On February 28, a few hours after President Trump launched his absurd war against Iran, I used this newsletter to note that it was yet one argument for clean energy, for “building out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.” A few days later I tried to lock that point into the public discourse by observing that though sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.

Those points have by now become the commonplace wisdom—note, for instance, Paul Krugman’s fine column this morning. It would be pleasurable to wallow a bit in the president’s disgrace, but not productive. So, as the war fitfully winds down, with the remaining question being just how expensive our surrender will turn out to be, it’s time to peer a little further out into the future and try to figure out how the quite different postwar world might use this opportunity to make rapid progress.

I think the first thing to remember is that the war was launched against a backdrop of already ongoing energy transition. As a rollicking new report out today from the thinktank Ember makes clear, the move towards power from the sun and wind was well underway, predicated by a fear of climate change that helped produce the investments that drove the cost of clean energy inexorably down. The report’s authors remind us where the bottom line sat as of the beginning of the war:

Around 80% of the global population can get 80% uptime solar-plus-storage power for less than $100/MWh, and half can get it for below about $80/MWh. That is already competitive with average fossil generation costs today, typically around $100/MWh.

And they go on to remind us, even more crucially, that those numbers will keep inexorably moving

Today’s affordability map is therefore not fixed. As time moves on and electrotech costs continue to fall on learning curves, regions that are already cheap become cheaper, and regions just outside competitiveness cross the line. The global area where solar plus batteries can provide high-uptime electricity at low cost expands over time.

By 2030, our analysis suggests that more than three quarters of the world’s population can get 80% uptime solar-plus-storage power for less than $80/MWh, and 90% of the world for less than $100/MWh.

Another way to say it is, the fossil fuel industry was already on the back foot before all this began. Indeed, a way to understand the Trump presidency, including its “excursions” into Venezuela and Iran, is as a reaction against this new reality: the desperate attempt by Big Oil, and by a would-be Big Man, to assert what Trump keeps calling “energy dominance.” We were trying, as it were, to “roll coal” on the rest of the world, with war but also with Trump’s other tricks, especially tariffs. His bet was that America was so militarily powerful, and its market so attractive, that we could coerce other countries into going along with his vision of a 1950s world where America used its oil supremacy to keep atop the heap.

For a moment it seemed almost to be working. Faced with preposterous tariffs, a number of countries promised to buy large amounts of American liquefied natural gas in order to placate the administration and see their bill drop. But China, the big target, was unintimidated, fighting back with its control over critical minerals, and with the fact that it no longer feared disruption in global energy markets. That’s because, as David Fickling the other day, China had restructured its energy supply over the last three years, effectively going on an “oil detox.” The war, and its effect on prices, simply supercharged this, as one can tell from the easily available statistical evidence on things like how much people were charging their cars with electricity as opposed to pumping them full of gas.

Public charging in China in April increased 17% from the previous month, to hit 10.38 terawatt-hours, or TWh, similar to the electricity consumption of the Netherlands. Add the majority of charging that happens at home, and the increase from last year is probably about 8 TWh — equivalent to about 800,000 barrels per day of oil. Other data back this up: The decline in gasoline and diesel production during April, relative to the average over the previous three years, was almost identical, at 790,000 barrels per day.

But as Fickling also pointed out, the threat for Big Oil is that China’s Asian neighbors, who are the remaining potential growth market for LNG, are watching closely and figuring this out. These are the countries that were supposed to be cowed by American might and then supplied by the new surge of gas from the fracking belt

The problem is that those rising middle powers do have alternatives to meet their energy needs, thanks to the growth of renewables. Asia’s LNG-to-power market was already being aggressively undercut on price by solar, batteries and wind. The war in Iran has demonstrated that clean energy is more reliable, too.

Indeed, just run the numbers and you get some pretty stark news:

A new gas-fired power plant in Asia needs to sell electricity for more than $100 per megawatt-hour to break even. Even existing plants, whose construction costs have long since been paid off, need $70/MWh or more if they’re fueled with LNG. Photovoltaic solar power, or PV, can be had for half the new-build price, at around $50/MWh or less. You can even and have round-the-clock clean electricity for less than what established gas plants are paying just for their fuel and maintenance.

This is why Trump’s failed war is so important. Those Asian leaders—who again represent most of the projected increase in demand for energy—would have slowly moved in the direction of cheap clean energy. But now they don’t have to go slowly, with one eye over the shoulder to make sure a wrathful America doesn’t punish them. They will now laugh at Trump all the way to the bank.

