I love California, and I love Disneyland, and I see the world through climate-colored goggles. So maybe it’s inevitable that I’ve come to experience one of my favorite rides — Soarin’ Over California, a stunning aerial tour of our coasts, deserts and mountains — as a reminder of how much this great state has changed since the motion simulator ride opened a quarter-century ago.

Lifted into the air last month, I found myself sighing at the sight of the Sierra Nevada blanketed with heavy snow near Lake Tahoe, projected onto an enormous 180-degree dome screen. If only we had such abundant snow now! If only global warming weren’t making years like that one less and less likely.

I’d had the same reaction riding Soarin’ during previous periods of dismal snowpack. But this time the wistfulness cut deeper. Perhaps because a climate-fueled March heat wave had recently broken temperature records across the Western U.S., melting much of the already-meager snow and imperiling downstream water supplies.

Or maybe I felt so pensive because Soarin’ just celebrated its 25th anniversary, and 25 is the kind of number that makes you stop and reflect.

When Disney California Adventure opened in February 2001, with Soarin’ a marquee attraction, the state hadn’t suffered through any of the fires that are now its 15 largest on record. Average temperatures were several degrees cooler. Sea levels were lower.

At what point are we soaring over a fundamentally different California?

Most people aren’t thinking about climate at Disneyland (at least not yet). But for me, last month, every scene on Soarin’ called the climate crisis to mind.

Come fly with me…

The Golden Gate Bridge

Soarin’ begins at a California landmark. Although rising seas won’t topple the bridge itself, the ride’s aerial footage also features San Francisco, where low-lying areas such as the Embarcadero and Crissy Field could be inundated. More broadly, the entire Bay Area faces significant flood risks.

Seeing the Golden Gate also made me think of “The Wild Robot,” a wonderful 2024 film that takes place in a nearish-future world reshaped by global warming. In one of the animated movie’s most powerful moments, a flock of Canada geese pass over the bridge’s red towers — and the waters of San Francisco Bay cover the highway. There are whales swimming where traffic should be. The bridge is underwater.

A likely scenario? Hardly. But the filmmakers worked with climate experts to convey the magnitude of the crisis. The movie certainly leaves an impression.

Redwood Creek, Humboldt County

Next the ride transitions to Redwood Creek, the aerial camera swooping low over the creek’s gentle waters as kayakers paddle downstream. It’s a serene moment.

So it’s jarring to realize that the creek’s namesake trees are increasingly threatened by worsening fire and intensifying drought — not to mention diminished fog. It’s painful to imagine such magnificent trees dying needlessly.

Napa Valley

As we flew from the redwood forest to the picturesque vineyards of wine country — colorful hot air balloons milling about, rolling hills extending into the distance, Jerry Goldsmith’s glorious score adding to the sense of awe — I thought about the wildfire smoke, water shortages and extreme heat crushing California winemakers.

I also remembered that California Adventure features a working vineyard. I doubt it’s going to fall victim to climate change. But many growers won’t be so lucky.

Monterey Bay

Transitioning to the deep blue waters of the Central Coast, I recalled my recent visit to the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium. As much as I was enchanted by the sea creatures — the jellyfish were wild, and don’t get me started on the adorable sea otters — I was disappointed that hardly any exhibits discussed the climate crisis.

I didn’t do a comprehensive survey. But I counted only two climate mentions, plus an abstract video about carbon dioxide molecules.

It’s not that the people in charge are ignoring climate change; the aquarium’s website explains that the surface of Monterey Bay has gotten 1.4 degrees warmer over the last century; that the waters are acidifying and losing oxygen; and that wildlife is suffering as a result. But climate is largely missing from the aquarium proper.

Climate is definitely a story better told at a science museum than at a theme park. But a lot more people visit Disneyland than the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Lake Tahoe

I started with Tahoe, so I won’t repeat myself. But I will suggest that there is, in fact, a role for environmental education at the Disneyland Resort.

Outside Soarin’, in California Adventure’s firefighting-themed Grizzly Peak Airfield, there’s a sign explaining the difference between “helpful fire” and “harmful fire”:

How great is that? Yes, you can still buy Smokey Bear merchandise at the nearby gift shop. But instead of simply promoting the outdated idea that all fire is bad and needs to be extinguished, somebody at Disney made a sign about the environmental benefits of letting certain blazes burn. And somebody else at Disney approved it.

I doubt we’ll ever see in-park newscasts about extreme heat and low reservoir levels. (Nor would I want that. It would be depressing, and Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth.) But 25 years from now, if not much sooner, a lot of guests will be confused if Disney is still playing a film showing abundant snow in the Sierra.

Yosemite National Park

After Tahoe, we see Yosemite Falls, water cascading into the valley. A person piloting a hang glider sails onto the screen. We catch a brief glimpse of Half Dome.

Where to begin? Vanishing glaciers. Trees killed by drought stress and bark beetles. Park closures caused by wildfire smoke and fierce storms. The National Park Service warns that due to shifting snowmelt patterns, visitors “may find Yosemite’s waterfalls at their peak during winter, leaving cliffs bare and meadows dry by midsummer.”

Hopefully Yosemite visitors can keep learning about the climate impacts, because the Trump administration is working to strip national parks of facts it doesn’t like.

Coachella Valley

The Soarin’ intro video claims that the next scene takes place in Palm Springs. But as a former Palm Springs resident, I’m obliged to point out that it’s actually a golf course in La Quinta, a 45-minute drive southeast.

Many riders shriek or laugh as a golf ball flies at their faces — it’s a cool effect! But I usually get distracted by the canal running through the course, which brings Colorado River water to desert cities and farms. Like tens of millions of Westerners who depend on the Colorado River for their water, Coachella Valley residents are threatened by the fact that Lake Mead and Lake Powell are terrifyingly low.

I’ve written about the bitter interstate conflict preventing California and its neighbors from saving water and propping up the reservoirs. If I were Disney’s new CEO, I’d put someone in charge of making sure Southern California never runs out of water.

The orange groves

The next scene takes place high above orange groves in Ventura County. But Soarin’ fans know it for the amazing orange scent that Disney pipes in. Yes, you can actually smell the Valencia oranges you’re flying over.

Now get this: Ventura is warming faster than any other county in the Lower 48 states. Extreme heat can take a toll on crops. One Ventura County grower lost more than 70% of her unpicked Valencia oranges during a 2018 heat wave. Others have been battered by fires and floods, and by mudslides destroying their irrigation systems.

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Back to the desert. We soar over rugged brown peaks before slowing to admire a vast open vista. An ear-splitting roar heralds the arrival of military fighter jets.

As a San Diego Union-Tribune headline put it in 2022: “Climate change is ravaging Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, warn scientists.” The article explained:

“For decades, scientists assumed California’s Colorado Desert — which stretches from eastern San Diego County into Imperial Valley and up to Joshua Tree National Park — would withstand the impacts of climate change.

Today, researchers have changed their tune. Streams are disappearing, plants shriveling. Animals are desperate for nourishment with iconic bighorn sheep evermore dependent on human interventions.”

Naval Air Station North Island, San Diego

Sadly, watching this scene last month made me think about war. The air and water pollution unleashed on the people of Iran. The Strait of Hormuz, high gas prices and the case for clean energy independence — including electric cars. The rising military spending that could instead go toward climate.

My late grandfather was a proud World War II veteran who served in Europe and the Pacific; we rode Soarin’ together more than once. He yearned for a world without war, as do I. Surely less war will mean a more stable climate, and vice versa.

Malibu

This one hurt more than I expected. As the camera swept out over the Pacific Ocean, the water golden in the sunset light, I thought about the Palisades fire, and the homes that had burned in Malibu and Pacific Palisades.

The Soarin’ footage was gorgeous. But with climate on my mind, it brought back bad memories of smoke-tinged sunsets during the worst days of the fire.

