Just recently I wrote a post titled “The Truth Will Out” that carried the deck, “Trump’s Reactionary Stance on Clean Energy May be Little More than a Small Bump on the Road to Clean Energy Transition, because Fossil Fuels are Very Expensive.” I stand by the modest hope the post represents, and the argument that Trump’s anti-climate actions are rearguard actions, and while hardly helpful, are most likely to be overwhelmed by the forces of the marketplace, where those forces are the renewable energy additions to the grid as the least expensive and fastest approach to meeting growing demands for electrical energy. Not that this post was pollyannish, containing as it did the posit that the fossil fuel industry remains set on maintaining its profit basis of finding, transporting, refining, and selling natural gas to meet the needs of growing power demands.

Then Bloomberg publishes an opinion piece by columnists Mark Gongloff and Elaine He, titled “Years of Climate Action Demolished in Days: A Timeline,” that starts with “Trump’s environmental directives are gutting basic protections for Americans and the agencies designed to deliver them.” More actual reporting than opinion, this March 26, 2025, piece presents an infographic detailing what the authors call “52 Days of the Trump Administration’s Climate Onslaught.” This infographic details 82 actions across 20 government bodies that will deepen the climate crisis. This is highly recommended as a snapshot of Trump’s animus of all things climate change related, and if you are inclined toward unfettered optimism you might want to avoid looking.

But, of course, it isn’t just that Trump hates climate change thinking, but considering all the plans—and PR—in place around new gas terminals and generators, the fossil fuel industry seems intent to put in place huge expansions of infrastructure across all parts of their business, from exploring and drilling for more oil and gas, to burning the stuff to make electricity, which suggests Big Oil expects to keep business as usual for decades to come.

But, of course, it is well established that continuing—or even increasing!—greenhouse gas emissions is already very much part of the problem. There is a growing realization that business as usual is dangerous, and this perspective isn’t coming from Greenies, but rather key players within the core structure of capitalism.

A recent article in The Guardian, titled “Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer,” also carried a deck that added, “Action urgently needed to save the conditions under which markets – and civilisation itself – can operate, says senior Allianz figure.” The speech by Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, was widely reported, and even by The Wall Street Journal, but the basic message has been around for a while. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, for example, has been giving speeches on the Senate floor, pointing out that without insurance, many investments and any mortgages are moot. Try selling your house if the buyer can’t get the property insured; it ain’t going to happen because no bank grants mortgages for uninsured houses. There is an ever-clearer understanding that parts of Florida, where private flood insurance companies have fled and parts of California and other western states without viable wildfire insurance, will at some point face a property value collapse from a growing glut of unsellable homes and buildings.

I’ve referenced several times before the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an article in Nature that made the news, although this important assessment has largely slipped from notice in the barrage of so much other news. Here’s how the Potsdam Institute’s website introduces the topic:

Even if CO2 emissions were to be drastically cut down starting today, the world economy is already committed to an income reduction of 19 % until 2050 due to climate change, a new study published in “Nature” finds. These damages are six times larger than the mitigation costs needed to limit global warming to two degrees. Based on empirical data from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) assessed future impacts of changing climatic conditions on economic growth and their persistence.

The key points follow:

Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected. These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure,” says PIK scientist and first author of the study Maximilian Kotz. Overall, global annual damages are estimated to be at 38 trillion dollars, with a likely range of 19-59 trillion Dollars in 2050. These damages mainly result from rising temperatures but also from changes in rainfall and temperature variability. Accounting for other weather extremes such as storms or wildfires could further raise them.

“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany, France and the United States,” says PIK scientist Leonie Wenz who led the study. ”These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately – if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100. This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering non-economic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity.”

Plenty of cracks in our economic foundation are showing up, but so too is Big Oil’s persistence in granting itself a golden future even as such a fantasy will crumble the economy. Now, don’t get me wrong: we’re hardly at the point where we don’t need fossil fuels (unless you’re one of those de-growth maniacs who is willing to have mass starvation and societal collapse bring about a rather—for millions of us—final solution). We are, however, at the point when transition to renewable energy should be the main focus of national and world policy. The good news is that all the pieces for this are in place and well-along the technological development curves and cost points needed, and capitalism, if following basic principles, should keep driving the transition. The bad news is, at least at this time, Trump’s anti-renewable vitriol is pulling back on the energy transition accelerator and fossil fuel companies keep partying like its 1999.