungood.

It has escaped nobody’s notice that Trump’s top consideration in doling out key positions is loyalty to the boss. For attorney general, he chose Matt Gaetz, an inexperienced lawyer (but fierce loyalist) who has been accused of sexual impropriety—no charges were ever filed—and is notorious for allegedly foisting upon House colleagues videos of women he’s bedded. For his director of national intelligence, Trump picked Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman my colleague Dan Friedman describes as a “uniquely bad choice.” Namely, she lacks intelligence experience and is so in sync with Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine that her nomination was even celebrated on Russian television. To oversee White House communications, he picked a bomb-thrower who cut his teeth at UFC. For Health, he chose Robert Kennedy Jr., a man with no academic expertise in the areas he would oversee, and whose views and priorities are far from the mainstream, as my colleague David Corn has reported. (In this administration, apparently, ignorance is indeed strength.)

Wright, too, is a loyalist, but this pick feels distinctly transactional—Swamplike. Trump, after all, met multiple times during his campaign with top fossil-fuel CEOs, promising that, if they gave him money and helped him get elected, they would be richly rewarded. Wright, who denies the climate crisis and completely dismisses the US clean energy transition—which is weird, because it is well under way, despite the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to thwart it—is the industry’s reward. As was Trump’s choice for Interior, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgham, who is apparently champing at the bit to expand drilling on federal land.

The New York Times reports that Wright’s wife, Liz, co-hosted a Trump fund-raiser in Montana, and that the couple donated a total of $350,000 to a Trump campaign committee. Most notably, Wright was the preferred choice of oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a major Trump donor and co-host of gatherings where candidate Trump wooed oil executives with what sounded suspiciously like a pay-to-play pitch.

Hamm has been playing the political money game for ages. As former Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson wrote in an early profile of the oilman, Hamm began supporting political causes in earnest starting in 2007, founding a group called the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance (slogan: “Good things flow from American oil”) and giving millions of dollars to candidates and right-wing causes supported by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch—including nearly $1 million to support Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 bid for the White House.

In his rush to exploit North Dakota’s Bakken Shale, Harkinson wrote in 2012, Hamm’s company, Continental Resources, “has ridden roughshod over environmental laws….

Documents acquired by ProPublica show that it has spilled at least 200,000 gallons of oil in North Dakota since 2009, far more than any other company. That year, in one of its few formal citations against oil companies, the state’s health department fined Continental $428,500 for poisoning two creeks with thousands of gallons of brine and crude, but later reduced the amount to $35,000. Around the same time, during a thaw, four Continental waste pits overflowed, spilling a toxic soup onto the surrounding land. The Industrial Commission said it would fine the company $125,000, but it ultimately reduced the sum to less than $14,000, since “the wet conditions created circumstances that were unforeseen by Continental.”

Hamm stepped up for Trump in 2016, securing a VIP seat at the 2017 inauguration and exerting his influence during Trump’s first term. From the Washington Post:

In early 2020, he lobbied Trump to help persuade Saudi Arabia and Russia to end a price war that had driven down the price of oil below $0 a barrel, causing Hamm to lose $3 billion in just a few days.

The effort appeared to pay off. In April 2020, under pressure from Trump, members of OPEC, Russia and other oil-producing nations agreed to the largest production cuts ever negotiated—nearly 10 million barrels a day—as oil demand collapsed during the pandemic. 

This time around, Hamm, now Continental’s executive chairman, and his fellow oil and gas executives, would love to see some of those pesky environmental regulations go bye-bye, including the fines imposed under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act on drillers who spew waste methane—a particularly potent greenhouse gas and primary component of so-called natural gas—into the atmosphere.

The purpose of regulating the fossil fuel industry is to ensure Americans clean air and water and at least some hope of escaping the worst ravages of a warming planet. Killing such regulations, and preventing new ones that cost his donors money, is a big part of what this second Trump administration—not to mention the US Supreme Court, with its decisions crippling the automony of federal agencies—is poised to deliver.

Call it Swamp 2.0.

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

For people involved with research and advocacy about climate change, the results of last week’s presidential election sting.

To get a sense of what’s to come and what’s needed to ensure domestic climate action continues, I spoke with Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and author who teaches at Texas Tech University and is chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.

She is one the country’s best-known communicators about climate change and often talks about how her religious faith informs her views about protecting the environment. Her 2021 book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, was not written for this moment, but might as well have been.

She specified that she was speaking for herself and not for her employer or any organization. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you feeling about the election results?

Disappointed and concerned. I was a lead author of the National Climate Assessment under the last Trump administration, and, as you know, I am firmly of the conviction that a thermometer does not give you a different answer depending on how you vote. A hurricane does not knock on your door and ask you which political party you’re registered with before it destroys your home.

Climate change is no longer a future issue. It’s already affecting us today. It’s affecting our health. It’s affecting the economy, which was a big factor in this election. It’s affecting the safety of people’s homes, the cost that they’re paying for insurance and for groceries, and it’s putting our future and that of our children on the line.

I want to see politicians arguing over who has the best solutions to climate change. I want them arguing over how to accelerate the clean energy transition. I want them to have competing proposals for how to build resilience and how to invest in the infrastructure and the food and the water systems that we need to ensure that people have a better and more resilient future. And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what we’re going to see with this administration. Of course, I would be absolutely delighted to be proved wrong.

What’s a good mindset going forward for people who care about supporting the energy transition?

That’s a great question, because our mindset really determines what we focus on and what we can accomplish. So in terms of our mindset, I am an advocate for recognizing, first of all, that the situation is dire, and on many fronts. It’s already getting worse. People might be surprised to hear me say that, because often I’m tagged as a relentless optimist. But for me, hope begins with recognizing how bad the situation is, because you don’t need hope when everything’s fine. And I’m a scientist, so I have a front row seat to what’s happening in terms of climate impacts, and the biodiversity crisis, the pollution crisis and more. So our mindset has to begin with a realistic look at what’s happening and how it is already affecting us. We cannot sugar coat it.

But that is only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin has to be focused on what real solutions look like. And when we lose hope, we tend to look for silver bullets, for one solution that if everybody did this, it would fix the problem. There are no silver bullets, but there’s a lot of silver buckshot, so to speak. If we put it all together, we have more than enough of what we need.

And often, too, when we lose hope and when we’re discouraged and frustrated, I see a tendency to turn on each other, to say, ‘Well, you know, you’re not doing exactly what I think should be done, so I’m not going to talk to you or even work with you. I’m going to criticize what you’re doing.’ Now, more than ever, is a time to come together, to focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, to be focused on what we can accomplish together, even if different people come at it for different reasons. 