Downtown Los Angeles

I could list all kinds of climate problems in my hometown: drought, wildfire, sea level rise, heat-trapping pollution spewed by cars and trucks on L.A.’s many freeways.

One of those freeways (the 110) serves as the focal point of this scene, traffic passing by the arena formerly known as Staples Center. But even though it was filmed at night — in fact, because it was filmed at night — I’m going to highlight rising temperatures. Heat kills more people than all other weather hazards combined. And global warming is extra harmful to human health because it’s driving up nighttime lows, depriving our bodies of the chance to cool down, as Angelenos learned last month.

Unhoused people — like those living on downtown L.A.’s Skid Row — are especially vulnerable to extreme heat. But plenty of people with homes are also at risk.

Disneyland

Soarin’ ends on Main Street, U.S.A. Tinker Bell sprinkles pixie dust. Fireworks erupt over Sleeping Beauty Castle. Happily ever after.

As a climate-conscious Disney fan, I’m eagerly awaiting October, when a big change is coming to Tomorrowland, next door to Main Street. Thanks to my prodding, Disney will shut down the 71-year-old Autopia ride, which still runs on polluting oil-powered engines. Eventually, Disney has promised to reopen the ride with electric vehicles.

I hope the company has the leadership and courage to look beyond the politics of the next few years and keep reimagining its storytelling with climate change in mind. I’ve argued for revitalizing Tomorrowland as a cleantech showcase; there are also loads of opportunities for small touches throughout the parks, like the “helpful fire” sign. And on a practical level, the parks need more shade. They need more water filling stations. They need to be pleasant places on a heating planet.

As for Soarin’ Over California, I still feel a surge of joy every time I ride, otherwise I wouldn’t keep doing it. Whatever melancholy I feel, it’s the same whenever climate is on my mind, which is most of the time — at a baseball game, on a hike, watching TV. Nothing can take California away from me. I loved this state 25 years ago, when I was eight years old. I’ll love it 25 years from now, when I’m in my late 50s.

But I don’t know if it’s the same state now as it was in 2001. It definitely won’t be the same state in 2051. Hopefully Disneyland won’t be the same either.

— Josh Ritter, “Thin Blue Flame”

Ten years ago this month, I visited Hell’s Kitchen for the first time.

Not the neighborhood in Manhattan, but a scorching expanse of dusty desert along the shore of California’s Salton Sea, where an Australian company pitched me on its plan to build a geothermal power plant. The executives told me they planned to start construction by 2018 and open the plant by 2020.

As those milestones failed to materialize, executives adjusted their pitch: Not only would they drill into superheated brine deep beneath the lake to generate 24/7 clean energy, they would extract lithium, a key mineral for electric vehicle batteries. When the company drilled its first wells in 2021, it touted plans for clean energy generation and mass lithium production by 2024 — developments that could help California and the nation meet aggressive climate targets. A ceremonial groundbreaking with one of President Biden’s top advisors was held in January 2024.

Two years later, Hell’s Kitchen is still a dusty desert. The “Lithium Valley” dreamed up by local officials and promoted by Governor Gavin Newsom has yet to arrive.

So, naturally, the company is pivoting to data centers.

Read more

I’ve seen variations of this type of statement so often it’s basically cliché: Imagine how Fox News would react if Joe Biden did anything like what Donald Trump just did.

Or: Can you imagine how long this kind of scandal would haunt Barack Obama? Republicans would never let it go.

Like I said, cliché. Still, it’s a useful framework for President Trump’s latest attack on the renewable energy industry. Via the New York Times:

Trump Administration to Pay $1 Billion to Energy Giant to Cancel Wind Farms

The Trump administration will pay the French energy giant TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon its plans to build wind farms off the East Coast, the Interior Department said on Monday at an energy conference in Houston.

Under the unusual deal, TotalEnergies would forfeit its leases in federal waters for two wind farms, which would have been built off New York and North Carolina. The Justice Department would then reimburse TotalEnergies $928 million, the amount it paid for the leases during the Biden administration.

In exchange, TotalEnergies would invest that money in oil and gas projects in the United States, including a facility in Texas that would export liquefied natural gas to global markets. The company would also commit to producing more oil in the Gulf of Mexico and said it was developing some additional gas-burning power plants to meet rising electricity demand from data centers.

The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power.

Extraordinary? Yeah, no kidding. Having failed to block construction of five coastal wind farms already nearing completion — turns out the rule of law does still apply in this country, at least sometimes — Trump’s appointees turned their attention to wind farms that hadn’t started construction. As a result, U.S. taxpayers will spend nearly $1 billion to cancel two projects that would have supplied badly needed electricity.

Whatever claim the GOP might once have had to being a party of free markets has long since died an ignoble death. It’s hard to do justice to the irony: Trump and his allies continue to bash liberals for “picking winners and losers” in the energy market, even as they themselves all but bribe a private company to switch from wind to fossil fuels. And the company is almost certainly accepting the bribe only because it knows Trump would have tried to block its wind farms anyway.

Yes, Democrats have approved laws and regulations incentivizing renewable energy, and raising costs for the fossil fuel industry. But what would the political fallout look like if a Democratic president pressured an oil giant into accepting a $1-billion payoff in exchange for the company canceling a fracking project in Texas and building a big wind farm in, say, California?

Seriously, what would the fallout look like? I’ve been trying to imagine it. Here’s what I’m coming up with:

• Immediate congressional oversight hearings, with some Republicans calling for the Democratic president to be investigated and impeached

• Weeks if not months of nonstop coverage on Fox News, Newsmax, the Free Press and other left-bashing media outlets, with a long tail lasting years

• A social media feeding frenzy led by influential figures in the MAGA movement, ultimately making life very scary for executives at the wind company

• A cavalcade of lawsuits by conservative think tanks, attorneys general and fossil fuel companies to overturn the $1-billion payoff

Suffice to say, none of that is happening in the opposite direction.

I also suspect the legacy media coverage might look a little different if the shoe were on the other foot. Can you imagine a world where Kamala Harris is president, and she pays an oil company $1 billion to shift gears from fracking to wind, and the New York Times doesn’t feel compelled to run a story on the front page?

Well, Trump did his version, and The Times’ story ran on Page B3. The Washington Post’s story ran on A16. The Wall Street Journal, so far as I can tell, didn’t run a story in print yesterday. Print newspaper placement is not the be-all, end-all, but it’s a good measure of the importance that editors place on a story.

Meanwhile, leading Democrats aren’t quite shrugging off the whole thing, but it’s not like they’re gearing up for battle either.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul — who last week proposed weakening the state’s climate law — described Trump’s deal with TotalEnergies as “an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars” before pivoting to her commitment to an “all-of-the-above approach that includes renewables, nuclear and other energy sources.”

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse — a well-meaning climate warrior who’s spent years working with Republicans on bipartisan “permitting reform” legislation to speed up construction of all energy infrastructure, including wind farms — called the $1-billion deal “stupid” and “not good,” E&E News reported. But even though he previously halted bipartisan negotiations when Trump tried to block construction of five offshore wind projects — because what good is a speedier permit if your project might get blocked later? — this time Whitehouse was more forgiving. He said the $1-billion agreement wasn’t a deal-breaker.

“It’s not per se illegal,” Whitehouse explained.

This whole episode is a case study in how Trump keeps shifting the Overton window — the range of ideas and arguments that are considered politically acceptable. It’s not per se illegal, so we shrug and accept our fate and move on. The story doesn’t make the front page. Permitting reform negotiations continue. Just another Monday.

And you know, I get it. It’s hard to maintain the capacity to be outraged when there are so many things to be outraged about — and when so many of them involve direct violence and human rights abuses. Trump and his cronies are good at this. They flood the zone and don’t care what their critics will say.

But how about we try to push the Overton window back in the other direction? When the president blows $1 billion to kill a wind project, it’s not just another Monday. It’s a perversion of American values. Let’s think like it, talk like it, act like it.

