Mill, Westport, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
2025 will go down as the second or third hottest year on record. The last decade has been the hottest decade in human history. Driven by drought and extreme winds, a massive fire burned its way across the LA Basin, incinerating more than 10,000 homes. The estimated damage ranges from $76 billion to $133 billion. Total losses to businesses and workers in income and wages totaled at least $297. The year saw two of the largest, most rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the history of the Atlantic Ocean. Floods in central Texas killed at least 137 people, while massive flooding driven by twin cyclones that tore across Sumatra and the southern Philippines killed at least 1,800 people and left more than a million people homeless. We are in the midst of the largest mass coral bleaching event in history, affecting 83% of the world’s extant coral reefs. The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is accelerating. Its surface is fracturing, causing massive ice falls and rockslides that are warping the southern continent’s geology. A total collapse of the ice sheet, which now seems certain, would raise global sea levels by 12 feet. The Arctic Ocean is now expected to be “ice-free” in the summer by 2030, twenty years earlier than predicted just a few years ago. The Atlantic Current is slowing down and may be on the verge of collapse, which would likely destabilize rainfall patterns for much of the planet. Wildfires in Canada now burn year-round. There were 24,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer from June to August alone. Deaths from extreme heat in the US have increased by more than 50% since 2000.
None of these catastrophic events has left the slightest impact on Trump, who has ordered his administration to slash nearly every restraint on the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Oil drilling has been expanded on federal lands (including the high Arctic) and waters. The dying industry of coal mining has been put on life support with new subsidies and exemptions from environmental regulations, while coal-generating power plants slated for closure have been forced to keep operating. Large-scale renewable energy projects, in the planned for years, have been cancelled and tax credits and incentives for small-scale solar have been gutted. Energy-hogging data centers have been fast-tracked and freed from regulatory constraints. Prior to Trump’s re-inauguration, Bethany Kozma — who now heads RFK’s Department of Health and Human Services Office of Global Affairs— vowed that the administration “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere” in government. And they’ve largely followed through gutting NOAA’s Office of Atmospheric Research; the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, National Center for Atmospheric Research, U.S. Global Change Research program and NASA’s Earth Science program. Climate research stations have been shuttered. References to climate change have been removed from federal websites, documents, databases and signage on federal lands, offices and parks.
And it’s not just Trump. The supposed global protectors of the climate had their annual meeting in Bélem, Brazil this year and likely generated more CO2 coming and going from the confab than they saved during the sessions. That’s in part because they came and went without even mentioning fossil fuels in their final document. These actions go beyond denial and amount to incitement of the wrath of the climate gods. Their vengeance will be a terrible thing to behold. We’ve gone from trying to survive in a global greenhouse into a madhouse.–JSC
January
Pacific Palisades fire from a flight leaving LAX. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)
“The climate crisis reveals that our civilization has never really been organized around science, contrary to the usual Enlightenment narrative. It is organized around capital. Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital and is often ignored when it does not.”
– Jason Hickle
There’s nothing so terrifying as a nightmare come to life. The Santa Ana winds have haunted the dreams of southern Angelinos for decades. Like the Chinooks of the Rockies and the Mistrals of the Rhone Valley, these winds play on the mind. They tell you they’re coming for you. They whisper the dangers they bring with them. Van Gogh believed the mistral inflamed his madness. Another kind of madness seems to be inflicting LA, the madness of boundless consumption.
Some listen to the warnings of the wind. Some don’t. Those who listen are driven mad by those who don’t. In the chaparrals of southern California, the warning of the Santa Anas has always been: fire. Fires that race down hillsides and canyons faster than any Tesla can drive. Fires that leap roads, highways, malls. Fires that ride on the wind.
This is not new. The Santa Ana winds come with the territory–that territory being the desert basins behind the coastal mountains and canyons. They are katabatic winds that rush downhill, dry and fierce, as they pour through the Cajon, San Gorgonio, and Soledad passes. Geography makes them. Climate change and a rapacious real estate industry that has remained deaf to their message have turned them into killers.
Historically, the Santa Anas (ponder the resonance of that name in our time of mass xenophobia) are autumn winds, warm winds that carry the dust of the Mojave. Now, Santa Anas can erupt any time of year. That’s climate change, for you. Yet a threat that is omnipresent often seems somehow less ominous, making it more likely to catch you off guard.
Even so, LA wasn’t entirely taken by surprise this week. They had two days to get ready. The Santa Anas create the conditions for catastrophic fires on their own. They are fire-making weather events that dry out already parched landscapes, lowering the humidity and raising the temperature as they blow through.
On November 13, 2008, 50-mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds whipped up a bonfire started by college students into an inferno that spread across neighborhoods in Montecito and Santa Barbara. The Tea Fire burned for three days, destroying 210 homes. Then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger described the charred landscape as “looking like Hell.”
The next day, the still-roaring winds, gusting to 80—mph, supercharged a fire in the Santa Clarita Valley that ravaged the town of Sylmar. The Sayre fire burned for a week and destroyed more than 600 buildings, including 480 mobile homes.
We don’t know how this week’s fires originated—cigarette, campfire, truck spark, downed power line, or arson. But the Hollywood Hills, Santa Monica, and San Gabriel Mountains were already primed to burn. Chapparal is born in fire and thrives in it. In their natural state, the chappal landscapes of southern California experience low-intensity fires once every 20 to 50 years.
After a couple of relatively wet years, the southern California coast has now flipped back into drought conditions. It hasn’t experienced any measurable rainfall in eight months. Climate change has made southern California drier, increasing the frequency and intensity of the region’s natural fire regime. Even fully functioning fire hydrants will never replace the amount of moisture climate change has stolen from the ecosystem.
They talk about the “urban-wildland” interface. In So Cal, that interface is under relentless siege as new luxury homes, condos, and “mixed-use” buildings creep inexorably up the hillsides and canyons, undeterred by the rugged geography, faultlines, or flammability. The boundaries between the natural and the manufactured have been shredded, both on the ground and in the atmosphere. The buffer zones are gone and now nothing is standing between you and the wind.
Yes, you were warned. But no number of red flags could really fortify you for what was coming; no amount of preparation at this late stage could save you from hundred-mile-per-hour winds from a hurricane of fire.
Even palaces burn.
Pacific Palisades fire. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)
+++
+ You don’t have to be versed in Mike Davis’s The Ecology of Fear to understand that the people who always pay the heaviest price for these kinds of cataclysms in So. Cal–even in elite zip codes like Pac Palisades–aren’t Hollywood moguls or hedge funders, but LA’s mostly brown and black working poor…
+ In 2019, Eric Garcetti, then the mayor of Los Angeles, told David Wallace-Wells: “There’s no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this. The only thing that will stop this is when the Earth, probably long after we’re gone, relaxes into a more predictable weather state.”
+ An initial estimate from AccuWeather Inc. puts the total cost of the LA fires at between $52 billion and $57 billion, making it the most expensive fire event in history.
+ In July, State Farm, one of the biggest insurers in California, canceled 1600 homeowner policies in Pacific Palisades. A year earlier, the same insurance company had dropped more than 2,000 policies in the nearby neighborhoods of Brentwood, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, and Monte Nido, all of which have now been ravaged by devastating wildfires. But the big insurers who have canceled policies for homeowners and businesses in climate-vulnerable states continue to insure the fossil fuel industries that make people’s homes uninsurable.
+ 19 of the 20 largest fires in California history have ignited since 2000…
+ Environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne, author of Fire in America: “If we keep fighting a war with fire, three things are going to happen. We’re going to spend a lot of money, we’re going to take a lot of casualties, and we’re going to lose.”
