As an entrepreneur, writer, and climate change activist, I’ve studied climate change science and policies for two decades and believe that the most effective basis for the discussion of the climate crisis is realism, both in science and the stories. I believe climate fiction can be an effective way for individuals and communities to identify with climate change challenges and that climate fiction can inform an individual’s personal actions and a community’s choices. Stories can offer alternative and surprisingly effective perspectives for understanding the climate crisis and on approaches for dealing with climate change. Climate fiction that focuses on the reader’s familiar sense of social order and circumstances and recognizable experiences may better explain the nature of the crisis and foster a more powerful identification with the problems we face.

The Themes, like Climate Change Itself, Have Shifted Over Time

The main theme of The Steep Climes Quartet is our fractured society and the solidarity climate progress requires of us and our communities. This theme, I hate to admit, still carries true.

Even over the course of writing the series—I started in 2015—other themes have evolved and now include some source of hope in the form of an economically competitive clean energy transition. Don’t think I’ve grown pollyannish, though, since important plotlines involve various misdeeds by Big Oil and take into consideration the element of slow progress that typically marks the efforts of political bodies and society at large. Still, by Book Three, Over Brooklyn Hills, 2035 sees that core court cases against Big Oil are finally starting to break for the climate, but then again, these same corporations and their political allies (or to use a more crass appellation, their “bum boys”) have managed to get too many gas-fired generator plants in place, with the net result of slowing progress in carbon emission reductions.

In the first three books, the residents of the Berkshires—a pleasant bucolic place, by the way—don’t have a lot of direct experience with the immediate consequences of climate change, but like most of us, hear about such negative consequences mostly through the news. Kill Well, in 2026, has a big heatwave in the upper Midwest, and the West is experiencing another plague of wildfires, but the Berkshire-based main character Davin, an economically pressed recent divorcee, may have some talking points about the climate down, kind of, and all the right intentions, kind of, but like most others, he’s mostly caught up in worrying about rising costs and his Airbnb apartment and his work. The worst thing that happens to him, climate-effect wise, is that a heavy rain damages a part of the Airbnb apartment on the first floor of his Housatonic house. The character and the much of the nation are still stunned by Trump’s reelection and all the resulting chaos from that clown show. There’s a plot line of a young woman on the run after witnessing her fossil fuel divestiture boss killed on a business trip, which brings her to Chicago, where Davin’s son is living his first year out of college, and the two meet on the train heading toward Boston, and she ends up at Davin’s house, and there’s a contract killer in play, too. A prevailing sub-theme is the widespread economic stress of rising costs and the recession-like state of the nation’s economy that retards, along with Trump, clean energy work.

Dear Josephine is different in that the climate consequence focus is Miami’s destruction by the combination of a powerful hurricane hitting in sync with high ocean surges, and the residents of Berkshires are unaffected directly, of course, although taken up among the multitude shocked by the event, with many trying to figure out how to help. Oh yeah, there’s a guy running around trying to kill billionaires and a guy using Kill the Rich as cover for his own assassinations for fossil fuels think tanks in order to ease some newly inconvenient political ex-allies off the board. And yeah, in Dear Josephine there’s a fair amount of conversation and thinking about externalities, which sounds as exciting to you as a reader and it does to me as the author, right? I think I pulled it off. Does the appearance of a climate action terrorist group make the medicine go down? The sub-theme here is the evil intents of those who run fossil fuel empires and the growing anxiety that their golden egg is hatching trouble. Will Big Oil turn even more savage as the clean energy transition starts to take a bite out of the energy market? I’m pretty sure I nailed this; read the headlines and tell me I’m wrong about Big Oil.

