Austin and Clare Aslan, the authors of the post “Climate Fiction Writing as the ‘Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield’,” published on  Climate Fiction Writers League Substack on May 19, 2026,  raise some good questions about climate fiction. They are co-authors of The Crystal Halo, which is described as “an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the ‘Chosen One’ myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature.” One of the authors is the director of the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University; the other serves on the Flagstaff City Council, “first winning a seat and then re-elected on a carbon-zero-by-2030 platform.”

So, serious people. They describe how their professional roles rely on “clarity and directness…[where] every action is directly and tangibly tied to evidence and outcomes. Our arsenal is our professional knowledge and our armor is facts.” They then go on to make the safe claim that storytelling is different than their day jobs… “not the same as policy, white papers, or climate action plans.”

Well, yes.

The two Aslans argue that “Fundamentally, fiction is about entertainment; there is a contract between writer and reader that the latter will enjoy themselves through the former’s work. When we invent stories that pontificate or proselytize, that sense of enjoyment is dulled or lost. No one wants to feel coerced by a novel.”

Well, right. So far, so good. This may be an overly stark distinction, though, especially thinking of Horace, the 19 BC poet famous for his Ars Poetica and many still lively phrases, including aut prodesse aut delectare, typically put as “Poetry should either entertain or edify.” The modern consensus is that literature can do both.

Hey, really, I just wanted to quote Horace in a post.

Their argument continues, basically claiming that people connect with “…stories [that] have a unique power to speak directly to hearts and souls, to get under the skin and to topple defensive front lines. People have long understood the world through myth, parable, and narrative—not climate models and temperature graphs.”

So we’re still in safe territory. We all understand, one hopes, that there is a big difference between fiction and policy statements, white papers, or climate action plans.

“Stories teach us to envision new possibilities, to sympathize with others, and to experience new or emerging obstacles. They ignite our imagination and allow us to conceptualize alternative futures and to consider their ramifications and anticipate our own responses,” the Aslans state, but here’s where the question about climate fiction gets interesting. The authors of the post go on to describe The Crystal Halo, the first novel in their Prophecies of Fathom series, where they “grappled with the seduction of trying too hard to make a case—to convey a moral lesson… There is no exposition presenting the problem and how to fix it. There is no straightforward lesson.”

Is Dune Climate Fiction?

While their phrasing shows their rejection of didactic or pedantic reporting on climate change in climate fiction, I question how this fantasy series becomes climate fiction rather than simply a fantasy series, albeit one where issues of “environmental collapse is present as background pressure, a deviation from normal, something characters plan around rather than solve. In this way, the disruption to climate in the world of Fathom is much like we experience it today, on Earth.”

But is it? The answer, of course, will be found in the reading of this work.

By the way, the “slow blade that penetrates the shield” is a story element in Frank Herbert’s Dune, where firearms and other fast kinetic weaponry are annulled by personal force fields, making knife fights based on slow(ish) movement the main form of close combat. Because the story revolves around the planet Arrakis, a virtually waterless place defined by vast stretches of bone-dry desert, severe windstorms, and extreme temperatures, the series is often cited as an early or proto-climate fiction series. A nifty enough if a bit bloody metaphor for how climate fiction must tread.

But let’s get back to the Aslans’ post and the question of “What is climate fiction?”

Unlike white papers and scientific lectures, they argue that “fiction can show us how people live during a crisis, but should be set before the complex problem has been resolved. To remain authentic, it ought to dwell in the long middle, where adaptation is uneven and life stubbornly continues…. Most human experience does not take place at the edge of extinction. It takes place in the in-between, charting a winding path through daycares and deadlines, bills and bedtime. When climate fiction doesn’t account for this real life, it risks becoming spectacle—harrowing, yes, but disconnected from how change actually unfolds.”

I think their view here is spot on. The problem with most apocalyptic or fantasy climate fiction is that these stories do not represent real life. Readers may very much enjoy such stories, but close identification between the reader’s life and the settings and characters in such stories, set as they are in alien worlds—whether post-apocalyptic here or on some distant planet or an entirely fantastical world—makes it less likely for us to identify the books closely with our own situation. Even if the setting is Earth, the situation is alien.

Today, we may be heading toward an apocalypse, but we ain’t there yet, although we might be setting up an unavoidable conclusion of disaster locked in, albeit slow motion. Of course, we’re getting ever closer to such disasters in some places more than others. Bill McKibben writes a particularly sobering post in his Substack, The Crucial Years,” titled “A Question of Margin: And there’s so very little,” about the Somali humanitarian crisis, with some Ebola and India and Pakistan heatwaves thrown in, and a sound ass-kicking of Elon Musk, to boot.

Finally, a Solid, Working Definition of Climate Change

But let’s get back to the Aslans’ post:

In The Crystal Halo, the stakes are real, but they are often unspoken. The moment of disaster passes without drama, and challenge emerges from how characters negotiate meaning in a world that no longer behaves as expected. What do you hold onto when the future crumbles? What counts as success when progress is redefined as nothing more than survival?

These are not questions with tidy answers, and fiction should resist providing them. Advocacy, in story, does not come from instruction but from proximity. Readers must be allowed to inhabit uncertainty without being rescued by didactic answers. They need room to wrestle, to disagree, and perhaps to come to a different conclusion from the one the writer would reach. This is where storytelling enters a realm that policy cannot.

Amen, I say. The above quote may be one of the best definitions of climate fiction I’ve seen.

Still, there seems to be something of an allergy to stories set in the real world of today and the near-future, which is the most important time when climate amelioration will or won’t happen. The Fathom series’ description is “an epic high fantasy series,” but I haven’t read the first book in the series, so I can’t fully judge the series alignment with our reality. As author of my own series, The Steep Climes Quartet, the first book is set in 2026, the second in 2029, the third in 2035 (this one, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publishing date of June 15, if I may so report!), and the last book is set in 2047. I want to tell the story of our contemporaries in the developed world, where resources to cope with climate consequences are plentiful—certainly in contrast to today’s Somalia, for example—and where political actions hold the best hope for climate progress.

The main point in my series is that while we live in a time of significant climate crisis we are human and that even in a climate crisis, our daily lives typically trump (sorry) our attention. Such lives are filled with many priorities, and mostly of the personal and immediate sorts, but one question to be asked is how climate change subtly intrudes into our lives. Here in the developed world, climate change is mainly in the static of news and the noise of weather around us and in our daily home economies, too. Unless you happen to live in the wrong spot at the wrong time, of course, such as with Helene and Asheville, North Carolina, back in September 26, 2024, and there are many more examples of acute crises by the minute.

Climate fiction makes readers witnesses, as the Aslans say, and bring into greater relief the experiences within “the consequences of our collective decisions [and] granted the authority to decide for themselves how their new experiences within this world will impact their perspective.” With fantasy books, are we reading of a world where our collective decisions are manifest? If only there was an AI called Gandalf the White we could query.

The Aslans’ also rightly state that “Fiction… can hold and expose contradictions without resolving them. It can show characters who make imperfect choices for understandable reasons. It can honor the reality that people care about climate change and still drive, fly, consume, and contradict themselves daily.”

They continue:

That contradiction is human. It captures all the daily complexity we must each balance, the easy and the difficult, the joy and the pain, and the tiny decisions that add up to a real life.

Too often, climate narratives reduce people into caricatures: villains of extraction, heroes of resistance, victims of circumstance. But real people are much more complex and also much more relatable. They resist change not because they are evil or because they deny science, but because change threatens identity, memory, and belonging. Stories that ignore this complexity may feel righteous, but they rarely feel true.

A climate story that refuses to simplify, that aims to show its characters as whole people with tangled and contradictory values, can reveal that truth. Characters can be complicit and caring, fearful and hopeful, informed and overwhelmed all at once. Characters can want to do the right thing, but can face many axes of rightness, constrained by the challenges of social ties, health, finances, and dreams.

When readers recognize themselves in a story, they are more likely to carry that story with them. Stories that linger shape perception. This is why narrative must come before message. A reader who would instinctively reject a manifesto or moral may be captivated by a character, haunted by a choice, or quietly changed by a narrative conflict.

Okay, maybe this is the best description of climate fiction.

Giving Austin and Clare Aslan the Final Word… Well, Until My Final Word, Anyway

If The Crystal Halo succeeds at all, we hope it succeeds in this way—immersing readers in a world where climate change is neither abstract nor theatrical, but intimate—a world where environmental collapse is a force that shapes relationships, ambition, hopes, and dreams. This is a world where climate change is a presence that cannot be ignored, but also cannot be reduced to a slogan.

The future will not be saved by stories alone. Policy matters. Infrastructure matters. Science matters. Our day jobs allow us to tackle environmental problems directly. But stories can shape the cultural ground on which society stands. Our shared artistic passion allows us to play a role in shifting the landscape under people’s feet. Storytelling prepares us—not by telling us what to do, but by helping us imagine who we might be and the world we might shape.

The Aslan post is impressive overall, as are the concluding paragraphs quoted above, in what I see as the continuation of a useful definition for climate fiction. I’ve been struggling with what the intrinsic elements of stories called “climate fiction” are, and it’s not easy. In fact, when I read this post, I was in the early stages of writing a post titled “What is Climate Fiction? As a Genre, It’s a Fiction,” so I was pleased to see that the Aslan post goes far in defining key concepts of what I think are the necessary elements of fiction to be “climate fiction.” Debates, no doubt, will ensue.

There’s an odd tension, however, between what the Aslans’ post says about climate fiction and the climate fiction they write. When I saw that the series is described as “an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the ‘Chosen One’ myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature,” I thought The Crystal Halo was going to be yet another post-climate change future or alternate world when what we are facing today is ancient history or worse yet, the real world supplanted by allegory. One of my critiques of many books that get labelled as climate fiction is that such books are fantasies or stories beyond our time or otherwise some sort of dystopian tale. There are also books that incorporate magic and special beings or evolved humans, but that sure as heck isn’t the world I see around me.

First though,  I haven’t read the first book, The Crystal Halo, so there nothing like a review or critique of the novel itself here. I know well enough that writing quality is as important as anything else in terms of a book’s value, as are the vividness of characters and compelling scenes and intriguing actions and situations. I well know that I can’t critique the book, not having read it. What I’ve done is studied The Crystal Halo’s Amazon page and the book’s descriptive copy. I’ve also read through the start of the book that’s provided through the book’s Amazon page, and I’ve gained a sense of the book. What is clear is that the book is fantasy, the locale and people quite different from today, at least in the developed world. It reads, at the start, like a scene from the Middle Ages, although as previously confessed, I haven’t read any further than the first six pages of Chapter One as provided by the “Read Sample” and that’s not even the full chapter that is, according to the Table of Contents, eight pages.

Why a fantasy series as climate fiction? This is a question I think a lot about. For example, I wrote “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction” a week or two ago, and the subtitle is “Why are so many novels about climate change pursuing myth and fantasy instead of actual solutions?” Here’s the first paragraph of this post:

I am a student of climate fiction, and not surprisingly so, since I write climate fiction. I’ve long rejected the easy story of apocalypse, and not because such stories are uninteresting or a failure as a fun read, but because such stories most often have little to do with the subject of climate other than as a premise for the story. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of far-future climate fiction stories that show mankind changed in response to the climate crisis, even while the stories don’t bother to do the work of showing how the change comes about.

Yes, I’ve been researching the differences between the words snarky, snide, and sardonic, and you might see why when you read a paragraph that comes later in the “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction” post:

What sticks in my craw is the propensity of novels calling themselves climate fiction that focus on fantasy, and that includes altered species or fairies or demi-gods, or far-future distant or dystopian worlds, or radical changes in human nature often focused on gender issues or BIPOC, all the while too often fitting into hyper-genre writing markets instead of having climate change the central focus. There are many fantasy, romance, thriller, or science fiction novels that have some “climate” orientation or other, but that clearly don’t address the clear issues of climate change, either in cause or solution. We’re burning fossil fuels and heating the planet. Isn’t this time and place of crucial threat to the world an interesting enough story? Who needs allegory when the menace and what needs doing to address it is staring us right in the face?

If you look at at recent posts on Climate Fiction Writers League, you’ll note that at least six out of the most recent eight posts on there involve climate fiction with fantasy or fantastic characteristics (book descriptions below from the posts), as follows:

Climate Fiction Writing as the “Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield,” by high fantasy co-authors Austin and Clare Aslan, May 19, 2026

Today we have an essay by Austin and Clare Aslan, authors of The Crystal Halo, an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the “Chosen One” myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature

Magick & High-Tech Augmentations in YA Fiction, a discussion between Kenechi Udogu and Ray Star, Mar 10, 2026

Today’s discussion explores climate fiction dystopian concepts in YA Sci-fi and Fantasy novels, by up-and-coming authors Kenechi Udogu and Ray Star.

Kenechi Udogu’s debut novel Augmented is set in a future where humans are enhanced to ensure the survival of society. Akaego fights to prevent her power to grow plants from being weaponized by a corrupt regime.

Earthlings by Ray Star is set on a remote island where the magick-born have the ability to control earth, air, fire, water and spirit. But elsewhere, humanity is enslaved, a cruel dictator rules the land, and an uprising is on the horizon.

Imagination, Mythology, and the Return to Earth, by Steve Stine, author of I, Enoch, May 5, 2026

Steve Stine talks about mythology in fiction. His sci-fi novel I, Enoch is about a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction. Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets.

The Balance Between Immersion and Believability, A conversation between authors Denise Robbins and Amy Lilwall, April 7, 2026

This year, Denise Robbins and Amy Lilwall published novels that address climate change sidelong. Through depictions of public reactions to pending disaster—and the turmoil that ensues—both novels seek to capture the panic of a world in the midst of wide-scale disruption.

Robbins’ novel, The Unmapping, bends the laws of physics in a city—New York—that ‘unmaps’, causing world-famous buildings and streets to move and displace overnight. Amy Lilwall’s The Water That May Come imagines UK citizens in the face of a megatsunami that threatens to engulf their homeland.

Mermaids & Sea Salvage in two oceanic sci-fi novels, A discussion between Timothy Chawanga and Susan Fletcher, February 24, 2026 [Note: this post seems to split between a near-future mystery and a fantasy YA book]

Today, we have a conversation with Timothy Chawanga, author of SALVAGIA, in which a diver searching for nostalgic salvage discovers the body of the most infamous man in flooded Florida and must avoid suspicion from both feds and corporate mafias.