As John Oliver said in 2016, when Trump was first elected: “Keep reminding yourself, this is not normal. Write it on a Post-it note and stick it on your refrigerator.”

Good advice then, good advice now.

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Temps keep rising, climate journalism keeps falling

In October, I broke the story that CBS News — fresh off its acquisition by the family of Trump-friendly billionaire Larry Ellison — had gutted its excellent climate team. I reported that four of the team’s six journalists had lost their jobs as part of a round of network-wide layoffs. I later learned that a fifth journalist was reassigned.

Last week, the final shoe dropped. The L.A. Times’ Stephen Battaglio reported that the final member of CBS’ core climate team — national environment correspondent David Schechter — lost his job during another round of layoffs.

The legacy media’s continued contraction of climate coverage couldn’t come at a worse time for the American public. Just last week, a blistering heat waved torched records across the Western U.S. Here’s a thorough news roundup from Bob Henson and Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections. A few highlights:

• Fourteen states set all-time heat records for March

• California broke its March heat record — first on Wednesday, then on Thursday, then again on Friday, ultimately topping the original record by five degrees

• San Francisco hit 90 degrees for the first time ever in March

• Iowa hit 97 degrees, breaking the state’s March record by 5 degrees

• Flagstaff reached 84 degrees on March 19, four degrees warmer than the city has ever measured in April. Half a dozen other places also beat their April records

California, by the way, topped out at 112 degrees, as did Arizona — both states beating the entire country’s previous March heat record of 107 degrees, set in 1954.

I didn’t recognize either California locality to mark a 112-degree reading, so I looked up the weather stations and learned they’re down by the U.S.-Mexico border in my old haunt, Imperial County. It’s a broiling place that can ill afford to get any hotter.

Speaking of Imperial, I’m hard at work on “Death in the Desert, Part 3.” Stay tuned.

Until next time

It’s hot in the American West right now, frighteningly hot — triple digits Wednesday in Los Angeles County, mid-90s in the Bay Area, low 90s in St. George, Utah, mid-90s in Las Vegas. Phoenix is expected to hit 106 degrees shortly. It feels more like summer than just barely spring. Records are collapsing everywhere.

This is what climate chaos looks like. It’s not an anomaly, it’s reality.

It’s also a lot to process. It can take a toll on your mental health.

Which is why I’d been hoping that “Shrinking” — my favorite TV show these days, a brilliant and poignant comedy on Apple TV about therapists and grief and healing — would grapple with the climate disaster that devastated the L.A. County communities where the show is filmed, Altadena and Pasadena.

Alas, as much as I love the latest season, it’s somehow taking place in a world where the Eaton fire never happened. This despite the fact that the inferno — which killed 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes — burned several key filming locations, as mentioned in interviews by Harrison Ford and other cast members.

It’s possible the writers simply felt they didn’t have time to respond. Production on Season 3 began one month after the fire ignited, so maybe co-creators Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein didn’t feel comfortable reworking the story. If so, I’ll defer to their creative judgment.

But in a world starved for climate storytelling, I feel like a valuable opportunity was missed here. “Shrinking” is about therapists going above and beyond to help patients cope with trauma, while they themselves navigate tragedy — finding hope and humor along the way. If ever a TV show was perfectly positioned to help Angelenos meditate on last year’s fires, this was it. If ever a show could have served as a model for climate storytelling on screen, this was it.

Maybe “Shrinking” will circle back to the Eaton fire in Season 4. Maybe not.

I’ll keep watching either way, finding joy and affirmation in the characters and their struggles and triumphs. But I won’t stop asking for more climate stories — on screen and across all forms of media.

Speaking of which…

The Hollywood Climate Summit expands its horizons

I love the Hollywood Climate Summit, an annual gathering at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that brings together artists, activists, scientists, funders and other climate-conscious folk. It’s a unique event where professional environmentalists can schmooze with studio executives, screenwriters can share ideas for weaving global warming into their stories and comedians can stage a fake trial for Big Oil.

Recently, though, the summit’s co-founders started to feel like they were outgrowing the name — and the mission it represented.

They’d been hosting the conference since 2020, but they were increasingly organizing other events for an entertainment industry audience — at the Sundance Film Festival, for instance, and at Climate Week NYC. They found themselves branching out beyond Hollywood, too, developing programs and partnerships to support climate storytelling in video games, sports, music and podcasts.

“The storytelling spectrum we’re working with is much broader than Hollywood,” said summit co-founder Heather Fipps.

Last month, they rebranded. Fipps and fellow co-founder Allison Begalman launched Context Collaborative, which will serve as an umbrella organization.

“When it comes to climate and environment and the crises that we’re facing, the No. 1 thing is people’s attention,” Fipps said. “Entertainment, sports, games, films and TV and social media — that is where people are putting their priority and attention. If we can direct attention to climate on all of these channels, that is an opportunity that has to be embraced right now, and urgently.”

“When cultural attention is moved in directions counter to climate, that has a lasting and resounding impact on policy,” she added.

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The oil and gas industry knows how to consume cultural attention. The biggest fossil fuel companies spend $7 billion annually on media, advertising and public relations — and according to a new report from Clean Creatives, they’ve largely stopped bothering with ads pretending they’re transitioning to clean energy. They’ve shifted to telling us that fossil fuels are essential and permanent features of life.

My constant refrain: We need better stories in the cultural ether. Kudos to the Context Collaborative team for working on that problem.

We also need better politicians to help turn cultural consciousness into action…

Life after Gavin Newsom

Ballots go out in early May for California’s gubernatorial primary, with polls closing June 2. Pundits and political journalists can’t stop obsessing over the possibility that no Democrat will emerge from a crowded field, resulting in two awful Republicans — Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton — advancing to the November election.

Personally, I’m not worried — at least not yet. Two months is a long time! Or at least it should be; many democracies have far shorter election seasons than the U.S., where politicians spend way too much time campaigning. Meanwhile, Americans have been understandably distracted recently: war in Iran, troops invading U.S. cities, etc.

If none of the Democrats start pulling ahead in the next month, I’ll worry. But I keep thinking back to 2021, when Governor Gavin Newsom faced a recall vote.

Less than two months before that election, polling showing likely voters evenly split. Some Democrats panicked; Newsom ended up keeping his job overwhelmingly.

So if you’re a Californian evaluating the gubernatorial race, my advice is this: Figure out which candidate you like and worry about the polls later, when your ballot arrives. And if you care about climate, you might want to know that California Environmental Voters endorsed two candidates on Wednesday: Katie Porter and Tom Steyer.

Here’s what the group’s CEO, Mary Creasman, had to say:

“As a working mom, Porter has built her career on holding powerful interests accountable to make people’s lives better. In Congress, she took on Big Oil fearlessly and fought to protect our natural spaces. Steyer has a powerful track record fighting corporate polluters and advancing climate justice. He’s made it clear he can and will deliver on his campaign promises to deliver clean, affordable energy options.”

In January, I moderated a climate forum with four leading candidates: Porter, Steyer, Xavier Becerra and Eric Swalwell. California Environmental Voters hosted the forum; you can watch the full video here. I was interested to see that the group’s endorsement largely mirrored my own analysis, which was that Porter and Steyer were far and away the most qualified candidates to lead on climate.

Steyer has racked up several other impressive environmental endorsements, including preeminent activist Bill McKibben; former Sierra Club executive director Mike Brune; Jared Blumenfeld, former secretary of CalEPA; and John Podesta and Ali Zaidi, two of President Biden’s top climate advisors.

One more time, my analysis. Warning that you need to be a paid subscriber to read.