+ Mike Davis: ‘The loss of more than 90 percent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate.”
+ It’s worth noting that one of the reasons California likes to keep its prisons as full as possible is that inmates make up around 30% of the state’s firefighting force. For risking their lives on the firelines, prisoners are paid between 16¢ to 74¢ an hour (maxxing out at $5.80 to $10.24 a day) and rewarded with a bologna sandwich and an apple for lunch on the job.
+ When there’s a mass shooting, the response from MAGA is “thoughts and prayers.” When there’s a climate-driven cataclysm, the response is: “Drill, baby, drill, rake, baby, rake, and log, baby, log.”
The LA fires will be used as Trump’s Reichstag fire against environmental regulations.
+ He’s deliriously wrong about everything in this post, except for the incompetence of Gavin Newsom, a preening servant of the real estate and energy industries.
+ President Empathy struts his stuff one more time…
+ If Biden keeps this up, he may be destined to end his presidency less popular than Trump was after Jan. 6, 2021.
+ Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire: “In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing–the fateful blowup.”
+ In 2000, the global warming trend predicted the world would hit 1.5C warming in 2041. It happened in 2024.
+ According to a new study by Aurora Energy Research, rescinding the Inflation Reduction Act’s technology-neutral clean energy tax credits could increase Americans’ electricity bills by 10%. Some states, like Texas, could see increases of more than 20%.
+ Last year, the European Union imported more Russian LNG than ever.
+ The Federal Trade Commission announced that crude oil producers XCL Resources Holdings, LLC (XCL), Verdun Oil Company II LLC (Verdun), and EP Energy LLC (EP) will pay a record $5.6 million civil penalty for illegal coordination that led to a crude oil supply shortage. Before merging, the crude oil companies started working together, limiting the oil supply when the US faced shortages and inflated prices.
+ As more green power plants have gone online, German gas imports dropped by 11% in 2024.
+ After the first week of congestion pricing in NYC, the commute times into Manhattan were cut in half….
+++
Drone image of Pacific Palisades.
Number of destroyed or severely damaged buildings in LA (so far): 20,000
Population of LA County: 10 millionNumber of destroyed or severely damaged buildings in Gaza (so far): 80,000
Population of Gaza: 2.1 million
+ In only five days, the Pacific Palisades fire destroyed more structures (> 12,500) than any fire in California history, except the Camp Fire of 2018, which burned for 18 days.
+ In the 1980s, the US experienced around three weather-related disasters that caused more than $1 billion in damages. Now, the average is around 18 a year. (NOAA)
+ More than 1000 incarcerated people are out fighting LA’s fires, but their families aren’t allowed to contact them to see if they’re safe.
+ Jason Oppenheim, owner of the celebrity real estate firm featured on Selling Sunset, told the BBC that his clients are being price gouged in post-fire LA. One landlord was asking $13,000/month, but when his client went to rent the home, the landlord demanded $23,000. Welcome to the club…Meanwhile, California State Attorney General Rob Bonta said that his office has received numerous reports of hotels and rental properties in southern California increasing their prices by more than 10%, which violates the state’s anti-price gouging law. According to the LA Times, the asking price for single-family homes in the Los Angeles area are being listed for nearly 20% higher since the wildfires started.
+ Florida’s state residual insurance plan is on the hook for $525 billion in losses, twice the amount in 2022, while California’s state insurer faces $290 billion in liabilities, a sixfold increase from 2018. Thirty-six states now have residual insurance plans, but 21 of the states don’t explain how they will pay when the liabilities overwhelm their assets.
+ A report by researchers at the University of Colorado and the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimates that three-fourths of homeowners may not have enough insurance to fully cover losses after a disaster.
+ Shed a few tears for the investment bankers of So Cal, one of whom shelled out $27 million to buy a now incinerated mansion on ‘Billionaire’s Beach.’ He told Fortune that he only expects $3 million from insurance. He’ll probably write the loss off on his taxes for the next decade, assuming he’s paying any.
+ The New York Post reported on Wednesday that Los Angeles landlords have increased rents by as much as 124% after the wildfires.
+ Here’s a spreadsheet tracking rental price-gouging by landlords in LA County…
+ Potential insurance exposure to the Los Angeles fires is $458 billion. The state’s FAIR insurance program only has $700 million cash on hand to pay claims.
+ From Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism:
Out of approximately 700 homes destroyed in the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire, only 95 have been rebuilt and occupied 4 years later, with only 158 more in construction. Nearly two-thirds are not being rebuilt.
+ The top five least affordable metro areas in the US are all in California. According to Redfin, someone living in LA Country who makes the median income in 2024 would need to spend 77.6% of their earnings on monthly housing costs if they bought a median-priced home. How long can this go on?
+ Octavia Butler wrote about a climate-change-ignited wildfire in her path-breaking novel, the Parable of the Sower. The cemetery in the historic black community in Altadena where Butler is buried was burned in the LA fires.
+ A new paper by Zeke Hausfather published in Dialogues on Climate Change exploring climate outcomes under current policies finds that the planet is likely headed toward 2.7C warming by 2100 (with uncertainties ranging from 1.9C to 3.7C), which, if it pans out, is a little better than the 4C warming many of us feared.
+ More than 11 million Californians now live in high-risk wildfire zones, including large areas of Los Angeles County, San Diego, and the wine country of Napa and Sonoma.
+ $2,000: cost per hour of private firefighting teams employed by wealthy homeowners in southern California.
+ If you’re looking for a book to help explain the political ecology behind the LA fires and other climate-driven cataclysms, try this one by a couple of writers you might be familiar with: The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink…
+ As he prepared to go out the door, Biden took time this week to sign an Executive Order cutting regulations for “energy sources” (nuclear, among them) for AI data centers, which are expected to consume around 12% of U.S. electricity by 2028.
+ From an FT story on the coming collapse of the Atlantic Circulation Current: “Data uncertainty is substantial. But uncertainty is not our friend. Uncertainty could mean the tipping point is passed early.”
+++
+ In Ventura County, farmworkers are harvesting strawberries in the dense, toxic smoke from the still-spreading Hughes Fire. Employers are required to provide them with respirator masks when the Air Quality Index hits 150. Many don’t.
Image: United Farm Workers.
+ In one 24-hour Arctic blast, Pensacola, Florida, was buried under 8.7 inches of snow, more snow in one day than 8.0 inches the Gulf Coast City had experienced in the previous 124 years combined.
+ Climate scientist Daniel Swain on the LA fires: “I don’t see this as a failure of firefighting. I see it as an indication of what you can achieve when conditions are this extreme.”
+ A third of Alaska’s vast tundra, once one of the Earth’s greatest carbon sinks, is now a carbon emitteras the permafrost melts, releasing tons of carbon dioxide and methane gas.
February
+ Number of fire alerts in LA County during the first three weeks of 2024: 183
The average number of fire alerts in LA County in the first three weeks of the year from 2012 through 2024: 1.5
+ So, maybe the problem isn’t the Delta Smelt?
+ Maybe part of the problem was private equity’s increasing stranglehold on the fire truck industry, which left more than half the fire trucks in Los Angeles out of service as the fires raged through the Palisades and Altadena.
+ The once giant Ogallala Aquifer, the largest groundwater source in the nation, dropped by more than a foot last year in western Kansas.
+ A new study published in Environmental Research under the ungainly title, Quantifying the Acceleration of Multidecadal Global Sea Surface Warming Driven by Earth’s Energy Imbalance, warns that: “Policy makers and wider society should be aware that the rate of global warming over recent decades is a poor guide to the faster change that is likely over the decades to come, underscoring the urgency of deep reductions in fossil-fuel burning.”
