Elections should not be this important

This data on deforestation comes from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, but the invaluable Hannah Ritchie has overlaid them to show who was Brazil’s president at the time. Read her account here Greetings from Michigan—I last wrote one of these dispatches on Sunday, from Kansas; since then I’ve been in Texas, where the remarkable James Talarico is apparently locked in a dead-heat race with the execrable Ken Paxton; now I’m headed to greater Lansing with my Third Act colleagues to try and boost the Senate fortunes of Abdul el-Sayed and the House race of Will Lawrence, once a founder of the Sunrise Movement. (If you want to join us, here’s the info ). So you might say I’m taking this election seriously. More seriously than I wish we had to. In democratic societies elections should always be important. But they shouldn’t, ideally, be the deciding factor between continued stability and whatever kind of creeping fascism we’re playing with. And they certainly shouldn’t be determining questions of planetary survival. But they are. This is slightly harder work than it may appear, or maybe I’m just feeling tired this week. But many thanks to the kind souls who have taken out a modestly priced and voluntary subscription, which is…heartening The chart above shows the rate of deforestation in the Amazon; it comes ahead of Sunday’s contest between the next Bolsonaro (think chainsaw) and the incumbent, Lula (think standing tree). As George Monbiot writes in the Guardian this morning Physically and politically, Flávio Bolsonaro is the spitting image of his father, the jailed coup-plotter , Jair. When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, he appeared to see ecological destruction as a kind of a holy duty. The deforestation rate rose by 59% in his four years, and attacks on Indigenous people and other forest defenders, as well as invasions by illegal ranchers, loggers and goldminers rocketed. The crudest forms of extractivism – regardless of their costs, or how they might hold back all kinds of progress – were a matter of policy. The ideology of the far right in Brazil has been described as “ beef, Bible and bullets ”: violence against those who resist the seizure of their resources, an ultra-conservative evangelism and the expansion of cattle ranching, which is both a potent symbol of far-right machismo and the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon. If you combine this with the knowledge that we’re very very near a tipping point in the Amazon, you start to get worried. The Amazon rainforest is almost an organism itself—it in essence generates half its own rainfall, recycling rainwater five to six times as air moves east to west across it. As early as 2018, my old friend, the dearly missed Tom Lovejoy, and his collaborator Carlos Nobre had a paper in Science that concluded We believe that negative synergies between deforestation, climate change, and widespread use of fire indicate a tipping point for the Amazon system to flip to non-forest ecosystems in eastern, southern and central Amazonia at 20-25% deforestation. The severity of the droughts of 2005, 2010 and 2015-16 could well represent the first flickers of this ecological tipping point. These events, together with the severe floods of 2009, 2012 (and 2014 over SW Amazonia), suggest that the whole system is oscillating. For the last two decades the dry season over the southern and eastern Amazon has been increasing. Large scale factors such as warmer sea surface temperatures over the tropical North Atlantic also seem to be associated with the changes on land. Here’s what Nobre told the Times this week: Legal deforestation, he said, put the Amazon at “total risk” and could sharply reduce rainfall throughout much of South America, threatening Brazilian agriculture and global food prices. Brazil is the world’s second-largest food exporter and could surpass the United States this year. “We are going to lose all of this,” Mr. Nobre said. We may lose even more. It’s not at all clear that the earth’s climate system can function if the Amazon begins to break down—along with the poles, it’s one of the planet’s handful of truly keystone physical systems. That its fate depends on an election is terrifying. Needless to say, the usual cast of characters like Elon Musk are allied with the chainsaw in this one. But of course Musk, fresh off his breathtaking betrayal of the Ukrainian people, is playing an even more critical role in America’s elections. As Laurent Belsie pointed out this week, the reason that Talarico may lose is largely down to this one man: Mr. Musk’s biggest donation was $158 million to the GOP’s Senate Leadership Fund, which put that same amount into the Senate race in Texas – where Mr. Musk’s companies are based. On X, Mr. Musk has been urging people to vote for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, saying, “The fate of Texas and America is at stake.” But more’s at stake even than that. Here’s