Timothy is talking to Susan Fletcher, author of Sea Change, a YA retelling of The Little Mermaid set in a near-future where rogue gene editing has changed humanity.

Stop the World, I want to Get Off, Adam Connors interviews Alex Foster, Feb 10, 2026

Alex Foster’s debut novel, Circular Motion, explores how a new, high-speed travel network causes the Earth’s rotation to accelerate, not just by a few seconds, but by a minute, an hour, and more.

That’s a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but I’m not sure how many of these books are fictional works addressing or focused on climate change. And, no, I’m not talking about graphs and charts, but focus.

This question of what is climate fiction, I believe, also applies to the planned The Prophesies of Fathom series. I love how Austin and Clare Aslan talk about effective climate fiction, but their talk of climate fiction and their series seem to be opposite each other.

I guess I have a lot of would-be climate fiction reading ahead of me, but at this point I’m confused about the whole domain.

Learn more about The Prophesies of Fathom Book One: The Crystal Halo.

Learn more about The Steep Climes Quartet.

The post A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy first appeared on David Guenette.

There are many Americans who are retired or approaching retirement who have been fortunate enough to have accrued healthy retirement savings. Unfortunately, there are many more Americans who have only very meager retirement savings or none at all, but that is another story; these are not the people being discussed in this post.

I’m talking about the group of people who understand that the world needs to radically reduce carbon emissions as quickly as possible in order to keep climate change consequences from being worse. I’m talking about people who have retirement funds in investment instruments beyond their Social Security or pension. In other words, I’m talking about the “money-where-the-mouth-is” group. I’ve gotten curious about what’s out there financial-instrument-wise for such a person, mythological or otherwise.

Yes, god help me, I’ve decided to look into this.

The “Date of Death” Metric

I’m at that stage of life where retirement fund amounts and performance stand in as the “date of death” metric, where one adds up all assets and subtracts liabilities to determine how many years a person can live at their previously fixed level of annual spending. For example, if a person has $500,000 in retirement funds and $21,000 is Social Security, and has an annual budget of $42,000, then one would have 23.8 years to afford to live, as follows:

• $42,000 (overall annual spending budget) minus $21,000 (annual income through Social Security) equals $21,000, which is the annual addition annual income needed beyond Social Security to meet the living budget.
• $500,000 (retirement assets) divided by $21,000 (annual income needed beyond Social Security to meet the spending budget) equals 23.8.
• Add 23.8 to your current age (example, 70) and 93.8 years of age is when you’ll no longer be able to afford to live, hence “date of death.”

I’m not a financial planner, but I know how to make a budget that subtracts expenses from income (e.g., Social Security), which then tells me how much supplemental money I require from my retirement assets. I’m not a financial planner, and I know that some people have more complicated sources of income than just Social Security (e.g., pensions and annuities); I also know that most common retirement funds are based in markets that have returns that rise and drop, whether equity stocks or mutual funds or other investment arrangements (I’m leaving the issue of bonds out of this because, well, I’m not a financial planner). If, in the above example, the $500,000 in retirement mutual funds drops by half–because, say, of an alien invasion or AI bubble collapse—then the “date of death” for the proverbial 70-year-old would be 81.9 years of age. Eighty-two years of age doesn’t feel all that old to me or my peers. I’m reminded of the “Bring out your Dead” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I’m not dead yet.”

Of course, if markets drop precipitously and significantly, there are larger problems afoot, so the example above is less a real-world scare tactic than an effort to keep the example’s math easy. I’m not a financial planner, but even I know that the simple math above doesn’t take into account various complicating factors such as taxes. The example above also assumes little rise in the cost of living (ha!) or whether the market will see neutral growth, negative growth, or positive investment growth. Obviously, market performance or alternative financial instruments for retirement funds that better buffer the retiree from market volatility, and a whole bunch more considerations exist, which is why one pays for a financial planner’s service and doesn’t consult me. Nevertheless, none of this is exactly rocket science, and the general argument outlined in this post holds.

How Many Well-off Retirees Are There?

Who are well-off retirees? I am talking about the modest chunk of American retirees who have $500,000 or $250,000 or $1,000,000. Here’s what Google’s AI Overview reports:

Approximately 7% to 9% of Americans have saved $500,000 or more for retirement. While this figure is higher among older age groups, it remains relatively rare, as 58.4% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved, and the median retirement savings for those aged 55–64 is only $185,000. 

Retirement Savings Breakdown

• • $500,000+ Range:About 4% of Americans have $500,000–$999,999, while roughly 3% to 4.6% have $1 million or more.
  • Households with Savings:Among U.S. households with any retirement account assets, roughly 9% have hit the $500,000 mark.
  • Median vs. Average:While average balances might look higher, the median (middle) value is much lower, indicating many people have far less
  • Age Factor:According to this Federal Reserve data analysis from NerdWallet, median savings for ages 65–74 is $200,000, while the average savings is over $600,000, highlighting that a large portion of the wealth is held by a minority of savers. 

While $500,000 is a significant milestone, it falls below the estimated $1.28 million to $1.46 million many Americans believe they need for a comfortable retirement. 

More specifically, I’m talking about the subset of retirees with such resources who might consider doing something with those retirement funds to support, speed up, and otherwise make it more likely that the transition to clean energy happens sooner and better. If I use the more modest 7% of Americans with median retirement savings of $500,000 or more, the number is 23.9 million people. Is there a percentage of this percentage who are interested in shifting their savings into investment instruments that support the clean energy transition? I’m not talking donations, but putting their retirement savings to work in financial instruments (e.g., IRA mutual funds) doing the important work of combatting climate change and building a smarter world of energy.

What kind of money are we talking about? Google AI does what it is good at (although not infallible), which is finding and aggregating information it’s prompted to collect. Here’s the Google Search AI Summary for the query “What is the size of investment instruments of Americans in 2025?”

As of late 2025, U.S. retirement assets totaled $49.1 trillion, with $19.2 trillion in IRAs and $14.2 trillion in defined contribution plans (like 401(k)s). Households favored stocks (25%), mutual funds (13%), crypto (10%), and bonds (8%), with 64% of Americans likely to invest and 56.4% owning mutual funds/ETFs.

Size and Composition of Investment Instruments (2025)

• • Retirement Assets: Totaled $49.1 trillion in Q4 2025.
  • Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs): $19.2 trillion.
  • Defined Contribution Plans (401k/403b/457/TSP): $14.2 trillion.
  • Mutual Funds: Represent $14.7 trillion in IRAs and DC plans (44% of total).
  • Average Portfolio Composition: Stocks (25%), Mutual Funds (13%), Cryptocurrencies (10%), Bonds (8%), and alternatives like private equity/hedge funds.]

Key Findings on 2025 Investment Landscape

• • Robust Growth: Assets under management for advisors grew to $144.6 trillion in 2024, with continued strong market conditions leading into 2025.
  • Capital Gains: Average net capital gains for applicable tax returns varied by state, with investors seeking high returns in 2025.
  • Commercial Real Estate: 70% of investors planned to buy more assets in 2025, with multifamily and industrial being preferred sectors.

How Much Retirement Money Could Be Invested in Clean Tech?

Here’s the thought experiment (a phrase I love, because it is a pretentious way of saying “thinking”): Let’s say that of these 23.9 million Americans half have no interest in shifting their retirement funds to fossil-fuels-free or clean-tech-focused funds, keeping in mind the highly polarized society we’re living in. That leaves 12 million people. If each of the 12 million people transfer $1000 into non-fossil fuels/clean energy funds, that is $12 billion. Now let’s say these 12 million people shift half of their retirement portfolio ($500,000 medium amount divided by 2=$250,000), that’s $2.75 trillion shifted over to non-fossil-fuels-free clean tech portfolios.

And then there’s the answer, according to Google replying to “How much money got invested in clean tech in 2025?” which resulted in a total of $2.3 trillion:

Global investment in clean energy technology reached a record high of $2.3 trillion in 2025, marking an 8% increase over the previous year despite policy and trade challenges. Key investments included $893 billion in electrified transport, $690 billion in renewable energy, and $483 billion in power grids, according to BloombergNEF.

Key 2025 Investment Highlights:

• • Top Markets: China remained the largest market with $800 billion invested (despite a 4% dip), followed by the U.S. at $738 billion (up 3.5%), and the EU with $455 billion.
  • Growth Leaders: India experienced rapid growth, with a 46% increase to $101 billion.
  • Sector Breakdown: Electrified transport led total investment, while investment in stationary battery storage grew significantly to $66 billion.
  • Manufacturing Slowdown: Global manufacturing investment in clean tech dropped as a result of domestic overcapacity, particularly in China.

While BloombergNEF reported $2.3 trillion, the Clean Investment Monitor indicated a figure of $1.96 trillion, covering manufacturing and deployment, highlighting a shift toward more moderate growth compared to prior years.

So, if half the retirees with good retirement funds put those funds into clean energy financial investment instruments, there could be a doubling or more of money focused on clean energy. In theory, this cohort could retire themselves into a doubling of market efforts to make clean energy happen. Of course, some number of the 11 million retirement investing Americans may already be involved in non-fossil fuel/clean tech investments. Again, let’s stress that we’re not talking donations, but shifting the retirement savings already in investment instruments to non-fossil fuel/clean tech investment instruments doing the important work of combatting climate change and building a smarter world of energy.

Has the clean tech and climate change world been talking enough about what many of us can be doing to hurry along the better world? Well, I’m not a financial advisor, but I’ll say “No.”

Fossil Free Funds and Clean Tech Funds

How does one go about discovering in a confident manner, what investment funds are likely more effective for encouraging the dual outcomes of investing in clean energy and keeping one’s “date of death” from dwindling close?

Well, you can always ask Google to “Identify the best performing non-fossil fuel mutual funds. Identify the best performing clean tech mutual funds. Base this on returns over the last five years. Include the evaluation of how strict the fossil fuel exclusion is, including with funds that may include financial institutions that fund fossil fuel.” Here’s the answer I got recently (by the way, you’re likely to get different results depending on when you ask, or, possibly, the mood of Google; remember, I am not a financial advisor, nor is Google):

The following funds are identified as the best performers over the last five years (as of May 2026), categorized by strategy.

TOP PERFORMING BROAD MARKET NON-FOSSIL FUEL FUNDS [1]

These funds invest in the broader market (tech, healthcare, finance) while excluding fossil fuel producers. They have generally outperformed pure “clean energy” sector funds over the last five years due to the strength of the broader market. [1, 2, 3, 4]

1. 1. Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund (VFTAX) [1]

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: ~13.2% (Cumulative ~86%)
  • Performance: This is likely the highest-performing “sustainable” fund accessible to most investors, driven by heavy weightings in large-cap tech stocks like NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft.
  • Strictness & Financial Exposure: Low Strictness on Finance. While this fund strictly excludes companies with fossil fuel reserves (like Exxon or Chevron), it does not exclude financial institutions that fund the fossil fuel industry.
    • Evidence: As of 2026, it holds significant stakes in JPMorgan Chase (1.65%) and Bank of America (0.68%), both of which are top funders of fossil fuel expansion. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

1. 2. Green Century Equity Fund (GCEQX)

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: +11.07%
  • Performance: This fund has delivered strong double-digit returns, significantly outperforming its “Balanced” counterpart. It tracks a customized index of sustainable companies.
  • Strictness & Financial Exposure: Highest Strictness. This fund is marketed as a “truly fossil-fuel-free” option. It excludes exploration, extraction, processing, and utilities that burn coal.
    • Differentiation: Unlike Vanguard, Green Century uses shareholder advocacy to pressure companies (including banks) to stop funding climate change. It is the primary option for investors seeking to minimize all association with the industry. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

1. 3. Parnassus Core Equity Fund (PRBLX)

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: +9.66%
  • Performance: A long-time leader in ESG investing, though it has slightly lagged the S&P 500 and Vanguard’s passive index over the last 5 years.
  • Strictness & Financial Exposure: Parnassus excludes companies generating >10% of revenue from fossil fuel extraction. However, it may invest in companies that use fossil fuel energy and does not have a blanket exclusion on diversified banks. [1, 2, 3, 4]

TOP PERFORMING CLEAN TECH/CLEAN ENERGY MUTUAL FUNDS

These funds focus specifically on the energy transition (wind, solar, batteries, efficiency). The sector has faced significant volatility recently, making the top performer an outlier. [1, 2, 3, 4]

1. 1. Fidelity Environment and Alternative Energy Fund (FSLEX)

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: +11.65%
  • Performance: This is the best-performing clean energy fund It has significantly outperformed popular ETFs like ICLN.
  • Why it Won: It is actively managed and takes a broader view of “environmental solutions.”
  • Strictness: While focused on clean energy, it is not a “purist” fund. It has recently held companies like Siemens Energy and GE Vernova (gas turbine manufacturers) because they are critical to grid efficiency and the energy transition, even though they service natural gas infrastructure. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

1. 2. Calvert Global Energy Solutions Fund (CAEIX)

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: +4.05%
  • Performance: Positive but modest returns. It holds a “Gold” medalist rating from Morningstar for its process but has lagged behind the broader market. [1, 2, 3]

1. 3. Popular ETFs (Underperformers)

Note: These passive funds suffered from the post-2021 deflation in clean tech valuations, whereas the actively managed Fidelity fund avoided the worst of the drawdown. [1, 2]

• • iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (ICLN): +1.92%
  • First Trust Nasdaq Clean Edge Green Energy (QCLN): -1.57% annualized (Negative return).

• • For the highest raw return, Vanguard (VFTAX) is the winner, but you will own shares in the world’s largest fossil fuel financiers.
  • For the best performing strict option, Green Century Equity (GCEQX) offers the strongest combination of a ~11% return and a “fossil free” mandate that actively addresses the banking sector’s role in climate change.
  • For clean technology exposure, Fidelity (FSLEX) is the only fund in this category that has delivered double-digit annualized returns over this period. [1]

Or, of course, you can always do the work yourself or use a financial planner (which I am not). Useful green investment funds information resources include Fossil Free Funds for analyzing carbon exposure, Morningstar for sustainable fund ratings, and Green America for curated lists of environmental mutual funds and ETFs. These platforms help identify options that avoid fossil fuels and focus on clean energy, sustainability, and ESG criteria.