I really feel like, in the next four years, we need to lean into collaborations and partnerships and solutions that have multiple wins for both people and the planet. So one group of people might be advocating for solutions because it has an immediate health benefit. Others might see the immediate economic benefit. Others might see the benefit for nature. For too long, we’ve worked in silos, and now we don’t have time for single wins. We need multiple wins. We need partners that are in it for multiple reasons, and the more we focus on what we can accomplish together, I think the more positive outcomes we’re going to see, and the more allies we’re going to gain, especially at the local to regional level.

You’ve talked about your faith and how it informs your thinking about climate. Does that help when facing the potential for adversity like we’re seeing now?

Oh yes, it definitely does. If you’re familiar with the Bible, you know that there are many, many passages that talk about incredibly negative circumstances and our mindset when confronting and addressing those. All through the Bible, whether you’re looking at David or whether you’re looking at the apostle Paul, there are so many stories and histories of people who confronted suffering and felt discouraged and frustrated at the situation that they were in.

I love the fact that you’re bringing up mindset multiple times. The most important part of my faith is not what it says about nature, but what it says about our attitudes and our mindsets. For example, there’s this one verse in Second Timothy, where Paul’s writing to Timothy, who he mentored, and he says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, rather a spirit of power, of love and a sound mind.” And for me, that’s so impactful, because when I start to feel overcome or overwhelmed by fear, as many of us do when we’re dealing with these situations, I remind myself that that’s not coming from God.

What God has given us is a spirit of power, which is a bit of an old-fashioned way to say that we should be empowered, because research shows that when people are overwhelmed with fear it will paralyze us, and that’s the last thing we need right now. We need to be empowered to act.

The second part is the spirit of love, because love considers others. It’s not just about ourselves, it’s not selfish. It’s about other people and other things that are being affected, in most cases, more than we are.

And then the last part is about a sound mind. Our sound mind can use the information that we have to make good decisions, and so that is really my own litmus test for how I’m making decisions…not out of fear, but out of power, love and a sound mind.

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

Some of the votes Americans cast on Tuesday that may have mattered most for the climate were quite a bit down-ballot from the presidential ticket: A handful of states held elections for the commissions that regulate utilities, and thereby exercise direct control over what sort of energy mix will fuel the coming years’ expected growth in electricity demand. In three closely watched races around the country—the utility commissions in Arizona, Montana, and Louisiana—Republican candidates either won or are in the lead. While they generally pitched themselves to voters as market-friendly, favoring an all-of-the-above approach to energy, clean energy advocates interviewed by Grist cast these candidates as deferential to the power companies they aspired to regulate.

Arizona is, in a word, sunny. Its geography makes it “the famously obvious place to build solar,” said Caroline Spears, executive director of Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that works to get clean energy advocates elected. But its utilities have built just a sliver of the potential solar energy that there is room for in the state—and the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities, is partly to blame for that. That commission’s most recent goal for renewable energy, set in 2007, was an unambitious 15 percent to be reached by 2025. “Their goals are worse than where Texas currently is and where Iowa currently is on clean energy,” Spears said. What’s more, the current slate of commissioners is in the process of considering whether to ditch that goal altogether.

Louisiana’s Public Service Commission is described as “one of the most reviled utilities in the country by its customers.”

Those commissioners have held a 4-1 Republican majority on the commission since 2022, and in that time they’ve approved the construction of new gas plants, imposed new fees on rooftop solar, and raised electricity rates. Tuesday’s election, in which three of the commission’s five seats were on the ballot, gave voters a chance to reverse course. The race hasn’t yet been officially called, but three Republican candidates are in the lead, ahead of three Democratic candidates, two Green candidates, and a write-in independent. (The election is structured such that candidates don’t run for individual seats or in districts; rather, the seats go to the three top vote-getters.)

So far, the Republican candidate who’s gotten the most votes is Rachel Walden, a member of the Mesa school board who’s made a name for herself in Arizona politics with transphobic comments and a failed lawsuit against the Mesa school district over its policies on student bathroom usage. “She’s a candidate who doesn’t have a lot of specific energy experience but seems to be very diehard to the kind of MAGA movement more broadly,” said Stephanie Chase, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog nonprofit.

In Montana, three seats were open on the Public Service Commission, but one in particular—District 4—captured the attention of clean energy advocates, because it was the only one in which a non-Republican candidate was running. Elena Evans, an independent, began her campaign after learning that the incumbent commissioner in her district, Jennifer Fielder, was running unopposed. The race focused less on clean energy than affordability: Evans said in interviews she decided to run because of the 28 percent rate hike that the all-Republican commission had approved. In the closest of the commission’s three elections, Fielder beat Evans with 55 percent of the vote.

Like in Arizona, the Montana PSC has neglected to take advantage of its state’s untapped potential for renewable energy—wind. A Montana commissioner was captured on a hot mic in 2019 candidly acknowledging that the purpose of a rate cut for renewable energy providers was to kill solar development in the state.

“He says he cares about storm protection…in Louisiana, but the very thing that’s creating these storms is climate change—which is being caused by carbon emissions.”

While one independent on the commission wouldn’t have likely swayed the course of its decisions, Evans would have had the opportunity “to be a consumer voice,” in Chase’s words, as the commission deliberated not only over future decisions on renewable energy, but also the looming question of the future of a coal plant in eastern Montana.

The Colstrip power plant has been co-owned by utilities in nearby states, which, in anticipation of those states’ renewable energy targets kicking in, are selling their shares of its energy to the Montana utility NorthWestern Energy. These deals could saddle ratepayers in Montana with new costs, both for the purchase and for compliance with environmental regulations.

In Louisiana, the largest utility regulated by the Public Service Commission is Entergy, which Daniel Tait, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, described as “one of the most reviled utilities in the country by its customers.” Louisiana’s utilities are legally permitted to donate directly to the campaign funds for commissioners who regulate them—and they do so in great volume.

The race to replace Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Craig Greene, who is retiring at the end of his term, commanded attention because, though a Republican representing a deep-red part of the state, Greene is considered the swing vote among the five commissioners, two of whom are Democrats. In his eight years in office, he’s become known for “his willingness to hold Entergy accountable,” according to Tait—voting with the progressive commissioner Davante Lewis on issues like energy efficiency programs and limiting utilities’ political spending.

On Tuesday, Greene’s seat was won by Jean-Paul Coussan, a state senator from Lafayette who accepted utility donations, supports an expansion of gas infrastructure, and has criticized renewables for “driv[ing] out oil and gas jobs.” Tait described Coussan as less hostile to clean energy than his Republican opponent in the race, Julie Quinn, but further right than the Democrat he defeated, Nick Laborde.

In an interview with the Louisiana Illuminator, Coussan cast his energy policies as based on free markets. “It’s critical that we look at the most affordable options. I think renewables are currently part of the matrix and will be in the future,” he said. “We also need to address the reality that we’ve got an abundant supply of natural gas.”