this week’s UNEP report (titled, with more wit than usual for these things, The Point of Return) about just how far we’re overshooting the Paris climate accords. What it demonstrates is that the election of Trump plays an outsized role in keeping us from having a fighting chance. The venerable Seth Borenstein of the AP headline his story (a lesson for other headline writers) “ US is a big reason for the world losing ground in the fight against climate change, UN report says.” In just a year, the projections for how much temperatures will rise even if governments keep their pledges has risen by two tenths of a degree Celsius—on a world where every tenth of a degree pushes another 140 million human souls into a dangerously hot zone. Here’s how Borenstein described it: If all the countries do what they promise to reduce heat-trapping emissions, Earth will likely still warm another 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) above current temperatures, according to Wednesday’s update of climate calculations by the United Nations Environment Programme. That’s about two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit (0.1 degrees Celsius) more than last year’s projections by the same science team. “This is a worse outcome than expected last year, as a result of the formal withdrawal of the United States of America from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions,” the report said. The report also blames the United States for increased emissions last year, saying all the other top 20 major economies reduced their carbon pollution or at least slowed the growth in how much carbon dioxide was spewed from the burning of coal, oil and gas. “In terms of magnitude, the increase in the United States of America (133 megatons of CO2 equivalent) far exceeded that of all other countries and was driven by increased electricity demand and a rebound of coal power generation,” the report said. The 124 countries that increased emissions — not counting the 63 that decreased like most European nations — added 189 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2025, and 70% of that increase came from the U.S., according to the report. Almost nobody who voted for Trump in 2024 thought (or, to be frank) cared that this would be the outcome. But that’s what happens on a world that is far too finely balanced. So we fight as hard as we can. And we do it with some real champions in contention. Brad Lander, for instance—Ayana Johnson just released the excellent conversation the two of us had with the soon-to-be New York Representative, who will enter Congress as probably its most knowledgeable member about the connection between climate and finance. (Lander, to his immense credit, was detained by Israeli Defense Forces yesterday for helping protect Palestinians who wanted to harvest their olives in the face of violence from West Bank settlers. He’s now safely out). Or Justin Pearson. The Tennessee state rep, who led opposition to the Byhalia Pipeline and to Elon Musk’s Memphis AI pollution factory, seemed to have an inside track for a Congressional seat until the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act this summer—Tennessee immediately redistricted to try and turn its congressional delegation lilywhite. But Pearson is putting up a creditable fight in his Trump +20 district. As Katherine Burgess reports, analysts say Pearson’s longstanding opposition to data centers and other industrial polluters gives him credibility as he challenges Taylor, who was an early supporter of Colossus 1 and received $10,000 in campaign funding from a political action committee associated with SpaceXAI. Or in New York’s Hudson Valley, where embattled GOP incumbent Mike Lawler has been trying to save his seat with an attack on New York City’s congestion pricing law. As Charles Komanoff points out, he’s not very good at math: Since Trump launched his war on Iran, the 260,000 households in NY-17 have coughed up $102 million more for gasoline — $390 per household — than they would have paid in the absence of the war. That collective toll, if you will, exceeds by 75 percent the $58 million they’ve paid in New York congestion charges (including surcharges on cab rides) since congestion pricing commenced in early 2025 (again, see the methodology below). I’m hopeful Lawler’s opponent, Cait Conley, can beat him—she’s a West Point grad with three Bronze Stars. Indeed I’m hopeful in lots of places—but I’m afraid to hope too. At this point our job is just to run through the tape, doing our level best wherever we are to win the last possible votes. (And then defend the election). If you have some money to spare, find a race to help. (The Environmental Voter Project is a good place to start ). If you have some hours to spare, spend them phone-banking . Work as if the planet depends on it, because sadly it does. Share In other energy and climate news: +Election news close to home for me. Many-term Vermont governor Phil Scott apparently used a debate on the