Key Information Resources for Green Investing

• Fossil Free Funds: A premier tool for searching mutual funds and ETFs to analyze fossil fuel exposure and check the carbon footprint of portfolios.
• Morningstar: Provides comprehensive analysis, performance rankings, and lists of the best sustainable funds and ETFs to buy.
• Green America: Offers a guide to green mutual funds and ETFs that specifically avoid fossil fuels and focus on environmental solutions.
• Green Century Funds: Provides resources on fossil fuel-free investing, shareholder advocacy, and sustainable investment strategies.
• S. News & World Report: Regularly publishes lists of top-performing socially responsible funds and green stocks.

Top-Rated Green Funds and ETFs (As of 2025-2026)

• Fossil-Free Focused: Etho Capital Climate Leadership U.S. ETF, Green Century Funds.
• Clean Energy & Environmental: iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (ICLN), Invesco Solar ETF (TAN), Impax Global Environmental Markets Fund.
• Sustainable Broad Market: Vanguard ESG U.S. Stock ETF, Sphere 500 Climate Fund, Fidelity U.S. Sustainability Index Fund.

Key Considerations

• Shareholder Advocacy: Some funds (e.g., Green Century) actively urge companies to improve environmental policies.
• Expense Ratios: Look for competitive fees; the Fidelity U.S. Sustainability Index Fund (FITLX) has a low expense ratio of 0.11%.
• Performance: Sustainable funds can outperform traditional funds, with some specialized funds providing high returns in 2025 and 2026.

I See Your Confusion and I Raise Your Awareness

So, you want to help push the transition to clean energy forward. You want to do your part to reduce the consequences of climate change. One way is to put your retirement savings to work within financial instruments like mutual fund IRAs. Personally, having to pay attention to this sort of thing makes me want to pull my own head off, but then I’m not a financial planner, remember?

On the other hand, I do want to encourage clean energy in order to help reduce the present and future challenges of climate change, so I’m making the effort. I’m also one of those 11 million Americans with a chunk of savings for retirement, and while my accounts are modest compared to many, it’s unseemly to think that I’m less fortunate than them, with the far better way to think is that I’m more fortunate than a big majority of Americans to have such resources. An even better way to think of these retirement resources is that I can put my money where my mouth is, and that means putting what retirement resources I have into the market in such a way as to encourage the direction I want to see the world take.

This seems like a good bet to me.

The post Clean Tech/Fossil-Free Funds Can Make A Difference first appeared on David Guenette.

I am a student of climate fiction, and not surprisingly so, since I write climate fiction. I’ve long rejected the easy story of apocalypse, and not because such stories are uninteresting or a failure as a fun read, but because such stories most often have little to do with the subject of climate other than as a premise for the crisis. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of far-future stories that show mankind changed in response to the climate crisis, while the stories don’t bother to do the work of showing how the change comes about.

Let’s Set the Stage

Climate change is an astonishing event in our human culture. We have altered the climate of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and have already locked in more changes to the climate over the next many centuries. The reasons for our alteration of fundamental Earth systems make sense in that the fossil fuel-based energy provided to societies and their economies has pushed human development forward even as, supported by the energy abundance, the population numbers have exploded. The combination of huge energy use and ever-larger population numbers over the last two hundred years is the mechanism behind climate change.

It is an impressive achievement, really.

The problem is that the resulting change in the Earth’s climate is itself impressive, but darkly so, since we’re altering the stable climate of the last 10,000 years that supported the dominance of humans. The benefits of such a stable climate are now disappearing, increasingly being replaced by significant disadvantages. We’ve exhausted our species’ advantage from burning fossil fuels to power growth and population. In fact, we find ourselves facing a future that presents growing disadvantages for us in the form of horrendous heat waves, devastating deluges, deadly droughts, surging seas, damning diseases, and massive meteorological disasters.

Another important point to keep in mind is that we’ve known of these consequences for many decades. There’s a report titled The Greenhouse Effect, produced by J.F. Black, Scientific Advisor, Products Research Division, Exxon Research and Engineering Company, dated June 6, 1978. This report closely matches—scarily so—the rises in average global temperatures we’re now seeing and expect to see going forward. This is hardly the first such understanding of the greenhouse gas/global warming effect concluded by the fossil fuel corporations themselves in studies starting back nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

In fact, there are a shocking number of earlier studies on greenhouse gases and warming that began in the 1820s with Joseph Fourier identifying the atmosphere’s heat-trapping “greenhouse effect.” This was followed by Eunice Foote’s (1850s) experiments showing CO2’s powerful heat absorption, and John Tyndall’s (1859) confirmation of gases like CO2 and water vapor absorbing infrared heat. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius first calculated that human CO2 emissions could significantly raise Earth’s temperature, linking industrial activity to climate change, a concept later refined by Charles Keeling’s (1950s-60s) precise CO2 measurements.

Look up “Early 20th century newspaper stories about burning coal and the greenhouse effect.” Here’s the AI Search Summary you’ll find (I’ve left the links live):

Early 20th-century newspapers, notably in 1912, published short, syndicated articles linking coal combustion to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and future global warming. These reports, such as a famous August 1912 piece, accurately predicted that burning coal would act as a “blanket” to raise Earth’s temperature within a few centuries. [1, 2, 3]

Key Historical Clippings

• • 1912 Climate Change Article: Originally published in March 1912 in Popular Mechanics, and later in Australian/New Zealand newspapers (e.g., The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal and Rodney and Otamatea Times) in August 1912, this report was titled “Coal Consumption Affecting Climate” or similar.
  • What it Stated: The 67-word article noted that furnaces were burning 2 billion tons of coal annually, adding roughly 7 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere yearly. It explained that this CO2 acts as a “blanket” that raises temperature, predicting, “This effect may be considerable in a few centuries”.
  • Scientific Context: This was not the first instance of such reporting. It followed pioneering work by scientists like Svante Arrhenius, who predicted this effect in 1896, and earlier studies by H.A. Phillips in 1882. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Keep in mind that a number of the big fossil fuel corporations had commissioned their own studies in the 1970s and 1980s, although we don’t know the exact count, and probably won’t until the discovery phases of liability cases against the fossil fuel corporations take place and are made public. Unless, of course, SCOTUS rules that fossil fuel companies are protected against liability lawsuits, and remember, SCOTUS has done this for the gun companies.

Climate Change is a Fantastic Story in the Real World

A recent Substack post in Climate Fiction Writers League, “Imagination, Mythology, and the Return to Earth, by Steve Stine, author of I, Enoch, May 05, 2026, is unfortunately typical of what is found in this Substack. The intro to the post is as follows:

Steve Stine talks about mythology in fiction. His sci-fi novel I, Enoch, is about a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction. Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets. 

The first thing that set me off is Stine’s use of the manned moon mission as an example of the age of science, setting Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon in opposition to mythic storytelling. “And yet, what we gained that day in the annals of space exploration, we lost in the age-old story-telling traditions that bestowed upon the moon a mythic quality. For countless generations and throughout the world, the moon played a lead role in shaping cultures, aligning belief systems, and influencing human behavior.”

Good to know, I guess. It turns out that the moon is made of straw, not cheese, and that it’s the old straw man in the moon. Stine waxes nostalgic on the role the moon once played in human imagination, and bemoans that now, somehow, we’ve lost what for the ancients was the understanding that “…not knowing [is] fertile ground for story-telling.” There’s mention of the Age of Reason, and Voltaire, David Hume, and Thomas Paine come up, along with their complaints about myths. Stine comments, “…[T]he substance and purpose of mythology suffered a full-frontal assault by those bent on placing science at the centre of our cultural transformation.” The straw man argument here is that “not knowing” and science are oppositional, and if not knowing” is essential for story-telling, then somehow, amid all the test tubes and data sets, we’ve lost the ability to tell a story. “Today, the word ‘myth’ is synonymous with a falsehood,” Stine then claims. Well, it can be, but myth has other meanings and hewing only to the falsehood definition is itself false. Let’s turn to a product of science (and imagination!) to test definitions. Here is the Google AI summary of the definition of myth:

A myth is a traditional, often sacred narrative explaining a culture’s worldview, beliefs, or natural phenomena, typically featuring gods or heroes in a remote era. While commonly misconstrued as a “false story,” a myth acts as a symbolic, foundational truth for a community, rather than a literal historical account. [1, 2, 3]

Key Definitions of Myth:

• • Sacred Narrative: A story of ostensibly historical events that explains a culture’s practices, beliefs, or natural phenomena (e.g., creation myths).
  • Cultural Worldview: A story that defines a group’s identity, often involving divine or supernatural beings, which is revered as true and authoritative within that culture.
  • Common Usage (False Belief): A popular but unsubstantiated belief or false notion (e.g., “the myth of racial superiority”). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Key Characteristics:

• • Anonymous Origin: Usually told without a known author, passed down through generations.
  • Symbolic Truth: Myths are often metaphorically or symbolically true, even if factually false.
  • Functions: They serve to answer fundamental questions (creation, death) and justify social systems and rites. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Myth vs. Related Terms:

• • Myth vs. Legend: Legends are usually based on historical figures or events, though often exaggerated, whereas myths operate in a, “primordial,” or non-specific time involving gods.
  • Myth vs. Folktale: Folktales are told for entertainment or moral instruction rather than being considered sacred or strictly true. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Myths, Storytelling, and the Modern Age of Climate Fiction

I understand Stine’s interest in supporting the concept of myth—his book, I, Enoch, presents the following description on Amazon:

I, Enoch is an enthralling journey into a world where ancient secrets and modern ambitions collide. Enoch, the protagonist, stands as a guardian of lost truths and protector of the marginalized, battling against forces that hold dominion over the planet. In a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction, Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets. As he delves deeper, Enoch confronts not only external adversaries but also internal dilemmas about justice, knowledge, and power. This tale weaves together mysticism with gritty realism, creating a tapestry rich with philosophical questions and the perennial quest for understanding one’s purpose. As Enoch wrestles with his responsibilities and the consequences of his actions, the reader is invited into a vividly crafted universe that challenges the conventional boundaries between history and myth, between what is known and what is imaginable. This book promises to leave readers pondering their own place in the history of humankind and the universe.

To be fair, I’ve not read the entire book, just samples from the book as well as descriptive copy, so maybe I’m using I, Enoch as my own straw man.

Storytelling exists across many modalities, where myth, in the word’s various connotations, is but one. I happen to like Carl Jung’s sense of archetypes within the human mind and Joseph Campbell does a great job tying the history of myths into literature. Heck, I took a course as an undergraduate called “Myth in Literature,” where I got to read Eric Neumann’s The History of Consciousness, for pete’s sake, so I’m no anti-myth guy, honest. I also don’t see myth and science as opposites, not when it comes to human imagination and storytelling. What sticks in my craw is the propensity of novels calling themselves climate fiction that focus on fantasy, and that includes altered species or fairies or demi-gods, or far-future distant or dystopian worlds, or radical changes in human nature often focused on gender issues or BIPOC, all the while too often fitting into hyper-genre writing markets instead of having climate change the central focus. There are many fantasy, romance, thriller, or science fiction novels that have some “climate” orientation or other, but that clearly don’t address the clear issues of climate change, either in cause or solution. We’re burning fossil fuels and heating the planet. Isn’t this time and place of crucial threat to the world an interesting enough story? Who needs allegory when the menace and what needs doing to address it is staring us right in the face?

To be clear, there are many excellent climate fiction works. Think Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future; Nicky Singer’s The Survival Game; Richard Powers’s The Overstory; Jenny Offill’s Weather; Omar El Akkad’s American War; Arthur Jeon’s Snowflake; Nick Fuller Goggin’s The Great Transition; Paul E. Hardisty’s The Forcing; Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife; Stephen Markely’s The Deluge; Chuck Colin’s Altar to an Erupting Sun; and J. Underwood’s The Bell Lap, to name some. But out of the 160-plus “climate fiction” novels I’d noted in building a Goodreads list (an effort I abandoned in late 2024 due to the sheer volume and size of the task), the sort of climate fiction I prefer remains a small minority.

And sure, it is a matter of taste, in part. But what sets climate fiction apart from other categories? Might it not be the topic and focus on where we are now and how we address climate change? Any category that is too inclusive ends up losing value as a category. Novels that turn to deus ex machina may be fun, but there’s not much of a real climate change solution being investigated in such stories. Fantasy can be a fun read and teach the reader about the human condition, but unless it is actively focused on climate change, does it fit into the category of climate fiction? Myths and allegories and social criticism can be edifying, and romances and thrillers and crime novels can be entertaining, but maybe climate fiction should directly address climate change and what we might imagine doing about the problem.

There’s this idea of “thrutopia” in climate fiction which I define as climate fiction that shows where we are in the world of changing climate and how we get to where we’re going. I like to quote the old Down Easter joke, “You can’t get there from here,” but getting from where we are today to the world we are heading to—solutions successful or not—seems likely the real focus for climate fiction.

The post Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

There’s a lot to do and we need a lot of people to do it. Most of all, at the least we need people active in the electoral process and candidates who are worth voting for when it comes to democracy and climate action.

We’ve run out of time for climate action and are now at the stage of now-or-never. We’ve not yet managed to reduce carbon emissions. We have slowed the rate of emissions, but more carbon is still being added into the atmosphere and temperatures keep climbing. I sure as hell hope that the recent studies suggesting the rate of temperature rise is faster than previously thought turns out to be wrong, although science has grown more sophisticated in its understanding of large Earth systems, and with more understanding comes, typically, more accuracy. With higher temperatures comes the greater likelihood of various tipping points happening sooner rather than later, and that’s another piece of bad news.

The good news is that we have economically viable technological developments in solar/wind/batteries and digital grid and demand management to meet not only the growing demand for electricity but replace some of the existing fossil fuel-based electricity generation and much of the gasoline-driven transport so dear to the American culture. If we keep from adding new gas-fired gas plants and retire existing coal plants and gas plants, we can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions that stem from the electricity generation we need.

We can win.

There’s a great EMBER report I covered in “The Electrotech Manifesto,” posted last June that does a great job spelling it all out. If you need a pick-me-up in the face of all the dirty tricks Big Oil has been pulling, check it out. 

Cutting back on carbon emissions instead of adding to emissions must be our goal for the next few years, never mind any decades time scales. We need to manifest this reduction of emissions as soon as possible. 2030 is right around the corner and even if we do manage to reduce emissions from the electricity generation sector, we’ll still be dealing with a world at least 1.5 Celsius hotter, in annual global average, and it looks likely that 2.0 Celsius is now the new minimum rise. I’ll take 2.0 Celsius by 2100 over 3.0, 4.0, or even higher Celsius increases, but whatever the actual number of Celsius warmer annual global average temperature, the lower the number, the better for one and all.