And all of this converges at the exact same moment with something even more important: the El Niño about to unleash itself on the planet. Political leaders here and abroad thought they had somehow bottled up the issue of climate change, that they could conveniently ignore it. Physics, as usual, has other ideas, and it looks as though those ideas will be expressed with…vigor. Essentially, an El Niño serves as a way for the ocean to release heat that has been accumulating in its waters, and as Tom Harris notes, there is a lot of that heat.

Global ocean heat uptake jumped by a staggering 23 zettajoules (ZJ) in 2025 alone. For context, 23 ZJ is roughly 200 times the total annual electricity generation of the entire human race. The 2025 ocean heat uptake represents an eight-fold increase over the 1958–1985 annual mean baseline

The degree to which we’ve been storing global warming in the oceans can’t be overstated, and now the door to that sauna is being flung open. You may recall the shock a few years ago when global temperatures started occasionally breaching the 1.5 Celsius mark; Harris cites predictions that we could see months in 2027 when we go past the two-degree mark. Jim Hansen and his team just published a new paper predicting that the El Niño is coming fast enough that 2026 will likely set a new record for global temperature

For the purpose of predicting temperature in the remainder of 2026, we note in Fig. 8 that global SST in 2026 has approximately “caught” the 2024 global SST in May (upper figure) and 2026 continues to be at least 0.1°C warmer than in 2023 (the last El Nino onset year). We expect that gap to be maintained, as the upcoming El Nino is at least as strong as the one in 2023. We note also that Earth’s energy imbalance for the last 15 months of data (January 2025 through March 2026) is 1.58 W/m2 , even higher than the prior decade (Fig. 4). The year 2026 should already exceed the 2024 record, with higher temperatures to come in 2027.

(And as Hansen notes, if his predictions are correct it will go some way towards rejiggering scientific assumptions about just how sensitive the climate is to our emissions—that is, recent celebrations in some quarters that the worst climate outcomes were off the table may well have been premature. Meanwhile, also worth reading Daniel Swain’s very detailed forecast for how it all may affect the West Coast)

We don’t know in advance all the ways that El Niño will manifest, but I confess to being fearful; we’ve been barely dealing with the stresses that temperature rise has already inflicted, and the soaring mercury will come as farmers are already facing the fertilizer shortage that Trump’s war provoked. The best we can hope for at this point, I think, is a year that stops a little short of cataclysmic; in any event, I believe it will be enough to produce a return to the politics of, say, 2020, when the world was more focused on the climate crisis.

We’ve been drifting away from that focus in this country, mostly because Democratic politicians began to lose their nerve in the face of ongoing attacks by the fossil fuel industry. But now is the time to regain that focus. As it turns out, new research makes it clear that Americans are in fact at least as worried about climate change as they ever were. Here’s a summary from David Gelles:

Take, for example, April research from Gallup, which found that 44 percent of U.S. adults “worry a great deal about global warming or climate change.” That’s among the highest percentages since 1989, and just short of the all-time high of 46 percent registered in 2020.

Another 22 percent of Americans worry “a fair amount” about climate change, meaning it’s an issue that is solidly on the radar for two-thirds of U.S. adults .

A survey last year from George Mason University also found that about 65 percent of Americans were “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about global warming.

And unlike in some previous studies, when climate change often ranked near last among voters’ major concerns, that poll found that the threats posed by a warming world were squarely in the middle of the pack, above issues like crime and health.

Democratic candidates in the primaries—which are not so far off—are going to have no choice but to grapple with the fact that

A full 72 percent of Democrats say they worry a great deal about the issue, the second-highest figure on record, according to Gallup

But really, it should be an asset, not a trouble. As a new study of climate communications makes clear across six countries makes clear

“By a margin of more than 4:1 we’ve seen people believe more clean is a better path to affordability than more fossil.”

As of now, with the Iran debacle receding and El Niño looming, we can say a few things with certainty:

  1. The cheapest power on earth comes from the sun and wind, and everyone but us seems to have realized it
  2. That clean power gives us some hope of dealing with the climate crisis that threatens our future, not to mention our insurance premiums
  3. That clean power does not involve us in foreign wars
  4. And the only important person on earth who does not agree with 1, 2, and 3 is Donald Trump, who is being daily proven wrong on exactly everything. I mean, the man can’t fix the reflecting pool. So opponents should constantly identify Trump with climate denial and with solar denial; make him the face of our retrograde policy. How hard can that be?


 

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