A Sunny Week in New York

My watch, which tells me lots of things I don’t necessarily want to know (I scored a depressing 56 out of 100 on my sleep last night) informs me I’ve taken 112,000 steps around the city of New York in the last four days, not to mention a considerable number of miles on the B, M, 6, and 3 trains. It’s all been interesting, but a literal and figurative high point came yesterday, on 6th St between Avenue C and D. On this block, in 1982 shortly after his eviction from the White House, Jimmy Carter began his post-presidential career as a Habitat for Humanity volunteer, rehabilitating a six-story apartment building across the street. I know the number of stories, because I got to carry a solar panel up them, part of the project to make the building even more affordable for its inhabitants. And the pleasure of that project underscored the best part of the week—the hope for practical solutions even as our overlords dithered and tussled at the UN and in the other corridors of political power. I’d gone to the Lower East Side straight from Solar One, the nonprofit clean-energy outpost on the East River in whose grand new building we’d had an excellent discussion of the rapid spread of balcony solar across the country. Pictured below is State Sen. Ray Ward of Utah, who ushered in the country’s first balcony solar law, now followed by a rough dozen other state legislatures this spring (we’re still waiting for Governors Hochul and Newsom to sign the laws their assemblies have approved). But of course those hopeful sprouts aren’t going to bloom fast enough at the current pace to put the planet on a new trajectory. The cynical men that run America’s energy policy currently were in town, underlining the trouble. Chris Wright, the Secretary of Highly Expensive Energy, was over at the Times and HeatMap , explaining that despite the pledge of his boss, the US was not going to ban diesel exports, just “tweak where diesel flows out of U.S. refineries.” He also explained to the Times again that “Every day, actually, the sun goes down, it doesn’t produce power at all.” That the man in charge of America’s energy policy is purposefully blinding himself to the rise in batteries across the country—the single most important energy development of his term—is sad but not shocking; he is and always will be a fracking executive, not a patriot. And he won’t be stopped unless we stop him. The kind people who can afford to take out a modestly priced subscription to this newsletter brought me breakfast, lunch and dinner as I wandered through Climate Week. Thank you! What’s missing here in New York is activism. The marches of past years are not boe be seen, though I did get to speak at a small but important rally outside Amazon’s NY headquarters near Bryant Park, scolding them for proposing the country’s biggest source of pollution near Pecos TX. (“Forget Amazon Prime. It’s Amazon Crime—climate crime”). And without a movement to force action, it’s hard to imagine how we manage to really speed up the shifts that have begun but must come faster. I got to listen to Mayor Mamdani speak this morning at a New School conference. From a few feet away, I can assure you he was as charismatic as you’ve been told, and he is good at the necessary task of avoiding specific questions. But he is an organizer at heart, and he took note of how the data center rebellion is offering real openings. Most of the people out at those zoning meetings were, he said, new to political movements; it’s “an opportunity to bring someone into a movement to say that the reason that you are opposed to this — the things that you're worried about in your life — that's what others feel the same about. You are actually part of something bigger than yourself.” Which brings us to the mural pictured below, tucked under the High Line over on the edge of Chelsea. It’s an early project of newly formed Brightside , which also spearheaded the release of a letter yesterday signed by some of the world’s climate leaders, everyone from Bernie to Jane Fonda to Muhammad Mustafa Amjad of Renewables First who has helped lead Pakistan’s remarkable solar revolution. It is a bold call for dramatically accelerating the pace at which we roll out solar energy around the world. First, we must build clean power for everyone. For the first time ever we can reliably bring electricity to the 1 in 10 people on earth living without regular access. We ask everyone who can afford it to donate something so that others can turn the lights on for studying, cooking, and medical care - and never have to think about a gallon of diesel or gas again. It takes just $15 to give access to clean electricity for one person for a generation. Second, we need to build clean power everywhere, and to make that happen we need to build a movement powerful and beautiful enough to force governments to take large-scale action. Individual steps alone are not enough: too many of our leaders will resist action, until we