So, chop chop, people.

First, Restore Democracy

The first objective in the fight for faster clean energy transition, at least here in America, is to revive our democracy. While polls strongly suggest there will be a Republican rout in the midterms, the polls assume there will be midterms that aren’t abused by the Trump Administration to its advantage. And what is the basis for Trump’s advantage? Basically, to stay in power and out of jail.

Trump’s corruption is historic, and that’s keeping in mind that there have been periods in American history where corruption was strife. Still, when it comes to corruption and self-dealing, Trump truly deserves the gold medal in that event. A crucial aspect of this corruption is the favors bought by Big Oil that has President Big Oil Stooge leaning the economy heavily toward fossil fuels, despite clean power technology being more costly both in direct cost and, of course, in health and environmental impact.

For the 2026 midterms, the fight will be on two fronts. The first is to make sure the elections take place in fair and legal conditions. The second is to vote for the right candidates in record numbers.

Second, Stress the Positive

We have the means to transition our energy systems toward clean energy, including solar, wind, battery storage, geothermal, and nuclear. Solar and wind and batteries are cheapest and fastest to implement, while also freeing countries from having to continuously spend and spend on more fossil fuels to replace that which has been burned.

The reduction in carbon emissions from the clean energy transition can slow down carbon emissions and even start to reverse the high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The net effect will be to keep climate change from worsening, and thus reduce the amount of money, time, and effort to build resilience for the warming climate and decrease the adaptation efforts that higher temperatures will demand. We must diminish the threat of economic and societal collapse posited by many should we experience 2 Celsius or higher global average temperature rises.

Sounds like a bargain, right?

How about cheaper and cleaner electricity fairly shared, and not just among Americans, but to address the Global South’s energy poverty? Here, in many countries, clean energy is countering the fossil fuel-based systems that contribute to overall poverty, including high mortality, hunger, famine, disease, and whatever other horsemen of the apocalypse you can think of. Oppressive living standards occur by keeping such countries’ own energy and economic development hostage to the costs of fossil fuel energy generation.

Third, Go Big on Clean Energy Build Out Nationally, State-wide, and Locally

The United States faces big energy infrastructure build out regardless of energy source. There’s the need for more electricity, not only for the panicked requirements of AI and data centers, and clean electricity is far more efficient an energy source than fossil fuels, whether in terms of generation itself, or for the heating and cooling of the built environment, or transportation. Electrical grids need better digital management for load balancing, efficient use of distributed energy resources such as virtual power plants, and controlling demand load capacity and distribution. Overall power capacity needs expansion and old distribution lines require repair and updating.

This may seem overwhelming, but keep in mind that America has undertaken this sort of infrastructure work before–think the Federal Rural Electrification program or Tennessee Valley Authority, or for that matter, the Interstate Highways buildout. Keep in mind that just one administration back, two major bills for big energy infrastructure passed, only to be illegally curtailed by the Trump Administration’s violations of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

The clean energy transition may seem too expensive, but longer-term considerations prove out that the clean energy transition to be the less expensive path. Why are large clean energy infrastructure programs less expensive, especially if one doesn’t get caught up in the “next-quarter” thinking? First, solar/wind/and battery systems are cost comparable to fossil fuel-based generators, but the cost of operation for fossil fuel-based generation is never-ending with ongoing purchases of price-volatile fossil fuels. This contrasts to clean energy generation that has only its upfront cost but very low cost of operations that does not include any ongoing fuel purchases for thirty or forty years. There’s an old argument still being made that the levelized cost of energy (LCOE, or the overall costs over the life of the energy generation) is lower with natural gas than with renewables. Yes, once upon a time this was true, but only by cherry picking old data from back when solar, for example, was costly, do the numbers work out that way. In reality, costs for solar, wind, and battery storage have fallen so low that renewable energy’s LCOE is cheaper than fossil fuels and that that’s not even counting the negative externalities of health and climate cost inseparable from fossil fuels.  Another way to look at this issue is as energy return on investment (EROI), and if you want more on this, check out my post “My Report About EROI, Written by AI,” published last April.

Today, the thumb on the scale for fossil fuels is even worse, with 100-plus year old tax code advantages and $billions in direct subsidies still being handed to the fossil fuel corporations each and every year, including several $billion extra added in by Trump through the OBBBA. Big Oil has been gaming the system for its own business benefit, cost, inefficiencies, and damages from the business of fossil fuels be damned. We need to act at every level, from federal, to state, to local.

Fourth, Take a Breath

The energy transition may look better and be moving forward faster in many other parts of the world outside the U.S. China has been full steam ahead (old metaphors never die, they just become ironic), and while China’s large economy and huge population make carbon emissions reduction difficult, that country is on its way toward becoming the first “Electrotech” country. Usually, advantage goes to first place winners, but as an American considering this advantage, I’ll merely sigh.

There are good signs that many Global South countries are leapfrogging older energy systems and often this may mean that the expensive infrastructure outlays that the West’s traditional energy grid systems represent can be ignored for a more quickly built and less expensive micro-grids and local energy capacity based on renewables. One of the great fears has long been that the developing countries, as they approach parity in energy wealth to the developed countries, would contribute to huge further spikes in carbon emissions. What we’re seeing instead are countries putting in place clean energy systems early on. This trend has the potential for a significant win/win, where countries develop energy wealth parity while no further carbon emissions are added.

Fifth, Eat the Billionaires

Any neutral economic assessment of the past forty or fifty years shows a staggeringly huge shift in wealth to the top 10%, and even worse, the top fraction of one percent. By most analyses, our wealth inequality today exceeds the excess of the late nineteenth century Gilded Age, and any reader of history knows that the Gilded Age was an awful time of corruption, worker oppression, and wide-scale poverty. Today, America is captured by oligarchs. Billionaires avoid taxes in myriad ways. The accretion of power to the top one-percent is so significant as to be nearly incomprehensive. Dé·jà vu, all over again.

Shifts in distributed wealth have many examples in American history. Within our lifetimes—well, decreasingly few of us still living these days—the Depression era New Deal corrections provided economic support to desperate citizens. The post WWII American productivity growth created a growing middle class because productivity gains were shared more equitably. The top income tax bracket was 92 percent during Eisenhower’s administration, and while the top bracket fluctuated, the 1960 and 1970s saw top rates at 70 percent or higher. Only with the election of Ronald Reagan did the top rate crash down to 50 percent in 1982 and fell further to 28% in 1988. Further tax cuts in the George W. Bush administration happened and then the Trump tax cuts in his first term went into law, then were extended again in 2025 with OBBBA.

The current level of wealth inequality is absurd and absurdly dangerous: The top 1% (approx. $55 trillion in assets) holds roughly as much wealth as the entire bottom 90% of Americans. As of early 2026, the top three richest Americans are Elon Musk (approx. $839B), Larry Page ($257B), and Sergey Brin ($237B). Together, they represent a significant portion of the roughly 31.7% of U.S. wealth held by the top 1% of households.

Let’s tax the rich and get the wealth distribution back into fair territory. Let’s have a more fairly shared burden contribute to the crucial work on the energy transition ahead of us.

By the way, should billionaires even exist?

Sixth, Shift America’s Money to the Real Conflict

In 2026, the budget for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) was $839.2 billion in discretionary funding, but The FY2026 DOD budget request also contains approximately $113.3 billion in mandatory (non-discretionary) funding, including the following:

• Resources designated for the Navy’s shipbuilding plan and to revitalize the nation’s shipbuilding industrial base
• Over $5 billion is allocated specifically for the submarine industrial base
• Investments include $321.9 million for DPA purchases and $2.6 billion for Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) programs
• Strategic capital to the tune of $300 million directed toward the Office of Strategic Capital for loans and loan guarantees
• The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) budget, which is part of the broader, non-discretionary personnel-related costs, accounting for 84% ($1,216.8 million) of the specific budget request
• While not mandatory funding, the enacted NDAA/appropriations provided significant budget additions in specific, targeted “non-discretionary” areas (items that Congress authorizes) such as $1.5 billion for the maritime industrial base and various, targeted, weapon systems enhancements

Well, what’s another $113 billion, right?

And then, of course, there are the additional costs associated with specific military adventures in 2026, including:

• Iran-related operations incurring roughly $10.35 billion in costs in just the first 10 days of the conflict, with the initial 100 hours of operations costing an estimated $3.3 billion, with costs rising rapidly due to munitions, flight hours, and damaged equipment. A two-month engagement is estimated to cost between $40 billion and $95 billion
• Venezuela adventure/Caribbean operations will incur costs above the initial FY2026 budget, including increased personnel benefits (e.g., family separation allowances) and higher operational tempo (e.g., more flying/steaming hours). These are estimated to cost an extra $3 million per day
• The FY2026 defense budget includes expanded missions for the DoD to support the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes deploying U.S. forces to border areas

Due to the high intensity of operations, the Pentagon has informed Congress they need an additional $50 billion beyond the original budget request. Additionally, the administration has anticipated at least $150 billion in further, separate, or reconciliation funding for defense activities.

Well, what’s another $150 billion, right?

So, yeah, well over $1trillion is going to the DOD. One core factor in the current war efforts is fossil fuels, whether to address the threats against oil markets or for “strategic” geo-political considerations. And then there are the costs stemming for the protection of maritime shipping and the negative production capacity among both U.S. allies and enemies.

Keep in mind that the Pentagon has never passed a clean financial audit since they began audits in 2018, failing its eighth consecutive annual audit in late 2025. Despite conducting yearly audits, the Department of Defense (DOD) remains the only federal agency unable to achieve an unmodified, or “clean,” audit opinion. That 1960 warning by Eisenhower about a military-industrial complex? It turns out, I Like Ike.

Keep in mind, too, the negative revenue consequences of OBBBA. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is estimated to reduce federal tax revenue by approximately $4.5 trillion to $5.5 trillion over the ten-year period from 2025–2034. These revenue losses primarily stem from extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) policies, implementing new business tax reforms, and raising the SALT deduction cap to $40,000.

You’ve heard this before, but the U.S. military budget in 2026 is $839.2 billion (but actually over $1 trillion). China (People’s Republic of) is in second place, at $303 billion, well less than a third of the U.S. military budget. Here are the next top eight military budgets, in $billions: Russia, $212.6; Germany, $127.4; India, $88.4; Saudi Arabia, $67.2; United Kingdom, $64; France, $57.4; Japan, $57.4; South Korea, $45.8.

So, yeah, what you’ve heard is right: the budget for the U.S. military is as much as the next nine nations’ military budgets combined. Half of these are allies.

The money for the clean energy transition is there, but it is being spent on the wrong things.

Let’s fund the Electrotech Revolution, save most people money, and save the planet’s hospitable climate. That’s the battle we need to join.

The post How to Win the Electrotech Revolution first appeared on David Guenette.

Still, I’m tempted to call baloney when it comes to balcony solar, but another part of me knows that any step forward with solar power is a good thing. But I still grumble that this under-powered piecemeal addition for adding solar is far less important than all the proposals being considered across—at last count—28 states and DC might suggest.

What’s being considered in legislatures across the land is allowing small plug-and-play photovoltaic (PV) kits that connect directly to a standard wall outlet, allowing users to reduce electricity bills without complex installation. Balcony solar panel systems typically have a maximum output capacity of 600W to 800W for standard plug-in microinverter kits, which is the legal limit in many European countries. While some systems allow for up to 1,200W or slightly higher, 800W is the common, safe, and regulatory-approved threshold for small apartment-focused solar energy. Basically, we talking a balcony solar kit generating an amount of power that falls short for most microwaves or hairdryers. Forget about refrigerators that may only need 150–300 watts to run, but can require 1,000–2,000-plus watts to start the compressor.

Keep in mind that balcony solar powers only the circuit it is plugged into, not the whole house. Under best conditions a balcony solar set-up might generate 300-1,200k kWh annually. Here in Massachusetts, the typical household annual electricity consumption is approximately 7,150-7,250 kWh, which means, best case, balcony solar might supply 16% of your annual usage, but of course there’s no such thing as best case, especially here in New England.

But whatever. In my book, any reduction in fossil fuel-derived electricity is a win, even if my enthusiasm for balcony solar is, like its output potential, weak.

What is clearly not a win at all is adding more regulations and local authority over rooftop and community-scale solar and battery projects.

Good Intentions Can Have Bad Consequences

In fact, I find myself grumbling about a lot of solar-related issues these days and balcony solar isn’t top of the list. Some people within one of my local climate groups sends around to the members information from Responsible Solar MA asking that members consider submitting testimony to the state Energy Facilities Siting Board to support changes in the regulations on siting of solar projects be adopted for “Safe Solar Siting.” Responsible Solar MA was asking for the public written testimony in support of many new restrictions on solar siting, and when I read the template testimony provided, I ended up editing it to oppose most provisions included.

Here’s what I wrote (slightly further edited for this post):

To the Energy Facilities Siting Board,

Please accept my comments relating to the energy siting regulations and guidelines that are in development. My guiding principle below is that liberal permission should be allowed in the siting of solar and solar/batteries facilities in the vast majority of cases, but perhaps with a few exceptions, such as setback and fencing and aesthetic border requirements as described in local zoning codes. 

The country and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are in a race to develop solar and tie clean energy into existing or newly needed transmission grids renewable energy sources. Indeed, the transition to renewable energy-based electricity production is among the highest priorities for the world at large, as progress in the reduction of greenhouse gases has to date underperformed, with consequential increases in climate change. As few restrictions to solar or battery or solar/battery facility siting as possible will be necessary to encourage and accelerate the renewable energy transition.

1) Do NOT exclude “small” energy projects and all ESS battery systems by only allowing such projects on the built or disturbed environment. This is an unnecessary restriction that will only serve to delay, complicate, and raise the costs of solar and battery facilities.

