Not easing the climate crisis is far more costly, but there’s danger if we’re not upfront about the costs

 

The 2026 midterms are an unambiguous victory for American democracy and the climate. There are plenty of negative scenarios that can be spun with the consequences of this dramatic political shift, up to and including civil war should Trump’s madness and his followers’ fears extend into the realm of election overturn and martial law. However, I’m ready to declare that scenario a fantasy, even while lighting a candle that I’m right. Other outcomes mentioned by smart people include the prospect of the re-emergence of a new Trump type in our future should promises made by many of the newly elected go unkept. Those promises center on the issue of “affordability,” a catchword for the economic imbalance (and hence, power imbalance) manifesting as income and wealth inequality. We can hope that the neo-liberal experiment that radically shifted wealth upwards is over, all but for the clean-up in aisle six. And, yes, corruption was another big issue, but corruption is also a matter of affordability, as well as a direct legal and moral issue.

But what does affordability mean? There are the usual ideas: health insurance that serves our health and not the profits of private corporations; grocery prices that support life, not cartels; energy that doesn’t break the bank and drive prices upward for most essential goods; housing that is available for all without the demands of feudalism. The solutions, in their details, are complex, but the aims are clear.

Some ways to improve affordability are largely legal choices: re-establishing FTC-type controls that combat monopolies and cartels to encourage better market competitiveness; we’ve all experienced—Amazon being today’s poster child—what happens to prices when corporations grow so big they control markets. One can look at the outsized profits taken by the fossil fuel corporations over the course of the U.S. war with Iran for another example. These days, it might require a multi-volume set to list all the cost consequences of undue market control by corporations across the economy. When it comes to energy competition, Trump’s anti-climate progress thumb on the scale against clean tech is an example of political choices leading to higher costs—one recently roundly repudiated in the midterms.

Under the Thumb or Free to Run to the Sun

When it comes to energy, climate change is a central cost consideration because fossil fuel-based energy creates significant costs in terms of changing climate. Fossil fuel-based power also now intrinsically projects higher costs relative to clean energy such as solar, wind, and BESS. The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) over the lifetime of clean energy generation/storage resources are now clearly lower than fossil-fuel-based energy generation and storage. Even though, by some analyses, the most efficient natural gas generation plants remain close, the cost curve for renewables remains downward while fossil fuel costs are stuck in an upward curve. Even today, solar/wind/BESS is more cost competitive with fossil fuels and the differential is only going to grow.

Category	Generation Technology	U.S. Unsubsidized LCOE (Lazard v19.0, 2026)	Global Weighted Avg. LCOE (IRENA, 2025/2026)	Dispatchability & Fuel Cost Exposure
Fossil Fuel	Gas Combined Cycle (CCGT)	$51 – $129 / MWh	N/A	Dispatchable; sensitive to natural gas prices (modeled at $3.45/MMBtu)
Fossil Fuel	Coal (New-Build)	$72 – $177 / MWh	N/A	Dispatchable baseload; high capital cost, modeled at $1.47/MMBtu coal
Fossil Fuel	Gas Peaking (Simple Cycle)	$144 – $276 / MWh	N/A	Fast-ramping dispatchable; low capacity factor and high fuel sensitivity
Clean Energy	Onshore Wind	$37 – $99 / MWh	~$34 / MWh (China: $27)	Variable; zero fuel cost ($11 – $81/MWh with U.S. PTC)
Clean Energy	Utility-Scale Solar PV	$40 – $98 / MWh	$44 / MWh (India: $35; China: $36)	Variable; zero fuel cost (Community/C&I solar: $88 – $197/MWh)
Clean Energy	Hydropower	N/A	$62 / MWh	Dispatchable (reservoir); zero fuel cost, highly site-dependent
Clean Energy	Geothermal (Hydrothermal)	$66 – $109 / MWh	$89 / MWh	Firm baseload; zero fuel cost, high upfront drilling risk
Clean Energy	Bioenergy	N/A	$86 / MWh	Dispatchable; ongoing feedstock/fuel supply costs
Clean Energy	Offshore Wind	$105 – $167 / MWh	N/A	Variable (higher capacity factor than onshore); zero fuel cost
Clean Energy	Concentrated Solar Power (CSP)	N/A	$115 / MWh	Dispatchable with thermal storage; zero fuel cost
Clean Energy	Nuclear (New-Build)	$175 – $255 / MWh	N/A	Firm baseload; high capital cost (U.S. Vogtle benchmark), low fuel cost ($0.85/MMBtu)

Table 1: Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE). It used to be that anti-clean energy proponents would point to the cost of renewable energy and tsk-tsk the boosters. That was then, but in today’s world, fossil fuel has become the loser in the LCOE race. I’ve included the full table, with other forms of clean energy, including some, like geothermal and nuclear, that remain more expensive. Source: Google Gemini (sources listed in table); prompt: “Provide a table of levelized cost of energy comparison between various fossil fuel-based generation and clean energy generation.”