Over Brooklyn Hills, now back from the editor and in the midst of review and then to formatting (and then to proofreading, and then…) is six years after the second book and nine years after the first. MAGA, repudiated in the 2026 mid-term and 2028 elections, has given way to economic reforms and climate policies and America has rejoined much of the rest of the world in making climate progress. The sub-themes include the consequences of choosing violence, as the climate terrorist group now finds itself involved with Mexican cartels and three-quarters of the way toward becoming a criminal organization. The primary theme, though, is about climate migration, and because of a long heatwave hovering over the New York metropolitan area, the Berkshires finds itself with very many more young people (i.e., typically less economically advantaged) escaping the heat and the energy bills demanded for safety, and the towns of South County and the second-homers aren’t enjoying the change in the character of their summer. Of course, the migrant movement at the southern border is a bigger problem, and the violence between parts of Pakistan and India and the portions of their populations on the move from devastating heatwaves is seeing tens of thousands of deaths, largely through paramilitary violence. But up here in the relatively cool green hills, we can be put out by the waves of body odor from those free camping in the woods as we line up at So-Co Creamery to get the kids some ice cream.

Farm to Me, which is mostly a mess of notes and line items for further research, sees 2047 with climate change reducing, due to chronic drought, the yields of some of the once highly productive agricultural areas in the U.S. New England has been experiencing a resurgence of its once dominant industry, agriculture. There’s been some real progress with carbon emission reduction, but climate change is locked in place, albeit at levels that could be worse without modest progress. Resiliency and adaptation programs are the rage, but climate change continues to exert a downward pressure on the economy. It turns out that poisoning the Earth’s atmosphere for centuries has some negative consequences. Who knew?

The fourth book’s themes will include that human nature remains a good news/bad news puzzle, with a murder mystery that may be tied to one ambitious New England food distribution company trying to take over other food distributors. There will be the sub-theme of the angst and agony of the young about the future, where the cumulative effects of climate change pile on. Tipping points, for instance, are getting more attention, but, yeah, a lot less love, that’s for sure.

What It Takes (to Write the Series)

I’d be happy enough to put down my long-running autodidact effort on climate change, but alas, climate models keep getting tweaked and plentiful research continues. Science never sleeps, and all too often, I feel that I need to be on the growing edge of climate change knowledge 24/7, which I can’t be, of course. Currently, for instance, there are new findings and expanded concepts about faster rising temperatures than previous conventional understanding has posited, and I’ve had to make my best guess that 2035 will see the rise of 1.7-1.8 Celsius in the global annual average. By the time I have the fourth book’s manuscript well in hand, I’ll have to best guess about further global annual average temperature rise in 2047, by being as well-informed as I can be to determine that guess.

One objective of the series is to present climate change as accurately as possible and with the best scientific grounding. In this way, readers who may not be similarly inclined to keep up with the science and policies may consider their own understanding advanced, and, yes, this is something of an illusion for those future timelines, but then novels are derived from the creative act of controlled illusion. Yet more speculative, I suspect, will be the political winds and social expectations governing these timelines, made all the more challenging because making assumptions about such trends requires forecasting political and societal developments that march on up and down and sideways.

An example of this challenge of future forecasting happened when I was preparing Dear Josephine for production in 2024.The national election was underway, with Harris and Trump trading leads a number of times. The situation was sufficiently unclear, so I paused in order to suss out which way the wind was blowing. My original working assumption in the manuscript was that Harris would win, and the Biden-era clean energy work would continue, but at times this seemed less or more likely. And then November 7 happened and Trump prevailed, and after recovering from the shock, I was back to work on the manuscript to have the book’s 2029 timeline reflect this dark turn in American politics. Before I shifted the Dear Josephine story to reflect the political reality, there was similar work to do with the already published Kill Well, which has the story taking place in 2026, and so a Trump-ascendent revision was issued. The main thing I got out of this experience was this joke: Who knew that writing near-future fiction wasn’t easy?