2) Do NOT exclude the following areas from large and small energy generation and transmission projects:

• • Article 97 protected open space [Note: the proposed additions do already recognized that some Article 97 land could hold exceptions such as solar canopies over a DCR beach parking lot]  
  • Wetland resource areas (310 CMR 10.04) and with setbacks of 1,000 feet to identified wetlands resources. However, a shorter distance setback, perhaps up to 40 feet, might be considered with the addition of construction barrier placements near such set back lines.
  • Properties included in the State Register (950 CMR 71.03), except as authorized by regulatory bodies
  • BioMap 2 Critical Natural Landscape, Core Habitat, Important Habitat, or Priority Habitat
  • Flood plains and flood prone areas 
  • Land that provides public drinking water, especially with adequate set-backs and construction barriers, given that solar facilities are not significant sources of water table toxicity contamination, although battery facilities may be restricted because of the (low) potential for toxicity dissemination.
  • On prime farmland (as defined by the state), where private land owners should be the decision source as to whether solar or solar/battery facilities are placed within the bounds of the private land

Flood plains and flood-prone areas actually make excellent siting choices for solar and/or solar and battery facilities, if sufficiently robustly platformed and at a height safely above flood plain high-water flood potential.

As for land that provides public drinking water, solar facility siting should be allowed, especially with adequate set-backs and construction barriers, given that solar facilities are not significant sources of water table toxicity contamination. Restrictions on land that provides public drinking water should not be considered, because of the (low) potential for toxicity dissemination.

3) Do NOT exclude ground-mounted solar projects on newly deforested land, defined as cleared less than 5 years ago. This is an unnecessary restriction that will only serve to delay, complicate, and raise the costs of solar and battery facilities.

 4) Marginal farmland should have NO restrictions on solar siting.  Any private land use for solar or battery or solar/battery facilities should yield decisions only by the property owner, with adequate setbacks and fencing and aesthetic borders, as defined by state and local zoning regulations.

 5) Language should NOT be included that ensures no negative impacts on:

• • Biodiversity including plants and animals listed under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act
  • Protected open space
  • Native American cultural areas as determined by Massachusetts’ Indigenous people

The facts are clear that the consequences of climate change pose the greatest threat to biodiversity. The irony of arresting or slowing the reduction of greenhouse gases through overly-restrictive renewable energy production siting is clear.

6) Please keep decision making on solar power generation facilities within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts authority, so that NIMBY pushback to solar facility siting may be discouraged. Consider allowing the discretion and authority provided to the towns to enforce adequate setbacks and fencing and aesthetic borders, as defined by state and local zoning regulations and in keeping with public safety concerns, especially for battery facility siting (e.g., adequate access for emergency responders). Therefore, language should NOT be included that ensures the following:

• • Locally generated enforceable safety standards for battery storage
  • Town-specific capacity and siting goals, with local control of siting
  • Authority for municipalities to reject any proposal for minimization and/or mitigation that are deemed a threat to the towns’ health safety and welfare, and natural and cultural resource protections, as determined by local boards and commissions

Please note that threats to the towns’ health safety and welfare and natural and cultural resource protections should be directed by state-level policies, rather than be left to local boards and commissions, and largely because local NIMBY reactions can too easily be driven by a minority of voters within any locality who may not represent majority views. The state-level policies should be adequate for defining  threats to the towns’ health, safety, and welfare, and natural and cultural resource protections.

I don’t think Responsible Solar MA, the local effort to improve solar siting rules, has nefarious intent, nor do I believe this is some sort of astroturf conspiracy but rather a sincere contribution to the public process. But I think that too many of us who have long been active in the environmental movement are stuck on old goals such as protecting specific species or to keep land pristine. While I’m all in favor of good stewardship, the dangers from rising global average temperatures put the vast majority of environments and their fauna and flora at risk, and our best opportunity to reduce such acute danger and damage is to reduce carbon emissions. Solar power has the present and ready capacity to take a big chuck out of carbon from fossil fuel-driven electricity generation and internal combustion-based transportation and gas- or oil-based heating and cooling of buildings.

The Best Approach: Reduce Barriers to New Solar and Solar/Battery Facilities

The best solution is fewer rules and regulations about siting and permitting solar, wind, and battery projects. We already have too many rules and regulations and too many Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ), or town-based permitting and inspection, that slows such projects down or keeps them from getting built, even while significantly contributing to the cost of such projects that go forward. The fact is that clean energy project permitting is too arcane and slow and complicated by AHJ inspection requirements., and slow and difficult permitting and inspection processes add costs. Common estimates are that over one-third of the cost of rooftop solar is tied to permitting and inspection and the time delays these processes cause. I did an analysis last year about the source of high costs for rooftop solar/batteries systems, if you want more detail. The report is titled “The American Solar Cost Paradox: Analyzing the Soft Cost Drivers and Policy Barriers to Affordable Residential PV in the U.S.”

I’d much rather have the climate movement pay more attention to permitting reform that has fewer restrictions and an fast and automated permitting process such as SolarAPP+. I wrote a post titled “What is the State of States’ Efforts to Make Home Solar and BESS Easier and Cheaper? Red Tape, Not Technology, Is the Biggest Threat,” if you want to find actual efforts underway to improve solar/battery project costs.

What’s the Real Threat to Clean Energy?

Big Oil recognizes the threat of the transition to clean energy, which is why, in addition to their lying and greenwashing, they’ve been buying up more and more of our government, and getting results. Trump has severely repressed clean energy projects, up to and including cancelling the East Coast wind farms, although recent court cases may have solved this to some degree (although, of course, then there’s an appeal possible). Removing the IIJA and IRA incentives for solar, wind, and EVs and other clean energy projects, have dealt a major blow to the energy transition in the U.S. And Big Oil is on the rampage to get 100+ new gas generator built and expand their natural gas market for another thirty or forty years, citing the need to meet growing electricity for AI and data centers, even while actively and unfairly suppressing clean energy alternatives needs, fighting for climate court case pre-emptive dismissals, and continuing to manipulate the public’s perception aboutclean energy and the danger of climate change.

Climate activists need to focus on bigger solutions, even if balcony solar is okie-dokie. We need to reform the permitting processes, the mis-match in interconnection queue schedules , and otherwise return our country to a more equal market environment, where the faster speed and lower cost of clean energy production can kick Big Oil’s can.

Oh yeah, this work also includes getting democracy healthy in the U.S., but no one ever said saving the world was going to be easy.

The post Let’s Get Serious About Solar first appeared on David Guenette.

This is the first paragraph of one of my posts from earlier in the year, “AI is Giving Me Gas: The Collision of Tech Hype and the Carbon Budget.” It may be bad form to start a Substack post citing another Substack post, but clearly these two posts are related. The sub-title of the above referenced post” “We are scraping the bottom of the 1.5°C carbon budget. Big Oil’s response? Build 252 gigawatts of new gas power to feed the AI boom.”

I also wrote about this back in September of last year, in a post titled “New Gas Generator Plants and the Plan to Flood the (Electricity Demand Growth) Zone.” In this post there’s a link to an AI analysis I did in a report called “The Future of U.S. Natural Gas Power Generation: Projections, Accuracy, and the Confluence of Limiting Factors to 2030.”

The electricity demand growth tied to AI and data centers has Big Oil salivating, with plans—dreams?—of 100-plus new gas-fired generation plants in place by 2030. Not that the supply chain and turbine manufacturing capacity can deliver, but the explosion in small diesel or natural gas generators nonetheless seems a happy enough ending, boding well for Big Oil sales.

This doesn’t bode well for the rest of us, unfortunately. In the news of late is Elon Musk’s xAI company, which has used a large fleet of mobile, trailer-mounted gas turbines (rather than diesel generators) to power its “Colossus” AI data center in Memphis, Tennessee. These turbines are deployed as a temporary, “quick and dirty” solution to bypass power grid constraints while constructing the facility, which houses Nvidia H100 GPUs for training the Grok AI model.

To get the data center operational in just 122 days, xAI used mobile turbines (approximately 35 to 62, depending on the report and timeline). Each turbine is capable of providing 2.5 MW of power, with reports indicating a total capacity exceeding 35 MW to over 100 MW. There’s been pushback from local residents and environmental group. It turns out that neither noise pollution or emissions of nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde are being welcomed, and in January 2026, the EPA ruled that xAI violated the law by operating dozens of these, at times, unpermitted, gas generators. I’m guessing any fines actually levied against xAI will be just part of the cost of doing business. The broader AI data center industry is facing a shortage of power, with many companies increasingly using on-site, fossil-fuel-based generators to bridge the gap.

By the way, if you want to dive deeper into the issue of power strategies and developments for AI data centers, check out Distilled, on Substack. Distilled is written by Michael Thomas and he’s undertaken as series of articles on the issue of AI data centers and approaches being pursued for power, including data centers building their own power plants.

Wet Dreams and Sloppy Seconds

The accuracy of future demand predictions itself is highly questionable, considering the wide-ranging numbers and, among other issues, the double, triple, or greater duplicate counting of generation sources among data center hyperscalers. These eager corporations reach out to more than one potential generation source to cover their bets. Accurate forecasting seems hindered by some combination of wishful thinking and double counting. Here’s an AI summary of this issue:

The “duplication issue” (often called “phantom load” or “speculative queuing”) refers to the practice where data center developers submit multiple applications for electrical grid interconnection for the same single project. 

Because securing power is now the primary bottleneck for AI and hyperscale facilities, developers “spam” the queue to hedge their bets. They might file requests for the same 500 MW project in three different states (or three different sites within the same utility territory) to see which one gets approved first. Once one is approved, the others are withdrawn, but in the meantime, they clog the study queue and artificially inflate demand forecasts. 

Grid operators warn that these “phantom” requests make it impossible to accurately plan for new power plants, as the requested demand on paper is often 5x to 10x higher than what will actually be built. 

Estimate Ranges of Duplication

Industry data suggests that the vast majority of current interconnection requests are duplicate or speculative. 

• • Overall “Phantom” Rate: Experts estimate that 80% to 90% of the data center capacity currently in US interconnection queues will never be built.
  • Realization Rate: Utilities often project that only 10% to 20% of the requested data center load in their pipelines will actually materialize.
  • Speculative Ratios (Firm vs. Requested):
    • AEP (American Electric Power):Reported 24 GW of firm commitments but has requests for 190 GW of additional load—a ratio of nearly 8:1 (speculative to firm).
    • Oncor (Texas Utility):Reported a queue of 186 GW of data center requests. For context, the utility’s entire current peak demand for all customers is only ~50 GW, suggesting the queue is inflated by nearly 400% of the grid’s total existing capacity.
    • PSE&G (New Jersey):Reported a 9.4 GW large load pipeline but expects only 10–20% of those inquiries to result in actual projects.
    • ERCOT (Texas Grid):Has received requests for over 220 GW of new load by 2030 (mostly data centers), which is more than double the state’s all-time peak demand record. 

Why This Is a Problem

1. 1. Planning Paralysis: Utilities cannot distinguish real projects from “zombie” projects. If they build transmission lines for all 190 GW (in AEP’s case), they would bankrupt ratepayers. If they wait to see which are real, they risk being too slow for the 24 GW that is real.
   2. Queue Backlogs: The “phantom” requests force grid engineers to perform complex impact studies for projects that don’t exist, delaying the connection of viable power plants and real factories by years.
   3. Artificial Scarcity: The illusion of zero capacity drives up power prices and panic-buying of land, further fueling the cycle of speculative multiple-filing. 

Why is this a Problem?

You might also ask, from the perspective of Big Oil, “Why is this an opportunity?”

Big Oil loves the high estimates of power demand and the expanded market for their products, and not just more volume, but more over the next several decades, just when we need to reduce carbon emissions, not raise them. Big Oil is in a frenzy to keep their business going for decades more, despite the counter need for this industry to decline.

There’s temptation, too, for the utilities who contract or build new generation capacity. While solar/wind/batteries can meet new energy needs (and be quicker and cheaper), power utilities remain drawn to action that follows business-as-usual thinking, and for many utilities, especially without governmental and regulatory guidance, that means more power plants.

The opportunity is now for Big Oil to future-proof the industry.

Does the Trump Administration strike you as leaning on governance and regulation to push for clean energy?

I don’t think so, but then maybe I’m as wrong as all those wild estimates about power requests to feed the AI industry.

The post Fossil Fuel Demand Growth Uber Alles first appeared on David Guenette.

What I am talking about is the clear identification of the fossil fuel industry—I like the moniker “Big Oil”—as the enemy. Enemy to whom? How about those billions and billions of us alive today and those in the future who directly suffer because of the actions of Big Oil in denying, delaying, and actively opposing the benefits of energy sources and policies that reduce carbon emissions.

The main arguments for clean energy to be the only energy source going forward for electrical generation and transportation are:

1. Clean energy is the cheapest energy resource to build and implement compared to fossil fuel-based energy, making clean energy the affordability winner;
2. Clean energy is the fastest to build and implement compared to fossil fuel-based energy, making clean energy the best choice for meeting growing energy demands;
3. Clean energy significantly reduces health problems tied to fossil fuel use across the world in many ways, including declining asthma and premature deaths;
4. Clean energy reduces geopolitical conflicts based on energy resources, since solar and wind do not rely on scarce consumable commodities but derives energy from the sun and wind available to all.

Fossil Fuels Had Their Day

Every time I mention that Big Oil is bad there will be people ready to jump down my throat with some version or another of “Fossil fuel built our modern economy” or “If we stopped using fossil fuel today, millions would die from starvation.”

This kind of reaction is still all-too common, and my answer is, “Yeah, so stipulated.” An immediate full stop in our use of fossil fuels would be disaster for the world. But replacing fossil fuels with clean energy electricity as soon as possible will go a long way in dropping carbon emissions.

Solar, wind, and batteries are now so low in manufacturing and build out costs that fossil fuels can’t compete. Building out solar, wind, and batteries is the way to go if you want lower electricity bills. Clean energy now makes reducing our economy’s carbon footprint the best choice just on economic basis, never mind the health benefits and slowing climate change. Even if you are part of the small minority that doesn’t care about climate change or reducing environmental pollution, I’ll bet you’re interested in lower electricity bills.

You know who’s not interested in lowering your electricity bill? Big Oil. Big Oil’s business model is to keep selling you oil, gas, and coal for you—well, when it comes to electricity, your utility—to keep burning their products, replacing every volume used with new volume, and on and on until the generation plant gets decommissioned. How long do fossil fuel generator plants last?

Here’s a quick Google AI Overview:

Fossil fuel power plants typically operate for 30 to 50 years, with coal-fired units averaging around 45 years in the U.S. and some lasting over 60 years with maintenance. Natural gas combined-cycle plants generally have a 25 to 30-year design life, though they may operate longer. 

