Vandalism, with a plan

Figuring out what the thugs are up to so we can stand up to them

It would be tempting to dismiss Trump’s many functionaries as idiots, because many of them are. Here, for instance, is a transcript of leaked audio from a recent staff meeting led by acting FEMA director David Richardson, a man with no experience in disaster management (but who did write what the reliable Kate Aronoff described as a bad autobiographical novel with the inspired title War Story). Anyway, put yourself in the place of the FEMA staff hearing this highly relatable anecdote:

"The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend, she's from Texas. She's got like huge red hair. Like, she's from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up. However, they do disaster recovery very, very well, and so does Florida, okay. So, we should be able to take some lessons learned on how Florida and Texas do their disaster recovery, we’ve got to spread that around and get other folks do it some way. And there should be some budgeting things that they have, I bet. I bet Governor Abbott has a rainy day fund for fires and tornadoes and disasters such as hurricanes, and he doesn't spend it on something else"

But if there’s endless idiocy at work (some of it as cover—if I was taking flak for my $400 million flying bribe I’d start tweeting about Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen too), there’s also a kind of underlying feral cunning. All the stupid stuff heads in the same direction.

For example, the administration last week announced it would get rid of the Energy Star program, which rates various appliances by their efficiency so that consumers (and landlords and building owners) can make wise choices.

“The Energy Star program and all the other climate work, outside of what’s required by statute, is being de-prioritized and eliminated,” Paul Gunning, the director of the E.P.A. Office of Atmospheric Protection, told employees during the meeting, according to the recording obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Gunning’s office itself is also slated for elimination.

This is a program begun by Republicans—former EPA administrator William K. Reilly wrote a fond reminiscence yesterday for the Washington Post, who pointed out that if you were actually worried about, say, waste, then this would be the last program to cut

The program costs $32 million in annual federal outlays to administer but has saved consumers $200 billion in utility bills since 1992 — $14 billion in 2024 alone. The averted air pollution, which was the EPA’s initial objective, has been considerable, equivalent to the emissions of hundreds of thousands of cars removed from the road.

But what if you wanted to burn more fossil fuel? What if you wanted to stretch out the transition to cheap, clean renewable energy? Well then it would make a lot of sense.

Or take yesterday’s news, from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, vowed that he would eliminate the “start-stop” technology in cars because “everyone hates it.” This feature keeps your car from idling at stoplights—when you tap the accelerator the car turns back on. It’s not mandatory for carmakers, and drivers can turn it off with a button. But, as Fox News points out,

The feature can improve fuel economy by between 4% and 5%, previous EPA estimates showed. It also eliminated nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year as of 2023

Meanwhile, energy secretary Chris Wright, according to excellent reporting in Heatmap News today, is taking federal money designed to convert a steel plant to electricity and hydrogen and instead using it to convert the steel plant to…the fossil fuel it’s already using. The company, its CEO explained, is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” and those priorities, of course, are to use more energy.

Occam’s Razor, I think, would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy. Remember all that endless Trump nonsense about low-flow shower heads? They cut the use of hot water by about forty percent. Ditto incandescent bulbs, which use 75-90 percent more energy, and which Trump is trying to bring back. It’s strange to be pro-waste, but there you are. This administration is garbage in every way.

That all of this costs consumers money is obvious—but we don’t really pretend to care about consumers any more. Remember: two dolls and five pencils apiece. No, the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: it became increasingly clear this week that the Republican Congressional majority is all too willing to gut the IRA, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.

And Big Oil is in trouble. Power demand in New England hit an all time low in late April, because so many homes now have solar panels on top. In, um, Saudi Arabia solar arrays are springing up left and right. Bloomberg’s David Fickling chronicles the “relentless” switch towards spending on clean energuy, albeit too slowly to hit the most important climate targets. A new global poll of business executives found that 97 percent were eager to make the switch to renewable energy for their companies, on the grounds that

Electricity is the most efficient form of energy, and renewables-generated electricity a value-add to businesses and economies. In many countries, fossil fuels, with their exposure to imports and volatility to geopolitical shocks, are a liability. For business, this isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. Volatility drives up costs, turns strategic planning into guesswork and delays investment.

That’s how sensible people with sensible goals—like making their businesses work, think. But it’s exactly the opposite of how our government now imagines its role. The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register yesterday: their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech.

So the goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear: do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating. Courtesy of Johann Saether in Norway, here’s the Sun of the Week, from the global gallery at Sunday.earth, where I hope you’re planning your event for September 21

In other energy and climate news:

+Well, we’re finding out what doesn’t work. The giant “direct air capture” plant in Iceland, designed to filter co2 out of the air, has always been hopelessly expensive. But it also is failing to capture enough carbon dioxide to cover its own emissions—that is, it’s making the problem worse. Reykjavik’s weekly newspaper Heimildin had the data and also the reactions from good people around the world who had signed up to reduce their carbon footprints

“I’m 65 years old and retired when I was 60. One of the things I wanted to do in my later years was reduce my carbon footprint,” says Michael de Podesta, who worked for the UK’s National Physical Laboratory for most of his life, where he studied cold fusion, including debunking it. Michael is one of 21,000 subscribers to Climeworks, but after paying his subscription dutifully for about two years, he began to have doubts. Finally, he wrote on his widely read blog and asked a simple question: Am I a gullible idiot?