Of course, the growing need for power from AI data centers and overall electrification demands expanding and updating the transmission and distribution grids, including making smarter, more efficient, and more flexible grids and building new lines and adding more supporting equipment. There are some differences in the types and scopes of new transmission line build between a fossil fuel-based generation system and a clean energy one, but both need more buildout.

But with climate change, there is a much bigger cost being exacted: the climate change consequences’ damage to the economy at large and within personal households. The numbers for these costs are all over the place, mainly because some studies chose only subsets of negative economic hits, while other studies are more inclusive. The fact is that establishing specific estimates of future economic damage from climate change is a fool’s game since we’re prognosticating future events within a hugely complex system. There’s an irony here, in that our projections of climate change consequences themselves are future prognostication within extremely complex systems.

If you think that relieves us from worry, please seek professional therapy: while the details of the kinds and amounts of weather damages and their economic values over time can’t be exactly known, the overall concept is unassailable. More bad weather and life conditions are, of course, more damaging than fewer instances of bad weather and better conditions. There’s a lot of debate about the scope of economic damage to the economies of the world (not to mention projected death rates!), but the range is from really bad to much worse. There is no “don’t worry, be happy” option.

I’ve written about these costs a number of times over the last few years, including Price on Carbon is Pragmatic Because It Reflects Reality and The Short-term Costs of Clean Energy and the Long-term Affordability Advantages. While there’s a lot of variability in cost studies, the commonsense conclusion is stable.

The Google Gemini prompt response included in the caption for Table 2 below opens this way:

Calculations projecting the economic costs of climate change through 2050 present a stark financial outlook, with global estimates ranging from $1.7 trillion to over $7 trillion in annual damages and mitigation expenditures. These projections generally divide into two categories: the direct costs of climate-induced damages (such as infrastructure repair, agricultural losses, and real estate inundation) and the capital required to transition global economies to net-zero emissions. While local and sector-specific models provide granular cost estimates—such as the U.S. bearing over $500 billion annually by 2050 under business-as-usual scenarios—global macroeconomic models forecast that unmitigated warming could shave between 1% and 5% off global GDP, with extreme models predicting far steeper declines.

Source / Organization	Geographic Scope	Projected Cost (Annual or GDP Impact)	Primary Drivers & Methodology
World Economic Forum / EcoWatch (2023)	Global	$1.7 trillion to $3.1 trillion annually by 2050	Direct damage to infrastructure, property, agriculture, and human health.
UNCTAD (2023)	Developing Economies	$5.5 trillion to $7 trillion annually (2023–2030)	Mitigation and adaptation costs: fighting climate change, protecting biodiversity, and cutting pollution (approx. 18% of collective GDP).
NRDC	United States	$506 billion annually by 2050	Business-as-usual scenario factoring in hurricane damages, coastal real estate losses, energy sector shifts, and water supply disruptions.
MIT Climate Portal (2026)	Global	1% to 5% global GDP loss at 3°C warming	Synthesis of prominent structural models assessing the social cost of carbon and long-term economic drag.
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) (2024)	United States	3% reduction in US GDP by 2100 (Central Estimate)	Mortality, real estate loss ($930B at 4ft sea-level rise), agricultural shifts, and extreme weather damage.

Table 2. Projected economic costs of climate change through 2050. Source: Google Gemini; prompt: “Provide a summary of the calculations and reports on the projected costs of climate change through 2050; assess the accuracy/reliability of the selected reports; present a summary of the range of reports in a table format.”