In other news

Water in the West:

• California’s Sierra Nevada snowpack is already low. The heat wave now underway will only make it worse. (Ian James, L.A. Times)

• A new report from UCLA concludes that restoring Mono Lake will require Los Angeles to stop taking water — and thanks to the stress of global warming, even that might not be enough. (Kurtis Alexander, San Francisco Chronicle)

• Microplastics and other industrial chemicals have reached the farthest reaches of the oceans, a new study finds. (Susanne Rust, L.A. Times)

On the landscape:

• California plans to bring 7% of the state’s land and waters under the care of tribes, beginning to right a 176-year-old wrong. (Noah Haggerty, L.A. Times)

• “It’s easy to imagine a future in which the entire canyon is healthy.” Restoration efforts are underway in Eaton Canyon. (Jaclyn Cosgrove, L.A. Times)

• Resolution Copper now owns Oak Flat, a sacred Indigenous site in Arizona, and has begun drilling for a copper mine. (Debra Utacia Krol, Arizona Republic)

California controversies:

• State officials still routinely throw huge sums of money at freeway projects while slashing funds for biking and walking infrastructure, forcing cities to compete for safe streets. (Ariane Lange, Sacramento Bee)

• Plastic distributors are suing California, arguing the state is violating their free speech rights by requiring them to stop lying to consumers about what is actually recyclable. (Susanne Rust, L.A. Times)

• President Trump used his war on Iran to get new offshore oil production started in California again. We’ll see what the courts say. (Grace Toohey, L.A. Times)

Trump nonsense:

• The Trump administration is getting ready to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research and sell it for parts. (Eric Niiler, New York Times)

• Interior Secretary Doug Burgum may ask the “God Squad” to strip endangered species protections to advance oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. (Catrin Einhorn, New York Times)

• Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s second order forcing a Washington coal plant to stay open is just as meaningless as the first one. The plant is generating no power because it’s too expensive to run and isn’t needed. (Jeff St. John, Canary Media)

Lastly: Having failed to block offshore wind development on fake “national security” grounds, the Trump administration may just pay a developer to cancel its projects, the New York Times’ Maxine Joselow reports — spending nearly $1 billion! The developer would agree to invest in fossil gas infrastructure, too. Absolutely ludicrous.

Until next time

First off, thank you for following along this week as I published five stories in five days! If you want to catch up, here’s what I wrote:

• Day 1: Rooftop solar loses in court, again

• Day 2: NBC giveth, and NBC taketh away

• Day 3: Los Angeles needs a bold new leader

• Day 4: Everyone go see ‘Hoppers’ ASAP

• Day 5: Phillips 66 polluted L.A.’s water. Trump won’t prosecute

I’m especially grateful to everyone who made the decision to support my work with a paid subscription. I started the week hoping to add 50 paid subscribers; I’m thrilled to say we exceeded that goal. Thank you for helping me make a living, and for keeping this publication alive.

Over time, I still need more folks to step up and pay for Climate-Colored Goggles, or I won’t be able to keep it going. Like I’ve said before, I know a lot of folks can’t afford to pay, and that’s OK. I’m committed to making most posts free to read.

But right now, paying readers make up less than 11% of total subscribers. I think we can do better. We can get that percentage higher.

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Thank you so much for your support. Now, on to today’s story.

In the final months of Joe Biden’s presidency, federal prosecutors charged oil giant Phillips 66 with several crimes, accusing the Houston company of violating the Clean Water Act by dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of dirty wastewater from its Los Angeles County oil refinery into the local sewer system.

I took a special interest because Phillips enjoys a cozy relationship with the Dodgers, of whom I am a die-hard fan. Orange-and-blue logos advertising the oil company’s 76 gasoline brand loom large at Dodger Stadium; there’s also a storage tank painted with a Dodgers logo at the Phillips refinery. Like other oil companies that sponsor baseball teams, Phillips is using America’s national pastime to sanitize its corporate image.

Anyway, Phillips was scheduled to stand trial for its alleged crimes last month. But in a last-minute twist, the company reached a deferred prosecution agreement — kind of like a settlement — with the Trump administration.

The parties agreed to postpone trial until 2029. At that point, the case will most likely be dropped, allowing Phillips to avoid criminal penalties altogether.

“As an environmentalist and a former prosecutor, I don’t like this,” said Erina Kwon, a senior attorney at the nonprofit advocacy group LA Waterkeeper.

Indeed, when I learned about the deal — which has gone largely unnoticed since it was filed in court nearly two months ago — my first reaction was to wonder whether President Trump’s Department of Justice was letting Phillips off the hook with a slap on the wrist. This administration loves doing favors for fossil fuel companies, after all. What’s more, the deal was signed by an especially notorious Trump appointee: Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who represented Trump in the hush money trial that led to his conviction on 34 felony counts.

Still, reading the agreement made me question whether it was so bad.

Phillips paid an $8 million fine, which sounded significant, given that the original news coverage referenced just $2.4 million in possible fines should the company be convicted. The oil giant also agreed to follow a Clean Water Act compliance plan at eight refineries in other states, which sounded logical, since Phillips recently closed the local refinery where the alleged crimes occurred. Under the deferred prosecution agreement, the feds will move to dismiss the case in 2029, so long as Phillips follows the compliance plan.

Was this a good outcome? I needed to ask a lawyer.

It took me a few weeks to find someone with the right expertise (and time to read the 53-page agreement). My first hit was Jennifer Novak, a former deputy attorney general for the state of California. She now represents companies in manufacturing and other industries, focusing on environmental law.

Novak thought the whole thing seemed straightforward: Phillips 66 broke the law and was motivated to avoid trial. She said the deal looked fair.

“I don’t find it all that unusual or unreasonable,” she said.

Although the Clean Water Act compliance plan didn’t strike her as anything special, she did like a provision requiring a third-party auditor.

“You have somebody who isn’t the federal government and isn’t the company coming in to monitor, and potentially calling things out,” she said.

LA Waterkeeper’s Kwon had a totally different analysis.

Kwon previously served as a deputy district attorney in L.A. County. She noted that not only did Phillips 66 dump highly contaminated wastewater twice, it failed to tell the county on both occasions.

“While ordinary negligence may explain the non-compliant discharges, knowingly failing to report the discharge to [L.A. County] is much more serious and smacks of bad faith,” Kwon said in an email.

Kwon wasn’t impressed by the Clean Water Act compliance plan, saying it mirrored the company’s existing obligations. As for the $8 million penalty, she said it appeared to be calculated based on a legal standard allowing a polluter to be fined up to “twice the gross gain” resulting from its violations. Which made her want to know: What did the company gain from its violations? In other words, how much money might it have saved by delaying expenditures that would have prevented the pollution?

The agreement doesn’t say. We don’t know how the $8 million fine was calculated.

All of which makes it hard to determine whether the Trump administration is playing fair or letting Phillips 66 off the hook.

Kwon called the assistant U.S. attorneys working the case “stand-up prosecutors.” She said it was unclear whether they had decided that a deferred prosecution was the right course of action, or whether a political appointee had interfered with their work.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. A Phillips 66 spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

One thing’s for sure: In two weeks, I’ll be back at Dodger Stadium for Opening Day, cheering on the World Series champions and staring at those darned 76 logos.

The refinery is gone, but the stench remains.

Iran, oil and electric vehicles

I don’t have anything terribly insightful to say about Trump’s war on Iran, except to amplify what Bill McKibben keeps writing in his wonderful newsletter, The Crucial Years: A world fueled by oil is inherently unstable and prone to price shocks; a world powered by clean electrons is cheap and freeing and much, much safer.

A few stories about the war-fueled energy crisis:

• The Trump administration is using the war to justify oil drilling off the coast of California. (Clara Harter, L.A. Times)

• Rising gas prices could give the slowing EV market a much-needed jolt. (Caroline Petrow-Cohen and Blanca Begert, L.A. Times)

• Thanks to Gavin Newsom, California has the power to cap oil refinery profits and curb gas prices. So why isn’t it using those powers? (Alejandro Lazo, CalMatters)

In other oil and EV news:

• U.S. car companies keep saying they need to shift to EVs or they’ll be killed by China — and yet they keep shifting more resources to pickup trucks, SUVs and muscle cars. (Keith Naughton and David Welch, Bloomberg)

• The California city of Benicia has long been defined by a Valero oil refinery. What happens after the refinery shuts down in April? (Matthew Green, the Guardian)

• Turns out electric vehicle batteries are lasting years longer than experts originally expected. Awesome! (Camila Domonoske, NPR)

As California and the West heat up, Tom Steyer talks climate

Kudos to HEATED’s Emily Atkin for this interview with billionaire climate advocate and California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer. It was fascinating to watch Emily press Steyer on whether a billionaire can be trusted to lead California — and whether it’s ethical for billionaires to exist at all.