• • Coal-Fired Plants:Often designed for 50 years, many in the U.S. are approaching or exceeding 45 years of age.
  • Natural Gas Plants:Combined-cycle units typically last 25–30 years, while simpler, smaller generators might require major overhauls within 10–20 years.
  • Retirement Trends:While many plants last 30-50 years, environmental regulations and economic factors are leading to earlier shutdowns, with 28% of U.S. coal capacity planning to retire by 2035.
  • Replacement vs. Life Extension:Despite aging, some plants are granted extended lifespans to ensure grid reliability, particularly in areas with high energy demand, such as data centers. 

For every new fossil fuel generator plant built, you and your utility are signing up for buying more natural gas or oil or coal for 25 years or more.

Want to know why Big Oil is fighting so hard to keep solar/wind/batteries from getting built? Big Oil, of course, wants to continue in the business they know and have invested in, which is selling you energy that you burn up and need to buy more of year after year after year. Do U.S. fossil fuel generator plants get to pass on increased costs of fuel?

Here’s another Google AI Overview:

Yes, in the United States, fossil fuel generator plants—specifically investor-owned utilities—are generally allowed to pass on increased fuel costs to customers, often with little to no risk to their own profits. This is accomplished through regulatory mechanisms known as Fuel Adjustment Clauses (FACs) or similar cost-recovery trackers, which are overseen by state-level Public Service Commissions. 

Here is how this process works and its implications:

• • How Fuel Costs Are Passed On:Utilities are permitted to adjust electricity rates outside of formal, lengthy rate cases to reflect fluctuations in the cost of fuel (coal, natural gas) used to generate electricity. If fuel prices rise, the cost is passed to consumers as a surcharge on their monthly bills.
  • “Dollar-for-Dollar” Recovery:In many regions, particularly the Southeast, 100% of these fuel costs are passed on to customers. This means that if a power plant pays more for natural gas, the utility does not absorb that expense; rather, customers pay it.
  • Regulatory Oversight:While these adjustments are often automatic, they are reviewed by state commissions for accuracy. Regulators may disallow charges if they find improper fuel procurement practices.
  • Impact on Utilities vs. Customers:Because these mechanisms exist, utility investors are often insulated from fuel price volatility. Critics argue this reduces the incentive for utilities to seek lower fuel costs or invest in more stable, renewable energy sources.
  • Incomplete Pass-Through:While many utilities pass on costs completely, studies suggest that across the industry, marginal cost pass-through is not always 100%, with consumers bearing between 25% and 75% of the cost increases in some scenarios.
  • Timing Differences:Fuel adjustment charges are often calculated monthly based on costs from previous months, which can lead to a lag in how quickly price increases or decreases are reflected in customer bills. 

Are power utilities motivated to seek the lowest energy cost? Public power utilities are notoriously conservative, not liking change. After all, one of their mandates is reliability of electricity. Of course, solar/wind/batteries are reliable suppliers of electricity and the application of digital management of grid balance and support of distributed energy resources such as demand flexibility make more of the overall capacity of the grid available meet peak demand loads.

According to “U.S. Spending Bill to Grant $40 Billion in Fossil Fuel Subsidies,” originally published in Wired in late 2025, fossil fuels still get billions of dollars in U. S. subsidies each year:

The Trump administration has already added nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025, a report released Tuesday finds, sending an additional $4 billion out the door each year for fossil fuels over the next decade. That new amount, created with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, adds to $30.8 billion a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The report finds that the amount of public money the U.S. will now spend on domestic fossil fuels stands at least $34.8 billion a year.

Keep in mind that the U.S. had already been subsidizing fossil fuels for a century or more. President Biden’s 2021 budget had called for ending tax breaks for oil companies, but these phaseouts were struck down in the Senate and now, with President Trump, new subsidies have been added, including for coal, a favorite fixation of the Trump Administration.

Why Big Oil is the Enemy

Quite simply, Big Oil puts profits over the common good and ignoring the common good in this case leads to disease, death, and the collapse of the climate environment of the last ten millennia that has fostered human development.

Big Oil isn’t doing this out of ignorance, but rather in willful disregard for the physics behind global warming. In short, those leading the corporations that make up Big Oil seem happy enough to forfeit our future and that of our children and their children, down the many generations. Here’s the right analogy: “Big Knives” has employees test the sharpness of their products by stabbing people and children in the street and since Big Knives get paid only when selling knives that are so tested, there are one hell of a lot of bleeding people in every neighborhood, although more so in poorer neighborhoods.

As absurd as the analogy sounds, the correlations are direct. Big Oil produces a product (the knife) that poisons the air we all breathe (people getting stabbed). The question becomes how we shift to clean energy in a way that supports the essential and pervasive energy benefits to people.

Keep in mind that Big Oil plays dirty. Big Oil—along with other big money interests—has purchased much of the federal government, from the Executive branch to many in Congress. What has Big Oil gotten? Here’s a very partial list:

• A DOJ attempting to repress court cases and many states’ legislation against Big Oil corporations, including, most recently, “polluters pay” bills that Trump calls “extortion.”
• The EPA’s recent removal of the endangerment finding that has been a central regulatory enforcement mechanism against greenhouse gases.
• The Executive branch’s overriding of massive Biden-era funding programs (such as IIJA and IRA) for clean energy.
• Outright market interference, such as Trump’s anti-offshore wind projects shutdowns.

Since Big Oil has clearly demonstrated it wishes to continue business as usual—the current efforts to build dozens and hundreds of new gas electricity generators are just the latest example—we see that these corporations stand in opposition to what needs to happen.

Al Gore is right when he says, “They [Big Oil] are much better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions… They are the enemies of progress.”

Bill McKibben is right, when he says, “We have a literal enemy in this fight… The fossil-fuel industry has played the most disgraceful role of any set of corporations in the history of the world. They are Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our civilization.”

George Monbiot, the journalist and activist, puts it this way, “We are not just fighting climate change; we are fighting the people who profit from it. The fossil fuel industry is the enemy of nature and the enemy of humanity.”

Kevin O’Brien, author and ethicist, In his 2024 book Meeting the Enemy, writes, “To make progress on climate change, we must recognize that the fossil-fueled industrial complex is a strategic enemy… treating them as such is a requirement for justice.”

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, said, “We are at war with nature, and the fossil fuel industry is the fuel for that fire. We must end this war on our planet… We are seeing a historic battle between those who want to protect life and those who want to protect profits.”

Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator, said, “We are in a battle for the survival of the planet. We are taking on the greed of the fossil fuel industry, and it is a war we cannot afford to lose.”

Jay Inslee, former Governor of Washington, during his presidential campaign, stated, “This is a world war… it is a war of survival against the carbon-industrial complex that has held our democracy hostage for decades.”

Why We Will Win

Despite the decades of Big Oil’s explicit effort to deny climate change and fossil fuel’s contribution to it and the political favors and market advantages bought with a small part of profits, Big Oil has the losing hand. The industry continues to expand its investments when fiduciary responsibilities dictate that a managed drawn down of production is called for to avoid creating stranded assets and further legal liability. Fossil fuels are, simply put, an increasingly bad investment that is now offering “last idiot in” conditions.

Costs

Generating electricity from fossil fuels is more expensive. While the capital investment for solar farms and wind farms together with battery storage may have somewhat higher initial capital costs (i.e., to build), based on 2025 industry data, natural gas peaker plants are generally more expensive than solar plus battery storage systems when comparing the total cost of electricity generation (LCOE) over their lifetimes. While natural gas remains a cheaper option for instantaneous dispatchable power in some specific scenarios, newly build, unsubsidized solar-plus-storage often beats the cost of new-build natural gas, particularly when accounting for the volatility of fuel prices and lower maintenance costs.

Here’s a Google AI Overview:

Cost Breakdown (2025 Estimates)

Key Comparison Drivers

• • Fuel Costs:Solar and storage have zero fuel expenses, providing stable, long-term costs. Natural gas plants are subject to market volatility and rising, unpredictable fuel prices.
  • Capital Costs:Solar + storage has higher upfront capital costs (installing panels and batteries), but lower operating expenses (O&M) compared to the ongoing, high fuel and maintenance costs of gas plants.
  • Battery Advancements:Battery costs have fallen by roughly 89% between 2010 and 2023, making them highly competitive.
  • Subsidies:Even without tax credits, solar and wind are frequently more cost-effective than new-build gas plants. With subsidies, the cost advantage for renewables is even more significant. 

While gas plants are still used for reliable 24/7 baseload power, solar + storage is increasingly seen as a more economical choice for new capacity in many regions, especially as technology improves to handle grid intermittency. 

Legal Position

There are many bases for legal action against Big Oil, including causing harm (pollution and global warming), corruption (dark money and “lobbying” for market advantage), more expensive electricity (the issue of affordability), and many social justice offenses (local pollution and reduced quality of living conditions). There are, as of early 2026, 3,000 climate court cases worldwide, although active litigation targeting Big Oil is a subset.

Here’s what Google AI Overview has to report:

Global Active Cases

• • Total Against Fossil Fuel Corporations: Approximately 86 major lawsuits have been filed specifically against “Carbon Majors” (the world’s largest oil, gas, and coal producers) since 2005.
  • Active Status: As of recent reports (late 2024/2025), over 40 of these cases remain active and pending in courts.
  • Top Defendants: The most frequently targeted companies are ExxonMobil (43 cases), Shell (42 cases), BP, Chevron, and TotalEnergies. 

U.S. Active Cases

• • Concentration: The United States is the primary battleground, hosting approximately 50 of the 86 global cases filed against fossil fuel companies.
  • State & Local “Deception” Suits: There are over 32 active lawsuits brought specifically by state attorneys general (e.g., California, Massachusetts, Minnesota) and local governments (e.g., Honolulu, Boulder) seeking damages for alleged climate deception.
  • 2026 Developments: This number continues to grow. In January 2026, Michigan filed a new federal antitrust lawsuit against major oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute (API), accusing them of operating as a “cartel”. 

Summary of Case Types

The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law categorizes these active cases into three main buckets:

1. 1. Climate Damages (38%): Seeking compensation for infrastructure damage and health costs (e.g., the “Climate Superfund” cases).
   2. Misleading Advertising (16%): Alleging “greenwashing” or false claims about net-zero commitments.
   3. Emissions Reduction (12%): Attempting to force companies to align their business models with the Paris Agreement (e.g., the landmark Milieudefensie v. Shell case in the Netherlands). 

Context: While there are over 3,000 climate-related cases globally (1,900+ in the U.S.), the vast majority target governments over policy failures or permitting decisions, rather than private corporations.

There’s one case getting a lot of attention, since the legal argument is fundamental: conspiracy. In January 2026, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against four major oil companies—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—and the American Petroleum Institute (API). This case is groundbreaking because it shifts the legal strategy from “consumer deception” to “anticompetitive conspiracy.”

Here’s what Google AI Overview says about this case:

Core Allegations of the “Cartel” Strategy

The lawsuit explicitly labels these corporations a “cartel” that engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to maintain fossil fuel dominance by sabotaging renewable alternatives. Key claims include: 

• • Suppressing Innovation: The defendants allegedly “acted in concert” to dismantle their own early solar and renewable energy divisions to prevent those technologies from maturing and competing with oil.
  • Hobbling EVs: The suit claims the companies coordinated to block the installation of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructureat their brand-name gas stations to prolong consumer reliance on gasoline.
  • Market Manipulation: By using their collective power to withhold cleaner, cheaper energy options, the state argues the companies artificially inflated energy costs for Michigan households and businesses.
  • Coordinated Disinformation: The Michigan Department of Attorney Generalalleges the industry used trade associations (like API) to exchange sensitive information and coordinate the suppression of climate science as early as the 1950s. 

Legal Framework and Objectives

• • Statutes Cited: The case brings claims under the federal Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Michigan Antitrust Reform Act (MARA).
  • Damages Sought: Michigan is seeking triple damagesand the disgorgement of corporate profits obtained through these alleged anticompetitive practices.
  • Affordability Argument: Unlike previous climate suits focused purely on environmental damage, Nessel has framed this as an “affordability crisis” case, blaming corporate “greed” rather than market forces for high energy bills. 

Industry and Federal Response

• • Industry Denial: Defendants like ExxonMobiland Chevron have dismissed the suit as “baseless” and a “coordinated campaign” to regulate energy policy through the courts rather than through Congress.
  • Federal Opposition: The S. Department of Justice(under the Trump administration) attempted to block the filing, arguing it threatened national security and energy independence, but a federal judge dismissed the DOJ’s challenge in early 2026. 

Marching Off to War

The first shots of the war against Big Oil were fired many decades ago. For decades clean energy skirmishes were small, scattered, and largely ineffective. The clean energy transition has been marshalling an army, though. Significant majorities of Americans—and worldwide—place climate change among top priorities of concern. Costs of clean energy are competitive, thanks largely to all the benefits of scientific and manufacturing learning curves driving down the costs of technologies.

In the fight against Big Oil there are plenty of weapons to be wielded. Here are some of the most powerful actions that can be taken to push back against Big Oil’s power: carbon taxes, carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAM), cancellation of direct industry subsidies, and including the negative externalities that makes the true cost of fossil fuels more evident, thus making clean energy even more competitive.

Many countries in the Global South are accelerating implementation of clean energy, often leapfrogging the old grid-style model advanced nations have long enjoyed. China’s high production of clean energy material and tools are making inroads to the Global South, which not only supports clean energy implementation, but favors China’s domestic industrial base and builds markets. China’s diplomatic advantage, relative to the United States, grows stronger.

Americans are catching on that Big Oil want to keep customers buying their products, even though this raises costs for these customers. Americans are catching on that the higher energy prices can be put to Big Oil’s corruption and influence within the political realm. Affordability is likely to be a major battle ground for fossil fuels and clean energy in the upcoming elections and this is a winning plank for clean energy.

Big Oil’s tricks and lies are becoming transparent to more and more citizens.

The question isn’t whether this war will be won, but how long it will take and whether the world is lit aflame in a pyrrhic victory.

Consider me enlisted.

The post The War on Big Oil first appeared on David Guenette.

These days the American solar industry finds itself in a paradox. The technology has never been better, cheaper, or more essential to our national security. Yet, for a homeowner in many parts of this country, putting panels on a roof remains a Kafkaesque ordeal of permits, inspections, and utility delays that can drag on for months. While the cost of the actual hardware—the photovoltaic panels and battery storage systems—has plummeted, the price of permission has skyrocketed.