The prompt response includes commentary on the basis for uncertainly in the assessment of macroeconomic climate models. There are severe structural uncertainties that make exact dollar figures highly volatile and difficult to verify, constrained by several documented methodological challenges, as follows:

• Data Extrapolation vs. Adaptation: Many economic models rely on short-term weather shocks (e.g., a localized heatwave causing a temporary dip in productivity) to project long-term climate impacts. Economists caution that humans and markets adapt more effectively to long-term climate shifts than to sudden weather anomalies, potentially causing some models to severely overstate long-term GDP losses.
• Model Sensitivity and Retractions: The fragility of these projections was highlighted in late 2025 when the prominent journal Nature retracted the widely cited “Economic Commitment of Climate Change” study (Kotz et al.). The study had projected a staggering $32 trillion per year in climate damages by 2050, but was withdrawn due to underlying data and coding errors that heavily overstated expected income drops, underscoring the volatility of the field.
• The Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) Variance: Baseline assumptions drastically alter final calculations. Depending on the discount rate applied to the well-being of future generations, the social cost of carbon used in these models ranges from under $10 per ton to several thousand dollars, allowing policymakers and researchers to generate vastly different economic outcomes based on subjective valuation.
• Tail Risks and Tipping Points: Institutions like the CBO acknowledge massive variance in their own outcomes. While their central estimate projects a 3% US GDP drop by 2100, their models include a 5% probability of a severe 17% GDP drop and a 5% probability of a 7% GDP gain (due to localized benefits like increased agricultural yields in certain latitudes). The unpredictability of ecological tipping points—such as rapid ice sheet disintegration—falls outside the reliable bounds of current financial forecasting.

However you slice this, the answer is that climate change is costly. Maybe such costs are just really expensive or maybe the costs are society-devastating, but what we can conclude is that climate change is expensive and that such costs contribute to inflation.

Welcome to Climateflation

Climate change is expensive in its consequences. Climate progress requires that we step away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Getting away from fossil fuels will help bring down energy costs, but the transition away from fossil fuels will cost money.

The costs are not just societal costs. There are very specific hits on household economies. Maybe you’re changing over to a heat pump system in your house or pursuing a solar project on your property, and maybe batteries, too. A new electric car? Induction stove?

But even with all such home electrification efforts and more, it isn’t like your costs will go down immediately. Induction stoves, heat pump water heaters, heat pumps, batteries, solar… these aren’t free. What you might save in lowered electricity consumption will be offset for some time by the cost of the electrification efforts you’ve made, and even then, the electricity you consume is only part of your utility bill: transmission and distribution charges, along with taxes and surcharges and public benefit program charges can easily add up to more than half of any month’s bill. And that half or more may grow in cost, even if your consumption falls, because, as Zack Colman, in Politico Surge (November 12, 2026) puts it:

Adding any kind of power—renewable or not—requires building a lot of infrastructure, and someone needs to pay for it. Enter utility customers — the same people who entrusted Democrats to lower their bills.

“That is the fundamental truism of all capital-intensive industries that are facing growth,” Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) told Surge this week. “We’re just in the sticker-shock moment.”

Colman points out that the U.S. grid is already in catch-up mode:

Electricity demand is soaring after being a flat line from 2005 to 2021. Artificial intelligence and data centers are fueling a lot of that growth, along with manufacturing and an increasingly electrified economy.

And even if Democrats are correct that adding more clean energy will suppress (or lower) costs, their timeline is a problem.

I’m not a huge fan of Politico Surge, since some of their advertisers are fossil fuel companies or fossil fuel adjacent, but they’re reporting straight. There’s been a backlog for grid expansion and improvement, and while the Trump politics depressing clean energy interconnection is a factor, that just contributes to a larger and very real backlog. Permitting reform will help, but easing the backlog by building new grids and expanding efficient use of the grids still costs money, even while prices from tariffs and constrained supply chains add to costs. Transformers, for example, are 77% more expensive over the last five years, and the list of other necessary materials that have also grown in costs is huge. There are government programs that could absorb some of the grid costs, but energy prices are looking more expensive for some time to come.

The cost pressure worsens if we’re intent on building only clean energy, especially if we look to not only add clean energy to meet the growing demands, but also wish to retire existing fossil fuel generation, something that will help reduce carbon emissions faster. I’m in favor of replacing existing fossil fuel generation with clean energy. Looking longer term, a rapid and comprehensive build out of clean energy to meet new electricity demands and to replace existing fossil fuel-based generation is a great deal in that reducing carbon emissions as fast as possible makes it more likely that we avoid the worst of climate change costs that place the economy itself under threat, but this is a long-term plan. At some point, if we pursue the clean energy transition, energy prices will be lower, but people’s utility bills are due each and every month, including next month. There’s no quick solution to energy costs because energy costs are integrated into the larger economy.