+ The rate of ocean warming has more than quadrupled since 1985, which is pretty clear evidence that global warming is rapidly accelerating.
+ Outside of China, the oil sheikhdoms of the Middle East are the world’s fastest-growing markets for solar power. What do they know the USA doesn’t?
+++
+ California is considering a new law that would permit victims of climate-driven disasters to sue fossil fuel companies for damages. Under existing law, utilities, such as PG&E, can (and have) been held liable if their equipment, such as transformers or power lines, starts wildfires. This move comes as So Cal Edison admitted its power lines (and not the Delta Smelt) may have been responsible for igniting the Eaton Fire that raging through Altadena.
+ Citing climate and environmental concerns, Gustavo Petro ordered the state-run oil company Ecopetrol to cancel a joint venture with Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) that was expected to produce around 90,000 barrels of oil per day, citing environmental concerns.”
+ NYC’s congestion pricing plan now enjoys the support of 66% of the drivers who pay the toll the most frequently.
+ The planet just experienced its warmest January on record…
+ At least 55 million Americans are expected to migrate within the country in the next decade, most of them fleeing the environmental and health consequences of climate change, including more than 5 million this year alone.
+ Energy Secretary Chris Wright: “The US should stop the closure of coal-fired power plants,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said, adding that the fuel source would be “essential to the nation’s power system for decades to come.” Why? Power-hungry AI data centers that need the electricity to steal all of the future, except those involved in the mining of coal.
+ In 2004, it took the world a year to install a gigawatt of solar power. In 2023, it took only a day. Americans, however, can’t get too excited about this remarkable achievement given that Trump has “paused” the permitting of solar projects, even on private lands, effectively paralyzing the development of new renewable energy plans across the country for at least the next two months.
+ EPA director Lee Zeldin said he will try to “claw back” some $20 billion in funding for climate projects awarded under the Biden administration.
+ Trump on gut regulations for powering AI data centers: “We’re going to let the people that are buying the electricity make their own electric plants, electric generation plants… We’re calling it a national emergency. And that’s exactly what it is.” As long as those plants don’t generate electricity through solar, geothermal, wind or hydro power.”
+ Natural ecosystems have seen a 47% decrease against their estimated baselines as of 2019.
Global forest area: –32 %
Natural Ecosystems (extent and condition: -47%
Coral reefs: -50%
Wetlands: -85%
+ Werner Herzog should remake Fitzcarraldo as a climate change thriller, but instead of lugging a steamship over the mountains, try the even more surreal-but-real task of pulling it up the dried-out riverbeds of the Amazon…
Photo:Divulgação observatório do clima.
+New research shows that carbon capture technology is more costly (and less effective at reducing CO2 levels) than switching to renewables: “If you spend $1 on carbon capture instead of on wind, water, & solar, you are increasing CO2, air pollution, energy requirements, energy costs, pipelines, and total social costs.”
+ For the first time in 2024, China’s clean energy technologies contributed more than 10 percent of its GDP, with sales of $1.9 trillion. On the other hand, China constructed 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal plants in 2024, the most in the last 10 years.
+ Peatlands store more carbon than all the world’s forest biomass combined. But they are rapidly being drained and developed around the world and, according to new research published in Conservation Letters, only 17% enjoy any legal protection.
+ A Carbon Brief analysis reveals that 182 of the 193 countries that signed the Paris Accords (nearly 95%) missed the UN deadline to submit new climate pledges for 2035. Countries missing the deadline represent 83% of global emissions and nearly 80% of the world’s economy.
March
+ What comes first this time around, a Dust Bowl or a Depression?
+ Laurie Laybourn, director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, on the failure to take decisive action to reduce carbon emissions: “It’s only really now that the penny is dropping that we didn’t prevent a global-scale climate crisis. We’re now in a global-scale climate crisis.”
+ From a new study in Nature Food: At 1.5C warming scenario, more than half of the 30 crops examined would experience a decrease in the extent of their global potential cropland. Wheat, barley, soya beans, lentils and potatoes would suffer the most significant declines. A 2C warming scenario shows more precipitous declines in suitable areas for the 30 crops with some crops surpassing 50%. At 3C warming, all of the 30 crops studied would have their suitable cropland area reduced.
+ Over 1,000 people came out this week to protest the firings of NOAA scientists in Colorado: “We used to attract people even with our lower pay because we had a good mission and it was a mission valued by the public,” said Nancy McLean, a retired NOAA manager.
+ Increasing tree mortality, attributable primarily to climate change, has resulted in Colorado’s forests now emit more carbon than they absorb.
+++
+ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “The Defense Department doesn’t do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” The US military emits more than 59 million tons of carbon a year, a carbon footprint that’s larger than many industrialized nations.
+ Last year, atmospheric C02 levels reached an 800,000-year high, leading to at least 151 “unprecedented” extreme weather events in 2024.
+ The Trump administration plans to pull the plug on the Mauna Loa Observatory, one of the world’s most crucial monitoring stations for atmospheric CO2.
+ The global average increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration in 2024 not only set a record at 3.7%, but represented a 25% increase over the previous record.
+ According to an IPSOS poll, climate activism continues to decline even as concerns about climate change increase.
+ A new report by the Boston Consulting Group and Cambridge University (Too Hot to Think Straight, Too Cold to Panic) predicts that by 2100, 13 major climate tipping points will be reached:
Greenland ice sheet collapse (1.5C)
West Antarctic ice sheet collapse (1.5C)
Extinction of tropical coral reefs (1.5C)
Abrupt thawing of permafrost (1.5C)
Barents Sea ice loss (1.6C)
North Atlantic subpolar gyre collapse (1.8C)
Tibetan Plateau snowmelt (2.0C)
West African monsoon shift (2.8C)
East Antarctic subglacial basins collapse (3.0C)
Boreal forest southern dieback (4.0C)
Gulf Stream disruption (4.0C)
Boreal forest northern retreat (4.0C).
+ At the onset of tornado season in the center lanes of tornado alley, the National Weather Service will be without weather balloons. Maybe the Chinese could loan them a couple (as long as the Air Force promises not to shoot them down this time)…
+ A recent study on congestion pricing in NYC (The Short-Run Effect of Congestion Pricing in New York City) documents increased commuter speeds and decreased emissions. The study found “no significant difference between neighborhoods with different incomes.
+ The Department of Energy estimates AI data centers could consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from just 4.4% in 2023.
+ While South Africa continues to generate 82% of its electricity from fossil fuels (mainly coal), Kenya has made a radical transition. It now generates 88% of its electricity from geothermal, wind, hydro, biofuels, and solar.
+ Javier Blas, energy columnist at Bloomberg News: “A senior executive of an American oil company told me, ‘We thought that Chris Wright, the energy secretary, was “our guy,” someone from the industry. And here in Houston we just realized that Mr. Wright is Trump’s guy. He’s not our guy. He’s going to do what the White House is telling us to do. And if that means $50 oil and bankruptcies in the oil patch, so be it.’”
+ The deglaciation of Glacier National Park is nearly complete: “In 1850, the area that is now Glacier National Park had approximately 80 glaciers; as of 2015, there were 26—all shrinking. In the last decade, 13 of those have broken apart and can no longer technically be considered glaciers.”
+ Paul Hawkins: “When people say we’re going to “fix” the climate … to me, it’s just so emblematic of this profound disconnection between self and other. We don’t have a climate crisis; the climate cannot have a crisis. We are the crisis”.
+ The Chinese EV maker BYD announced this week that its new line of cars can be fully charged in about the same time it takes to refill a gas-engine vehicle at the pump. It takes about 8 hours to fully charge a Tesla at home and up to 30 minutes to fully charge a Tesla at a “super-charging” station on the road…if you can find one.