demonstrate together how much we want them to move. We must demand that governments stop building coal, oil, and gas projects we no longer need, and start building the clean-energy systems that works - no pollution or wars required. One important day along this path will be 20 June, as the summer solstice approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, generating the most solar power of any day on earth yet. We will celebrate that day as Sun Day, coming together to celebrate and accelerate this great shift. I got to write about this new initiative in the Guardian yesterday. There is one solitary (and very literal) ray of sunshine amidst this gloom: the steady rise of solar, wind and batteries. That clean energy trinity has broken out of its Chinese base and over the last few years expanded quickly across the planet – from Karachi to California to Cuba, solar panels are going up faster than any energy source has ever grown. It’s even begun to demonstrate that it can drive emissions down: China seems to have started on its downward slope years before most thought it could, and California has cut the use of gas to produce electricity in half in the world’s fourth-largest economy. None of it is happening fast enough to catch up with the physics of global warming, though – which is precisely why civil society will now try to double down on this one bright spot, and push for a rapid acceleration of clean energy; this transition is going fast, but it needs to go much faster. And it can – China and India are using barely half their solar panel factory capacity, and too many countries are hedging their bets, using clean energy as additional power instead of replacing fossil fuels. By the time advocates gather for next year’s New York Climate Week, the landscape may be very different. The physical landscape (there is, I fear, no doubt that El Niño will change the literal map of the world), and the political landscape. If a resurgent movement demands action, we finally have the tools to make that demand matter – a working planet that runs mostly on sun and wind is in tantalizing reach. At the last possible moment, with backs to the wall, we still have our face to the sun. Every advance we’ve made in the climate fight has come from some combination of engineering and activism. Without pressure from civil society, we wouldn’t have gotten the Paris accords (there were 400,000 people in the streets of New York in September of 2014) nor the promises, now mostly abrogated, from banks and corporations (Greta Thunberg spoke to 250,000 in lower Manhattan in September 2019). We need more pressure. I’ll be talking to you about Sun Day in the months ahead—once we’re past the midterms, it will be time to build that pressure again, here and around the world. For now, time to get back on the campaign trail. I came to New York from Iowa, and am leaving this evening for Pennsylvania, ready to knock on doors and help Third Act rally voters. If you happen to be in the area come join us, but by all means find somewhere else to help. From now through November 3 our greatest leverage is electoral; after that, back to the streets Share In other energy and climate news: +Speaking of Mayor Mamdani, Ayana Johnson, with a bit of help from me, has an excellent chat with Luise Yeung, the mayor’s chief climate officer. The city—even without the federal dollars that would let scaling be much easier—is doing an enormous amount of interesting stuff. Battery-powered food carts! Also my rapper name revealed. +A call from Katherine Hayhoe and Dana Fisher for bipartisan conversation on climate We know that climate shocks, like the ones we’ve experienced this summer, open windows of opportunity: people who live through climate change-exacerbated extreme events are more supportive of climate science and climate action and are more civically and politically engaged. On this warming planet, we all need to learn from what the few who are talking about climate change are already doing. Research has shown that friends and family are trusted messengers who can initiate a pro-climate conversation loop . We all need to become climate communicators and stop letting those who want to delay climate action as long as possible polarize it and silence us. +Big win in the EU, as Brussels confirmed—against Norwegian pressure—its ban on Arctic oil drilling. As Marta Pacheco reports Norway has described gas exploration in the Arctic as insurance for the EU as the bloc grapples with rising energy prices. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron is calling a G7 meeting on energy, where a second release of emergency oil stocks could be discussed. Pressuring the EU to reconsider its position, Minister Aasland recently said that “continued activity in the Barents Sea serves both Norwegian and European interests”, citing disruption to global energy markets following the war in the Middle East. He also said Norway would continue drilling in the Arctic regardless of the EU’s position. The issue is particularly sensitive for Brussels because Norway is deeply embedded in the EU’s energy security architecture. Recent shocks, including a damaged pipeline in Saudi Arabia , have highlighted how quickly Europe can be exposed when supplies from other producing regions are disrupted . With Russian pipeline gas largely pushed out of the European market, Norway has become the EU’s largest LNG supplier, accounting for 54.4% of total EU imports between January and June, up from 52.1% in 2025, according to EU data. Environmental activists, however, argue that Norwegian Arctic gas accounts for just 1.4% of EU gas imports and is unlikely to make a significant difference to near-term energy security. Gas from the New Barents Sea would not come online until 2045, too late to address the EU’s immediate needs, according to a new WWF-Norway analysis. +Photographers: apply for the first James Balog Vision Award —top prize is $40,000. Balog, of course, is the great chronicler of climate change, above all its disappearing ice, and he wants the work to continue. The Awards are intended to recognize the winning artists’ direct engagement with the world around us. Images may be literal and documentary or symbolic and interpretive. They may be of impacts that are positive and inspiring, or negative and distressing, or both. +Under Keir Starmer, the UK’s Labour government refused to release a report from the country’s intelligence agencies detailing the danger of climate change to food security in particular. Now that Ed Miliband is the foreign secretary in the new government, the wraps have come off, and we’re seeing the kind of transparency we’re going to need in a fast-heating world The UK has warned countries around the world that the climate and nature crises and the coming El Niño threaten their national security and defence, presenting foreign ministries with the findings of a report suppressed under Keir Starmer. Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, made a presentation to the foreign ministers of the EU as well as Kenya and other countries on Wednesday night at a private meeting during the UN general assembly in New York, based on the report by the UK’s spy chiefs that found the collapse of natural systems around the world would lead to conflict, migration and food shortages. +The ever-active Charles Komanoff offers an essay on why he’s hoping for hundreds of nuclear power plants around the US. A longtime advocate of carbon taxes, Komanoff insists that reactor prices will be coming down. He couples it with a little jabbing at “mediocre” renewable energy. His thesis will get all the boost it could hope for from the Trump administration, which has been banning sun and wind even while bankrolling huge subsidies for nuclear. Yesterday the head of TerraPower told a Climate Week audience that their first plant, backed by Bill Gates and billionaire friends, might come online by 2031 +A federal judge has restored $7 billion in Solar for All funding that the Trump administration had confiscated. As Ethan Howland reports “When an agency acts outside the bounds of its statutory authority, it violates the [Administrative Procedure Act],” Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump-appointed judge with the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, wrote in her ruling. She said that contrary to the government’s argument, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law July 4, 2025, did not convert Solar for All funding into “a lump-sum amount subject to EPA’s discretion.”… “For more than a year, families and communities have seen higher energy bills while billions of dollars intended to lower electricity costs sat out of reach. Today’s decision makes clear that EPA unlawfully terminated the Solar for All Program,” Jillian Blanchard, senior vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, said in a statement . +The network of Green Banks across the country receive less attention than they should—but a new report makes clear their growing importance As electricity prices surge and power grids face unprecedented strain, green banking plays a critical role in filling gaps in clean energy funding. Green Banks are mission-driven lenders and community partners that provide capital and technical assistance to unlock clean energy projects that traditional lenders and investors often ignore because they are too small or unconventional. Green Banks close the capital gap and get clean energy to underserved communities quickly — lowering household energy bills, addressing rapid data center and commercial load growth, and catalyzing equitable, place-based economic development in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The GB 50’s new Impact Report shows that Green Banks are having a significant impact across the country. Since their inception, GB 50’s member Green Banks have supported nearly $30 billion in total project investment nationwide, deploying