state’s public radio and tv last night to imply I supported his energy policy. Ha ha—the incumbent Republican has been a do-nothing governor in energy policy (and almost everything else). I missed the debate because I was busy in Dallas, but here’s what I wrote up when I got back to the motel room: I‘m out in Texas and Michigan campaigning for those crucial Senate seats, so I didn’t hear Amanda Janoo debating Phil Scott live. But someone sent me the clip where the governor invoked me to back up his energy policies. That made me laugh--I’ve reached out to him over the years, but never heard a word back. In fact, his energy policies have been the same nothingburger as most of his other policies: thanks to him Vermonters are paying too much for energy when we could be running our state on much cheaper and cleaner homegrown energy. Even before prices went up after the war in Iran, Vermont was sending $2 billion a year out of state, writing a check to Exxon or Saudia Arabia instead of producing more of our own. That’s one reason why I’ve been backing Amanda Janoo since before she announced for governor. She’s got an energy policy closer to, say, Texas, which is putting up renewables faster than any state in the union. Maybe it’s time Vermont actually looked to the future for a while. Meanwhile, if you want a little more on the possibilities for a Janoo governorship in the Green Mountain State, may I commend Scudder Parker’s recent newsletter ? As Parker writes A new analysis by Vermont’s Energy Action Network estimates that Vermonters will pay four hundred million dollars in added fossil fuel prices in 2026 alone due to Mr. Trump’s foolish, illegal war on Iran. This is on top of the estimated two billion dollars that already flows out of the Vermont economy annually, for fossil fuels. https://eanvt.org/blog/2026-fossil-fuel-price-increases/ This is a staggering number, and Vermonters are reeling. Isn’t it time to begin protecting ourselves from global price disruptions, environmental destruction, and the escalating costs of dependency on a costly and unstable fossil fuel system? Phil Scott has had more than a decade to transition to a new energy economy that makes heating and transportation more affordable for Vermonters. He has consistently failed—and often actively opposed—doing so. +Permitting reform continues to be a hot potato in DC, as an early November vote looms. The White House says its loves it as part of its ‘energy dominance’ agenda, but yesterday they went on the offensive against yet another wind farm, causing Sheldon Whitehouse to accuse them of trying to ‘blow up’ the deal. Meanwhile, an organization representing 800 former EPA employees came out against some provisions of the deal. Section 1401 therefore jeopardizes EPA’s future ability to provide the ongoing public health protection from harmful pollution and toxic chemicals that existing environmental laws require. Rather than reforming permitting to speed the building of abundant energy, § 1401 risks launching a wave of protracted litigation against EPA (and potentially other agencies) for doing the job Congress has asked it to do. These are the sections that have been drawing the most fire. DC green heavyweight NRDC has flagged some of the same problems, and withheld its endorsement pending amendments. And California Congressman Ro Khanna sounded the political alarm, saying yesterday on Twitter that It would be tone deaf if Congress makes it easier to build data centers right after an election with bipartisan rage against shoving them down the throats of local communities. But if you were waiting to see what, say, Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s OMB chief, had to say, wait no longer. A bunch of what one can only call DC elites came out for the bill last week; they range from the credible (Obama and Biden counselor Brian Deese) to the incredible: Stephen Mnuchin, who you might remember from Trump 1. This guy: +The good folks at 350.org have been sounding the alarm about affordability—in particular what they’re calling “fossilflation.” Gasoline prices surged by 9.1% in September, accounting for more than half of the monthly rise in inflation. But the impact extends well beyond the pump, with higher costs affecting transport, healthcare, clothing and other everyday essentials. The figures underline how dependence on fossil fuels leaves households exposed to geopolitical shocks and volatile energy markets. Candice Fortin, US Campaigns Manager at 350.org, said: “What we are witnessing is fossilflation – real, direct and hitting people where it hurts: their pockets. When dependence on fossil fuels leaves household budgets at the mercy of war and volatile global markets, it is ordinary people who pay the price for an energy system built around fossil fuels. Rising gas prices are squeezing household budgets, and the impacts are spreading across the economy, making everyday life more expensive at a time when many families are already struggling to get by. “We cannot