The AI Overview definition of “Climateflation” tells the tale:

Climateflation describes how the physical effects of climate change, the dependence on fossil fuels, and the costs of transitioning to green energy combine to drive up everyday living and production costs. [1, 2]

Economists and researchers break climateflation down into three main components:

• • Fossilflation: The price instability and spikes caused by ongoing economic dependence on finite fossil fuels, which are frequently rattled by geopolitical crises and supply bottlenecks. [1, 2]
  • Carbonflation (Physical Climateflation): The direct economic damage from extreme weather—such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, and super-El Niño cycles—that destroys crops, ruins infrastructure, and constrains the global food and raw-material supply. [1, 2, 3]
  • Greenflation: Short- or medium-term cost increases driven by the massive capital investments, policy mandates, and industrial shifts required to build green infrastructure, transition away from carbon, and adapt to changing climate norms. [1, 2]

Key Impacts and Economic Transmission

• • Food Price Pressures: Extreme heat and droughts shrink agricultural yields (affecting staples like wheat, cocoa, olive oil, and fresh produce), disproportionately driving up grocery bills and forcing vulnerable households toward cheaper, less nutritious diets. [1, 2, 3]
  • Broad Inflationary Effects: According to research from institutions like the European Central Bank and Oxford Economics, weather-driven supply shocks do not just stay in the produce aisle; they feed into general producer prices, wage demands, and central bank interest rate decisions. [1, 2]
  • Unequal Burden: While middle-class households in the Global North experience climateflation as higher inflation percentages, low-income populations and import-dependent nations in the Global South often face severe food insecurity and social instability. [1]

You can read more about ongoing academic tracking on the Political Economy of Climateflation project website. [1]

The Climateflation Discussion

A recent article in The Conversation offers a solid breakdown on the climateflation issue. As the climate breaks down, cost go up: Welcome to ‘climateflation” was authored by Rayan M. Katz-Rosene and James Jackson and published on August 11, 2026. Much of the above AI Overview seems based on the work of the two authors, both leads at The Political Economy of Climateflation: A Research Project, out of the University of Ottawa, my dear departed dad’s alma mater, as it so happens.

Even odder is something I came across on Land and Climate Review, in an article called What is climate-flation? Down with Pete Smith, a global expert on climate change, biodiversity and food systems, to understand what’s happening to our fragile grocery supply chains. It’s a good piece, but one of the questions threw me. “Is this connected to the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre study which linked food price spikes to political instability?” asks Robinson about Smith’s project. In my literary climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet, Meri, the daughter of Davin, one of the major characters, happens to be a post-doc in Barcelona, where her husband works at Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. Well, I do sit a lot in my basement office, but I do get around, thanks to the magic of writing.

If you’d like to break into a sweat, I suggest reading Forbes’ Why Climateflation Will Drive Food Prices More Than War, published on August 1, 2026, by Ingmar Rentzhog, CEO and founder of We Don’t Have Time. You probably don’t have time to read his full piece, so here is the article summary Forbes conveniently supplies:

Extreme heatwaves now pose a greater threat to global food inflation than geopolitical conflicts, according to Oxford Economics. Record-breaking temperatures in June 2026 devastated European harvests, wiping out 9 million tonnes of grain and causing significant losses for even climate-adapted farmers. This “climateflation” is expected to drive food prices higher in 2027, surpassing the impact of war-related supply chain disruptions like the Strait of Hormuz closure. While war affects fertilizer costs with a delay, recurring extreme weather directly impacts yields, thinning global food buffers. This leads to higher grocery bills for consumers and potential unaffordability for the world’s poorest, influencing broader inflation and interest rates. Addressing climate change through emissions reduction and sustainable agriculture is crucial, as central banks cannot solve weather-induced supply shocks.

Okay. Everyone feeling alright? Climate change, don’t you know, is a serious condition for us humans (not to mention a lot of the biosphere, critters and flora alike). Food costs are a big issue and there’s no reason to believe that food costs will resolve lower anytime soon, at least as a trend. There’s an excellent piece in Nature, within the publication’s Communications Earth & Environment category, called Global warming and heat extremes to enhance inflationary pressures, by Maximilian Kotz, Friderike Kuik, Eliza Lius, and Christiane Nickel, published on March 21, 2024. Here’s the abstract:

Climate impacts on economic productivity indicate that climate change may threaten price stability. Here we apply fixed-effects regressions to over 27,000 observations of monthly consumer price indices worldwide to quantify the impacts of climate conditions on inflation. Higher temperatures increase food and headline inflation persistently over 12 months in both higher- and lower-income countries. Effects vary across seasons and regions depending on climatic norms, with further impacts from daily temperature variability and extreme precipitation. Evaluating these results under temperature increases projected for 2035 implies upwards pressures on food and headline inflation of 0.92-3.23 and 0.32-1.18 percentage-points per-year respectively on average globally (uncertainty range across emission scenarios, climate models and empirical specifications). Pressures are largest at low latitudes and show strong seasonality at high latitudes, peaking in summer. Finally, the 2022 extreme summer heat increased food inflation in Europe by 0.43-0.93 percentage-points which warming projected for 2035 would amplify by 30-50%.