Coussan has also spoken of the needs of Louisianans who are suffering from repeated hurricanes and rising rates. “The things that he has said since being elected are contradictory in nature,” Tait said of Coussan. “He says he wants affordable and reliable energy, and that he cares about storm protection, because there are so many issues in Louisiana, but the very thing that’s creating these storms is climate change—which is being caused by carbon emissions.”

“You can’t make the problem worse and say you want to work hard to solve the problem,” Tait added.

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

America’s oil industry released its wish list for the incoming Trump administration on Tuesday, a five-point plan that would eliminate many of the Biden administration’s most far-reaching efforts to reduce climate pollution and limit the warming that is driving ever more destructive and deadly extreme weather.

The list, released by the American Petroleum Institute and coming on the second day of the global United Nations climate conference, does not mention the words “climate change.” The document maintains that the industry group and its members agree on the need to reduce emissions. Yet its requests, if enacted, would remove many of the tools available to the United States to achieve that goal.

Perhaps most importantly, API asked the incoming administration to repeal the tailpipe and fuel economy standards for cars and trucks that aim to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector, the nation’s largest source of climate pollution. The list also includes revoking a waiver that allows California and 12 other states to set tougher rules for vehicles. These rules together are expected to speed the nation’s transition to electric vehicles and significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions.

“The API’s wish list demonstrates the fossil fuel industry’s existential threat to life on earth.”

API also called on the Trump administration to issue a new five-year plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling leases and to repeal rules adopted by the Biden administration that restricted new drilling on public lands. The Biden administration had greatly reduced the amount of new drilling on public lands and in waters offshore. The oil industry also wants the new administration to accelerate permits to export natural gas, a process the Biden administration had put on hold to review its climate impacts.

A top ask is the elimination of a fee on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, which the Biden administration finalized on Tuesday. Natural gas is largely made of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and some of it gets released into the atmosphere during oil and gas production.

API’s chief executive, Mike Sommers, said his group would press Congress to enact a bill to ease permitting of major energy projects before the end of this session, and would seek more changes to further speed permitting next year.

The proposal also looks ahead to a looming debate to extend or replace the 2017 tax cuts that expire next year, seeking to maintain the lower corporate tax rate the first Trump administration enacted and the numerous benefits the oil industry enjoys.

In a call with reporters, Sommers said voters had elected Donald Trump with energy and the economy in mind and that the proposals would help increase the nation’s oil and gas production, which climbed substantially under President Joe Biden. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer.

“It is clear that energy was on the ballot, whether it was EV mandates in Michigan or fracking in Pennsylvania,” Sommers said, referring to the Biden administration’s policies to encourage the sale of electric vehicles.

Environmental groups reacted to the proposal with scorn.

“This is a toxic soup of reckless proposals that would benefit the oil and gas industry at the expense of the climate, frontline communities and future generations. We’re prepared to fight them in court,” said Jason Rylander, legal director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The API’s wish list demonstrates the fossil fuel industry’s existential threat to life on Earth.”

Some of the requests seem difficult to square with the stated goals of API and many of its members to support the Paris Agreement and its goal of limiting warming.

Sommers said his industry supports the federal regulation of methane, for example, and that some API members support the idea of a methane fee. But the group is united, he said, in its opposition to the fee the Biden administration enacted. Sommers did not elaborate on what type of fee, if any, his group would support.

When asked if API would oppose Trump’s stated desire to withdraw the nation from the Paris Agreement, Sommers declined to answer directly, saying the industry would continue to support cutting emissions while producing more oil and gas regardless of whether the country stays in the global pact.

“It does everything possible to lock us into the fuels of bygone eras.”

Darren Woods, chief executive of ExxonMobil, the nation’s largest oil company, on Tuesday called on the incoming Trump administration to remain in the Paris Agreement, in comments given at COP29, the U.N. climate conference in Azerbaijan. 

This year is expected to be the hottest on record. Scientists say that in order to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, governments must begin reducing oil and gas production.

Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement that the car and truck efficiency standards would save Americans “billions of dollars at the pump, so it’s no surprise that the oil industry would want to gut them.” She added, “Drivers, auto companies, and workers are all benefitting from these standards. For their sake, they should be preserved.”

Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said in an email, “This agenda looks like something written in the 1900s.” Rolfes’ group has campaigned against building new pipelines and export projects along the Gulf Coast because of their impact on communities and the environment. “It does not reflect the technologies that are available now, and forfeits American leadership in so many areas, including high mileage and electric vehicles. It does everything possible to lock us into the fuels of bygone eras.”

Oil executives were prominent donors to Trump’s campaign, and the industry is likely to find a partner in a new Trump administration on many fronts. Yet some signs of possible friction emerged during the Tuesday call. Sommers indicated his industry might oppose efforts to implement new tariffs, for example, if they restrict the free flow of oil and gas across national borders. The imposition of new tariffs was one of Trump’s central campaign promises.

Many of the steps sought by API could be taken through administrative action, but some, including the repeal of the fee on methane emissions from oil and gas equipment, would require congressional action. Either way, they will be sure to face new lawsuits from environmental groups, which were able to delay or stymie many similar efforts by the first Trump administration.

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

Some of the votes Americans cast on Tuesday that may have mattered most for the climate were quite a bit down-ballot from the presidential ticket: A handful of states held elections for the commissions that regulate utilities, and thereby exercise direct control over what sort of energy mix will fuel the coming years’ expected growth in electricity demand. In three closely watched races around the country—the utility commissions in Arizona, Montana, and Louisiana—Republican candidates either won or are in the lead. While they generally pitched themselves to voters as market-friendly, favoring an all-of-the-above approach to energy, clean energy advocates interviewed by Grist cast these candidates as deferential to the power companies they aspired to regulate.

Arizona is, in a word, sunny. Its geography makes it “the famously obvious place to build solar,” said Caroline Spears, executive director of Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that works to get clean energy advocates elected. But its utilities have built just a sliver of the potential solar energy that there is room for in the state—and the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities, is partly to blame for that. That commission’s most recent goal for renewable energy, set in 2007, was an unambitious 15 percent to be reached by 2025. “Their goals are worse than where Texas currently is and where Iowa currently is on clean energy,” Spears said. What’s more, the current slate of commissioners is in the process of considering whether to ditch that goal altogether.

Louisiana’s Public Service Commission is described as “one of the most reviled utilities in the country by its customers.”

Those commissioners have held a 4-1 Republican majority on the commission since 2022, and in that time they’ve approved the construction of new gas plants, imposed new fees on rooftop solar, and raised electricity rates. Tuesday’s election, in which three of the commission’s five seats were on the ballot, gave voters a chance to reverse course. The race hasn’t yet been officially called, but three Republican candidates are in the lead, ahead of three Democratic candidates, two Green candidates, and a write-in independent. (The election is structured such that candidates don’t run for individual seats or in districts; rather, the seats go to the three top vote-getters.)