+ Sandeep Vaheesan, author of Democracy in Power: “China pursues an abundance of tech while the United States opts for an abundance of tech billionaires.”
+ Climate change is causing increased emissions, which are quickening climate change, which is….well, you get it. The record increase in global emissions last year was attributable to record heatwaves in India and China, which increased the use of coal to power air conditioning.
+ It’s March and wildfires are burning out of control across the Carolinas and New Jersey.
+ I repeat: It’s March and …
April
+ At least 50,000 clean energy jobs have been killed off or delayed by the Trump administration in the last two months. More than $56 billion in clean energy investments have been defunded or halted since February.
+ “Two-thirds of all irrigated agriculture in the world is likely to be affected in some way by receding glaciers and dwindling snowfall in mountain regions, driven by the climate crisis, according to a Unesco report.”
+ Planetary Death Wish 2025: Trump has signed an executive order calling for the use of coal to power AI data centers.
+ More than 470 tornadoes have been reported across the U.S. so far this year, nearly double the historical average for the year to date. According to AccuWeather, extreme weather and natural disasters in America have caused a staggering $344 billion to $382 billion in total damage and economic loss so far this year. But let’s restart the coal plants to power AI data centers!
+ Hank Green: “A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200k/year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.”
+ As predicted, the Keystone XL pipeline ruptured in North Dakota. Rescind that judgment against Greenpeace!
+ The global growth rate in CO2 emissions was 3.5 PPM, causing NOAA to extend its y-axis by 1 ppm for the first time. The significance of the graph is still understated, since it’s charting the rate of increase not the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which would continue to grow even if the rate of increase fell flat or even decreased.
+ According to Berkeley Earth’s dataset, March 2025 tied with March 2016 and March 2024 as the warmest on record. It was 1.55°C above preindustrial (1850-1900) levels.
+ Imagine living in a place that cared even a little bit about your health and well-being…
+ A new study in Science estimates that as many as 1.4 billion people live in areas with soil dangerously polluted by heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel, and lead.
+ “History shows again and again, how Nature proves the folly of men…”
+ The first quarter of 2025 was the second warmest on record, just a fraction behind last year’s mark. An ominous portent, given that 2024 was super-charged by a strong El Nino event, while 2025 started off with weak La Nina conditions.
+ According to a new study by researchers at Dartmouth College published last week in “Nature”, emissions from 111 fossil fuel companies have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, the study finds. These five generated the most harm. The top culprits….
Saudi Aramco: $2.05 trillion
Gazprom: $2 trillion
Chevron: $1.98 trillion
ExxonMobil: $1.91 trillion
BP: $1.45 trillion
May
+ Bloomberg News reports that Chinese purchases of American oil are down 90% year-over-year, while Chinese purchases of Canadian oil are up +700% year-over-year.
+ As hurricane and wildfire season opens, the National Weather Service has been blinded by staff cuts ordered by DOGE and now faces 155 “critical” vacancies. At least 30 National Weather Service offices are currently without a chief meteorologist, including those who issue forecasts for New York City, Cleveland, and Houston. Dr. Robert Rodhe, Berkeley Earth: “Severe staffing shortages at the National Weather Service will lead to missing data, worse forecasts, and late or missing warnings of extreme weather. Sooner or later, people are going to die as a direct result of this.”
+ Meanwhile, David Richardson, the newly appointed head of FEMA, admitted in private meetings that with two weeks to go until hurricane season, the agency doesn’t yet have a fully formed disaster-response plan, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
+ After record temperatures in 2024, many climate scientists predicted that this year would be cooler. In fact, the planet seems to be heading for a second consecutive year with temperatures breaching the 1.5°C climate goal.
+ New research indicates that “the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 C° per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate most recently.”
+ China’s CO2 emissions are declining for the first time in decades and are now a full one percent below their 2024 peak.
+ Maybe just “Drill, baby” and not “Drill, baby, drill”? According to Kaes Van’t Hof, CEO of Diamondback Energy, U.S. oil production has peaked and will start to decline due to the drop in oil prices.
+ On Monday, the city of Shabankareh in Iran hit 52.1°C, the earliest any town has ever topped 125°F…We’re making large swaths of the planet unlivable for humans and other forms of life, in our own lifetimes. What a thing to witness.
+ Over his first 100 days in office, Trump has approved more than 145 measures to roll back or eliminate pollution rules and promote fossil fuels, more than the entire number of rollbacks during his first term.
+ In the first quarter of 2025, China added 60GW of solar power, more than half of it as rooftop installations. This is more than the total installed solar capacity in Spain and France combined–all in only three months. In 2010, the US and Europe were the largest solar and wind power manufacturers. By 2024, China had installed six times more wind and solar power than all of Europe and eight times more than the US.
+ By gutting the incentives for renewable energy, the Trump tax bill passed by the House will likely:
+Cost more than 830,000 jobs
+ hike energy bills
+ increase carbon emissions by an additional 230 million tons by 2035, roughly the annual emissions of Spain
+ A new report on sea level rise published in Nature: Communications warns that millions globally will be forced from their homes by advancing waters and extreme tides even if warming remains below 1.5 °C. “We’re starting to see some of the worst-case scenarios play out almost in front of us. At current warming of 1.2 °C, sea level rise is accelerating at rates that, if they continue, would become almost unmanageable before the end of this century.” But the world is on track for 2.5C-2.9C of global heating, which results in the collapse of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets–a scenario that would lead to a catastrophic 12 metres of sea level rise.
+ Rep. Yassamin Ansari: “I sit on the Natural Resources Committee, where we witnessed the most anti-environment legislation go through. It includes massive giveaways to the oil and gas industry. I also discovered that the chairman, for the first time in his career, had purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of oil and gas stocks. So we’re seeing incredible amounts of corruption.”
+ Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo: “Should we really have wind and solar subsidies in this bill? What if it’s not windy? What if it’s not sunny?”
June
+ Greta Thunberg, defying Lindsey Graham’s call for Israel to attack the unarmed peace activists on the Freedom Flotilla, standing “unbowed” on the bow of the Madleen, as it sails to Gaza: “We can swim very well.”
+ Juan González: “Greta, could you talk about how you see the issue of Palestinian freedom connecting or intersecting with the issue that you’re best known for, which is climate change activism?”
+ Greta Thunberg: “For me, there is no way of distinguishing the two. We cannot have climate justice without social justice. The reason why I am a climate activist is not because I want to protect trees. I’m a climate activist because I care about human and planetary well-being. And those are extremely interlinked. For example, when we see the genocide in Gaza, of course, there are some very obvious links–that ecocide, environmental destruction, is a very common method used in war and to oppress people.”
+ Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawai’i’s Big Island peaked for the year at 430.5 ppm, 3.6 ppm higher than last year and the second largest May-May increase in the 67-year Mauna Loa record. In 2023, the CO2 peaked at 424 ppm. Just wait until you see next year’s numbers!
+ A new study in Canada by researchers at McGill University found that methane leaks from dormant oil and gas wells are at least seven times worse than previously thought. In a rational world, these companies would get the corporate death penalty and the executives a SuperMax cell. But that’s not the world we live in.
+ Just wait until September, when Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Oregon and California are burning, Switzerland!
+ In the last week, the burned area from the Canadian fires has grown by 760,000 hectares – that’s more scorched land than for most entire years! Currently, 2025 is sitting in 12th place for the largest burned area in Canadian history, and it’s only June.
+ Plus, Canada’s in for a long, hot summer…
+ Even though the days are getting longer, the outlook is getting darker and darker: This week Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its plans to to repeal outright greenhouse gas standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, based in part on the specious claim that power plant emissions do not contribute “significantly” to climate change. In fact, coal- and gas-fired power plants are the largest stationary source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and the United States is the second-largest contributor of annual heat-trapping emissions on the planet.