So, What Do We Do About Climate Change Costs? Let’s Be Honest

On November 11, 2026, Jim Ball posted on his Substack, Climate Hope Together Climate AND Affordability+, Part One. The post argues that climate progress and affordability go hand-in-hand. This is an obvious argument, of course. But there is a timeline challenge and the affordability gains from the clean energy transition are not immediate (with some rare and limited exceptions), so energy affordability from clean energy is at best a mid-future consequence. Therefore, one challenge we face in meeting our promise of energy affordability is to maintain political support even while a likely outcome is a loss in enthusiasm for climate progress from those who are told it will cost them.

Ball makes an argument against the media and its negative comfort zone, pointing to an Axios headline “Democrats’ Blue Wave Leaves Climate Behind.” “In a nutshell,” he sums up the Axios piece, “Dems won, but didn’t talk about climate. So it will have to be snuck in or shoehorned into affordability efforts—maybe, if we’re lucky.” Ball talks about “tough guy faux realism,” that can short-change what we can accomplish. “It poo-poos stretch goals by saying: ‘Be realistic.’ In other words, lower your sights.”

Unfortunately, while Ball’s argument is right that “a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone includes affordability—and so much more! We [climate progress] were for affordability even before it became a political buzzword,” it remains incomplete. There are cost requirements for getting from where America is today to where we want to be with progress on climate, especially if we’re factoring in when we want to get there, which is sooner rather than later. Costs for large-scale building out more clean energy generation, adding transmission capacity, and improving management and efficiency of the grid are significant. Even the cost requirements of the millions upon millions of small electrification efforts still to be undertaken (EVs, heat pumps, built environment efficiency work, etc.) all add up. It is easy—and correct!—to claim that all such action will lead to lower energy prices, but upfront costs are significant, as are the timelines involved.

Who Pays?

One question is who pays for this? The current system is that regulated power utilities, which are the entities that build out transmission and distribution grids, typically are guaranteed a return of somewhere between 8-10 percent on such capital investments. That money mainly comes from ratepayers. There’s always the possibility that the money could come from state and federal revenues, but that money comes from taxpayers, too. In a better world, it may be that no more money is being spent overall, with priorities on spending shifting as states and the Feds emphasize climate action spending and move away from, say, the Defense Department’s $trillion-plus annual budget. Other funding considerations may include taxing extreme wealth and other sensible tax reforms and/or no longer allowing fossil fuel companies to pollute for free.

The Biden administration’s IIJA and IRA were efforts to relieve climate progress costs for companies and individuals. There have been massive public infrastructure projects across much of America’s history. Think of the Erie Canal and other transport efforts like the railroads and the interstate highways. Keep in mind the Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electrification, Hoover Dam, the space program. Such programs cost big money, but money can be more equitably gathered and such projects provide  positive economic expansion that creates wealth for the society at large. We can work toward clean energy and expect the similarly positive consequences. This can be a form of affordability, just as would be a well-defined childcare assistance act, or Medicare for All, or the buildout of great numbers of housing units, or raising the minimum wage. Better regulatory oversight on utilities and how they spend money might also be a quick-ish turn toward energy affordability.

Unfortunately, while a childcare bill can pass and go into effect quickly, with fast and positive effects on affordability, the large infrastructure buildouts that are needed to improve and expand the electricity grids take time. Even if we figure out how to shift budget priorities and raise taxes on extreme wealth, or choose to re-jigger the oversight of regulated utilities, power prices will remain high and likely grow yet higher for some time.

Maybe we can achieve the aim of energy affordability fast enough, and maybe with the midterms and likely 2028 election cycle we’ll have the opportunity to make the argument that the clean energy transition takes time and money and we’ll build up even more support. We are off to a good start. But we can’t ignore the money and time this will take. Being honest about this will be critical to maintaining momentum, right along with tax and grant programs that can offer some economic relief to those most strained by affordability challenges.

