It’s a mug’s game to try and figure out the lowest point of the Trump presidency, because he’s certain to go lower still, often in a matter of hours.
Still, yesterday for me can’t pass without comment, because it so perfectly reflects the hideousness of our moment. The picture above shows a circle of white people gathered around the president, listening to him rant about Somali-Americans. The day before he had called them “garbage,” and he was taking up the theme again, with vigor. Somalis had “destroyed Minnesota” and “destroyed our country.” The “Somalians should be out of here,” he said. I have tried to go back and at least as far as Woodrow Wilson and I don’t think any president has said any thing as clearly racist while in office, and I was not alone. Alvin Tillery, at Northwestern, told Reuters yesterday that Trump is “absolutely unique” among modern presidents in his racism—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan made “thinly veiled” racial attacks but Trump has no interest in veils, nor do his supporters. His press secretary Karoline Leavitt called his remarks “amazing” and an “epic moment;” J.D. Vance, when the president was ranting about garbage the day before, banged the cabinet table to show his raucous appreciation. Let me say plainly—this is piggish behavior. One of my my most beloved colleagues is a Somali-American from Minnesota; she has more love, compassion and character in her little finger than our president has in his bloated sack of a body. He is simply a bad man, who—feeling a little cornered—heads for the hate that feeds his soul.
But what about those people gathered around him in the Oval Office? Therein lies a tale.
As it turns out, they were automobile executives, joining Trump for a happy moment where he told them that gasoline would be the fuel of the future. As he explained in his usual thoughtful manner
The greatest scam in American history, the Green New Scam, is a quest to end the gasoline powered car. This is what they wanted to do even though we have more gasoline than any other country by far.
It should surprise no one that these auto executives stood there simpering while the president launched into his racist diatribe. Black workers have, of course, been central to Detroit’s success. They faced discrimination from the start—among other things they were often sent to work in the fume-filled paint rooms of the big plants—but still they persevered. Detroit was eventually home to the country’s biggest branch of the NAACP; Dr. King previewed his I Have a Dream speech in a wild June day in Detroit in 1963, with Rev. C.L. Franklin, best known now as Aretha’s dad, presiding over much of the action. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the chairman and CEO of Ford issued a statement saying “we cannot turn a blind eye” to racism, but that’s just what current Ford CEO Jim Farley, and all the other executives in that room, did yesterday.
But perhaps it might surprise some that they were standing there applauding as Trump rolled back fuel economy standards, from 50 miles to the gallon by 2035 under the old rules to about 35 miles a gallon. Those higher mileage standards were the tool the Biden administration was using to help nudge Detroit towards electric vehicles; without them, it will almost certainly backslide towards irrelevance. That’s because they will slow down their process of innovation; as the Times put it, the new policy
“frees automakers to sell more pickups and sport utility vehicles, which are usually much more profitable than smaller cars. It will be difficult for carmakers to resist pressure to sell these gas guzzlers.”
Here’s Lenny LaRocca, who leads the automotive practice at consulting firm KPMG:
“I would anticipate that more focus would be on the larger S.U.V.s and pickup trucks.”
So—more gas for consumers to buy (the cost of owning an EV is far lower than the cost of owning an internal combustion car), more carbon and particulates in the air, more people being run over by absurdly sized vehicles.
And much less chance that Detroit will ever be a leading force in the auto industry again. That was already seeming unlikely: China’s carmakers grow more dominant by the quarter. But the IRA support for EVs was the last real possibility, an infusion of funds to help underwrite the retooling for the world to come. But instead of fighting for that, these executives have truckled to the president, and sold the future of their companies for a few more years of turning out Escalades.
At some level these guys know what they should be doing. Jim Farley , the Ford guy who was making jokes with the president yesterday? In the fall of 2024 he said he’d been driving a Xiaomi Speed Ultra 7 for six months, and that it was “fantastic.” “I don’t want to give it up,” he added. Fourteen months ago he told the Journal that the Chinese automakers were an “existential threat” because their cars were so good. “Executing to a Chinese standard is going to be the most important priority,” Farley said.
But now that won’t happen, because these guys were more cowed by a racist president than by their Chinese competition. By the time another president with more sense makes it to the White House, the Chinese “juggernaut” (Farley’s word) will have had three more years to build up its lead; Detroit will be choking on its dust.