There are other problems to solve in attempting to portray the future. These include representations of technology development, but here I think I’ve taken the right approach. Science fiction books tend to over-emphasize technology’s advancement, but for 2026, major advancements were known and other than a few mentions of how AI is becoming part of the characters’ work-a-day worlds. All the surveillance tech that figured into a plotline—things like Ring cameras and ways to hide IP tracking in emails—were already sufficiently prevalent, and a few other cyber-related tech was (one hopes) sufficiently covered by plausible handwaving. For Dear Josephine in 2029, AI is more prevalent, but not by a lot, and, no, no flying cars or major new technological developments, and that’s because human economies and technologies role out more slowly than the sci-fi-inclined often hope. Not just more slowly but also quite unevenly (tip o’ the cap to William Gisbson!), and most of the characters in this series are regular people and not pioneering tech heads.

Jump ahead to 2035, and in Over Brooklyn Hills AI and the spread of some other technologies advance, with smart glasses and haptic feedback and some modest virtual reality interfaces showing up through uneven adoption rates and with varying levels of interest. Davin, a content management systems architect involved with an online “local newspaper,” is a bit tech-forward, but he’s in his early seventies in 2035 and set in his ways, with his biggest tech adoption being a wide-screen interactive monitor that he can gesture at to swipe and select away using haptic wrist bands, but otherwise he’s using his laptop pretty much the way most people today do with keyboard and some voice interface. There’s the 6G networks that provide ubiquitous Wi-Fi.

This challenge of moderating regular people’s interactions with tech changes grows harder the further one goes into the future but faulting on the side of less-is-more is the right bet. For the Farm to Me story taking place in 2047, there’s a part that involves regenerative agriculture, and there are advances in sensor technologies that can accurately analyze carbon sequestration in soil. This sort of development is not a big stretch but rather an incremental improvement in monitoring systems, not doubt aided by AI-based computations. Still no flying cars, at least in any sort of common use by regular people. Improved information search and analysis is to be expected, of course, and this is likely to get some attention, but likely focused on the tension between those who desire better results than the low-hanging fruit of the personalization and prediction engines that typify Spotify and Netflix today. There will be some movement toward direct democracy, although mostly in the form of growing public interest and hardly a done deal. The production and markets for cultured meat and fermentation-based protein are becoming well established. The failure of property insurance and the threat to housing markets in some areas will be leaking into the general economy. There will be some new nuclear reactors, although fewer than one might expect, since such energy production is hampered by high costs and bankruptcies.

In Farm to Me, I’m looking at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which happens to be based in Great Barrington, and you may remember Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered that was written by the founder E.F. Schumacher. I want to consider what the shift toward a more local economy might look like, especially in response to climate change, although this will be more in the background, I suspect. Did I mention no flying cars?

Of course, I’ve got to write the damn thing first.

The post Writing the Future of Climate Change 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.

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.

The Present State of World: Them and Us

If you follow the news (ha!), you know that reducing emissions is far harder these days in the United States, thanks to Big Oil throwing pin money around to buy political influence that includes that industry acquiring President Big Oil Stooge, the man who claims that every revolution of a wind turbine costs $1000 and whose administration, through Lee Zeldin, is at this very moment killing EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding. This latest effort is designed to dismantle major climate regulations, including vehicle tailpipe standards and power plant emission rules. Clearly, optimism in climate progress has taken a hit in the U.S. Of course, the very continuation of America as a democratic entity is taking a hit, too.

On the other hand, market forces are pushing clean energy forward faster and faster. There’s a simple reason why clean energy is having its day in many other parts of the world and led by China. The reason is that clean energy is now cheaper, in and of itself, and even cheaper for undeveloped countries that may have a limited ailing grid system but can now directly build ubiquitous microgrids. Global South countries can “leapfrog” the large and capital-intensive centralized grid infrastructure. So, yes, grounds for optimism for reducing emissions are to be found in many parts of the world. China and India—not exactly small polluting players—both show signs of coal use plateauing, hence the plateauing of carbon emissions. Many other nations provide good instances for optimism, too.