more than $5.16 billion of their own capital and mobilizing nearly $25 billion in private capital across more than 180,000 projects in dozens of states. It also includes this pretty shocking statistic, which should help you understand American politics circa 2026: Over the past three years, U.S. residential electricity prices rose by about 14%, leaving 1 in 4 households behind on utility bills. +From Jan Rosenow, a very fine account of the solar wave in the developing world, and the strains that develop as more and more people figure out how to leave the grid Pakistan is probably the most dramatic and well-known case of a bottom-up solar revolution, but it is not unique, and versions of the same story are unfolding across the world right now: Countries with hot climates, fast-growing economies, expensive energy, and fragile grids are increasingly turning to solar. Not because of policy, but because individuals are voting with their wallets. In six developing nations — Pakistan, Nigeria, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Zambia, and Yemen — recorded solar generation has grown more than sixfold since 2019. Solar’s share of the electricity mix has risen sharply in each of them, in some cases by an order of magnitude . But while Pakistan’s rapid, bottom-up solar shift offers a hopeful model for ramping up clean energy, it also offers a warning. The proliferation of household solar in Pakistan has led to an exodus from the national grid, rattling the network while saddling the poorest ratepayers — who cannot afford solar panels — with higher bills. Similar dynamics are now at play in Nigeria and Zambia. These countries are facing a boom and a crisis at the same time. As Rosenow points out, the answer is not to slow down the solar boom. Instead: An important task for governments and international agencies is to bring distributed solar into official energy statistics, using import data, registrations, and, where necessary, satellite monitoring. Think tanks such as Ember in the U.K. and Renewables First in Pakistan are already piecing this picture together from customs data. Governments need to use that data for planning. With a clearer picture of what is happening on the ground, officials can begin to integrate fast-growing solar capacity into the power system and do it in a way that strengthens the grid rather than undermines it. That means installing batteries that can store cheap solar during the day for use in the evening. It means building more flexible transmission networks that can move surplus rooftop power to where it is needed instead of wasting it. And it means offering targeted support for low-income households to make solar affordable for more people. +Zoe Wood with an interesting and important new finding —though it comes from Britain, I’m willing to bet it’s universal: Motorists buying a secondhand car with a lot of miles on the clock are likely to find an electric vehicle (EV) ultimately more reliable than a petrol vehicle, according to a study. An analysis of 47.4m MOT tests found that after cars were driven 90,000 to 120,000 miles, EVs were about 25% less likely to fail than petrol models of the same age (based on a failure rate of 16.5% versus 22.1%). Beyond 120,000 miles, 16% of EVs failed, compared with 23.5% of petrol cars. +From Mark Hertsgaard and Covering Climate Now, an interview with California governor Gavin Newsom, which gives a heads-up that the “climate-hushing” era among Democrats is coming to an end. Newsom is just the latest Dem to say something like this: “People say, ‘Why are you talking about climate change? You should be talking about kitchen table [issues],’ Newsom said. “I say, ‘I am. You haven’t connected the droughts to the cost of beef, to the cost of coffee? You have to connect climate risk with financial risk, with our trade policy. These are kitchen table issues.” Extra bonus content: Newsom “totally rejected” criticisms by Bill McKibben and other climate activists that his administration has slowed expansion of rooftop solar in California by lowering net metering payments to homeowners with rooftop solar. Those payments, Newsom argued, “were subsidizing Wall Street hedge funds” and boosting electricity costs for Californians who “can least afford it.” The solar industry, he added, is now “a mature industry that needs to start to stand on its own,” without subsidies. Kind of sad that he unmasked my hedge fund commitments, but hey, you can’t become a billionaire writing free newsletters! +Check this out: a 30-seat electric plane just flew a half hour route in upstate New York…on five bucks worth of electricity. The aircraft reached 1,100 feet with one pilot aboard and no passengers. The flight marked the first time the company had put the X1 in the air. The 30-seat plane is 76 feet long and has a 106-foot wingspan. It weighs more than 25,000 pounds. Heart says it is the largest fully battery-powered aircraft yet flown. “With the first flight of X1, Heart A