Hey, but at least we can tell ourselves that we’re cool in a retro kind of way. Let’s bring in another man in that picture, Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, the guy right behind Trump who looks like he’s dressing for his part in Mad Men. (Gotta love the razor thin pocket square). Last month was admonishing airline passengers who dressed too comfortably; the result was the #pajamaresistance movement. Yesterday he was celebrating the new extra-pollution rules with this notion:
“This rule will actually allow you to bring back the 1970s station wagon. Maybe a little wood paneling on the side.”
Duffy’s eager to return to the 70s; Bobby Kennedy wants us back in the pre-vaccine 1940s; Trump wants to talk like a 19th century slave-trader.
The rest of us, who would like to participate in the future with the balance of planet earth, have a lot of work to do in the year ahead. Let us look on the abased truckling of the auto executives and resolve to not stay silent ourselves; we’ve got eleven months to win the midterms and break the political back of this retrograde ugliness. If you’re looking for some ways to join in, check out the work we’re doing at Third Act.
In other energy and climate news:
+ New reporting from Europe on “how a secretive alliance of eleven large multinational enterprises has worked to tear down the EU’s flagship human rights and climate law, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).” As David Ollivier de Leth reports
The companies, most of which are headquartered in the US and operate in the fossil fuel sector, aimed to “divide and conquer in the Council”, sideline “stubborn” European Commission departments, and push the European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament “to side with the right-wing parties as much as possible”.
Chevron and ExxonMobil were in charge of mobilising pressure against the CSDDD from non-EU countries. The Roundtable companies endeavoured to get the CSDDD high on the agenda of the US-EU trade negotiations and also worked on mobilising other countries against the CSDDD, in order to disguise the US influence.
Roundtable companies paid the TEHA Group – a think tank – to write a research report and organise an event on EU competitiveness, which echoed the Roundtable’s position and cast doubt on the European Commission’s assessment of the economic impact of the CSDDD.
+The extremely knowledgeable Zack Labe has been juggling the data (harder now that the US is shutting down some instruments) and reports that Arctic sea ice is at a shocking low for the date. This is one of those cases where a picture is worth many words
+Max Fawcett, in Canada’s National Observer, takes on the evergreen claim of the fossil fuel industry that they are helping poor people out of energy poverty—a claim beloved by the Canadian executives trying to build big new LNG export facilities
Renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels in large parts of Africa and Asia, and their cost will only continue to decline as storage technology continues to scale up. Why, exactly, would these countries invest billions of dollars in building new infrastructure for importing fossil fuels when they could dedicate that money to developing their own energy assets — ones that will tap into a nearly limitless source of low-cost energy?
The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t, and aren’t. A 2025 study from Power Shift Africa and the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures shows that switching to 100 per cent renewable energy would actually save Africa trillions — yes, trillions — of dollars by 2050, as the savings associated with replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind energy vastly exceeds the cost of actually replacing them. “As Africa’s currently existing fossil fuel infrastructure is relatively small,” the report says, “it can leapfrog directly into a renewable energy supply system without leaving a trail of stranded assets. New renewables capacity is the fastest and cheapest way for Africa to increase its energy supply to a per capita level similar to OECD countries.”
It’s not just Africa that stands to benefit from the widespread adoption of solar and other renewable energy technologies. As the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Will Atkinson noted in his analysis of the IEA’s latest outlook, “for the three in four people who live in fossil fuel importing countries, a path with more domestic renewables means that fossil fuel import costs could be two-thirds less than today’s. A clean future would mean less than half as many deaths from air pollution, along with three to five times the job growth for a more prosperous energy sector.”
+The Pakistan miracle continues! Check this out, from Reuters correspondent Sudarshan Varadhan
Pakistan’s rooftop solar generation will for the first time exceed power demand on the country’s electrical grid during daytime hours in some major industrial regions next year, a senior government official told Reuters.
The outlook reflects a record boom in the country’s solar panel installations in recent years that has delivered lower emissions and reduced power bills for some, but also disrupted the finances of debt-laden utilities due to a protracted decline in demand for grid-based electricity.
“Pakistan will experience negative grid-linked demand during certain daytime hours because behind-the-meter solar is offsetting grid consumption completely,” Aisha Moriani, secretary of Pakistan’s climate change ministry told Reuters on the sidelines of the COP30 climate conference in Brazil.