Unfortunately, petrostates, among which America can be considered current King, are playing hardball. The anticipated AI boom, with its attendant needs for data centers, is seen as argument for adding hundreds of new gas electricity generation plants over the next decades. Trump and his minions are keeping coal plants active despite their absurdly higher costs. The quickest and cheapest way to expand electricity capacity is to update the grids to better manage the excess capacity that currently exists, but somehow new gas plants and building out new grids are the order of the day, while future nuclear reactors the order of tomorrow. Windfarm projects get shut down and solar and battery projects go to the back of the interconnect queue, as we are told to dream of fusion and pretend that natural gas is a “clean” fuel.

How the Story is Shaping Up

Writing the American perspective about where we’re headed to address climate change is depressing at the moment. In fact, Kill Well, the first book in the series and published in the second half of 2023, takes place in 2026, but it had to be revised away from the initial rosier picture of continuing Biden-type climate and clean energy actions. The revision was to accommodate the shocking taking of the White House and Congress by Trump a little more than a year after the original publication date.

Dear Josephine, taking place in 2029, is the second book of the Steep Climes Quartet. This book was meant to be published in the Fall of 2024, but the necessary Trump-caused rewrites pushed publication to Spring 2025. The good news (fictionally speaking) is that Trump’s reign was soundly repudiated in the midterms of 2026 and election of 2028, and by 2029 the new administration is working furiously to get back on track. Of course, the timelines for legislation are long and progress slow. I’m writing fiction, not fantasy, after all, or at least that’s my fervent hope.

In Dear Josephine,the nation experiences a terrible blow when Florida’s Gold Coast, home of Miami, is largely destroyed by a monster hurricane hitting at the worst time and under the worst circumstances. Despite this, America rallies. Heck, even Davin, the somewhat hapless series’ main character who lives in the Berkshires, manages to help out in his modest way. The expectation that people will be inclined to help is no stretch: what we’re seeing from the communities in Minnesota, among other places, revives our understanding that we must all work together.

Of course, underlying the Dear Josephine story are a couple of assumptions. The first assumption is that America avoids collapse as a democracy, rallying to excise the current fascist cancer. The second assumption is that Big Oil’s thumb is taken off the scales and the ecological and economic benefits of the clean energy transition are ever more attractive. This second assumption doesn’t mean that Big Oil capitulates, to absolutely no one’s surprise. Big Oil keeps fighting, but their day in court is approaching. Unfortunately, the frustrations engendered by the Trump second term and the ascendancy of the Oligarchy and the long-running pushback against clean energy gives rise to a climate action terrorist group calling itself No One is Safe, which makes sure that they are true to their word when it comes to oil executives and Big Oil’s infrastructure not being safe.

By 2035, when Over Brooklyn Hills takes place, there’s been a lot of progress on The Electrotech Revolution (thanks, Ember!). But the consequences of climate change advance as well. There’s a horrible and long heatwave that blankets NYC and parts of several Eastern states and the relatively cool green hills of the Berkshires finds itself with too many young people up from the city and everything is already booked. If you’re wondering if this story line is climate migration writ small, give yourself points. In the background of the book some big trouble is brewing with huge numbers of climate migrants around the world, including at our southern border. Our southern border is now militarized against the cartels and their various violent trades that embrace smuggling people. NOS shows up down Mexico way in a tight story line, but you’ll have to buy and read Over Brooklyn Hills when it publishes this Spring. I ain’t saying nothing.

Where the Story is Going

I have lots of notes for Farm to Me, the fourth and final book in the series, but I can’t tell you how the story plays out. I can tell you that Farm to Me takes place in 2047 and there’s a question of whether emission reductions are keeping pace against climate change problems. I’m not sure exactly how slowly, but we are all sure that we’ve moved too slowly and that the future days will see extreme weather events due to further increases in average global temperature. I’ll let you know that by 2035, in Dear Josephine, the average may be as high as 1.7 degrees centigrade, although there are those who say it’s lower and those who argue the average global temperature is higher. By 2047 the temperature will be higher yet, although I haven’t done my due diligence to come to the amount of increase.