So far, the Republican candidate who’s gotten the most votes is Rachel Walden, a member of the Mesa school board who’s made a name for herself in Arizona politics with transphobic comments and a failed lawsuit against the Mesa school district over its policies on student bathroom usage. “She’s a candidate who doesn’t have a lot of specific energy experience but seems to be very diehard to the kind of MAGA movement more broadly,” said Stephanie Chase, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog nonprofit.

In Montana, three seats were open on the Public Service Commission, but one in particular—District 4—captured the attention of clean energy advocates, because it was the only one in which a non-Republican candidate was running. Elena Evans, an independent, began her campaign after learning that the incumbent commissioner in her district, Jennifer Fielder, was running unopposed. The race focused less on clean energy than affordability: Evans said in interviews she decided to run because of the 28 percent rate hike that the all-Republican commission had approved. In the closest of the commission’s three elections, Fielder beat Evans with 55 percent of the vote.

Like in Arizona, the Montana PSC has neglected to take advantage of its state’s untapped potential for renewable energy—wind. A Montana commissioner was captured on a hot mic in 2019 candidly acknowledging that the purpose of a rate cut for renewable energy providers was to kill solar development in the state.

“He says he cares about storm protection…in Louisiana, but the very thing that’s creating these storms is climate change—which is being caused by carbon emissions.”

While one independent on the commission wouldn’t have likely swayed the course of its decisions, Evans would have had the opportunity “to be a consumer voice,” in Chase’s words, as the commission deliberated not only over future decisions on renewable energy, but also the looming question of the future of a coal plant in eastern Montana.

The Colstrip power plant has been co-owned by utilities in nearby states, which, in anticipation of those states’ renewable energy targets kicking in, are selling their shares of its energy to the Montana utility NorthWestern Energy. These deals could saddle ratepayers in Montana with new costs, both for the purchase and for compliance with environmental regulations.

In Louisiana, the largest utility regulated by the Public Service Commission is Entergy, which Daniel Tait, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, described as “one of the most reviled utilities in the country by its customers.” Louisiana’s utilities are legally permitted to donate directly to the campaign funds for commissioners who regulate them—and they do so in great volume.

The race to replace Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Craig Greene, who is retiring at the end of his term, commanded attention because, though a Republican representing a deep-red part of the state, Greene is considered the swing vote among the five commissioners, two of whom are Democrats. In his eight years in office, he’s become known for “his willingness to hold Entergy accountable,” according to Tait—voting with the progressive commissioner Davante Lewis on issues like energy efficiency programs and limiting utilities’ political spending.

On Tuesday, Greene’s seat was won by Jean-Paul Coussan, a state senator from Lafayette who accepted utility donations, supports an expansion of gas infrastructure, and has criticized renewables for “driv[ing] out oil and gas jobs.” Tait described Coussan as less hostile to clean energy than his Republican opponent in the race, Julie Quinn, but further right than the Democrat he defeated, Nick Laborde.

In an interview with the Louisiana Illuminator, Coussan cast his energy policies as based on free markets. “It’s critical that we look at the most affordable options. I think renewables are currently part of the matrix and will be in the future,” he said. “We also need to address the reality that we’ve got an abundant supply of natural gas.”

Coussan has also spoken of the needs of Louisianans who are suffering from repeated hurricanes and rising rates. “The things that he has said since being elected are contradictory in nature,” Tait said of Coussan. “He says he wants affordable and reliable energy, and that he cares about storm protection, because there are so many issues in Louisiana, but the very thing that’s creating these storms is climate change—which is being caused by carbon emissions.”

“You can’t make the problem worse and say you want to work hard to solve the problem,” Tait added.

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

America’s oil industry released its wish list for the incoming Trump administration on Tuesday, a five-point plan that would eliminate many of the Biden administration’s most far-reaching efforts to reduce climate pollution and limit the warming that is driving ever more destructive and deadly extreme weather.

The list, released by the American Petroleum Institute and coming on the second day of the global United Nations climate conference, does not mention the words “climate change.” The document maintains that the industry group and its members agree on the need to reduce emissions. Yet its requests, if enacted, would remove many of the tools available to the United States to achieve that goal.

Perhaps most importantly, API asked the incoming administration to repeal the tailpipe and fuel economy standards for cars and trucks that aim to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector, the nation’s largest source of climate pollution. The list also includes revoking a waiver that allows California and 12 other states to set tougher rules for vehicles. These rules together are expected to speed the nation’s transition to electric vehicles and significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions.

“The API’s wish list demonstrates the fossil fuel industry’s existential threat to life on earth.”

API also called on the Trump administration to issue a new five-year plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling leases and to repeal rules adopted by the Biden administration that restricted new drilling on public lands. The Biden administration had greatly reduced the amount of new drilling on public lands and in waters offshore. The oil industry also wants the new administration to accelerate permits to export natural gas, a process the Biden administration had put on hold to review its climate impacts.

A top ask is the elimination of a fee on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, which the Biden administration finalized on Tuesday. Natural gas is largely made of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and some of it gets released into the atmosphere during oil and gas production.

API’s chief executive, Mike Sommers, said his group would press Congress to enact a bill to ease permitting of major energy projects before the end of this session, and would seek more changes to further speed permitting next year.

The proposal also looks ahead to a looming debate to extend or replace the 2017 tax cuts that expire next year, seeking to maintain the lower corporate tax rate the first Trump administration enacted and the numerous benefits the oil industry enjoys.

In a call with reporters, Sommers said voters had elected Donald Trump with energy and the economy in mind and that the proposals would help increase the nation’s oil and gas production, which climbed substantially under President Joe Biden. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer.

“It is clear that energy was on the ballot, whether it was EV mandates in Michigan or fracking in Pennsylvania,” Sommers said, referring to the Biden administration’s policies to encourage the sale of electric vehicles.

Environmental groups reacted to the proposal with scorn.

“This is a toxic soup of reckless proposals that would benefit the oil and gas industry at the expense of the climate, frontline communities and future generations. We’re prepared to fight them in court,” said Jason Rylander, legal director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The API’s wish list demonstrates the fossil fuel industry’s existential threat to life on Earth.”

Some of the requests seem difficult to square with the stated goals of API and many of its members to support the Paris Agreement and its goal of limiting warming.

Sommers said his industry supports the federal regulation of methane, for example, and that some API members support the idea of a methane fee. But the group is united, he said, in its opposition to the fee the Biden administration enacted. Sommers did not elaborate on what type of fee, if any, his group would support.

When asked if API would oppose Trump’s stated desire to withdraw the nation from the Paris Agreement, Sommers declined to answer directly, saying the industry would continue to support cutting emissions while producing more oil and gas regardless of whether the country stays in the global pact.

“It does everything possible to lock us into the fuels of bygone eras.”