+ Since the Paris Climate Accords in 2015, international banks have financed fossil fuels by $7.9 trillion, including loaning $869 billion to fossil fuel firms in 2024 (the hottest year ever) alone.
+ The Trump administration has slated 25 climate databases for removal: “The databases include historic earthquake recordings, satellite readings of cloud radiative properties, and a tool for studying billion-dollar disasters.”
+ In the last 12 months, the US has spent nearly $1 trillion on disaster recovery and other climate-related needs, which is more than 3% of the US’s GDP.
+ A new study suggests that if the Atlantic Current collapses, it will trigger extreme winters in northern Europe, with temperatures in Norway falling to -40 °C and in London to -20 °C.
+ With dry grasses, parched forests, scorching temperatures, and little rainfall, the fire outlook for California this summer is extreme…“In the last 10 years, the total number of acres burned by significant wildfires has varied from year to year. In 2020, when dry lightning sparked an outbreak of wildfires across Northern California, more than 4.3 million acres burned, but in 2022 and 2023, only about 300,000 acres burned each year. On average, about 1.4 million acres burn a year.”
July
Still from aerial footage of the Texas floods aired by CNN.
While offering his “thoughts and prayers” for the families of those drowned in the Texas floods, JD Vance referred to the killer torrents that swept away more than 100 people, including dozens of children, as “an incomprehensible tragedy.”
“Incomprehensible?”
Only if you ignore the fact that the Girls Camp was allowed to be built and continue operating in one of the most flood-prone valleys in the US, that the climate crisis is making these floods much more frequent and then in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires you gutted the staff of the National Weather Service that could have given these vulnerable children warning of the imminent danger that would claim their lives …If you don’t ignore these facts, this tragedy was both entirely predictable and avoidable.
Trump put his own self-exculpating spin on the floods, saying they were impossible to foresee: “Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it.” In fact, almost anyone who knew the slightest thing about the area known as “Flood Alley” saw it coming. Because it had already come, more than once. Previous recent floods had killed 10 people in 1987, 31 people in 1998 and 26 people in 2015.
The denuded hill country of central Texas contains some of the most flood-prone valleys in the United States. The Guadeloupe River was so flood-prone that the Kerr County sheriff had recommended installing a flash flood warning system back in 2016. And the Obama administration agreed to the request, only to have the Texas Division of Environmental Management refuse the offer.
Climate change has made the extreme rainfall episodes that have plagued this region of Texas for decades even more frequent and more lethal. In central Texas, the intensity of extreme rainfall events has increased by 19% since 1985. Climate change has made the extreme rainfall episodes that have plagued this region of Texas for decades even more frequent and more lethal. In central Texas, the intensity of extreme rainfall events has increased by 19% since 1985. “Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7 percent with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate,” Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA told the New York Times.
On July 3, remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which had whacked the gulf coast of Mexico earlier in the week, settled over central Texas, eventually dumping four months of rainfall on the Texas Hill Country (about 1.8 trillion gallon) in the next three days. That afternoon, the depleted ranks of the National Weather Service issued its first alert, warning of flash floods in the Guadalupe River valley, predicting rainfall totals of more than 6 inches in 12 hours. The predictions were made by a seriously understaffed NWS office in San Antonio, which lacked both a chief meteorologist and a warning coordination meteorologist.
It’s not just the NWS that finds itself overworked and understaff as the warming climate unleashes stronger and stronger storms. The slashes to NOAA’s budget and staffing are going to dangerously degrade accurate and timely predictions of the threats posed by tropical storms, cyclones and hurricanes. According to Dr. Frank Marks, a 45-year hurricane veteran, the staff needed to fly NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft is down by 50% this year.
This initial forecast proved to be a fatal underestimation and the emergency alert, urging residents to evacuate to higher ground (though how high that ground was and whether it was high enough remains unclear) didn’t come out until 4:30 in the morning. By 6:AM, it was too late, the river was already flowing at record flood levels. More than 20 inches of rain would fall on the Guadalupe Valley watershed in the next three days, causing the river to surge from 3.5 feet to 34.29 feet in less than an hour and a half, sweeping away houses, bridges, barns, roads, farm animals and at least 120 people (173 remain missing), including as many as 27 young girls and counselors at Camp Mystic, the summer camp for evangelical girls. Most of the cabins at the camp, run for years by Conservative Christians, were located in flood zones, some in areas label “extreme risk.”
In 2019, the owners of the camp completed a multi-million dollar renovation. But instead of moving the most vulnerable cabins out of the flood zone, it built more cabins inside it. Anna Serra-Lobet, a flood risk researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told the New York Times that allowing these cabins to be built in extreme risk “floodways” was “like pitching a tent in a highway. It’s going to happen, sooner or later. A car is going to come or a flood is going to come.”
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott didn’t waste much time in urging a socialist response to the disaster, as he begged Trump for immediate help. The emergency aid wasn’t quick in coming, however. Indeed, FEMA’s response to the Texas floods was crippled by cost controls imposed on the agency by DHS head Kristi Noem, who didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began. Still Abbott rejected calls for an investigation into the lack of warnings and the bungled rescue operations, calling it “words of losers.” He presumably wasn’t talking about those who “lost” their lives and loved ones, though who knows given the hair-chested rhetoric he customarily deploys.
Days went by, as the death toll continued to mount, without a single word from Trump and Noem’s pick to head FEMA, David Richardson, prompting a FEMA staffer to denounce Richardson for showing “a lack of regard in disaster response, and a lack of care for communities that suffer through these disasters.”
As for Noem, she fired contract workers at FEMA emergency centers a day after the flooding started, leaving thousands of calls for help unanswered in the middle of the crisis…
At his press conference in Texas, Trump said that anyone who criticized the response to the floods was a “bad person.” So, Heckuva job, Puppy Slayer!
+++
+ Five years from now, we’ll long for the cool June of 2025…
+ Rep. Tim Burchett: “God put coal in the ground, let’s use it… There’s a reason as Trump told me that there’s no windmills in China.”
+ Paul Musgrave: “The China challenge isn’t what American policymakers think it is. It’s not primarily about security threats or unfair trade practices—it’s about Chinese companies making better products for less money, and winning hearts and minds in the process.”
+ China now dominates the global market share across every major sector of clean energy technology.
+ Wind and solar power together generated a quarter (26%) of the China’s electricity in April 2025. Wind power accounted for 13.6% of generation while solar contributed 12.4%.
+ Bill McKibben: “It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.” Largely thanks to China.
+ According to new research published in Nature Geoscience, climate change is making heatwaves hotter and longer in duration: “Each increment of regional time-averaged warming increases the characteristic duration scale of long heatwaves more than the previous increment.”
+ French “heatwaves” since 1947…
+ Public concern about climate change is declining even as extreme weather events are on the rise: “The nonprofit also found the share of people concerned about climate change has fallen over the past year, dipping from 68% to 60%. Support for the UK’s target to hit net zero emissions by 2050 fell even further, plunging from 62% to 46%.”
+ The UK has missed its tree planting targets by more than 36,000 hectares, an area about the size of the Isle of Wight.
+ A report published in the New Scientist finds that “offsetting the estimated 182 billion tons of carbon held in the reserves of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies would require covering more land with trees than the entirety of North and Central America.
+++
+ In the last two years, wildfires have burned more acres in northeast British Columbia than in the previous 60 years combined and nearly a third of the remaining forests could burn by year’s end. Lori Daniels, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia.”This region of the province is in a multi-year drought. It has been in a drought condition for six or seven years now.”