“I paid £40 [around 7,000 ISK] a month for fifty kilograms of CO2. I was supposed to get around 600 kilograms a year. I paid them right up until October last year and by then I had paid them to dispose of almost 2.2 tonnes of CO2 and got the tonne for around £800 [135 thousand ISK],” says Michael. He says the project seemed promising at first. He saw coverage of the project in the scientific journal Nature, one of the most prestigious in the world. The science was certainly there: CO2 can be sucked out of the atmosphere and Climeworks’ plans were ambitious.

However, Michael quickly noticed that no matter how much he paid, no CO2 had been captured and disposed of in his name. The math didn’t add up when the energy requirements were examined more closely.

Meanwhile, the project’s Swiss sponsor, Climeworks, told Zurich media yesterday that they were laying off many of their employees, arguing that the problems in Iceland were due to “ice and snow causing certain mechanisms to freeze.”

And in California a new study found that the state’s carbon cap-and-trade program was wasting huge amounts of money, some of it on offsets that were supposedly protecting forests that in fact were never going to be cut.

All of this is a continued vindication of Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, who has been arguing steadily that wasting money on direct air capture or any other such scheme is a waste when we need to be focused on one project: the rapid buildout of sun, wind, and batteries. Here’s his latest update from a British journal

Poor technologies include carbon capture, synthetic (as opposed to natural) direct air carbon capture (direct air capture), blue hydrogen, electro-fuels, new small and large nuclear reactors, and bioenergy.

For example, investing in carbon capture and direct air capture increases air pollution, carbon dioxide emissions, fossil-fuel mining, fossil-fuel infrastructure, carbon dioxide and fossil-fuel pipelines, energy requirements, private energy costs, and social energy costs (by a factor of 9-12) relative to investing the same money in clean, renewable energy. What is more, over 82 percent of all carbon dioxide captured worldwide, in reality, is used for enhanced oil recovery. During this process, 30 to 40 percent of the carbon dioxide captured is released back to the air. Further, another 20 to 80 percent captured is released due to the additional oil obtained, so a total of 50 to 120 percent of the carbon dioxide captured during enhanced oil recovery is released.

Blue hydrogen is hydrogen made from fossil gas, but with two sets of carbon capture equipment added to it. As such, blue hydrogen faces the same problems as carbon capture and is not helpful. Electro-fuels are synthetic fuels containing hydrogen and carbon for transportation proposed to be made from blue hydrogen plus captured carbon dioxide, so similarly, they are not helpful. Plus, they are burned in vehicles for energy, creating air pollution.

The fossil fuel industry promotes all four technologies (carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, and electro-fuels) because such technologies give them an excuse not to stop burning coal, oil, or fossil gas. In fact, all four technologies are opportunity costs whose real impacts are to extend the life of the fossil-fuel industry without helping air pollution, climate, or energy security one bit.

+But you know what works great? Congestion pricing. The Times has an update four months in, and truthfully I can never remember a policy that’s worked this well this fast. They look at many many factors—here’s one of my favorites

M.T.A. bus speeds were also up January through March by about 3.2 percent compared with last year on the portions of local routes that run through the congestion zone. Gains have come on nearly every local route touching the zone.

+Hannah Ritchie has excellent numbers on an interesting question: how can China make batteries and solar panels so cheaply. The answer seems to have less to do with slave labor than it does with automation

China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.

The notion that China’s manufacturing output is purely the result of some centralised, governmental program is misguided; it has developed an incredibly competitive market with companies fighting for any edge to cut prices and beat competitors. The solar and battery industries are pretty brutal to be in, with slim margins.

Since China also refines a lot of the minerals and smaller components, its supply chains can become incredibly integrated, which also makes them more optimised.

The second big chunk is labour costs. Now, it’s undeniable that wages in the US are higher than they are in China. But this is not necessarily because Chinese salaries are abysmally low. Yes, they are low by American or European standards, but wages for factory roles are often higher than they are in the US’s southern neighbour, Mexico.

The biggest factor in labour costs is automation. The US uses six times as many workers per GWh (I initially found these numbers pretty shocking and hard to believe), so it’s not surprising that labour costs much more. China has invested heavily in automation, meaning many processes run with very little human input.

This is something else to keep in mind when considering the case for “bringing manufacturing jobs home.” There’s certainly scope for this, but it is at odds with the fact that low costs often rely on automation, not human labour. Especially with the growth of artificial intelligence, some manufacturing jobs could be increasingly vulnerable.

Meanwhile, a fine report on what happens to batteries in China at the end of their lives. As Many Zuo reports

As more and more batteries and solar panels reach the end of their life cycle in China – a global leader in renewable-energy deployment – Chinese businesses like Ma’s are embracing a circular economy, where materials are reused and reintroduced into new products, reducing waste and conserving resources.

And with valuable metals comprising essential components in many of today’s fast-growing, clean-energy technologies, the cycle is especially meaningful in terms of improving China’s mineral independence as it navigates intensifying global trade tensions, according to some analysts.