I had a chance to interview Steyer, among other leading candidates for governor, at a climate forum earlier this year. You can watch the full video here.

Also see this piece for my detailed analysis of the candidates: Steyer, Xavier Becerra, Katie Porter and Eric Swalwell. (That’s one of the few stories I’ve put behind a paywall — another reason to consider a paid subscription!)

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Broadly speaking, I think Steyer has made a compelling case for loosening the grip of the big utility companies and giving Californians greater ability to generate their own electricity with solar panels. A few relevant headlines:

• Virginia will become the second state to let households install do-it-yourself, balcony solar panels. Is California next? (Elizabeth Ouzts, Canary Media)

• Electric utilities across the country see balcony solar on the rise. In many places, they’re trying to stop it. (Jeff Brady, NPR)

• Oregon failed to advance several big climate bills, including “polluters pay” and balcony solar legislation. (Gosia Wozniacka, the Oregonian)

• California continues to be a terrible laggard at community solar relative to other states, thanks to the Public Utilities Commission. (Blanca Begert, L.A. Times)

If Californians need a reminder of why climate should be top of mind come election time, the next few weeks will offer a reminder. It’s going to be scorching.

Actually, it’s already been scorching — here and across the Western U.S.:

• It was so hot during the L.A. Marathon in early March that organizers let people bail at mile 18 and still get a medal. (Alissa Walker, Torched)

• Phoenix just concluded its warmest winter on record — by three whole degrees (breaking last year’s record). Albuquerque and Salt Lake City also set records, as did nine states. (Sara Tonks and Jonathan Erdman, the Weather Channel)

• Palm Springs is forecast to hit 104 degrees on Wednesday, which would break the daily record by nine degrees. L.A. could also see triple digits next week, which has never happened in March. (Ben Noll, Washington Post)

In other heat-related news, the Athletic’s Henry Bushnell reports that FIFA will allow TV broadcasters to cut to commercials during mandatory “hydration breaks” — made necessary by global heating — during this year’s World Cup. Which means the climate crisis isn’t all bad: It’s creating more opportunities for advertising.

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In other news

Climate backsliding:

• New York Governor Kathy Hochul wants to delay the state’s longstanding target of cutting emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. (Marie J. French, Politico)

• Nevada’s biggest electric utility projects it won’t reach 50% clean energy by 2030 — a mandate that was added to the state constitution by voters — because data centers will require so much electricity, and because Trump is making it so hard to build solar farms. (Amy Alonzo, the Nevada Independent)

• Arizona Republicans repealed the state’s meager renewable energy requirements. (Wayne Schutsky, KJZZ)

Water in the West:

• Nevada is so frustrated and worried over the lack of progress on Colorado River negotiations that it’s broken from the other Lower Basin states and proposed its own solution. (Alan Halaly, Las Vegas Review-Journal)

• Yes, alfalfa is a problem in the Colorado River Basin. But it’s not the problem that needs to be solved right now. (Jonathan P. Thompson, the Land Desk)

Climate in the courts:

• The Trump administration is suing California to undo vehicle pollution rules that are nearly 15 years old. (Blanca Begert, L.A. Times)

• Eighteen young Californians appealed a judge’s dismissal of their climate lawsuit against the EPA. They claim their constitutional rights are being violated. (Blanca Begert, L.A. Times)

Power struggles:

• Texas produced more electricity from big solar farms than California last year — although if you add in rooftops, California was still the solar leader. (Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News)

• “If a small Christian shrine sat on this site … decision-makers would understand what ‘sacred’ means.” Tribes are furious over a federal agency’s decision to permit a pumped hydro project in Washington. (B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster, High Country News)

• Turning Point USA, the late Charlie Kirk’s far-right advocacy group, has decided to get involved in a Phoenix-area public utility election with big energy and water stakes. (Jason Plautz, E&E News)

The Los Angeles fires:

• What happens when you lose your Oscar statuette in a wildfire? In L.A., a bunch of folks are finding out. (Josh Rottenberg, L.A. Times)

• The Palisades fire led to the closure of Pacific Palisades’ newspaper. Fortunately, new owners are bringing it back. (Clara Harter, L.A. Times)

Until next time

• Day 1: Rooftop solar loses in court, again

• Day 2: NBC giveth, and NBC taketh away

• Day 3: Los Angeles needs a bold new leader

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The first time I heard about “Hoppers,” I was worried.

It was 2024, shortly after President Trump’s reelection, and the Hollywood Reporter had published a story exploring Pixar’s decision to cut a storyline about a transgender character from the Disney+ streaming series “Win or Lose.” The story also referenced an upcoming movie, “Hoppers.” It cited a former Pixar artist who said the filmmakers were “forced to downplay its planned message of environmentalism.”

“Hoppers” was released last weekend — and Disney-owned Pixar now admits that it toned down the film’s environmental message. The Wall Street Journal quoted a Pixar executive as saying that before the changes, it “felt like a message movie.”

Folks, I went to see “Hoppers,” and I’m pleased to report that it was wonderful. So much joy, so much pathos and above all a beautiful environmental message.

Quick plot summary: A college student named Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) wants to stop Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) from building a freeway overpass through a serene forest glade, where animal-loving Mabel used to sit quietly with her grandma, listening to the sounds of nature and working through her anger issues. Jerry was only able to secure a permit for his freeway (yes, this is an animated movie for families that deals with infrastructure permitting!) because there was no wildlife left in the glade — no beavers, no frogs, no nothing.

So what does Mabel do? She discovers that one of her college professors has invented “hopping” technology that lets humans “hop” their consciousness into lifelike robotic animals. Mabel commandeers the tech and transfers her consciousness into a robotic beaver, then sets out to recruit a real-life beaver to reclaim the glade. Because beavers are a keystone species, they’re the key to rebuilding a thriving wildlife population that will make it impossible for Mayor Jerry to build his overpass.

The whole thing is wacky, heartrending and wildly relevant to modern environmental discourse. Human development butting up against biodiverse animal habitat? A literal freeway as the instrument of destruction? It’s a good thing I was sitting in the back of the theater, because I kept pulling out my phone to take notes — like when Jerry brags about how great his newly completed freeway will be.

“Ta-da! The Beaverton Beltway. Getting you where you need to go up to four minutes faster,” he says.

That’s not the only time “Hoppers” pokes fun at the absurdities of car culture. Jerry’s beloved freeway, which he sees as a ticket to reelection as mayor of Beaverton, runs in a loop around the city, “connecting Beaverton to itself.” In a mid-credits scene, several animals crack jokes about how much humans love big cars and traffic.

It’s not all surface-level gags: When Mabel discovers that Jerry broke the law to get his freeway permit, he lashes out at her, snarling without a trace of humor, “What law?”

Some of the most thoughtful scenes ask whether people can be trusted to care for the natural world, or whether they’re irredeemably selfish — and incapable of seeing how the human and natural worlds are one and the same. At first, Mabel isn’t hopeful. Her beaver friend King George (Bobby Moynihan) is more optimistic.

“I was so happy that this was the story [Pixar] ended up telling,” said Emily Fairfax, a geography professor and ecohydrologist at the University of Minnesota.

Fairfax is a beaver expert who consulted extensively with Pixar on “Hoppers.” She spent five years working with director Daniel Chong as well as animators and other artists, helping them portray beavers and their wetland ecosystems as accurately as possible. She took Pixar staffers to field sites in Colorado and Wyoming, and showed them three years of camera footage from ponds that she monitors in California’s San Luis Obispo County.