+ The US has experienced more than double the number of flash floods (4356) this year than average (1861).
+ In response to appeals from Camp Mystic and the state of Texas in 2013, FEMA removed dozens of buildings at the camp from the 100-year flood hazard map for Kerr County.
+ The top three wettest hourly rainfalls amounts in New York City have all happened in the last four years. The 2.07 inches that fell on NYC on Monday night between 6:51 PM and 7:51 PM was the second most ever recorded, ranking only behind the drenching doled out by Hurricane Ida in 2021. The remarkable aspect of this deluge is that it happened without a tropical storm.
+ Indonesia announced plans to transition to 100% renewables by 2035 instead of 2040, largely through solar.
+ Last month, solar was the leading source of electric power in Europe for the first time.
+ Share of global off-shore wind power installations…
China: 50.3%
Europe: 44.2%
Rest of Asia Pacific: 5.3%
USA: 0.2%
+ The top 13 fastest warming countries in the world are all in Europe…
1 Norway +3.47°C
2 Belarus +2.45°
3 Lithuania +2.35°
4 Russia +2.34°
5 Austria +2.31°
5 Slovenia +2.31°
7 Latvia +2.31°
8 Ukraine +2.29°
9 Czechia +2.28°
9 Estonia +2.28°
9 Switzerland +2.28°
12 Poland +2.25°
12 Moldova +2.25°
+ According to a report in the New York Times, data center construction “has exacerbated water shortages across the world.” How long before a Supreme Court decision ruling that data are people, too.
+ The International Court of Justice finally rendered its advisory opinion on the obligations of states in respect of climate change. Charging that “existential problem of planetary proportions,” the court ruled that government actions driving climate change violate international and members states are legally required to cut their emissions and compensate vulnerable nations for the harm they have caused.
August
+ Jeff Bearadelli:
I don’t think you can understate just how impressive this heat dome is. It covers 2/3 of the nation, in which 80% of the country’s population over the 7-day heatwave period will hit 90+ for a high temperature (~260 million people). The peak intensity of the heat dome was record-breaking for the SE US in late July. It peaked at 3.7 standard deviations, based on statistics from the past climate records we have, which means this heat dome is rare, if not virtually impossible, in our former climate of the 1900s. But human-caused climate change now makes these extreme heat domes much more likely. From the climate scientists at World Weather Attribution: ‘Every heatwave in the world is now made stronger and more likely to happen because of human-caused climate change.’
+ According to the energy statistics group Ageb, German hard coal-fired power generation increased by 23.3% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period last year.
+ A new study from the UK finds that being hit by an SUV (as compared to a regular car) “considerably” increases the risk of death for children, and even more so for young children.
+ Marine heat waves in 2023 covered at least 96% of the Earth’s oceans and lasted four times longer than normal. The heat waves of 2024 were just as bad.
+ The 2025 fire season in Canada is already the third worst in history and will almost certainly become the second worst. A study from 2018 found that over the last six decades, the fire season in Canada is starting one week earlier and ending one week later. The fire season is likely even longer now.
+ India is on track to meet its 2030 renewable targets and will exceed the US in the deployment of new wind and solar generators this year.
+ Trump in Scotland this week: “And the other thing I say to Europe: we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery. Our beautiful plains. I’m not talking about airplanes… they won’t let you bury the propellers.”
+ Under its most conservative estimates, the Department of Energy says the US needs to build 5,000 miles of new transmission lines a year to transport renewable power across state lines. In 2024, the entire US built 322 miles of them.
+ Only 474 out of more than 90,000 oil slicks from ships around the world were reported to authorities over a five-year period–that’s less than 0.5 percent. Carrie O’Reilly, marine ecologist at Florida State: “Even trace quantities of oil are damaging to planktonic organisms, which form the base of the marine food web”.
+ Bruno Maçães: “Stunning to look at Europe today: if China sells us ultra cheap solar panels, effectively subsiding our energy transition, that’s the threat of autocracy. If the US uses coercion and blackmail to sink our economies, that’s working together.”
+ Trump has almost completely deregulated the fossil fuel industry in the US, but his pals on Wall Street don’t seem to be buying it. The financing of new oil, gas and coal projects by the six largest banks has dropped by 25% percent, as compared to the last year of the Biden administration. Morgan-Stanely’s financing of fossil fuels fell by 54%.
+ A new study published in Science finds that breathing polluted air increases the risk of osteoporosis.
+++
Meteorologist Jeff Beradelli on the explosive growth of Hurricane Erin:
Hurricane Erin achieved something most storms do not this weekend. “Extreme Rapid Intensification”. Did climate change play a part? Science says, yes.
In 12 hours winds increased by ~65 mph. Only 3 other storms have done that and Erin was the earliest & only August storm to do so.
Also, there was a 78 mb drop in 24 hours, a feat only achieved by 2 other storms since 1980, and those were both in October (Milton & Wilma).
Erin was the 5th earliest cat 5 on record.
The image below shows that water temps in the vicinity of the Rapid Intensification (RI) were almost 2F above normal, hot waters made much more likely by climate change. In fact, studies show episodes of Rapid Intensification (esp. extreme RI) have increased significantly over the past few decades as waters have warmed. RI has increased by almost 5 mph per decade over the past 40 years. That means that a storm – which in the 1980s – had a RI of 40 mph in 24 hours, would likely have an RI of 60 mph in 24 hours now (on average). That makes storms much more destructive (if they landfall of course)
It’s not coincidence, it’s climate change.
Now, worth mentioning you need a whole lot more than hot water for a cat 5 & RI – all factors must line up – but if they do, hotter than normal water makes it much more possible.
+ Meteorologist John Morales: “The rapid intensification threshold is 35 mph in 24 hours. For extreme rapid intensification, it’s 58 mph in 24 hours. Erin saw an 85 mph gain in max windspeed in 24 hrs. By barometric pressure, it is a top-20 strongest Atlantic hurricane.”
+ From a disturbing new report in Nature on the “abrupt changes” going on down in the Antarctic:
“A regime shift has reduced Antarctic sea-ice extent far below its natural variability of past centuries, and in some respects is more abrupt, non-linear and potentially irreversible than Arctic sea-ice loss.”
“The tipping point for unstoppable ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be exceeded even under best-case CO2emission reduction pathways, potentially initiating global tipping cascades.”
+ What AI data centers have done to your electricity bill: prices in the US are up 38% in the last 5 years, after being stable for the previous 5 years.
+ A study in Nature found glaciers in the Alps and Pyrenees mountains of Europe have lost about 40% of their mass since 2000. 2022 and 2023 set new records for percentage of ice loss.
+ The Mediterreanean is becoming a tropical sea. With water temperatures of 32C, these warming water have encouraged hundreds of species native to the Red Sea, such as the lionfish, to invade the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal. The consequences to the sea’s ecosystems could be devastating.
Heatmap: “From 2020 to 2023, the average American breathed in concentrations of smoke-related PM2.5 that were between 2.6 and 6.7 times higher than the 2006 to 2019 average.”
+ Former NOAA scientist Holden Harris, whose doctorate was funded by the National Science Foundation, on life after being fired by the Trump Administration: “Today, among my four part-time and consulting jobs, I sell frozen chocolate bananas on the beach in Jacksonville Beach. That cannot be the best return on taxpayer investment.”
September
+ On Tuesday, California was hit by more than 10,000 lightning strikes in less than 24-hours, igniting wildfires up and down the state.
+ China currently has 339 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity under construction, that’s nearly two-thirds of the world’s existing capacity.
+There’s a reason for this…
+ The data center for Zuckerberg’s Meta, now under construction outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, will consume more power than all of the homes in the Cowboy State.
+ Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, got brutally fact-checked on Elon Musk’s own platform this week for his inane deprecations about solar energy…
+ Nicholas Fulghum, Senior Energy and Climate Data Analyst at Ember Energy: “Covering the planet in solar panels would produce around 150-200 million TWh of electricity a year. That is 1,000x more than the global primary energy consumption of ~180,000 TWh. There’s wrong and then there’s @SecretaryWright wrong, who is LEADING THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY.”
+ There are two options here: Wright destroyed a lot of brain cells when he drank fracking fluid to prove it was “safe.” Or he’s just lying. Probably both.
+ A bracing new report in Nature warns that the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon may be exhausted much sooner than thought: “Researchers report that Earth can safely store around 1,460 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO₂) — a number much lower than the 10,000–40,000 GtCO₂ often cited in previous studies.”
+ According to OXFAM, the deepening drought in East Africa is worse than the one that devastated the region in 2011, when huge herds of cattle, sheep and goats were completely wiped out and 750,000 people perished from starvation and lack of water. Herder Mahmoud Ciroobey from Kalsheikh in Somaliland:
This drought is slowly killing everything. First, it “swept away” the land and the pastures; then it “swept away” the animals, which first became weaker and weaker and eventually died. Soon, it is going to “sweep away” people. People are sick with flu, diarrhoea, and measles. If they don’t get food, clean water, and medicines, they will die like their animals.
+ Decade after decade, the dry season in the Amazon rainforest has been getting longer and drier. A new study published in Nature Communicationsfound that about 75 percent of the decrease in rainfall is directly linked to deforestation. In the first six months of 2025, Brazilian officials reported a 27 percent increase in tree loss nationwide over the same period last year.
+ The air quality in Squamish, British Columbia (30 miles north of Vancouver) hit 800 on Wednesday. An AQI between 200 and 300 is considered “very unhealthy. An AQI above 300 is considered “hazardous.” An AQI of 800 is almost unbreathable.
+ Air pollution generated by the oil and gas industry causes more than 90,000 premature deaths across the US each year and results in hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma and more than 10,000 incidents of premature birth annually, according to a new study by researchers at University College London and the Stockholm Environment Institute. Moreover, the report found that the burden falls disproportionately on the poor and communities of color.
+
+ Realtor Climate Risk Report: “More than one in four U.S. homes—amounting to $12.7 trillion in real estate—faces at least one type of severe or extreme climate risk, like floods, hurricanes, and wildfires.”
+ Trump’s EPA is preparing to stop collecting toxic emissions data from air polluters, which is going to end up killing a lot more people a year than mass shooters, even here in the home of mass shooters.
+ Last year, Burgum’s home state of North Dakota produced 35% of its energy from wind power.
+ Apparently, they’ve forgotten all about how to store energy and the batteries containing the rare earth minerals they’re arm-twisting countries across to acquire?
+ Even as Trump is doing everything he can to shut it down, congestion pricing in NYC has succeeded in reducing vehicle traffic into Manhattan by 12%, meaning almost 18 million fewer vehicles trips since it went into effect.
+ Trump at the UN General Assembly:
Climate change it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that cost their country’s fortunes and given those same countries, no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.
+ The Trump administration has ordered the National Park Service to begin removing signage about slavery, climate change and the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “This is an outrageous assault on our free speech and ability to educate each other,” charged Rep. Chellie Pingree, the Democrat from Maine. “It’s just bonkers to me that the federal government is imposing these kinds of restraints, that we’re taking away valuable information from our citizens who visit this park, and that we are trying to dumb everyone down and pretend real weather events don’t happen by not letting you read a simple sign.”
October
+ This month, Trump’s team launched a coordinated assault on renewable energy.
+ Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Fox: “We’re announcing today expanded programs to help the American coal industry. We’re helping it because for years it has been under assault. It was out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, Colorado, and New York City … coal just makes the world go round.”
+ Bailing out a dying industry that has killed and sickened 10s of thousands of workers and the atmosphere…
+ Coal power peaked in the US in 2007. Wind and solar power overtook it in 2024.
+ EPA director Lee Zeldin on why renewable energy is bad: “Those battery storage sites cost a whole lot of money, and they then catch on fire and these local municipalities, fire departments, they aren’t prepared for those massive fires that end up resulting and those environmental impacts.”
+ Interior Secretary Doug Burgum: “There was just a report out — all of these European wind companies, they’ve had a wind drought … All of those European companies are reporting earnings below expectations because the wind didn’t blow as hard this summer as they expected it to do.”
+ A new study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that: “A broad shift to electric vehicles — which are quieter than traditional vehicles — could yield noise reduction benefits of $77.3 billion, concentrated among low-income families in dense urban areas.”
+ Bloomberg News reports that “wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.”
+ Only 38% of the California homes lost to fire in the last ten years have been rebuilt.
+++
+ Since the year 2000, nearly 78% of the planet has set new records for all-time maximum monthly temperatures. At least 38% were set in the last five years alone.
+ The Energy Department has added “emissions” and “climate change” to its banned words list. Too bad George Carlin isn’t around to expound upon the 1,723 words you can’t say in the Trump Administration…
+ Chinese electric vehicles, which are priced thousands of dollars less than US and European models, now account for more than half of all global EV sales,
+ Carbon offsets are a corporate scam that hasn’t worked and never will work. Stephen Lezak, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Smith School:
We must stop expecting carbon offsetting to work at scale. We have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed.
+ The latest evidence that the ocean ecosystems are dying: Since June, around 400 marine mammals have washed up sick or dead on California’s Central Coast since June from leptospirosis, toxic algal blooms and a collapsing food chain. These numbers, records though they are, are almost certainly a vast undercount, since most of the deaths go unnoticed.
+ Despite spiking demand, Nevada has seen the lowest electric utility price increases in the nation over the last twenty years (just +1.4%), owing largely to its massive investment in solar power.
+ A new report submitted to the UK government by its climate advisors warns that “heatwaves will occur in at least four out of every five years in England by 2050, and time spent in drought will double. The number of days of peak wildfire conditions in July will nearly triple for the UK…with some peak river flows increasing by 40%.”
+ With his customary perverse sense of timing, Trump posted this rubbish on the same day one of the most powerful hurricanes in the history of the Atlantic Ocean trashed Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, and took direct aim at the Bahamas… 
+ Luke de Noronha on Hurricane Melissa’s ferocious landfall in Jamaica: ‘Shana texted me: ‘I can hear trees breaking and zinc flying. The wind sounds like it’s talking.’ On the videos people sent, it sounded more like screeching. Chris: ‘An almond tree broke in half next door. It was three storeys high.’”
+ Amitav Ghosh on Earth after the climate apocalypse: “The notion of anticipatory ruination has implications that extend far beyond Bangladesh: in a sense, it has now become a plan for the future of the entire planet.”
+ As Trump calls for a halt to solar installations, Texas has forged ahead. In the last five years, electricity demand on the Texas grid (ERCOT) has grown by 20 percent. But emissions have fallen by 7% over the same period. Why? Because according to the Energy Information Agency, nearly all of the demand has been met by renewables: wind, batteries and, especially, solar.
+ According to a survey by the University of Chicago, only 52% of Americans believe in human-caused climate change, a drop from 55% in 2017. Belief among Democrats has fallen 5 points since then, while belief among Republicans has grown by 9 points and, among Independents, by 16 points. (42 percent of young Republicans now believe in anthropogenic warming, logging only slightly behind the rest of the country.)