keep asking households to absorb the costs while fossil fuel companies benefit from market volatility. Governments must accelerate a fair transition to affordable, homegrown renewable energy, so people have greater energy security and are no longer held hostage to the next fossil fuel crisis.” Meanwhile, dependably elegant writer and thinker Mark Gongloff has a compelling account of why insurance costs are rising three times faster than the rate of inflation An annoying, persistent myth of climate discourse is the idea that trying to stop the planet from becoming a charred hellscape is antithetical to the affordability of life’s basic needs. Have you seen charred hellscapes? They tend to be short on the essentials, and shortages usually make things more expensive… In fact, in two-thirds of US counties, home-insurance premiums now cost more than property taxes, according to new research from Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Andrew John Stevenson. Throw in auto insurance against extreme-weather damage, and that gap stretches to 75% of US counties. And unlike property taxes, homeowners can’t deduct insurance premiums from their income-tax bills. They just have to eat them. +We can talk about data centers all day, but the incandescent Arundhati Roy really brings the goods on AI in this new short essay There are several brands of the Apocalypse, and its attendant miseries, that people are having to contend with. There is the scary extinction narrative. There is the version in which we are subjugated by a species more intelligent than ourselves. (To understand the consequences of this, think about what we have done to the other species we share our planet with; it makes extinction seem positively attractive.) And then there is the apprehension from the world of non-tech humans – climate-change activists distraught about the carbon footprint of the AI industry; students and workers who see mass unemployment and blank futures; artists, musicians and writers, like myself, who can sense the centrifugal churning that is sucking the beating heart from our bodies and drawing the steel threads of societal control together into one clenched, mechanical fist. +Heat pumps seem to be well on the way to becoming the default HVAC choice, accounting for 58 percent of sales last quarter. As Maria Taylor writes in Air Conditioning Heating and Refrigeration News For three years, homeowners could get as much as $2,000 from Uncle Sam for choosing a qualifying heat pump. As of January 1, that consumer tax incentive disappeared, creating an unusually clean real-world test of whether demand would crater. Eight months in, it hasn’t — and contractors and manufacturers are moving more heat pumps than they were a year ago. Whatever is selling heat pumps in 2026, it isn’t Washington. Lucas Davis from the Energy Institute at HAAS asks this question in a blog post from mid-July called “Will U.S. Households Still Buy Heat Pumps Without a Tax Credit?” and comes out with a bold theory: The credit may not have been driving much heat pump adoption in the first place. +Want to help kids coping with large feelings about the climate crisis? New resources from The Weather Within +Color me shocked. The five climate-obfuscating ‘scientists’ who were hired by the Trump regime to rewrite our understanding of basic science appear to have made a pretty basic error , confusing the troposphere and stratosphere. As Jessica McKenzie reports Earlier this year, at a panel discussion about the Energy Department report, one of the authors exhibited a previously unpublished figure. It showed a dramatic discrepancy between predicted and observed temperatures in the tropical lower stratosphere—the second layer of the Earth’s atmosphere—and was used to support the claim that “models fail in the upper atmosphere.” Benjamin Santer, the lead author of the Earth’s Future article, said the figure was wrong, and appeared to show observations from the troposphere, the lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, instead of the stratosphere. Santer and his Earth’s Future coauthors say this echoed a similar, and similarly inaccurate, argument in the Energy Department report, which they thought may have been based on this flawed analysis. They warn that until the Energy Department report is corrected or retracted it “will continue to misinform policymakers and the public about the reality of human effects on climate.” +Emily Pontecorvo set out to check short-sellers reports on highflying geothermal stock Fervo. The critics said the company was seeing dropoffs in water pressure and temperature in pilot wells, the company said no, Pontecorvo said: The community of people with knowledge of the subject is small, however, and almost everyone, it seems, is invested in Fervo’s success — if not financially, then emotionally. It’s hard to overstate how much people want this company to succeed. The report had clearly sent a wave of anxiety through the sector, with a founder of a different compan