While regions in Europe and Australia sometimes experience negative electricity prices due to solar oversupply and low demand, Pakistan would be among the first major emerging markets where rooftop generation could exceed grid-linked demand in major areas entirely for lengthy periods.
Here’s the thing: this miracle need not be confined to Pakistan. Or to Australia, which as I’ve noted several times (and will note several times more) will soon be offering three free hours of electricity to everyone everyday. Leah Stokes, who is about the shrewdest observer of America’s utilities, writes in a must-read piece in the Atlantic about how Americans could have free electricity too.
The states with the most solar, including California and Texas, are already wasting about 10 percent of their solar energy. But utilities and regulators have done little to set electricity prices lower during the day. The closest anyone has come is in California, where, as part of a regulatory proceeding, San Diego Gas & Electric agreed in September to create a lower-cost period from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. In the long run, as solar and wind supply more and more of Americans’ power, aligning electricity rates with clean energy’s availability could allow the grid to operate more cheaply.
Stokes also explains how legislators could refigure the way that utilities set rates (at the moment they’re constantly incentivized to build expensive stuff) and also explains how ratepayers should not be covering the cost of climate disasters like wildfires. As she points out
Fossil-fuel companies could pay. Climate-attribution science is now able to quickly say how much more likely climate change made a given weather event and then, using data on historic emissions, apportion blame to individual fossil-fuel companies.
That’s the logic behind the many “climate superfund” bills now working their way through state legislatures.
As I say: don’t miss Leah’s piece.
+I haven’t done enough reporting to adjudicate this dispute, but oil and gas veteran Art Berman has an interesting piece taking on the prospects for enhanced geothermal power—in essence, having oil companies drill down to find hot rocks and then use them to heat up water.
Why is EGS so expensive? The answer is simple: It has all the cost of shale drilling with none of the payback. A single 20-megawatt EGS project — tiny by grid standards — requires three to five very deep wells, each costing $12–25 million. Unlike oil and gas wells, these wells don’t produce a high-value liquid or gas. They just circulate water down into hot rock and back up again, hoping to pick up enough heat to spin a small turbine. Much of the electricity generated is used to run the pumps.
One hopes that the industry will indeed find a cost-effective way to get this done. In the meantime: sun, wind, batteries.
+From the excellent folks at Oil Change International, a new podcast series on “the true cost of fossil fuels.”
In the debut episode of Burned: The Price of Oil, host Shady Khalil speaks with Tasneem Essop, Executive Director of the Climate Action Network, to explore what it means to fight for justice in the era of climate crisis. From her roots as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa to leading one of the world’s largest climate coalitions, Tasneem shares how decades of organizing, persistence, and people power reshape the global conversation on fossil fuels and justice.
As the world faces a widening gap between climate commitments and Global North countries driving oil and gas expansion, Tasneem and Shady unpack how the Global South can chart a path beyond fossil fuels. Together, they discuss the meaning of a truly just transition, lessons from the UN climate talk’s breakthrough on fossil fuels, and how people power is building a just transition.
Tasneem Essop is a real hero, and this should be a fascinating conversation
+Kate Aronoff—one of the clearest minds thinking about climate—writes a lengthy post-mortem for Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Read the whole thing—here’s one crucial paragraph
Policymakers were aware that the vast majority of projects made possible by the IRA wouldn’t break ground and start hiring permanent workers until well after the next presidential election. Yet they didn’t plan how to communicate the long-term nature of the IRA’s climate and investment program either to the broader public or to people who lived where those projects were slated to happen, including the deindustrialized areas being hit hardest by inflation. The high-tech nature of factories producing battery cells, for instance—involving specialized robotics—meant that much of the manufacturing spurred by the IRA wouldn’t resemble traditional assembly-line jobs. That announced investments were concentrated in the South also required unions to invest considerable resources into organizing new plants. Even if there had been slightly more time for those investments to pay off (i.e., for factories to open and start hiring), and if implementation had proceeded more quickly, the political dividends of manufacturing investments appeared fated for modesty: Just 9 percent of the country actually works in manufacturing.
+One sequel of everyone’s good work on Sun Day: Balcony solar—or ‘plug-in solar’ as we’re starting to call it—seems set for a legislative breakout. Kevin Chou, at indsutry-leaving Bright Saver, is quoted in the Guardian
“There’s now so much interest in this,” said Chou. “The federal administration has been so negative to clean energy that people have thought ‘OK what can we do at the state level?’ and this has been one of those things.