We’re already locked into negative climate change consequences for many decades to come, and, yes, I’m being very conservative. What I know is that in this final book, droughts and water scarcity have collapsed or badly hurt some of America’s best food production areas. I’m looking forward to diving deeper into regenerative agriculture and describing how agriculture—think truck farms—has again come to the Northeast, where, all around New England, we can still find the stone wall traces of the area’s rich agricultural past.

Of course, there’s a murder from an effort to extort consolidation of competing food distribution companies. Of course, the rest of the world is heard about from the news. Of course, progress in decarbonizing the economy continues, even while other economic engines emerge for resilience and adaptation. Of course, the problems inherent in human society continue and the world of 2047 therefore is not all that different from today.

I’m writing fiction, not fantasy.

The post Climate Fiction, Climate Fantasy: What’s the right mix of hope and disappointment? 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.

The post Climate Fiction, Optimism, and Realism first appeared on David Guenette.

“The clean energy transition is projected to be a strategic necessity for long-term economic stability, characterized by high initial investment and systemic risks in the near term (to 2035), followed by structural benefits and industry contraction by mid-century (2050), culminating in significant net economic gains by the end of the century (2100).”

This is a quote from a Gemini Deep Research analysis I’d run recently. The prompt:

Analyze both negative and positive economic consequences of a transition to clean energy by 2035, 2050, and 2100, respectively, breaking out consequences for the general economy and the economic effects on the fossil fuel industry and shareholders and investors. How fast may this clean energy transition happen without creating economic hardship on the general economy?

Notice that I didn’t insist that Gemini look at the good aspects of the clean energy transition as much as on what happens to the traditional and dirty energy system that’s been in place for a couple of hundred years. Nonetheless, facts are that the best plan is the clean energy transition.

That’s not the plan of Big Oil, though.

No, the plan by Big Oil is to push and scrape and pull the levers of corrupted governance as fiercely as possible for as long as possible, claiming that a flotilla of hundreds of new gas turbines is needed and Big Oil points to AI as the reason why.

And when the clean energy transition eats fossil fuel’s lunch? You can be your bottom dollar that Big Oil—alongside the too-often allies the power utilities—will argue, of course, we all need to keep using fossil fuel power generation because—Whaaa!—nobody wants stranded assets, do they? What about all those institutional investors that kept pension funds in fossil fuels, or—horror!—those poor stockholders and C-Suites full of good and decent people? You’ll have to bail them out, right?

Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of argument we can expect if there’s not clear legislation outlining the course and timeline for the clean energy buildout. Unfortunately, bailing out the poor little rich men seems a near-inviolate tradition in America. Remember TARP in 2009, when the big financial institutions that caused the worldwide economic collapse because of their obviously crap securitizations got bailed and not jailed?

The United States needs large scale plans and authority to shift the current energy infrastructure to one based on clean energy and a full-on buildout of a digitally intelligent and flexible grid capable of load balancing, distributed energy resource management, instantaneous demand response, and incorporation of virtual power plants.

Sure, here in the land of Trump, a.k.a., President Big Oil Stooge, this seems impossible. But Trump’s days are numbered and the opposition needs clear and new alternatives for America as it reemerges from the current nightmare.

We’ve done large-scale before and we can do it again. Only smart and ambitious Federal policy and agency can bring about the shift to clean energy and capable and smart grids in the timely fashion needed, while road mapping by law to make clear where the country is going. That way, we can avoid all the brand new but doomed stranded assets being pushed by the fossil fuel interests and apply laws of fiduciary responsibilities to tell these S.O.Bs., “Sorry, do not collect $200 and go directly to jail.”