The artists did a good job. At one point, the Pixar team showed Fairfax a rendering of willows that was so lifelike it could have been one of her study sites.

“I was absolutely beyond impressed,” she told me.

Fairfax loved the movie’s environmental message because humans are the No. 1 threat to beavers, and to the habitat they share with so many critters — lizards, skunks, owls, raccoons, deer, owls, herons and more, all packed into wetlands that store spectacular amounts of carbon, limiting global warming. She appreciated how “Hoppers” shines a light on the dangers of unchecked development, and how Mayor Jerry — spoiler alert! — comes to learn that people can’t survive without animals.

That certainly includes beavers, whose ability to engineer fire-resilient ecosystems is legendary — and increasingly important in a world besieged by worsening fires, as the film dramatizes in larger-than-life fashion.

“In the end, [Mayor Jerry] realizes that protecting animals is also protecting people,” Fairfax said. “We need to partner with nature to deal with the climate crisis. We need to partner with nature to deal with the biodiversity crisis.”

“Hoppers” isn’t perfect. Jerry ultimately reroutes the freeway to spare Mabel’s glade, which sounds good until you stop and realize we shouldn’t be building new freeways at all. Living near freeways is terrible for human and animal health, which means the beavers and other glade-dwellers will still be impacted — as will Beaverton residents. Even before accounting for the additional climate pollution.

Will I always wonder if “Hoppers” was originally supposed to end with the Beaverton Beltway replaced with a biking and walking path? Yes, yes I will.

But that’s a minor complaint. Jerry may not have become a dedicated nature advocate, but Fairfax thinks he had a “light bulb moment.” Maybe next election, he’ll be ready to run on a platform of creating more parks.

“It’s very easy to let perfect be the enemy of progress,” Fairfax said. “If everyone could start acknowledging how important nature is, that would make a big difference.”

I actually wonder if Pixar executives did climate advocates a favor by toning down the environmental messaging. A light touch can go a long way. If you whack moviegoers over the head with a heavy-handed lesson, they’re liable to reject it unless they already agree with you. And if your message is so distracting that it gets in the way of telling a good story, you’re wasting your time. Nobody will remember what you wanted them to care about. The most important thing is to make people feel something.

Which is why I loved “Hoppers” — not because it was such a good climate parable, although it was, but because of Mabel, who spends most of the movie processing her fury and grief over a world she’s trying desperately to save but feels like she’s failing. During a low moment, she turns to George the beaver and asks, “Why doesn’t anyone else care?” Her despair is palpable.

But Mabel refuses to give up. She steadies herself with her grandmother’s wise words about the calming power of nature: “It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big.”

Leaving the theater, I felt like I was part of something big. Turns out I was. “Hoppers” brought Pixar the best opening weekend for an original animated film at the domestic box office in nearly a decade, earning $46 million in the U.S. and Canada.

If you haven’t seen the movie, check it out. And if Pixar hasn’t mapped out the sequel yet, Fairfax has a pitch: an origin story for Loaf the beaver and Tom Lizard. She thinks maybe they were forced from their original home — perhaps by catastrophic flooding, which would create an opening for another climate angle.

Me, I’d love to see Mayor Jerry recruit a solar energy developer to Beaverton, only for the developer to propose a power line through the glade. Jerry could say he’s atoning for all the freeway pollution, and Mabel could feel conflicted because she thinks clean energy is good. A few of her animal friends could hop into human bodies to learn why people are so obsessed with phones and computers and other power-hungry devices…

OK, so it needs a little work. But hey, why not dream?

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• Day 1: Rooftop solar loses in court, again

• Day 2: NBC giveth, and NBC taketh away

More than 6,000 people subscribe to Climate-Colored Goggles, which is incredible. But at the moment, just 10% of subscribers pay for my work. I can’t do this without you. If you can afford it, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription here.

Like most of my reporting and commentary, all five stories this week will be free to read.

Maybe you saw today’s headline and assumed I meant a new mayor to replace Karen Bass, who’s never prioritized climate and faces a surprise challenge from progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Nope. I’ll write about the mayoral race soon.

Today we’re talking about one of the most important roles in global climate policy: chief executive of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, or DWP.

The city announced last week that CEO Janisse Quiñones is stepping down after less than two years leading DWP. She’s accepted a new position in Puerto Rico, where she was born and raised, as CEO of the company that operates the island’s power grid.

At DWP, Quiñones was responsible for leading the city toward its ambitious goal of 100% climate-friendly electricity by 2035 — a decade ahead of California’s statewide target. There’s no guarantee that L.A. will get there. But Quiñones was working hard to make it happen, spearheading the development of giant solar farms, batteries and other renewable power projects at a breakneck pace. She knew that observers around the world were watching closely to see if she would succeed or fail.

So why is she leaving?

Reading local news, you might wonder if she faced pressure from City Hall to resign. Stories in the L.A. Times and elsewhere emphasized DWP’s response to the Palisades fire, for which Quiñones has faced vicious criticism — never mind that there wasn’t much the agency could have done to contain the climate-stoked inferno, and that Bass has given no indication she was unhappy with Quiñones. Rupert Murdoch’s California Post cruelly suggested that Quiñones was abandoning L.A., publishing the incendiary headline, “LADWP boss quits job to flee to Puerto Rico.”

Unlike the journalists writing those stories, I’ve gotten to know Quiñones. The first time we talked, at DWP headquarters in 2024, she told me about the eight months she spent rebuilding Puerto Rico’s electric grid after it was largely destroyed by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Initially, she was deployed as a reserve officer in the U.S. Coast Guard.

“I was there seven days after the storm hit,” she said. “I saw firsthand the impact.”

When the Coast Guard sent her back to her day job at San Diego Gas & Electric, she got SDG&E to assign her to a mutual assistance program, which enabled her to return to the U.S. territory and help the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. After that, she worked briefly as vice president of Cobra Energy in Puerto Rico.

Eventually she returned to the mainland. But when I read her written statement last week explaining why she wanted to run Puerto Rico’s Luma Energy, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. The island’s grid is still in awful shape, as Bad Bunny highlighted at the Super Bowl last month. People can’t count on reliable, round-the-clock electricity.

If Quiñones can help keep the lights on, that sounds like a dream job for her.

“Returning home to serve Puerto Rico at this pivotal moment is both a professional honor and a deeply personal commitment,” she said in her statement.

All that said, I can’t imagine leading DWP has been easy. Many Palisades fire victims are so angry over the agency’s perceived failures that DWP reported receiving “threats to [Quiñones’] personal safety, some of which have required direct intervention by law enforcement personnel.”

Even before the fire, running DWP was a notoriously thankless, frustrating job. You have to deal with the mayor, City Council, Metro and basically every other major local agency. You oversee nearly 12,000 employees charged with supplying water and power — crucial services that customers only stop to think about when there’s an outage, or when their bills go up. Running DWP means climate is your job. It means housing is your job. It means the Olympics are your job. It means making nice with IBEW Local 18, one of L.A.’s most bare-knuckled unions.

It’s been remarkably difficult for DWP to keep a leader in place for very long. When Marty Adams retired in 2024 after five years at the helm of the nation’s largest public utility, he was DWP’s longest-serving head honcho this century, by far.

It didn’t help that his predecessor, David Wright, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to bribery. But mostly the job is a political nightmare.

“It’s a hard enough role with all the scrutiny and exposure,” said Matt Petersen, who served as chief sustainability officer under Mayor Eric Garcetti. “What Janisse had to deal with in terms of the fire and death threats is an X factor.”

Whoever follows Quiñones, they’ll have their work cut out for them.

L.A. got 59% of its electricity from climate-friendly sources in 2024, the latest year for which data is available. The number was surely much higher in 2025, when DWP shut down its last coal plant and commissioned a massive solar-plus-storage plant that was expected to provide 7% of the city’s power.