Darren Woods, chief executive of ExxonMobil, the nation’s largest oil company, on Tuesday called on the incoming Trump administration to remain in the Paris Agreement, in comments given at COP29, the U.N. climate conference in Azerbaijan. 

This year is expected to be the hottest on record. Scientists say that in order to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, governments must begin reducing oil and gas production.

Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement that the car and truck efficiency standards would save Americans “billions of dollars at the pump, so it’s no surprise that the oil industry would want to gut them.” She added, “Drivers, auto companies, and workers are all benefitting from these standards. For their sake, they should be preserved.”

Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said in an email, “This agenda looks like something written in the 1900s.” Rolfes’ group has campaigned against building new pipelines and export projects along the Gulf Coast because of their impact on communities and the environment. “It does not reflect the technologies that are available now, and forfeits American leadership in so many areas, including high mileage and electric vehicles. It does everything possible to lock us into the fuels of bygone eras.”

Oil executives were prominent donors to Trump’s campaign, and the industry is likely to find a partner in a new Trump administration on many fronts. Yet some signs of possible friction emerged during the Tuesday call. Sommers indicated his industry might oppose efforts to implement new tariffs, for example, if they restrict the free flow of oil and gas across national borders. The imposition of new tariffs was one of Trump’s central campaign promises.

Many of the steps sought by API could be taken through administrative action, but some, including the repeal of the fee on methane emissions from oil and gas equipment, would require congressional action. Either way, they will be sure to face new lawsuits from environmental groups, which were able to delay or stymie many similar efforts by the first Trump administration.

Voters in Washington state narrowly passed a measure to preserve “energy choice” and block the state from discouraging natural gas—delivering a significant blow to climate efforts in one of the country’s greenest states. After days of counting, the measure, I-2066, passed Thursday with about 52 percent support, according to the Associated Press.

I-2066, as I reported earlier this month, fits into a growing, national backlash to progressive policies encouraging electrification across the United States, following lawsuits against Berkeley, California, New York State, and Washington, DC, places which moved to ban gas hookups in new construction in recent years. About half of US states have passed laws preemptively blocking state or local governments from banning gas.

Now, by passing a measure that prohibits local or state policies that “discourage” natural gas use or “promote electrification,” Washington State just went even further. As I wrote:

I-2066, a measure funded by fossil fuel and construction groups to “protect energy choice,” wouldn’t merely prevent local governments from banning “natural” gas in new buildings—with its broad language, climate advocates say, the measure might also be used to block state incentives encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient electric appliances. If it passes, they worry, it could provide a blueprint for the fossil fuel industry to oppose similar policies nationwide.

As Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, an affordable housing advocacy group, told me, I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state, which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

I-2066 was one of two climate-related measures on the ballot in Washington. In a victory for climate advocates, voters shot down a sister measure, I-2117, that would have rolled back Washington’s cap-and-trade program, which has raised about $2 billion for environmental programs in the state.

And it’s not the end of the story for I-2066: “There will be a challenge to the constitutionality of the initiative in order to protect Washington’s action on climate and clean air,” Leah Missik, a researcher and policy developer at Seattle-based environmental group Climate Solutions, said in a statement.

But to supporters of I-2066, the measure’s passage is a clear indication of Washingtonians’ desire to keep gas appliances around. As Greg Lane, the executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, which sponsored I-2066, said in a statement, the results “sent a thunderous message to policy makers at every level of government that natural gas service must be maintained as we address the energy demands in Washington state.”

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

By tapping former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, President-elect Donald Trump opted to put his planned radical rollback of climate policy in the hands of a staunch ally who is skilled at projecting an image of a moderate conservationist.

As a Republican representing a Long Island district “almost completely surrounded by water,” as Zeldin often said, he successfully fought in Congress for coastal resilience and nature preservation projects and expressed hope for bipartisan compromise on climate, calling it “a very important issue.”

But Zeldin never advanced any proposal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and like other congressional Republicans in the Trump era, consistently voted against those proposals. He came closer than any Republican in 20 years to capturing his state’s highest office by campaigning on a pledge to overturn the state’s ban on fracking.

“I think at times he spoke moderately when it was convenient to do so, but I don’t think that’s the Lee Zeldin that New York has seen for at least the past four years,” said Sam Bernhardt, the New York-based political director for Food & Water Action. He thinks the most telling item in Zeldin’s record is his vote against certifying the 2020 election.

“He did that because Trump told him to, so I think we can extrapolate that most of Lee Zeldin’s work at EPA will likewise be things that Trump has told him to do,” Bernhardt said.

In a Fox News interview on Monday, shortly after his selection was announced, Zeldin made clear that the president-elect has given him a long list of regulations to roll back.

“The president was talking about unleashing economic prosperity through the EPA,” Zeldin said. “There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that end up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction. And President Trump, when he called me up, gosh, he was rattling off 15, 20, different priorities.”

The agency that has spent the past four years spearheading policy to cut greenhouse gas pollution throughout the US economy would shift gears within “the first 100 days,” said Zeldin, into becoming a vehicle for Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Zeldin is a markedly different choice than the leaders Trump chose to head up the EPA during his first term. Trump’s first EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, was an Oklahoma attorney general who had sued the agency repeatedly, leading Republican states’ push-back against President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives.

But upon arriving in Washington, Pruitt quickly became entangled in multiple controversies—over his travel practices, his use of government employees for personal errands, and his relationships with lobbyists. Pruitt resigned under pressure and was replaced by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, a behind-the-scenes player on Capitol Hill and in the EPA. He stirred less drama as he pursued the Trump deregulatory agenda, ultimately rolling back more than 100 environmental rules.

Zeldin comes to the EPA not as a combatant or a bureaucrat, but as a politician with a record of successfully delivering Republican messages in Democratic strongholds. Trump trusted Zeldin to act as a surrogate for him on the campaign trail—from Iowa at the beginning of the race through to Georgia and Pennsylvania at the end.

“He certainly is a savvy political operator,” said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell, which represents a range of energy-industry clients. 

“He wasn’t particularly well known for taking in-depth positions on EPA issues, but I’m not surprised that he gets a position like this,” Maisano said. “I’m certain what he’ll do is be a good leader, and a good spokesman for the president’s energy and environment agenda.”

Zeldin in recent years has advocated unleashing fossil fuel production without challenging climate science outright. That also sets him apart from Pruitt and to some extent, Wheeler, both of whom were proteges of one of Congress’ most outspoken climate science deniers, the late Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who died earlier this year.

Zeldin was one of 12 Republicans who voted with House Democrats in 2019 in favor of a ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines.

In 2019, during a debate on the first climate legislation to reach the House floor in a decade, Zeldin praised the Democratic sponsors for “their intentions and advocacy” on a measure that sought to hold the Trump administration to the goals of the Paris Agreement. But he still reeled off the reasons why he agreed with Trump’s decision to exit: there had not been enough debate or study of its potential economic impact, the measure had never come before Congress for a vote and China and India should be forced to make greater cuts.