+ North Dakota is the only state in the US that has seen its electricity prices fall since 2019. Could that be because in the last six years, the Flickertail State has seen:
– Solar generation increased by 425%
– Wind generation increased by 34%
– Coal generation fell by 8%
+ Carbon reduction plans submitted to the UN by more than 60 countries would reduce global emissions by a mere 10 percent, far below the goals set in the Paris Climate Accords or needed to slow runaway climate change.
+ A Lawrence Livermore / Berkeley study estimates that about 40 percent of California’s electricity price increase over the last five years was due to wildfire-related costs.
November
+++
+ Obviously, not “our” people, so no cause for alarm…
+ Since 1997, there’s been a 2.7% decline in annual rainfall in the US, while extreme flooding events have dramatically increased, according to new research from AccuWeather.
+ According to a study by researchers at the World Inequality Lab, the wealthiest 1 percent of the global population accounts for 15% of all emissions attributed to consumers, but when their carbon footprint is measured by the assets they own, their share jumps up to about 40 percent.
+ A new paper published in Energy Research and Social Science found that the 2022 energy crisis drove record global profits for fossil fuel companies: “We estimate that globally, the net income in publicly-listed oil and gas companies alone reached $916 billion in 2022, with the US the biggest beneficiary, with claims on $301 billion, more than US investments of $267 billion investment in low-carbon energy economy that year.” Half of profits went to the top 1 percent, mainly through stock ownership.
+ CNBC: I could see a Democratic president declaring a climate emergency to tax countries with high CO2 emissions. Does that concern you at all what Democrats might do with this type of tariff power?
Scott Bessent: I would question whether there’s a climate emergency. It’s all been proven wrong.
+ Elon Musk, disputing Trump’s assertion that solar energy is “a scam to make your country fail”: “Just with solar alone, China can, in 18 months, produce enough solar panels to power all the electricity of the United States.”
+ Though fossil fuels still dominate, the percentage of the planet’s energy derived from fossil fuels edged down again in 2024 and is now at the lowest level since the 1960s.
+ Battery capacity by power grid in the US:
CAISO (California): 14,609 MW
ERCOT (Texas): 10,982 MW
PJM (Mid-Atlantic): 441 MW
+ Since April 13, 2025, Nepal has recorded 4,597 weather/climate-related disaster incidents nationwide. A total of 335 people have died, 41 are missing, and 1,264 have been injured, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.
+ Lyndi Stone, a principal corporate counsel for Microsoft, on the problem with siting data centers:
Nobody really wants a data center in their backyard, I don’t want a data center in my backyard…. Data centers, once they’re operational, don’t bring a lot of jobs.
+++
+ Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement will rise around 1.1% in 2025, reaching a record 38.1 billion tonnes of CO2, according to the latest figures from the Global Carbon Project.
+ A new study published in Nature finds broad support globally for decisive action to combat climate change: “Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action.”
+ In the last 13 years, electric vehicle sales in Norway have gone from less than 5% to 95% of all cars and trucks sold in the country.
+ Today, almost 3/4 of EU electricity generation comes from non-fossil energy sources.
+ Solar now accounts for around 90 percent of all new energy growth, globally. Global solar grew by 498 TWh (+31%) in Q1-Q3 2025, compared to 2024, “the largest increase ever over a nine-month period.” Global solar output in the first three quarters of 2025 already eclipsed the total output in all of 2024.
+ China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months.
+ The draft text coming out of COP30 in Belém dropped a provision calling for a global plan to move away from fossil fuels. In fact, the elides all mentions of fossil fuels. What’s the point?
+ The amount of carbon dioxide emitted getting to and from the climate summits is now officially more than the amount of carbon dioxide reduced by the summits.
+ This is the 29th year in a row that Greenland has lost more ice than it gained. For the past four years, rainfall has been recorded at Greenland’s northernmost point.
+ Trump on climate change at Saudi/US Investment conference: ” I’m all for climate change… It’s climate change that’s destroying the world, remember? The world was supposed to have been gone two years ago. The world was gonna burn up, but it actually got much cooler. It’s a little conspiracy. We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated.”
+South Africa’s solar panel imports increased by 60% in the last 12 months, led by South Africa and followed by 20 other countries. Meanwhile, India has now hit its goal of 50% clean energy, five years ahead of the target date.
+ In 2008, climate models predicted the world would pass 1.5 °C of warming in 2048. Today, the best estimate is 2029.
+ After pushback from the real estate industry, “Zillow “quietly removed” climate risk estimates from over one million listings…
+ Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro, the genocide defender many Democratic Party elites want to run for president in 2028, pulled his state out of a climate pactmany other Blue states, including Virginia, under new governor Abigail Stanberger, have joined…
+ The Guardian on the rapid depletion of the planet’s groundwater:
“Groundwater poverty has become one of the major issues in climate change, with cities throughout the world sinking through a combination of frequent droughts, heavy stormwater running off without replenishing the underwater storage and megacities drawing too much Artesian water. It is a problem which immediately affects large centres of population, eventually making them uninhabitable. And now huge swathes of southern Europe, home to millions of people for thousands of years, are under severe and immediate threat.”
+ Solar power generation in Texas is up 40 percent over last year.
+ According to a piece in Forbes, it seems like Trump’s campaign to halt the transition to renewable energy sources are failing:
In the third quarter, USA spending on clean energy and transportation jumped 8% from a year ago to $75 billion, the highest quarterly amount ever. And so far this year, such investments are running 6% ahead of the first three quarters of 2024.
December
+ The mass coral bleaching event that began in 2023 has become the largest event ever recorded. It is the fourth mass coral bleaching event ever recorded and the second to occur in the last 10 years. Since January, 2023, at least 83.7% of the world’s coral reef areas have been damaged by bleaching-level heat stress, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced last week.
+ According to a new paper published in Nature Communications, peak glacier extinction will occur in the next 15 to 30 years: “Here, using three global glacier models, we project a sharp rise in the number of glaciers disappearing worldwide, peaking between 2041 and 2055 with up to ~4,000 glaciers vanishing annually.”
+ The massive flooding in Sumatra may have been a death knell for the world’s endangered great ape, the Tapanuli orangutan. Primatologists are calling the flooding an “extinction-level disturbance” for the species, which has fewer than 800 individuals left. Large areas of habitat have been destroyed and ape conservation groups estimate that as much as 11% (35 or more individuals) of the orangutan’s entire population may have been lost.
+ The Trump administration is pulling the plug on one of the world’s leading climate research stations, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Known as the “Global Mothership” for climate and weather forecasting, Ross Vought, Trump’s hatchet man at OMB, says the Center needs to be eliminated because its research and forecasts spread “climate alarmism.” This is the climate equivalent of Trump trying to tell people that their food and energy prices have gone down, not up.
+ In New York City, congestion pricing has led to a 22 percent decline in particulate pollution, a study finds.
+ More than 1,800 people died and some 1.2 million were chased from their when two overlapping tropical cyclones – Ditwah and Senyar – hit Sumatra region of Indonesia and Peninsular Malaysia at the same time, generating deadly floods, mudflows and landslides. The storms developed over North Indian Ocean waters that were 0.2°C warmer than the historical 1991-2020 average. It is one of the most lethal weather-related disasters in recent history and recent research by the World Weather Attribution group corroborates the theory that climate change is making these deadly cyclones more frequent, the winds stronger and the rainfall more intense.
+ According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said this year is “virtually certain” to finish as either the second- or third-warmest year since records began around 1850:
The global average temperature anomaly for January to November 2025 stands at 0.60°C above the 1991–2020 average, or 1.48°C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial reference. These anomalies are identical to those recorded for the full year 2023, currently the second warmest year.
+ The last 10 years have been the 10 hottest years on record.
The post Out of the Greenhouse and Into the Madhouse: the Year in Climate Politics appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.