Here are a few examples of Federal energy-related agencies we’ve benefited from in the past:

• Federal Power Commission (FPC) (1920-1977): Established to coordinate federal hydropower, later became independent, regulating interstate electricity and natural gas.
• Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (1946-1974): Managed nuclear development; abolished to separate research/development from regulation, leading to DOE/NRC.
• Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) (1975-1977): Briefly housed energy R&D from the AEC before becoming part of the Department of Energy (DOE).
• Rural Electrification Administration (REA) (1935-1994): A New Deal agency that funded rural power lines, dramatically expanding access.
• The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) (1933): Federally-owned U.S. corporation that provides electricity, manages flood control, and promotes economic development across the Tennessee Valley region (mostly Tennessee, parts of AL, MS, KY, GA, NC, VA).

This all reminds me of Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA) of 1935, a landmark U.S. federal law passed during the Great Depression to regulate massive, often corrupt, interstate utility holding companies, forcing them to register with the SEC, simplify structures (often limiting them to a single state), and keep regulated utility business separate from other ventures, ultimately breaking up huge monopolies and protecting consumers from price gouging, though parts were later repealed by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

If you want more gray hair, follow the PUHCA link to Wikipedia and see how we’ve been where we are today fighting special interests, and that there are solutions to moderate greed and self-serving. I know, radical, right?

Summary of Economic Trajectories of the Clean Energy Transition: A Multi-Temporal Analysis of Consequences to 2100 AI Report

Here’s the summary of Economic Trajectories of the Clean Energy Transition: A Multi-Temporal Analysis of Consequences to 2100. If you what the detailed analysis, follow this link. I’ve kept all the references and sources used by Gemini in its report generation. One of the more interesting conclusions is that the U.S. needs to resolve supply chain problems with critical clean tech minerals. There’s already a lot of work underway, including this bit of news from today, “A huge cache of critical minerals found in Utah may be the largest in the US.”

Optimal Transition Pace: Fastest and Most Orderly

The analysis concludes that the optimal speed for the clean energy transition—the speed that minimizes overall economic hardship on the general economy—is the fastest possible orderly transition, aligning with the IEA’s rapid shift benchmark of 2035.

The greatest risk of economic hardship is a disorderly or delayed transition, where postponed climate action triggers a sudden, destabilizing repricing of assets, potentially causing a global financial crisis on the scale of 2008.² Minimizing hardship requires proactive policies like robust Just Transition programs and supply chain security to manage social and market friction.²

Economic Consequences by Timeline

1. The 2035 Horizon: Investment Surge and Financial Shock

2. The 2050 Horizon: Structural Costs and Systemic Stability

3. The 2100 Horizon: Net Benefits and Resilience

Mitigating Economic Hardship

The transition’s speed is constrained by policy and social stability, not just technology. To manage economic hardship (e.g., localized unemployment, cost inflation) and ensure the fastest orderly pace, two key interventions are required:

1. Fully Implementing Just Transition Policies: Proactive social support is necessary to manage labor displacement and regional friction. The cost of comprehensive worker and community support, such as guaranteeing pensions, income support, and retraining, is relatively small compared to total infrastructure spending; for example, a high-end estimate for a US program is around $600 million per year.
2. Securing Critical Mineral Supply Chains: Policies must focus on diversification, recycling, and market stabilization (e.g., strategic stockpiling) to prevent supply disruptions and cost escalation of clean technologies.⁵

The post Let’s Go Big on the Clean Energy Transition first appeared on David Guenette.

I’d written, “I like a survival story as much as anyone. I’m less sanguine about taking on fundamental catastrophes for shallow entertainment, however. It strikes me as unseemly as well as potentially unhelpful or even dangerous by suggesting—as inadvertent as such suggestion might be—that nuclear war or climate change or even a zombie plague is just another of those sort of things that could happen, and boy, can they have an element of fun!”