“We needed a better deal for the world and other countries to step up and do more, more transparency and debates, and a vote here in Congress,” Zeldin said. “That is in the best interests of all our constituents. Hopefully, we can agree on the numbers and a process going forward, and we can work together on a bipartisan basis.”

But no bipartisan effort would ever emerge in Congress to deal comprehensively with the need to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution as aggressively as scientists say is needed to avoid catastrophic climate risk. Zeldin, like all Republicans in Congress, voted against the legislative solution that the Biden administration hit upon, the massive incentives and subsidies for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The future of the IRA is now unclear, with Trump about to regain the presidency and Republicans poised to take control of Congress. And the other crucial part of Biden’s climate agenda—regulations on vehicles, power plants, and the oil and gas industry—are on the chopping block. Zeldin has been given the axe.

Zeldin, a native of Suffolk County, became one of the youngest attorneys ever in New York State at the age of 23. He then served four years on active duty in the US Army, deploying to Iraq in 2006, and holding roles as an intelligence officer, a prosecutor, and a magistrate. Zeldin continues to serve as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve.

In 2020, he talked about the damage that Superstorm Sandy did in his district eight years earlier when he spoke out in favor of water resources development legislation that later became part of the omnibus budget bill Congress passed and Trump signed.

“The widespread devastation emphasized the dire need to ensure our communities were better prepared for the future,” Zeldin said, speaking in favor of prioritizing and increasing spending limits for dredging and coastal storm risk management projects along the Long Island coast.

Zeldin also helped lead a long and ultimately successful effort to preserve Plum Island on Long Island Sound, which has become a key habitat for birds, seals, fish and coral. The federally owned island had been at risk of being sold off for development.

He was one of 12 Republicans who voted with the majority of House Democrats in 2019 in favor of a ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, a measure that the Senate never acted on.

But there were limits to Zeldin’s advocacy of coastal protection. He unsuccessfully sponsored legislation in 2016 that sought to block presidents—in particular, Obama—from creating any national monuments in the exclusive economic zone along the coasts of the United States. “I do this on behalf of commercial fishermen on Long Island and throughout the nation who, like so many other hard-working Americans, are increasingly under assault from the executive overreach of this administration,” Zeldin said at the time.

Over his four terms in Congress, from 2015 to 2023, Zeldin generated a pro-environmental voting record of 14 percent, according to the League of Conservation Voters, or LCV. That’s a high score relative to other House Republicans (their average was 4 percent in the last Congress), but environmental advocates said it signaled a lack of concern over the issues that he would be in his purview at EPA.

“Trump made his anti-climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during the campaign,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president for government affairs. “During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14 percent environmental score if he wants to be charged with protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink, and finding solutions to climate change.”

If Zeldin’s past statements are any guide, he is likely to vow to protect clean air and water, even while touting the economic benefits of expanded fossil fuel development.

“We all have constituents who want access to clean air and clean water,” Zeldin said before his 2019 vote against holding Trump to the Paris Agreement goals. “It is something that, whether you are representing a district in Flint, Michigan, or you are in Tampa, Florida, or the east end of Long Island, we all want to advocate for that for our constituents.”

When he ran against Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 in his bid for New York’s top office, Zeldin advocated overturning the fracking ban that had been enacted under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “If New York would reverse the Cuomo-Hochul ban on the safe extraction of resources under many parts of the state, jobs will be created, energy costs will go down, communities will be revitalized, and our state can prosper again,” Zeldin posted on Twitter during his campaign. 

Zeldin lost, but garnered more votes than any Republican who ran for the state’s top office since former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller 50 years earlier. Maisano said that message apparently resonated with many New Yorkers, who live on the same geological formation, the Marcellus Shale, as their neighbors to the south.

“In many cases, the fracking ban in New York has been a scourge, because Pennsylvania is reaping the benefits and New York is not reaping anything,” Maisano said.

Trump, who is now seeking to lift restrictions on all oil and gas development in the nation, said Zeldin “will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”

Trump, who once frequently called climate change a “hoax,” but dropped that rhetoric before his 2016 presidential run, has honed a message on environmental protection that has allowed him to successfully campaign on a pro-fossil fuel agenda at a time when polls showed swing voters preferred clean energy and climate action. In Zeldin, Trump has found someone to lead that agenda who is skilled at the same kind of messaging.

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

As dozens of heads of state arrived in Azerbaijan for the annual United Nations climate talks this week, one absent world leader’s name was on everyone’s lips. At press conference after press conference, questions arose about the election of Donald Trump. The president-elect has threatened to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement—for a second time—and slow down the country’s transition to renewable energy.

The Biden administration has tried to project confidence in the early days of the conference, which is known as COP29, given the country’s status as the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of planet-warming carbon. At a packed-house presser on the conference’s first day, President Joe Biden’s senior climate advisor, John Podesta, said he expected many of Biden’s clean energy achievements—which are projected to put the US within close reach of its international climate commitments—will endure a second Trump administration.

He added that the US will still release a document detailing its updated plan to do its part to limit global warming below the 2 degrees Celsius threshold outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, as required under that treaty. “The work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief,” he said.

But other signs at the conference suggest that the US has already receded from a starring role in the fight against climate change. Developing countries have long criticized the US as an obstacle to major climate agreements, in particular on the issue of overseas aid to help poor countries fund their energy transitions and protect themselves from climate-fueled natural disasters.

Establishing a new global goal for this sort of international aid is the main agenda item for this year’s conference, but the center of gravity in negotiations has clearly shifted away from the U.S. and toward Europe, China, and the dozens of developing countries pushing for a big increase in international assistance.

Even Canada, which just announced a $1.5 billion program to help the world’s most vulnerable countries pursue climate adaptation projects, is beginning to outshine the US on this issue. Likewise, the headline item from the first day of the conference—an arcane spat over the implications of the agenda structure, which pitted a bloc of developing countries against the European Union over the latter’s carbon tariff system—did not feature the US in a starring role.

In a gaggle with reporters on the second day of the conference, White House climate czar Ali Zaidi seemed to acknowledge a diminished US role in climate talks. He vowed that the Biden administration would continue working toward an ambitious international finance goal, but he admitted that climate-conscious Americans may want to “look for other countries to step up to the plate” during the Trump administration. “We may have less to offer in terms of a projection of leadership certainty,” he said.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the diminished US role in the global climate puzzle is the maze of national pavilions that sprawls across the conference venue at the Baku Olympic Stadium. The US national pavilion is one of the most humble in the entire complex: a plain white room with white chairs, white desks, a television screen, and no other decorations save a single potted plant and a few foam-board posters.