As we stare down the barrel of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act (OBBBA) and the repeal of most federal tax credits, the solar industry stands at a crossroads. The battle for the future of American energy is not just fought in the halls of Congress over tax incentives. It is being fought in town councils, county zoning boards, and state legislatures over something far less glamorous but infinitely more consequential: “soft costs.”

For too long, we have accepted a status quo where nearly 65% of the cost of a residential solar installation goes not to the equipment or the labor, but to administrative friction—the paperwork tax. See the post “Why I Haven’t Installed Solar Power and Batteries” [.https://davidguenette.com/why-i-havent-installed-solar-power-and-batteries/ ] on my own experiences with home solar and battery efforts. I ran a wide-ranging AI behind that post, titled “The American Solar Cost Paradox: Analyzing the Soft Cost Drivers and Policy Barriers to Affordable Residential PV in the U.S.”

Serious about energy independence, grid reliability, and consumer rights? If so, we must pivot our advocacy toward the aggressive streamlining of permitting, installation, and interconnection. The blueprint for this revolution isn’t theoretical; it is being written right now in statehouses from Tallahassee to Salt Lake City.

The Invisible Barrier

While federal advocacy groups like the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and American Clean Power Association (ACP) are rightfully engaged in a defensive struggle to preserve the Inflation Reduction Act’s legacy, the real friction points are local.

Consider the “soft cost” crisis. In Australia, a rooftop solar system costs roughly one-third of what it costs in the United States. The panels are the same. The sun is the same. The difference is bureaucracy. In the U.S., a patchwork of over 18,000 local jurisdictions—each with its own fire codes, zoning ordinances, and permitting fees—creates a regulatory thicket that suffocates innovation.

This bureaucratic drag is not just a nuisance; it is an economic drag that penalizes homeowners and threatens grid resilience. Every week a permit sits on a desk is a week a family continues to pay volatile utility rates. Every month an interconnection application languishes in a utility queue is a month that battery storage capacity is kept off a strained grid.

The “Deemed Approved” Revolution

Fortunately, a new wave of state-level legislation is challenging this inertia, led by effective trade associations that understand the power of structural reform. The most significant victory of the 2025 legislative cycle didn’t happen in a blue state known for environmental zealotry, but in Florida.

Florida’s HB 683, championed by the Florida Solar Energy Industries Association (FlaSEIA), is a masterclass in legislative streamlining. It attacks the bottleneck of municipal permitting with a simple, enforceable mandate: local governments must process residential solar permits within five business days. If they fail? The permit is deemed approved.

Of course, the counter-argument is that all this is likely to is streamline denying such permits. One interesting element of this bill is that it breaks the monopoly of municipal inspectors by authorizing private providers to conduct virtual inspections. This is a free-market, efficiency-driven policy that frames solar not as a climate issue, but as a business efficiency issue.

Automating the Future

Other states are providing the tool to direct alleviate bureaucratic delays in permitting solar and battery installations. The adoption of SolarAPP+—the automated permitting platform developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory— hopefully will shift best practice to statutory requirement.

In Massachusetts, S. 2780 is moving to mandate a “Smart Residential Solar Permitting Platform” that issues permits instantly. In New York, S. 5781 seeks to force all jurisdictions with populations over 5,000 to adopt similar automation. Hawaii’s SB 232 pushes for the same by 2026.

The argument for automation is unassailable. Manual plan review for standard rooftop solar projects is a waste of human capital. It is akin to using a bank teller to withdraw twenty dollars when an ATM is available. By mandating automated permitting, states can slash compliance costs by thousands of dollars per installation. This is not deregulation; it is modernization. Trade associations like SEIA and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) have spent years building the technical consensus for this moment. Now, policymakers must have the courage to mandate it.

The Fight for Property Rights

Streamlining isn’t just about government permits; it’s also about private constraints. For decades, Homeowners Associations (HOAs) have acted as shadow governments, using aesthetic covenants to block solar installations or force homeowners into expensive, inefficient system designs.

Utah’s HB 340, which was signed into law in March 2025, codifies “solar rights” as a fundamental property right. It tells HOAs that they cannot ban solar or storage, and crucially, they cannot impose restrictions that increase the cost of a system by more than 10% or decrease its efficiency by more than 10%.

This “10% Rule” strips HOAs of the ability to use “reasonable restrictions” as a cover for de facto bans. It recognizes that energy independence begins at home, and that a neighborhood covenant should not override a homeowner’s right to generate their own power and store it for emergencies. As extreme weather events become more common, the ability to island one’s home with a battery system is a matter of safety, not just aesthetics. The Utah victory, secured by the Utah Solar Energy Energy Association, demonstrates that protecting solar access is fundamentally a conservative value rooted in property rights and self-reliance.

The Storage Imperative and Grid Access

The conversation about streamlining cannot end at the rooftop. It must extend to batteries and connections to the grid. As the penetration of renewables grows, the old utility model—centralized generation, one-way flow—is collapsing. The future is the Virtual Power Plant (VPP), where thousands of home batteries are aggregated to stabilize the grid.

Illinois has taken the lead here with SB 25, the “Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act.” By mandating the procurement of 3 GW of energy storage and establishing a statewide VPP program, Illinois is streamlining the value proposition for storage. It turns a passive home battery into an active grid asset, creating a revenue stream for the homeowner.

However, this future is threatened by utility obstructionism. In states like Arizona and Indiana, we are seeing utilities push for “Right of First Refusal” (ROFR) laws and onerous interconnection delays that protect their monopoly status at the expense of third-party developers and homeowners. Streamlining must include strict enforcement of interconnection timelines. Utilities cannot be allowed to act as the gatekeepers of the grid, arbitrarily delaying the connection of distributed resources that improve system reliability. Legislation like Georgia’s SB 203, which mandates nondiscriminatory interconnection for community solar, is another counterweight to utility stalling.

A Call for a Unified Agenda in 2026 and 2028

The path forward for 2026 is clear. The solar and storage industry must stop playing defense and go on the offensive. We need a unified legislative agenda that prioritizes three pillars of streamlining:

1. Mandate Automation: Every state should pass legislation requiring local governments to adopt SolarAPP+ or equivalent instant permitting for residential systems. There is no excuse for manual review in 2025.
2. Enforce Timelines: “Deemed approved” clauses must become the standard for both building permits and utility interconnection applications. Delays must carry a consequence.
3. Codify Energy Rights: State laws must explicitly preempt restrictive covenants from HOAs and local zoning boards that unreasonably inflate costs.

This is not a plea for subsidies. It is a plea for market access. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act may threaten the tax equity market, but it cannot stop the fundamental economic reality that solar is the cheapest form of new electricity generation. The thing that can stop this shouldn’t be bureaucracy. Of course, the other barrier is the money that’s being spent by the fossil fuel industry and some allies among electrical utilities just fine with the way things are now.

We need our elected officials to understand that being “pro-energy” means clearing the path for deployment. It means recognizing that a permit delay is a tax on the consumer. It means understanding that a three-month interconnection queue is a threat to grid reliability.

The trade associations identified in the research—SEIA, FlaSEIA, CALSSA, and others—are the trench fighters in this war. They are winning battles in Tallahassee, Salt Lake City, and Springfield that will define the market for decades. But they need the support of the public. Homeowners must demand that their local officials adopt automated permitting. Voters must tell their state representatives that energy freedom includes the right to store power without HOA interference.

Unfortunately, the post ignores (probably due to the prompt used) other important cost contributions to home solar and BESS. Examples include installation inspections being left to the inspection services of local towns and municipalities, where sufficient expertise is somehow expected by people already overburdened with other responsibilities. Local inspection shortfalls are often exasperated by state regulations that prove onerous. In Massachusetts, for instance, you basically are required to build a battery bunker and are restricted to only a few placement options. Garages are one of the preferred options, but garages then lose some of their flexibility of use. Safety is paramount, granted. But you know what is also important? It is important that the people writing the code to be expert, and the fact that you have to add thousands of dollars of additional building to have batteries suggests either a lack of imagination or a lack of expertise in the real world.

About the Post

This post is edited from a Gemini AI Summary prompt, which is to summary one aspect of an AI analysis of likely or possible future legislative action to push forward the clean energy transition sin 2026 and 2028. That report “Strategic Report: The U.S. Clean Energy Transition and Re-Industrialization (2026–2028),” ] contains useful appendixes, too. Here’s a gander at the table of contents:

I. The 119th Congress: Permitting and the “Abundance” Pivot (2025–2026) 1

II. Re-Industrialization and Supply Chain Security. 2

III. Analytical Conclusion: Political Capture Prospects. 3

1. 1. Democratic Capture in 2026: “Defensive Restoration”. 3
   2. Democratic Capture in 2028: “Industrial Permanence”. 3

Appendix A: Organization Directory. 4

Appendix B: Detailed Entity Profiles. 5

I’m not exactly thrilled with this post, but it does alright making the argument for updating permitting processes beyond the 19^th Century. (Another complaint I have is that the post isn’t snarky enough, but it seemed unseemly for me to go out of my way to “snark it up.”) There’s also too little on  another archaic practice that holds time of completion of solar and battery installation for the home, and that is inspection processes. For such a good idea as solar and battery and VPP, there sure is still a lot of friction generating more heat than light.

The post What is the State of States’ Efforts to Make Home Solar and BESS Easier and Cheaper? first appeared on David Guenette.

Sure, the fossil fuel industry is powerful, but this only means we should go after it as hard as we can. And why prosecute an attack on Big Oil? How about because the industry has been delaying progress on the green energy transition for decades and decades, even while it knew about the greenhouse gas effect. Or how about the fossil fuel industry’s long history of destruction of governments and environments, and its violence against people. How about the fossil fuel industry’s knee-deep involvement in corruption even at the expense of the Earth’s health, the world’s economy, and society’s continuance?

Let’s put the current world of carbon emission reduction in stark terms: Big Oil is fighting tooth and claw to remain relevant, and they’re using big corruption to do it. This isn’t a matter of “good business practices,” not unless you count extortion, bribery, and violence as good business practices. There’s a long history of lawlessness in the fossil fuel industry that spans international bribery, environmental disregard, and actual physical malfeasance and violence, but we’re fast running out of time to put things right.

Search as Catch Can

The beauty of the Internet today is that it is a lot harder to hide information. Even the simple Google search reveals many result pages of blood-curdling histories of Big Oil’s bad behavior, not that you don’t know about bad behavior already on the part of fossil fuels.

Search: “History of fossil fuel industry using force against individuals and groups”

Here’s the AI Summary for this search:

The history of the fossil fuel industry involves extensive use of force, from international conflicts over resources (like WWI/WWII oil/coal) to domestic suppression of Indigenous rights, land defenders, and workers, manifesting as militarized policing, human rights abuses, gender-based violence (especially around “man camps”), and systemic environmental racism that harms marginalized communities, alongside sophisticated legal tactics (SLAPPs) and lobbying to silence critics and influence policy for profit.

It is easy enough to fall down any number of rabbit holes when looking for answers. The answers to this search are wide-ranging, from world wars to SLAPP suits. An article, “Tactics Used by Fossil Fuel Companies to Suppress Critique and Obstruct Climate Action”, by Sophie Hartley in The Commons Social Change Library, has a nifty list of eight tactics employed by fossil fuel corporations, along with examples. The Commons Social Change Library is an Australian online resource “for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, advocacy and justice.” You want another seven pages of search results on the query above, just type it into Google.

But we don’t want to hurt the world economy, right? Isn’t this one of the gaslit claims we hear from so many corporate interests?

Search: “What is the role of the fossil fuel industry in negative contribution to the world’s economy?”

A leading question?

Not really. Here’s the first part of the AI Summary return:

The fossil fuel industry negatively impacts the global economy primarily through massive health costs from air pollution (millions of deaths, trillions in losses), enormous government subsidies ($7 trillion globally, diverting funds from other needs), climate change damage (extreme weather, sea-level rise), and energy inefficiency, creating economic burdens that outweigh short-term benefits and hinder sustainable growth. These “hidden costs,” or negative externalities, strain public budgets, reduce workforce productivity, and destabilize economies through climate disasters, even as the industry provides jobs and energy security. 

One of the four cited sources in the summary is “The Incredible Inefficiency of the Fossil Energy System”, by  RMI’s Daan Walter, Kingsmill Bond,  Amory Lovins,  Laurens Speelman, Chiara Gulli, Sam Butler-Sloss, published on June 4, 2024. Here’s how this paper begins:

Today’s fossil energy system is incredibly inefficient: almost two-thirds of all primary energy is wasted in energy production, transportation, and use, before fossil fuel has done any work or produced any benefit. That means over $4.6 trillion per year, almost 5% of global GDP and 40% of what we spend on energy, goes up in smoke due to fossil inefficiency. Literally.

Look, I’m not one of those people who backdate accusations. I understand that fossil fuels play an important part in the development of our societies and technological advancement and general population growth. All hail Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and railroads, refrigerators, oil furnaces, tractors, and clothes washers. Yes, fossil fuels have delivered huge benefits for mankind over the last several centuries. I’m not a big fan of having to cut my own wood to keep my family from freezing.

At least here in the developed world, our age of technology would not have developed, or developed as fast, anyway, without the boost we get from fossil fuels. But we are at the point when fossil fuels should be over, must be over, and thank goodness we have great alternatives in the age of solar, wind, and batteries and all the other digital wonders of The Electrotech Revolution. It is past time for fossil fuels to retire gracefully from the stage, especially for the generation of electricity, but instead Big Oil acts like a belligerent guest who demands another drink even when you’re already in your pajamas and asking the guest to leave, only to hear the guest passing gas then claiming it’s the sound of the floorboards squeaking.

The problem is that fossil fuels have become—and have been for some while—more than an unruly guest insisting on another pour because it makes them feel good.

There’s a killer in the house.

Battle Time: Grid Your Loins

How did I get to this point of thinking about the fossil fuel industry as the killer in the house?

Recently, I was trying to figure out exactly how we’re going to meet the electricity demand growth everyone’s talking about (AI! Data centers!). I’ve written about some other aspects of this, including the likely exaggeration of the load demand growth numbers by Big Oil as justification for building many more new natural gas generation plants, in my post “New Gas Generator Plants and the Plan to Flood the (Electricity Demand Growth) Zone.” One of the interesting point is that supply chain constraints make the industry target of 100 new generators only—at best—30% achievable by 2030, and that’s with everything else going perfectly.