I especially like zombies as a secret pleasure, although mostly in terms of movies and television shows, where part of my enjoyment often rests with the appreciation of the ludicrousness or stupidity of the storyline or character or production values or any and all such combinations thereof. After the first season of The Walking Dead, for instance, the fact that the characters had not developed effective means to clean up the zombie problem made me wonder if the series was about a different plague, maybe widespread lead poisoning. Yeah, I know. I can be snarky, but message me if you what to hear my top ten ways for solving The Walking Dead zombie problem.

Anyway, one point of the July 2023 post was that there are too many climate fiction stories that leave out the deeper human element, instead killing off huge numbers of people completely dry-eyed and even giddy. This isn‘t just experienced in some climate fiction works, but also in EMP-related books and a slew of post-nuclear war holocaust novels or any other such stories grounded in wide-spread immense catastrophes.

Another and more central point of that post was that well-written or not, climate fiction that sets itself in a future post-disaster time means that the novel isn’t set in our own time and therefore less likely to offer readers opportunities to directly identify with the characters and settings of the story. There’s no guarantee that setting climate fiction in our own time results in readers identifying with the story, or that the story is any good. There are certainly well-written and engaging climate fiction set in some barely recognizable future that still illuminates climate change. The question of effectiveness of books to educate and motivate readers toward climate change awareness and action is, in the end, a literary issue, just as the question of a book’s engaging qualities are a literary issue.

But one value in setting stories about climate change within a recognizable setting—our place and time now and the near future—is that the topic of climate change action can be explored and modelled from our current perspective. BTW, the short version of action modelling is: Vote for the right candidates who support the clean energy transition ASAP. Climate change is now seen as real by  large majorities, so the next step is to see the clean energy transition as not only progress against carbon emissions, but also as an economically beneficial energy system. Oh, and getting the right people in office to support the transition, to repeat myself.

Davin, the main through-character of the series, is still at a distance from climate issues in the first book, Kill Well, set in 2026. By 2029, in Dear Josephine, he’s paying more attention and has even joined Climate Covenant, a pro-climate progress candidate vetting organization. By 2035, in Over Brooklyn Hills (the book due this coming Spring), Davin is modestly tithing to Climate Covenant and Congress has been actively supporting clean energy progress through legislation. The books aren’t fairy tales, though. In 2035, fossil fuel interests are still playing hardball, protecting their profits at the expense of all, but hey, even Davin has rooftop solar and an EV. Unfortunately, another decade from now, climate change consequences are going to be exacting higher costs.

Written years ago, my first novel-length work—The Wall, a collection of inter-related stories sometimes called a short story cycle or story sequence or composite novel—presented snapshots of a post-nuclear apocalypse across time ranging from one month post-event to eight years post-event, each taking place in the same location but mainly with different characters per story, although there were some re-occurring characters, too. One impetus for that work was to counter the absurdist post-nuclear apocalypse works that had authors killing off millions merely to serve up survivalist fantasies. There was a rash of such survivalist works in the Reagan years, inspired, I imagine, by the increase in the nuclear threat of that time, not to mention the shifting focus and strength of the NRA.

While I am pretty sure that I’ve forgotten three-quarters of what I’d learned about the consequences of nuclear explosions over the many years working on The Wall, that learning was important to my effort to extrapolate as accurately as possible and so better imagine what it might be like for people in that situation. I was particularly interested in how different characters might feel, which is to say their psychological and emotional states. Imagining characters’ feelings, I believed, would be essential for understanding the conditions of their survival or whatever one might call such existence. Getting details right makes for a better story, too.

Writing The Steep Climes Quartet requires a similar effort to mount the learning curve, although in terms of climate change, not nuclear bombs. One thing that remains the same between my earlier writing and the work I’m currently engaged in is the effort toward realism. One part of the reality of climate change is the costs climate change exacts. As I wrote in 2023, “It is easy to ignore the prospect of a future drowned world when your feet are still dry, but when you realize, for instance, the cost of climate change for you today, you just might pay more attention.”

One can hope.

The post Fun with Apocalypse, Part 2 first appeared on David Guenette.