“There’s real momentum behind this now. In states where electricity is more expensive, in particular, I think we will see market forces really carry this far.”
More background on balcony solar from David Roberts at Volts, talking with Chou’s effervescent Bright Saver colleague Cora Stryker
It’s going to be a consumer-driven thing. It can’t be yet because we’re constrained by regulation. But this is not going to require subsidies, it’s not going to require incentives, it’s not going to require any political friends. It just requires regulation to get out of the way and then consumers will push this forward and it’ll take off on market forces. And look, you can’t argue with cheap. Cheap is not a political matter. We think everybody will want some version, some way to make energy affordable. And we think this is a step. Look, it’s not the whole puzzle, I know that, but we think it’s a real on-ramp, a real, real gateway drug, as you used the word drug earlier.
+Direct air capture technology—essentially sucking carbon out of the atmosphere—seems increasingly unlikely to save us, because scientists can’t drive the cost down anywhere near fast enough. From Zurich, Christoph Elhardt reports
ETH researchers estimate the cost of removing 1 tonne of CO2 from the air in the year 2050 to be between 230 and 540 US dollars. This is twice as high as previous estimates.
Which means, of course, that it’s even more important to stop burning fossil fuels now—there’s not much of an escape route later
+From the estimable Amy Westervelt, a final report on the climate talks at Belem. She notes that the agreement signed there calls for ‘information integrity,’ but there wasn’t much of that actually in evidence
What is the point of activism that celebrates hypocrisy? Or of journalism that doesn’t tell the whole truth?
It was the same feeling I had roaming the Blue Zone last week and wondering what the fucking point was of about 90 percent of the booths and people and events I saw. Everyone was doing a very good job of making themselves look and feel important, but what were they there to do exactly? It felt like a whole lot of tapdancing on the Titanic. The most inspirational action, for me, came from the folks on the outside, marching in the streets or blocking the entrance to the venue, and from the small but mighty Colombian delegation, the only one whose negotiators and civil society groups were unified in their call for one primary goal: a commitment to phase out fossil fuels. This, by the way, is also the goal that one would have if one were following the science and committed to information integrity.
As for me, I’m an actions speak louder than words gal, so my take is that those advocating for information integrity should be calling out the hypocrisy of using that term or referring to COP30 as a “COP of Truth” while utterly betraying the meaning of those words. Otherwise, you are just co-signing a new version of greenwashing: info-integrity-washing.
+Finally, a nifty new heat pump (from, yes, China) that can be installed in a window, without a lot of help. As Adele Peters explains
Like other heat pumps, the PWHP transfers warmth from the outdoor air to heat your space, using relatively little energy. But the new heat pump is designed to be much easier to install than other versions, which reduces the overall cost and complexity of switching.
The inspiration for the idea originally came from New York City, where the state and local government launched the Clean Heat for All Challenge in 2022—which offered the potential of a contract with the city’s public housing authority, which controls more than 177,000 apartments within 335 housing developments—as the city looked for ways to decarbonize apartment buildings.
Right now, most heat pumps come in one of two formats: “mini splits” that are installed in the wall, or central units that can connect to ducts and replace a gas or oil furnace. Both work well, but installation is time-consuming and can be expensive. Putting in a mini-split often involves adding new wiring, since older homes don’t have the right voltage, and cutting holes in the wall. One unit might take a day of work and require multiple licensed tradespeople. Replacing a gas furnace in a house typically takes a couple of days. In a large old apartment building in New York, the challenges are multiplied.
Midea started working on the challenge in its Louisville office, which focuses on R&D. “We’re essentially a startup with the world’s largest appliance manufacturer as the backer,” says Brian Langness, a senior project manager at the Midea America Research Center. (Gradient, a startup, also separately worked on a different design for a window heat pump for New York.)
Midea began designing a new unit to meet the city’s strict requirements: sized to fit in a window, quiet to run, with reliable heating in very low temperatures that wouldn’t need backup from electric resistance heat. It also couldn’t require electrical upgrades, needed to have a saddle shape that wouldn’t block views, and had to be easy enough to install that it could theoretically be a DIY job.
Again, a picture will help
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