The Kazakhstan pavilion next door, by contrast, has a massive light-up display with the country’s name and a stage on risers surrounded by handsome blond wood. The United Kingdom pavilion has a free, full-service cappuccino bar and a full-size model depicting London’s signature red telephone booths. The Brazil pavilion is embowered in tropical foliage and features a display of baskets by traditional artisans. In the home-country pavilion of Azerbaijan, waitstaff serve fresh tea on demand.

“You’re not the first person to say this,” said a member of the US delegation when Grist mentioned the apparent lack of effort put into his country’s pavilion. The member said he was “shocked” when he first saw the space, and he added that a more ambitious effort would have helped “show that we care.”

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 the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50 percent, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed.

The assessment tracked more than 25,000 private jets and almost 19 million flights between 2019 and 2023. It found almost half the jets traveled less than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles) and 900,000 were used “like taxis” for trips of less than 31 miles. Many flights were for holidays, arriving in sunny locations in the summertime. The FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022 attracted more than 1,800 private flights.

Private flights, used by just 0.003 percent of the world’s population, are the most polluting form of transport. The researchers found that passengers in larger private jets caused more CO₂ emissions in an hour than the average person did in a year.

The US dominated private jet travel, representing 69 percent of flights, and Canada, the UK, and Australia were all in the top 10. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK. The total emissions from private jet flights in 2023 were more than 15 million metric tons, more than the 60 million people of Tanzania emitted.

The jets “are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget…and their emissions are soaring.”

Industry expectations are that another 8,500 business jets will enter service by 2033, far outstripping efficiency gains and indicating that private flight emissions will rise even further. The researchers said their work highlighted the vast global inequality in emissions between wealthier and poorer people, and tackling the emissions of the wealthy minority was critical to ending global heating.

Stefan Gössling, the professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who led the research, said: “The wealthy are a very small share of the population but are increasing their emissions very quickly and by very large levels of magnitude.” He added: “The growth in global emissions that we are experiencing at this point in time is coming from the top.”

The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, took data from the ADS-B Exchange platform, which records the signals sent once a minute by transponders on every plane, recording its position and altitude. This huge dataset—1.8 terabytes—was then filtered for the 72 plane models marketed by their manufacturers as “business jets.” The emissions figures are most likely an underestimate, as smaller planes and emissions from taxiing on the ground were not included.

The analysis found the number of private jets increased by 28 percent and the distance flown jumped by 53 percent between 2019 and 2023. Fewer than a third of the flights were longer than 620 miles and almost 900,000 flights were less than 31 miles.

“We know some people use them as taxis, really,” Gössling said. “If it’s just [31 miles], you could definitely do that by car.” Outside the US and Europe, Brazil, the Middle East, and the Caribbean are private jet hotspots.

Much of the use is for leisure, the researchers found. For example, private jet use to Ibiza in Spain and Nice in France peaked in the summer and was concentrated around weekends. In the US, Taylor Swift, Drake, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey are among those who have been criticized for heavy private jet use.

The researchers also looked at some business events in 2023, with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, resulting in 660 private jet flights and the COP28 climate summit in Dubai having 291 flights.

Gössling said the driving factors behind the large recent increase in private jet use have not been analyzed but might include an increasing reluctance to share cabins on commercial flights that began during the Covid pandemic. Industry documents describe private jet users as “ultra-high net worth,” comprising about 250,000 individuals with an average wealth of $123 million. US private jet users are increasingly using “privacy ICAO addresses,” which mask the identity of the plane and could make tracking them much harder in the future.

According to Gössling, passengers should pay for the climate damage resulting from each ton of CO₂ emitted, estimated at about $216: “Very basically, it would seem fair that people paid for the damage they are causing by their behavior.”

A second step would be to increase the landing fees for private aircraft, which are currently very low, he added. A landing fee of $5,400 could be an effective deterrent, roughly doubling the cost of common private flights.

Alethea Warrington, head of aviation at the climate charity Possible, said: “Private jets, used by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people, are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget to avoid climate breakdown, and their emissions are soaring, even as the impacts of the climate crisis escalate.”

“It’s time for governments to act,” she said. “We need…a supertax, rapidly arriving at an outright ban on private jets.”

The US Private Aviation Association did not respond to a request for comment.

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

Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50 percent, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed.

The assessment tracked more than 25,000 private jets and almost 19 million flights between 2019 and 2023. It found almost half the jets traveled less than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles) and 900,000 were used “like taxis” for trips of less than 31 miles. Many flights were for holidays, arriving in sunny locations in the summertime. The FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022 attracted more than 1,800 private flights.

Private flights, used by just 0.003 percent of the world’s population, are the most polluting form of transport. The researchers found that passengers in larger private jets caused more CO₂ emissions in an hour than the average person did in a year.

The US dominated private jet travel, representing 69 percent of flights, and Canada, the UK, and Australia were all in the top 10. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK. The total emissions from private jet flights in 2023 were more than 15 million metric tons, more than the 60 million people of Tanzania emitted.

The jets “are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget…and their emissions are soaring.”

Industry expectations are that another 8,500 business jets will enter service by 2033, far outstripping efficiency gains and indicating that private flight emissions will rise even further. The researchers said their work highlighted the vast global inequality in emissions between wealthier and poorer people, and tackling the emissions of the wealthy minority was critical to ending global heating.

Stefan Gössling, the professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who led the research, said: “The wealthy are a very small share of the population but are increasing their emissions very quickly and by very large levels of magnitude.” He added: “The growth in global emissions that we are experiencing at this point in time is coming from the top.”

The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, took data from the ADS-B Exchange platform, which records the signals sent once a minute by transponders on every plane, recording its position and altitude. This huge dataset—1.8 terabytes—was then filtered for the 72 plane models marketed by their manufacturers as “business jets.” The emissions figures are most likely an underestimate, as smaller planes and emissions from taxiing on the ground were not included.

The analysis found the number of private jets increased by 28 percent and the distance flown jumped by 53 percent between 2019 and 2023. Fewer than a third of the flights were longer than 620 miles and almost 900,000 flights were less than 31 miles.

“We know some people use them as taxis, really,” Gössling said. “If it’s just [31 miles], you could definitely do that by car.” Outside the US and Europe, Brazil, the Middle East, and the Caribbean are private jet hotspots.

Much of the use is for leisure, the researchers found. For example, private jet use to Ibiza in Spain and Nice in France peaked in the summer and was concentrated around weekends. In the US, Taylor Swift, Drake, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey are among those who have been criticized for heavy private jet use.

The researchers also looked at some business events in 2023, with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, resulting in 660 private jet flights and the COP28 climate summit in Dubai having 291 flights.

Gössling said the driving factors behind the large recent increase in private jet use have not been analyzed but might include an increasing reluctance to share cabins on commercial flights that began during the Covid pandemic. Industry documents describe private jet users as “ultra-high net worth,” comprising about 250,000 individuals with an average wealth of $123 million. US private jet users are increasingly using “privacy ICAO addresses,” which mask the identity of the plane and could make tracking them much harder in the future.