I’ve also recently written about what is often called “Grid at the Edge,” by which is meant the needed upgrading and expansion of our electricity grid to accommodate all that new juicy electricity that is already overwhelmingly from renewables in 2025. The main approach is to add digital intelligence and technology to the grid so that electrical capacity can be handled more efficiently. There are lots of parts to this grid improvement in the U.S.

But what does “the edge of the grid” mean? Here’s another AI Summary result:

“The edge of the grid” refers to the physical boundary where the traditional centralized power system meets end-users (homes, businesses), a zone now filled with smart tech like solar panels, EVs, and batteries (Distributed Energy Resources), allowing for two-way energy flow and localized management, unlike older one-way grids. It’s where innovation meets the consumer, enabling active grid participation but also introducing new security challenges.

The query below was submitted to Gemini under the “deep research” mode.

Query: What conditions (laws, regulations, state or PUC rulings) must be in place for Distributed energy resources and VPPs to be deployed in American electrical grids? What technological capabilities and technologies must be in place? What are the probable timelines for such grid upgrades and the timelines for DER and VPP growth?

The result was a tidy 18-page report titled “The Edge of the Grid: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Regulatory, Technical, and Economic Conditions for DER and VPP Deployment (2025–2030).” The report included 44 endnote source references. Here’s a paragraph from the Executive Summary that goes to the issue I was after:

This report posits that the realistic timeline for a wide DER-enabled grid system in the U.S. has shifted from an optimistic, policy-accelerated horizon of the mid-2020s to a pragmatic, necessity-driven struggle that will likely not achieve broad national scale until the early 2030s. However, this delay is not uniform. We are witnessing the emergence of a “Two-Speed Grid,” where specific regions and sectors will achieve advanced DER integration by 2028 out of sheer survival necessity, while vast swaths of the country will face stagnation, locked in a traditional centralized paradigm until the next decade.

A “shift from an optimistic, policy-accelerated horizon of the mid-2020s to a pragmatic, necessity-driven struggle that will likely not achieve broad national scale until the early 2030s”? That doesn’t sound like the best progress, does it?

Still, the report lacked specificity as to the actual mechanisms contributing to the timelines for the development of edge of grid, so I added my specific query items. Here’s the close of the revised report’s Executive Analysis:

Our findings indicate that while the federal implementation of FERC Order No. 2222 has encountered significant friction—resulting in multi-year delays across major Independent System Operators (ISOs) like SPP and MISO—state-level initiatives have accelerated, creating a “dual-track” deployment landscape. The conditions for success have thus shifted from a reliance on wholesale market access to a mastery of state-specific “value stacks,” requiring aggregators to navigate a complex patchwork of interconnection rules, telemetry requirements, and consumer protection mandates.

Nothing like getting a FERC order number for a sense of specificity. It’s a nifty report and a great primer on the factors determining grid enhancement development timelines, along with breakouts for different states and their own and various legislative mandates, or lack thereof. Still, what the report gained in specificity—I now understand much better the regulatory problems of PJM, for instance—the report lost some clarity as to the overarching challenge. The first version put this forward more forcefully right there in its Executive Summary:

The catalyst for this shift is the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) in July 2025, which has effectively ended the era of federal “green industrial policy” initiated by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The OBBBA’s repeal of key investment tax credits (ITCs) and production tax credits (PTCs), coupled with stringent “Foreign Entity of Concern” (FEOC) restrictions, has pulled the financial rug out from under the residential and commercial solar sectors just as they face their stiffest competition for capital from the booming Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure market.

In other words, the progress we were making got its legs kicked from under it. You can thank Trump and the fossil fuel industry that bought him.

Corruption R Us

And so, back to the malfeasance of Big Oil. We all remember the infamous meeting between Trump and representatives from the fossil fuel industry during the 2024 campaign for the Presidency of the United States, where Trump asked for a $1 billion. There was an uproar about quid pro quo, but that turned into nothing, mainly because the election finance system is already so badly corrupted that even the obvious solicited bribe was seen as “business as usual.”

Big Oil has a long history of bribery, although the bribes to United States officials have been rarer than the bribes to foreign officials. The information is easily available, should you be interested.

Search: “Fossil fuel industry history of bribery and corruption”

Here’s the AI Summary:

The fossil fuel industry has a long, documented history of bribery, corruption, and deceit, from early 20th-century scandals like Teapot Dome involving oil barons and politicians, to modern-day accusations involving climate fraud, lobbying abuses, illegal payments to foreign officials, and the funding of misinformation campaigns to block climate action, using front groups and complex schemes to influence policy and hide harmful knowledge.  

Let’s see. There’s “Climate Change Deception Campaigns,” “Bribery and Illegal Payments,” and “Lobbying and Political Influence” among the “Modern Corruption and Climate Deception” category, with types of activity ranging from bribery, fraud, racketeering, greenwashing, and state capture.

The most brilliant of these criminal activities by Big Oil, at least in our time, has been state capture, which is why I refer to Trump as “President Big Oil Stooge.” Trump has taken Big Oil money and come out swinging against climate change, even while the results are a weakened economy, especially relative to Red China’s economy. Then there’s the problem for us rate payers in that electricity generated with fossil fuels is now intrinsically more expensive, but then “affordability” is a hoax, I guess. There’s the problem with meeting growing demand load, because renewables are the quickest to market and to interconnect, if, that is, the playing field is level, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has pressed the greasy thumb of Big Oil on that scale, and viciously.

Oh yeah, there’s also the problem of climate change and the U.S. falling behind on efforts to reduce its carbon emissions, and that leads to all sorts of other rising costs for us and the world.

By the way, let’s take a moment to talk about subsidies. The next time someone tells me that renewable energy is only cheaper because of subsidies, I’ll likely kick that person on the shin. Sure, the Federal government has supported the development of clean energy, as it should do with new technologies with public-facing benefits. Can this person, now hopping about in pain clutching his or her leg, explain to me why the fossil fuel industry, well established in its 150-year-old-plus history, still requires government subsidies, both direct ones and the indirect support from being allowed to freely dump into everyone’s common atmosphere the poison fossil fuel extraction and use produces?

The fact is that the days of fossil fuel being the primary source of energy for the world are over. The fact is that Big Oil is playing dirty to keep their source of revenue and profit in the mix.

Better a Big Oil Dissident than a Victim of Cognitive Dissonance

When I talk about the malfeasance of Big Oil, I’m not talking about the guy pumping gas, the oil field or pipeline worker, fuel tank driver, or refinery engineer. I’m talking about those within the fossil fuel corporations who have known that fossil fuel’s days are numbered, and known it for decades, but who have nevertheless kept pushing for exploration and market expansion instead of looking out for their stockholders by shifting their corporations’ resources toward clean energy, or for that matter, anything other than the polluting and costly business of heating up the globe. If no other charges are to be leveled at such individuals, the failure to act with due fiduciary responsibility is clear. Bribing, corrupting governments, and exercising violence against people and the environment is not exercising fiduciary responsibility, unless, of course, you justify any such action as the means to maximize your shareholders’ value.

But, of course, even five-year-olds understand that “maximizing shareholder value” is neither a sensible nor moral primary action. Even five-year-olds understand that not causing harm to others is a central moral consideration. The day is coming when oil executives will face the gallows and utter, for one last time, “I was only maximizing shareholder value.”

Whoa! Gallows? Really?

Well, as far as I’m concerned, as an anti-death penalty guy, I’d only bring them to the gallows as show and tell, in what would be a moment of somewhat mean-spirited hijinks before carting them off to their new prison home. But I do think that the comparison of the sins of the oil industry with the sins of the Third Reich, as meted out at Nuremberg, is apt. Big Oil seems all too happy to keep turning up the world’s thermostat for a few extra bucks. Their attack on humankind and the very world itself, when such consequences are cumulatively considered, can be counted against the hundreds of millions of people directly suffering and killed and the trillions of dollars in monetary loss that coulda, shoulda been used to better each and all.

Frankly, the climate/clean energy world has been playing far too nice for far too long. We’ve allowed ourselves to be gaslit by those who stand for short-term gain. We’ve offered reason and the benefit of the doubt to those whose only reason to act is to benefit themselves. Big Oil is connected, of course, to other malignant players, and some part of the financial world should be put up in the dock as well, as should some politicians and other enabling operatives. But Big Oil—like Big Tech these days and monopolists—seems happy enough also to undermine the foundations of American Democracy for the sake of a few extra baubles, so the best actions we can take is to understand as clearly as we can that there are bad players in this world of ours. We need to consider not only how best to counter them, but how to bring them to justice.

The post How Do I (Big Oil) Love Thee (Big Oil)? Let Me Count the Money, Despite the Costs first appeared on David Guenette.

The essay was written by Joey Eschrich, who is the co-editor of Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, a new anthology collection of speculative fiction, essays, and artworks edited by Eschrich and Ed Finn, publishing on December 2, from MIT Press. Here’s how the anthology is described by Eschrich:

We challenged our contributors, who represent 17 countries around the world, to envision hopeful futures shaped by climate action. These visions of the future are grounded in the scientific consensus about the severity and urgency of the climate crisis, but also in the cultural and geographic complexities of real places across the globe, and real communities on the ground.

The start of the third paragraph caught my eye, not at all surprising since The Steep Climes Quartet centers around Berkshire County, MA. “For me, the act of hope is easier when it attends to the local and the particular. The climate crisis is one vast phenomenon with which we’re all contending.”

Well, amen brother.

Eschrich continues preaching to my specific choir:

It kicks up chaos in disparate forms everywhere—a wildfire here, catastrophic flooding there; crop failures here, migration crises there—but it’s also a protean, or perhaps a tentacular thing. We’re all dealing with it locally, on our home turf, with our friends and neighbors. Climate stress and climate action are multifarious, which makes it easy to forget that we’re all in the same struggle together.

Some of the contributors—many, actually, is my guess, not having yet seen Climate Imagination, although the book is on order—hail from lands beyond America. It turns out that in lands other than the Western developed countries, talk about “climate fiction” is even less defined than the crazy quilt of pseudo-genre with which we westerners get to play. Environmental degradation, colonialism, and disparate cultures come into play, as one would expect. Hannah Onoguwe, who is rooted in West Africa, raises an interesting point:

I’ve found that with readers, when a story is rooted where they are, then it morphs into something that could be happening to someone they might have bumped into recently. When it actually resonates and the issues are close to home, they are more likely to be moved to action. It ceases to just be science fiction, something “out there” from the West created and consumed purely for entertainment.

Amen, sister.

Onoguwe addresses an essential dynamic in climate fiction. “I’ve heard some writers talk about jumping on this bandwagon of climate fiction just because it’s ‘trending’ and so, why not? Some are focusing on what publishers might be looking for, which might not always translate into actual care for the environment.” But her argument extends into the urgency of the crisis and beyond literary entertainment.

Yet Climate Imagination carries a subtitle: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures. There’s something of a cottage industry around climate optimism these days, and who can blame any so involved, but Gu Shi, who contributed two short stories, caught my eye. “City of Choice” presents a world where, “due to climate change, an annual ‘Flood Season’ arrives each summer, submerging the city’s roads, plazas, green spaces, and the lower floors of buildings. The protagonist, a mother who works as an urban planner, uses her professional knowledge to enhance the city’s resilience while repeatedly escaping crises with her three children, aided by artificial intelligence.” Shi’s take on optimism is that things can get worse, but we can take action. “I believe that this unwavering courage to never give up in the face of disaster is perhaps the greatest form of hope.”

Amen.

For Onoguwe, her novelette “Death is Not an Ornament” conjures up another Nigerian civil war for a hopeful climate future, because “much has to change besides the mindsets of stakeholders—it will require policies and institutions that ensure that countries are actually keeping their word when they make environmental commitments.” She continues:

To catalyze change, we will need people fueled by this radical passion who are also able to communicate in the local languages and proffer little everyday practices and manageable changes that work. I think if we turn away from purely economic considerations to a more nurturing outlook, then it won’t seem like we’re losing too many of the benefits and conveniences of the current status quo.

Civil war? Yikes. That’s quite a route to hope. I’m looking forward to reading this work, because, of course, in the end it is the writing that tells the tale.

But overall, the thing I’ll be most curious about is not only the grounded aspects of the anthology’s story settings, but whether or not these stories are temporally local, by which I mean near- and mid-futures that reflect the reader’s world. Future worlds are challenging from the writing perspective, but there lies a common problem with climate fiction: worlds decades and centuries past our own time may reflect consequences of climate change and even offer optimistic new worlds that have overcome or adapted to climate change. But, as they reputedly say in Maine, Yuup, you can’t get theyah from heah.

I’m inclined to consider that the most optimistic climate fiction is grounded in the world we recognize as our own but also shows how we can deal with climate change. Arguably, America under Trump is among the most pessimistic locales relative to climate change, even as many other countries find themselves leapfrogging fossil fuel infrastructure into clean energy. One can also argue that Trump will prove little more than a speed bump in America’s path toward the clean energy transition, but the real point is that in America, legislation is the biggest driver of the clean energy transition, even with Biden’s IIJA and IRA legislation getting killed in the crib. Economics plays another essential role, although the American concept of “free markets” is tainted these days when the concept of capitalism hope can seem dim and dimmer.

I’m most interested in stories that start here and end up there, moving from where we are and showing how we get to where we’re going. This is the story that needs believing.

The Steep Climes Quartet starts with Kill Well, set in 2026 (and, yes, believe me, I’m tempted to buy more time, but the first book is published and already revised to account for Trump winning a second term). Dear Josephine, also already published, is set in 2029. Over Brooklyn Hills is set in 2035, and the target publication is Spring 2026. The last book in the series, Farm to Me, is set in 2047, and this book is currently only pages of notes and the stories I tell myself about what this book will be. The series’ through characters live in one locale, although, of course, there are plenty of plot points and transient characters all over the place and all but the luckiest of us are already drowning in news. Nonetheless, climate change and climate change progress is seen directly and primarily through the Berkshires perspective.

Describing a path toward climate progress within a recognizable world for the reader is an act of hope, one grounded in today’s and tomorrow’s world where we live, with all the facts, political realities, societal struggles, business conflicts, household economic anxieties, personal relationships, and all the other big questions, just like in our very own lives.

The act of hope is showing how, with all our stuttering steps, we can get there.

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