But 100% clean energy is still a long way off. When I visited the massive Eland solar-plus-storage plant in the desert north of L.A., Quiñones told me the city needed “10 more projects like this.” DWP officials are currently scrambling to negotiate contracts for more solar farms, so that developers can start construction by July 4 — after which solar farms will no longer qualify for federal tax credits and the cost to Angelenos will rise, thanks to the “Big Beautiful Bill” signed by President Trump.

DWP isn’t just investing in solar plants: It’s building out the grid to support electric vehicles and looking for companies to install rooftop solar, batteries and EV chargers across the city, which can be operated in tandem as a virtual power plant.

Petersen said DWP’s next leader needs to be “somebody who understands the utility business. Somebody who is passionate about getting to 100% clean power. Somebody who is good working with elected officials, somebody who is good working with labor, who is good working with clean energy advocates.”

It’s a big, big job.

“It’s enormously important in its impact and influence,” said Petersen, who now runs the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator.

The mayoral election could be a game-changer.

Bass will pick Quiñones’ successor. But if Bass fails to win reelection, the next mayor could choose someone else, continuing the game of musical chairs at DWP.

Personally, I think the best thing for L.A.’s climate goals would be stability — so long as Bass chooses someone good. The last time the CEO’s chair was up for grabs, DWP starting freaking out environmentalists by raising questions about its commitment to 100% clean energy by 2035 — a target date originally set by Garcetti, not Bass.

In the end, things worked out. Facing pressure from activists to prioritize 2035, Bass hired Quiñones. At this point, the momentum to keep going is probably — hopefully? — too great to overcome. Quiñones deserves much of the credit.

“In two years, she was able to get a lot done and make a lot of progress,” Petersen said. “Hopefully the next person will be able to pick up the baton.”

No pressure.

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I’m extremely grateful to the 6,000 of you (!) who have signed up for this newsletter. I totally understand that not everyone can afford to pay to support my work, but I’m pretty sure more than 10% of you can. If you enjoy what I’m doing and want to make sure I can keep doing it, I’m asking you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription here.

Like most of my reporting and commentary, all five stories this week will be free to read. In case you missed it, yesterday I wrote a breaking news story about a big blow for rooftop solar in California.

OK, here we go.

“Late Night with Seth Meyers” marked its 12-year anniversary on NBC last month. Meyers celebrated by roasting President Trump, interviewing Tony Shalhoub about his new cookbook and — drumroll please — promoting electric vehicles.

Yes, promoting EVs! With jokes, of course.

“Electric vehicles are everywhere these days, and more drivers are discovering the benefits of owning an EV,” Meyers told viewers. “I found this out firsthand this past weekend. Check it out.”

The next few minutes were devoted to a prerecorded sketch featuring “Late Night” writer and “30 Rock” actor John Lutz, who lures Meyers to a warehouse to show off his Kia EV9.

“When you texted me to meet you here, you said it was urgent,” Meyers gripes.

“Yeah, I urgently needed you to see my cool new EV,” Lutz quips.

Lutz fawns over the car, practically hugging it as he tells an irritated Meyers about its features: 300-400 miles of range, the ability to recharge overnight, a front trunk he can fill with road trip snacks. Also, way less maintenance than a gasoline car.

“Won’t have to ignore a check engine light anymore,” Lutz brags.

“Oh, you should never ignore those,” Meyers replies in alarm.

By the end of the segment, Meyers can’t help but love the EV. Watch for yourself:

The “Late Night” writers didn’t just wake up one day and decide to promote EVs. The segment grew out of a paid partnership between NBCUniversal and Veloz, a nonprofit EV education and advocacy group based in Sacramento. Veloz is funded by a long list of automakers, electric utilities and government agencies. The “Late Night” sketch is part of its “Electric For All” campaign.

“Parks and Recreation” star Nick Offerman has worked with the group recently on a series of educational promos. But Veloz executive director Josh Boone was especially excited about the chance to reach a large audience through Seth Meyers.

“We know that we have to use credible, trusted voices in the media. We know we have to be culturally relevant,” Boone told me. “It’s really important in our work to not only bring factual information to consumers, but to ensure there’s an element of fun.”

“We know from our data that when people are informed, they choose electric,” Boone added. “You’ve got to inspire them to pay attention, and then you have an opportunity to educate them.”

Now if only Meyers’ colleagues at NBC News would do more to educate viewers about the climate crisis.

Last week, the watchdog group Media Matters for America released its annual report tracking climate coverage at the major U.S. broadcast networks: ABC, CBS and NBC. Total coverage declined for the third straight year, even as extreme weather disasters kept getting worse and the Trump administration dismantled climate rules.

Here’s a chart:

Look at the 2025 columns and add up the minutes: The TV broadcast networks aired a grand total of eight and a half hours of climate coverage in all of 2025.

That is very bad!

Sure, broadcast networks have been shedding viewers since the dawn of the internet. But they’re “still the place where a lot of older, motivated voters get their news,” said Evlondo Cooper, Media Matters’ senior climate and energy researcher. And we know Trump is watching — not just news shows, but late-night hosts like Meyers.

“They’re the place where the institutional agenda is getting set,” Cooper said.

Which is why it’s so disappointing to see the networks pull back. CBS, which led the pack for the fifth straight year, finished 2025 by gutting its climate team.

NBC, meanwhile, recently saw its top climate reporter resign. In an interview with HEATED last week, Chase Cain explained that after years of fighting to persuade his bosses to prioritize climate — usually with little success — he was simply exhausted. He just started a YouTube channel.

When I asked Cooper what would be a good number of hours of climate coverage for the networks to target — because eight and a half hours is pitiful — he said he’s less interested in a number and more interested in seeing journalists stop treating climate as somehow separate from all the other things they cover. It’s a national security story, and an economic story, and a housing story. Especially as climate journalists lose their jobs, it’s vital for their colleagues to strap on their climate-colored goggles.

“If you’re doing 100 stories about Trump’s comments on Greenland, I think it’s worth talking about why these shipping lanes are opening up in the first place,” Cooper said. “It’s global warming, which Trump has said is fake.”

I don’t think most journalists or newsroom bosses — or even billionaire newsroom owners — are sweeping climate under the rug because they don’t believe the science, or because they’re afraid of Trump. As I’ve written previously, the biggest problem for climate journalism in America is that most people don’t care nearly enough about the climate crisis. That includes billionaires, journalists and news consumers alike.

Which is why I found the Seth Meyers segment so encouraging.

Again, network television viewership has declined since its heyday. But “Late Night” still averages nearly 1 million viewers in its post-midnight time slot, with many more people watching clips online. And to Meyers’ immense credit, he agreed to plug EVs despite the fact that Trump — no fan of clean energy — has repeatedly attacked him and his fellow late-night hosts, calling for them to be canceled and generally making life hell for their corporate employers.

Credit also to NBCUniversal. In a written statement, executive Sari Feinberg — senior vice president of development, advertising and partnerships — said the company was “thrilled to collaborate with Veloz’s Electric For All initiative to bring electric vehicle education into the cultural conversation in an entertaining and authentic way.”

Veloz worked with the “Late Night” writers, giving them facts about electric cars to inform the sketch. But the “Late Night” team had creative control.

The segment ended with Meyers directing viewers to electricforall.org, where you can find info about EV models, price points and financial incentives — which do still exist in many places, even after congressional Republicans repealed federal tax credits.

I asked Boone if Trump’s politicization of late-night TV had given him any pause over teaming up with Meyers. Could the comedian still be considered a trusted messenger? If he plugged EVs, would it be seen through a partisan lens?

Boone acknowledged the risks but said the opportunity was “too big to pass up.”

“It’s great to see people talking about EVs,” he said. “There’s always a risk, especially in a world where some people view EVs as political. But that’s part of our job.”