“The recycling of minerals is largely for the sake of resource security,” said Du Huanzheng, a professor specialising in circular economy at Shanghai’s Tongji University.

+The Union of Concerned Scientists has a remarkable report on exactly what and when the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change and hence how much they owe.

The evidence could hardly be clearer: For decades these companies possessed detailed and accurate knowledge about the dangers their products pose to the global climate and understood that climate action would threaten their business models. Yet they planned, funded, and continue to engage in a campaign to profit from the planet’s destruction by deceiving the public and blocking climate action. Ongoing investigations link a criminal hacking scheme targeting climate accountability advocates to a Washington, DC, lobbying firm and one of its clients—a major oil and gas corporation.

And if you want a number, another new study provides it. As Seth Borenstein explains

The world’s biggest corporations have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates as part of an effort to make it easier for people and governments to hold companies financially accountable, like the tobacco giants have been.

A Dartmouth College research team came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from 10 fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation.

For comparison, $28 trillion is a shade less than the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.

+ The Financial Times (a constant reminder of how nice it would be to have a less ideological business paper than the Wall Street Journal) has a really stellar report on how China managed its cleantech revolution

Earlier industrial revolutions were led first by the UK and then by the US, including the so-called information age more recently. But it is China that now leads the latest global technology revolution in electrification and renewable energy, say analysts from US-based energy think-tank RMI and other independent research groups. And just as oil and gas drive a petrostate’s economy, clean energy technologies are making a significant contribution to Chinese growth. This has been particularly welcome for Beijing in the context of a slowing economy. Clean energy sectors accounted for a record 10 per cent of the country’s GDP and drove a quarter of its growth last year, according to analysis of official government statistics by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

+The invaluable meterologist Jeff Masters takes on Energy Secretary Chris Wright, explaining how he’s systematically misusing statistical data. It’s brutal

The new Department of Energy secretary, Chris Wright, until recently was the CEO of Liberty Energy, the nation’s second-largest fracking firm. In 2024, the firm published a manifesto called “Bettering Human Lives,” in which Wright makes a provocative statement that would be reassuring – if only it were true:

“Another thing that we often hear about climate change is that it leads to a significant increase in extreme weather events with deadly consequences. This claim is false. Extensive reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) actually show no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or weather-related droughts,” Wright wrote in a CEO letter introducing the report.

+Ben Boettger and Susanna Wong have some good advice for Japan: don’t get involved in the Alaskan LNG boondoggle

+Genius move—the Trump administration is shutting down 25 centers across the country that monitor flood and drought.

The administration has not indicated a plan to fill the holes left by those that closed.

“It’s not being done with any thought about human life, it was just ‘this seems so woke so let’s get rid of it,’” Kyla Bennett said. “People think water is free and comes out of your tap whenever you want, but it’s not that simple.”

And it’s happening just as we’re heading into hurricane season. What could go wrong?

+An essay from me on why Santa Fe should approve a big new solar farm, and some good background on the project from Michael Benanav

+Movie watch: Check out Qotzuni, from Bolivia’s Altiplano. And activism watch: financial support would be welcome for the Denniston 11, Kiwis that tried to block a coal mine on Aeoteroa’s West Coast.

The Denniston 11 took peaceful direct action — climbing into coal buckets to halt operations and shine a light on the destructive impacts of coal expansion. Now they face charges of wilful trespass, and court proceedings are underway.

+A new study making a point that will be familiar to readers of this newsletter: don’t use cornfields to grow ethanol, use them to harvest sunshine

About 29.7 million acres of farmland are dedicated to corn growing for ethanol fuel in the U.S. Roughly 38% of U.S. corn harvested is used for ethanol fuel, rather than food.

A study from Department of Natural Resources and the Environment of Cornell University published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that solar PV generates the same amount of energy as corn ethanol in just 3.2% of the land-use footprint. In other words, the energy generated by one hectare of utility-scale solar would require about 31 hectares of corn-ethanol to produce the same amount energy. Find the methodology here.

+Finally some lovely news from the LaPlata River between Argentina and Uruguay, where an Australian built ferry—the largest electric ferry ever—is now in operation

Meanwhile, Latin American consumers are driving the renewable revolution there with fast-spreading rooftop solar

Latin America and the Caribbean has seen a huge expansion of distributed energy, driven mostly by Brazil, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Chile and Colombia. The region went from just one gigawatt installed capacity of distributed systems in 2017 to 31.8 GW by 2023, the year with the latest available data, according to energy consultancy Onred. Virtually all of these installations use solar panels.

Distributed energy has thus become a major driver of Latin America’s energy transition, along with large, utility-scale solar and wind farms. The region has long been established as a clean electricity leader thanks to its hydropower resources, and the International Energy Agency estimates the growth in its renewables will continue, with their share of the electricity supply projected to increase from just over 60% today to 80% by 2050.

“Large energy installations are not enough to meet climate goals. Distributed energy enables users en masse to participate in the energy transition,” says Ignacio Romero, co-founder of Onred. “It is a cultural change after decades of an energy sector operated in a centralised manner by large players.”