 This post is about “Extinctions and Optimism: What a recent study says and doesn’t say about extinctions,” by Jason Anthony. I’ll admit that I was concerned this Substack post of his would be another apology for cautious thinking about what we should do today.

But really, this is a delightful post. Anthony is looking at geological timeframes and presents, early in, a graph of “Big Five Mass Extinctions in Earth’s History,” which he got from Our World in Data. I love me a good graph and this one is a terrifically rich infographic that shows the five mass extinctions throughout geological history, but it also presents spikes of 16 lesser extinction events. Now there’s a phrase I’d never imagined writing: “lesser extinction events.”

By the way, I came across this post through Andy Revkin’s cross-posting on Sustain What. A tip of the cap, sir.

Later in the post Anthony reports that species extinctions have been declining for the last hundred years, contradicting the typical cry about vast biodiversity losses. He quotes Peter Brannen’s book, The Ends of the World. Here’s an interesting Brennen quote:

Though we’ve proven to be a destructive species, we have not produced anything even close to the levels of wanton destruction and carnage seen in previous planetary cataclysms.

Of course, considering that one such “planetary cataclysm“ was the super high speed collision of Earth with a really large asteroid, I’m not sure there’s much comfort to be taken in Brannen’s quote.

Anthony goes on to examine the geological record and argues that “the common wisdom about biodiversity in the Anthropocene is that it is in steep decline and that the losses are piling up.” He suggests that we’re possibly past “peak extinction,” but he also argues that past extinctions turn out not to be good predictors of future extinctions. If I understand this right, that’s because we’re talking about complex Earth systems of different sorts and characteristics. It turns out that one mass extinction is not like any other. Makes sense.

Anthony also writes: “A warming climate over the last two centuries was found, surprisingly, not to have increased extinctions. Not yet, anyway.”

“Not yet, anyway.” Sobering words.

While we can’t extrapolate from the earlier extinctions to understand the threats to biodiversity now, we do know that the disruption of the carbon cycle is a constant factor in mass extinctions. Global warming is disrupting the carbon cycle in our time, and that’s troubling. He writes:

Homo sapiens are a recent Pleistocene/Holocene blip in terms of our time on Earth, but in a geological nanosecond our population and culture have metasticized into something like a CO2-spewing supervolcano. Looked at another way, the impacts of our species have not arrived as quickly as those from the End-Cretaceous Manhattan-sized asteroid, but they’re certainly occurring faster than the millennia of volcanic purges that led to other mass extinctions. We’re neither asteroid nor supervolcano, of course, but we are consciously exhibiting symptoms of both.

And that, friends, is a clear statement about dangers from runaway carbon emissions, a.k.a., climate change. Apparently, those people who may feel offense in Anthony’s counter-intuitive report that biodiversity is doing okay at present really only have to wait a while longer to be proved right, unfortunately.

Anthony’s post is an interesting mixture of hope—we’re protecting biodiversity to the point where extinctions have been slowing—and distress—the oceans are turning acidic, major ocean systems like AMOC are slowing down, oxygen is being reduced under the waves. “The extinction rate is not what we thought it was, but the future remains unclear.” Indeed.

He ends with some grounds for aspiration, meditating on an old fossil he describes as his talisman; “…we live in relationship with deep time, and that even in our mayfly-like little lives, we get to decide what that relationship will be.”

Part of this relationship with today has to be the rejection of fossil fuel corporations as anything other than an enemy to our future and as a threat continuing to mess with the Earth’s carbon cycle in negative ways. Just because specie extinctions aren’t as bad as they could be today doesn’t mean we’re unlikely to avoid all sorts of ecological collapses if we don’t get greenhouse gas emissions moving toward net zero. But don’t look to me for that answer. Look at geological history.

And then get to work on the clean energy transition.

Here’s a nifty infographic Anthony includes in his recent Substack post. I love a good infographic.

The post Extinctions are Interesting in Relation to Climate Change first appeared on David Guenette.