According to Gössling, passengers should pay for the climate damage resulting from each ton of CO₂ emitted, estimated at about $216: “Very basically, it would seem fair that people paid for the damage they are causing by their behavior.”

A second step would be to increase the landing fees for private aircraft, which are currently very low, he added. A landing fee of $5,400 could be an effective deterrent, roughly doubling the cost of common private flights.

Alethea Warrington, head of aviation at the climate charity Possible, said: “Private jets, used by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people, are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget to avoid climate breakdown, and their emissions are soaring, even as the impacts of the climate crisis escalate.”

“It’s time for governments to act,” she said. “We need…a supertax, rapidly arriving at an outright ban on private jets.”

The US Private Aviation Association did not respond to a request for comment.

Today, voters in several states will get a say on ballot measures related to climate initiatives. Across the country, there are hotly debated propositions surrounding pipeline construction, climate infrastructure, and carbon reduction. (And fate of the planet aside, there’s also one referendum that could usher in a new tree-centric, state flag.)

Here’s a round-up of the green issues, big and small, that some voters will see on their ballot. 

Alabama:
Amendment 1
Currently, Alabama schools hold lands that are managed by the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which has prevented its timberland from being sold or leased. This amendment could allow some local boards of education to manage, sell, or lease land and its natural resources to fund education. 

California:
Proposition 4
California voters are deciding whether to allocate another $10 billion to climate change preparedness infrastructure projects. The money would go to preventing wildfires, developing drought and coastal resilience, mitigating rising sea level impact, improving drinking water, and other related projects, with 40 percent of the funding destined for disadvantaged communities.

Louisiana:
Outer Continental Shelf Revenues for Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund Amendment 
Louisiana voters will decide whether money the state generates from the production of wind, solar, or other alternative energy on the Outer Continental Shelf will, like similar revenue from oil and gas, be used to fund wetlands preservation, coastal restoration, hurricane protection, and infrastructure directly impacted by wetlands loss.

Maine:
Question 5
Maine’s flag might get a green boost. Residents will vote on replacing the state seal-based flag with one bearing the image of a pine tree and the North Star, inspired by “an Eastern White Pine in Governor’s Grove at Viles Arboretum,” according to the artist.

Minnesota:
Amendment 1
If passed, Minnesota will be allowed to extend for another 25 years a program allocating 40 percent of the state’s lottery revenue into the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, which supports conservation projects. 

Rhode Island:
Question 4
Ocean State voters will weigh issuing $53 million in bonds to fund environmental infrastructure projects, including wind development projects and climate change resilience efforts.

South Dakota:
Referred Law 21
South Dakotans will have a say in an ongoing battle surrounding a $5.5 billion carbon dioxide pipeline network and landowners rights. Supporters of the so-called “Landowner Bill of Rights,” argue it will create regulatory uniformity, protect private property, and boost agriculture. The opposition describes this bill as a ”trojan horse” for the pipeline company behind the project, Summit Carbon Solutions, allowing it to bypass local government by undermining “local control over zoning laws, pipeline setbacks, and other vital safety measures.”

Washington:
Initiative 2066 
This initiative, funded by fossil fuel and construction groups, would hinder, or even ban, government efforts to incentivize replacing gas stoves with energy-efficient electric appliances. 

Initiative 2117
Residents of the Evergreen state may also vote to repeal its 2021 Climate Commitment Act, a carbon market program that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent by 2050. As of 2023, the program took in over $2 billion from the state’s largest polluters—money that went into environmental programs. 

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

The final days of this election season are wearying for the people who do research and advocacy on the transition away from fossil fuels.

For this group, the Biden administration has been a champion, developing landmark legislation and building a policy team that included some of the brightest experts from universities and think tanks. Vice President Kamala Harris would continue on this path.

And yet, polling indicates that there is about a 50-50 chance that President Joe Biden’s successor will be former president Donald Trump, whose antipathy for the energy transition includes talk of “wind cancer” and close ties to the oil industry.

I spoke with four nonprofit leaders this week to get an idea of how they are feeling about the election. All of the groups they represent are nonpartisan, but their worldviews tend to be much more in line with those of Harris than Trump.

“We need to pick up the pace, and that certainly will not be the case under the wrong federal leadership.”

“I feel very nervous, because this election seems like it’s going to be very close, and one of the candidates is an anti-democratic fascist who seems not to be interested in respecting the results of what are very safe and secure elections,” said John Farrell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

His organization, with offices in Washington, DC, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, works to make energy systems more democratic by decentralizing the sources of electricity and encouraging community ownership of utilities.

The Biden administration has taken many actions that support the institute’s agenda, including extending and expanding incentives for rooftop solar.

“This could be really stressful next week for people, and everybody’s going to react in different ways,” he said. “Some people might be like, ‘I just want to bury myself in my work,’ and other people may be like, ‘I need to take two days off and just not look at anything.’”

Sonia Aggarwal, CEO of the think tank Energy Innovation, came to her current role after serving in the Biden administration as special assistant to the president for climate policy, innovation, and deployment.

“Just looking at the two paths we have in front of us, I would say they could not be more different in terms of American leadership, in terms of our economy and, of course, in terms of climate and our energy choices,” she said. “I think they couldn’t be more different in terms of the capability for people to have good lives and take control of their energy bills, reduce those energy bills and make them less volatile.”

Energy Innovation, based in San Francisco, does analysis of what various policy options would do for the climate, public health and energy markets.

“I think it’s a stark choice, and there’s no minimizing that,” she said.

One comfort, she said, is that renewable energy technologies are inexpensive and will grow in the market regardless of who is president. But policies matter a lot, and can hinder the rate of growth. “We need to pick up the pace, and that certainly will not be the case under the wrong federal leadership,” she said.

I found less alarm when talking to people who mainly work with state governments.

“Clean energy is a bipartisan issue,” said Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, a trade group based in Little Rock, Arkansas. “While all eyes will be on the presidential election, arguably the state-level elections have a larger impact on the nation’s energy policy.”

Inside Climate News has written about some of these state-level races, including three seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission and one seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. “State-level energy policy has been an underappreciated venue for supporting reliable, clean, low cost energy resources,” he said.

Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association, agrees. Her trade group is based in Sacramento.

“Obviously there’s a lot of attention on the top of the ticket this year but what matters most for the transition to clean energy is who sits in your governor’s office, who runs your state legislature and how many local mayors champion rooftop solar,” she said.

Her view is informed by recent clashes with California Gov. Gavin Newsom on a variety of issues that affect the financial benefits of solar and energy storage.

“Despite the actions of the Biden administration and Congress, the Newsom administration clobbered rooftop solar, costing us tens of thousands of jobs, dozens of company bankruptcies and set our market back 10 years,” she said. “The same could be said about the experiences of Hawaii, Arizona and other states.”