But Wait! There’s More Cost

While we’re being honest, climateflation is more than high costs of energy, hence the portmanteau.

The fact that we’ve continued polluting our atmosphere with greenhouse gases and that we’ve been slow to act, means that other costs are on the rise. Climate change is expensive. Climate progress is expensive. Climate change consequences and the resultant need for amelioration and resiliency are expensive. Global average temperature continues to climb. The 1.5 C target looks lost, and today’s climate world already extends huge costs in lives, property, and societal cohesion. We’re looking at infrastructure projects in huge numbers —from major to minor—to control the increasingly frequent and stronger flooding, sea rise, heat waves, droughts, disease spread, and stressed food production and hunger. A further warming planet will exact even more. I’m not talking about the end of the world here, but I am talking about a world that needs that much more effort and treasure to counter these growing ill effects.

Step one, of course, is to stop digging the hole.

Step two may be to talk about the cost of climate change. That discussion must include the far greater cost of inaction.

The Costs of Climate Change must be Part of the Discussion

One of the themes of The Steep Climes Quartet is the cost of climate change. Yeah, I know, this sounds like an extremely sexy topic.

Fortunately for readers, rising costs are not the central topic of the story across 2026-2047, which is when the last book, Farm to Me, which is still a work in progress, takes place. The first book, Kill Well, which takes place in 2026, centers in the Berkshires. The main throughline character is Davin, recently divorced, worried about keeping his house, complaining about prices, and trying to balance his time in his art studio with making ends meet. He’s taking in house sharers to help with the house budget. He’s doing his professional work as a gig. He’s as good a would-be progressive as any, but like most everyone else, he knows about climate change and he’s got the right views, but it remains mostly abstract. Sure, there’s that heavy rain that damages a part of his first floor that he rents out as an Airbnb. Mostly, what he hears about climate change consequences comes from the news, except that his son is homeward bound from Chicago, having been laid off from his first job out of college, and there’s a big heatwave there and his roommates have already fled back home, making his staying both economically hard and damn uncomfortable.

I’m writing about the world—well, middle-class America, anyway—as most of us experience it. Not climate ravaged but climate change affected, often subtly, often just part of the infosphere rather than obviously direct. Prices, as they are for most of us, are just part of the pressurized background of everyday, like weather in our quotidian lives. The series has specific plotlines that illustrate the malfeasance of fossil fuel power in the world, or the madness our current situation encourages in some of us, or even just plain craziness, but these rarely or tangentially cross into the lives of the throughline characters. The western end of Massachusetts isn’t a climate dystopia or ravaged landscape, but the dangers of climate change hang about like darkening clouds on the horizon. As climate conditions slowly worsen over the two-decades-plus of the series, such apocalypse mostly remains a foreign case borne on the wings of the news.

You know, like today, and tomorrow. By Farm to Me, in 2047, climate change is bringing agriculture back to the Northeast because a number of previously high-yield agricultural areas elsewhere provide a market opportunity, especially combined with regenerative agriculture carbon credits. Climate change consequences continue, but progress on reducing emissions is working, too. The fossil fuel industry is on its heels, but hardly down for the count. The issue of stranded assets and government support thereof is an explosive political fight between those wishing to protect the economic interests of large corporations and their shareholders and the New Worlders, a youth movement that believes there’s no more time for gradual easement of fossil fuel interests, calling instead for nationalizing the industry and shutting it down. Davin’s seventeen year old granddaughter is caught up and on the run from investigations into violent demonstrations at the office of a lobby firm supporting the diminished but still powerful fossil fuel corporations fight against asset seizure and shareholder accountability.

The battleline is clear: A better world is possible with a lot of hard work, but there’s no room left for the enemies of that better world. Fossil fuel corporations must be named as the enemy and treated as such. The fact is that we are in the midst of a tough fight against an incredibly powerful foe in Big Oil, not to mention all those other powers that have grown sickeningly powerful in the last five decades in the neo-liberal pushback against the Great Society. Affordability is one part of that fight, and while clean tech will win on merits here, let’s keep in mind the world we live in and understand the story to be told is not just of the coming golden age, but of the battles and trials and setbacks we must endure to get there.

How we spend our money and where we get that money to spend is part of the story of climate progress. Let’s make sure we tell it right.

The 2026 mid-terms is a victory. Playing prices and costs straight with our fellow citizens is essential for the winning streak.