Amen to that. A lot of people debate the best way to talk about the climate crisis, and climate solutions. But the most important thing is for people to talk about this stuff at all. Silence will get us nowhere.

I’m extremely grateful to the 6,000 of you (!) who have signed up for this newsletter. I totally understand that not everyone can afford to pay to support my work, but I’m pretty sure more than 10% of you can. If you enjoy what I’m doing and want to make sure I can keep doing it, I’m asking you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription here.

Like most of my reporting and commentary, all five stories this week will be free to read.

OK, here we go.

For a brief shining moment, it looked like the Golden State might change course and embrace rooftop solar once again.

Several years after the Public Utilities Commission reduced rooftop solar incentives, the state Supreme Court ordered a lower court last summer to reevaluate the agency’s decision — something the lower court hadn’t wanted to do. But now it had no choice.

Well, the lower court reevaluated. And on Monday it released a decision: The agency did nothing wrong. Governor Gavin Newsom’s appointees were simply following the law when they slashed solar incentives.

Meaning nothing will change. Higher solar incentives aren’t coming back.

“We may have just set the clocks forward an hour but this decision sets California back a decade when it comes to building a clean energy future,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president of the Environmental Working Group, one of the groups that sued the Public Utilities Commission.

“It isn’t just Washington D.C. setting us back on energy affordability and reliability. California is providing more than its fair share of forced errors,” Del Chiaro said in a written statement.

I’ve been writing about California’s rooftop solar battles since 2014 — so long that I am phenomenally sick of them, as I explained in an L.A. Times column last year.

The short version is, an incentive program called net metering helped make the state a rooftop solar leader, with more than 2.2 million small-scale systems. (That is a lot of solar!) The incentive program required SoCal Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric to pay homes for their extra solar power. The utility companies claimed these payments resulted in higher electric rates for everyone without solar by depriving the utilities of revenue. Some independent experts calculated the solar “cost shift” at billions of dollars a year.

Leading consumer watchdog groups agreed that net metering was causing rates to go up, as did a few environmental groups. But many more environmentalists believed the “cost shift” was a fantasy cooked up by the monopoly utilities to protect their profits. Critics grew furious as Newsom’s appointees slashed net metering, and as politicians did nothing to stop the rooftop solar industry’s downward slide.

As for me? Well, like I said, I got sick of the whole debate. I think I managed to annoy absolutely everybody by taking the position that the cost shift was a real problem, and also that Newsom was doing a gigantic disservice to California — and to his supposed climate leadership — by failing to support rooftop solar in some other way.

Almost everyone agrees we need lots more rooftop solar to confront the climate crisis. Alas, California has spent years backsliding.

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And now here we are in March 2026 — three years after Newsom’s appointees to the Public Utilities Commission took a wrecking ball to net metering, and a whopping 13 years since the state Legislature passed the law that the First District Court of Appeal painstakingly scrutinized in Monday’s decision.

I won’t bore you with all the details. But basically, when environmental groups sued over the vote to demolish net metering, the appeals court originally sidestepped most of their arguments, ruling it had no legal option but to shrug its shoulders and accept the utilities commission’s interpretation of a certain 2013 law.

The California Supreme Court disagreed. Last year, it instructed the appeals court to take a closer look at the arguments for and against net metering, instead of accepting that the Public Utilities Commission knows best.

So the environmental groups tried again, insisting that the commission had wrongly portrayed solar incentives as a societal cost rather than a benefit.

And the court essentially said, “Nope, the commission got it right.”

“It almost seemed like a predetermined narrative based on a predetermined belief,” said Roger Lin, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the litigants. “The decision is very much clouded with a belief in the cost shift narrative.”

Full disclosure: My father-in-law is an energy attorney who assisted one of the other litigants. He got involved after I started writing about the case.

Now that the case is done — although another appeal is always possible — I think it’s important for rooftop solar advocates to think about what they do next.

Newsom will be out of office in less than a year, and it’s possible his successor will be less in thrall to the utility companies — and the utility labor unions — that have made the policy landscape so inhospitable for the rooftop solar industry.

Tom Steyer, one of the top-polling candidates, has made a lot of noise about bashing the utilities and bolstering rooftop solar. Another leading candidate, Katie Porter, said at a climate forum I co-moderated that the utilities commission has “lost the faith and the confidence” of many environmentalists and needs “a reboot and a refresh.”

The rooftop solar industry and its environmental allies have fought for years to restore net metering. But if I were them, I would resist the temptation to keep trying.

Even with Newsom gone, “energy affordability” will still be the name of the game in Sacramento. Fairly or unfairly, even most Democrats have long since decided that net metering is a main cause of high electric rates.

Instead of beating a dead horse, rooftop solar advocates should use Monday’s decision as an opportunity to pivot. There’s a budding “balcony solar” movement, for instance; lawmakers in 28 states have introduced bills to give people permission to install do-it-yourself, plug-in solar panels in their homes. It’s a popular, easy-to-explain idea. A bill from California Senator Scott Wiener, SB 868, offers an easy rallying cry.

That’s just one example; there are lots of ways to scale up rooftop solar power — and large solar farms, and electric cars, and bike lanes, and all the other technologies and lifestyle upgrades we’re going to need to tackle the climate crisis — without endlessly relitigating the battles of the past.

In short: Let’s move forward, not backward. Who’s with me?

In the five months since I left the Los Angeles Times — no, I can’t believe it’s been five months already — I’ve been working days, nights and weekends here at Climate-Colored Goggles to tell stories you won’t find anywhere else.

I broke the news that the Washington Post and CBS News were gutting their climate teams, and that Hollywood’s leading sustainability group had decided to cut ties with Toyota over the car company’s climate hypocrisy. I called out a top L.A. politician for denying that the Palisades fire was stoked by global warming (a story totally ignored by legacy media) and shared my frank analysis of the leading candidates for California governor. I celebrated the end of coal in California, and profiled the New Jersey-born clean energy engineer playing hockey at the Winter Olympics.

Between news events, I’ve explored how climate and energy are portrayed in movies, TV shows, auto shows, studio marketing campaigns, even at Disneyland — sometimes for better, sometimes not. I’ve continued shining a spotlight on fossil fuel advertising in sports, at Dodger Stadium and elsewhere. I’ve critiqued shoddy climate messaging, whether it’s coming from Matt Yglesias or Bill Gates. I’ve even tried my hand at the true crime genre, investigating a tragic desert murder with potentially significant implications for Western water and energy.

I’m extremely grateful to everyone supporting Climate-Colored Goggles with a paid subscription. Really, I’m grateful to everyone who has signed up — all 6,000 of you!

But right now, fewer than 10% of total subscribers are paying for my work. I know not everyone can afford to pay. But I hope and believe that more of you can.

So this week, I’m going to publish one story every day for the next five days (fingers crossed), in hopes of signing up 50 new paid subscribers this week.

If you’ve been enjoying Climate-Colored Goggles and want to help me keep doing it, please take this opportunity to chip in. I’m 33 years old and trying to build a career as an independent climate storyteller. I can’t do it alone.

You can sign up for a paid subscription here. Or if you’re already a free subscriber, here’s the upgrade button:

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No matter what happens, I’ll keep most stories free for all readers. The climate crisis is too important to keep too much of this stuff behind a paywall.

I’m confident that if I work hard and tell stories that matter, this newsletter will work out. I hope you’ll help prove me right.

This year’s Academy Awards are still a week away, and already they’ve set two records.

First: most nominations for a single movie, with 16 nods for vampire flick “Sinners.”

Second: most nominees to pass the Climate Reality Check, which tests whether a film acknowledges the reality of the climate crisis.

Developed as a climate version of the Bechdel test — which measures representation of women in film — the climate test has been around since 2024. Two years ago, three Oscar-nominated movies passed muster. Last year, the number dropped to one.

This year, five nominees acknowledged climate change, according to a report released Thursday. Maybe not a tidal wave of climate storytelling, but an improvement.

“I think it’s an indicator that because climate change is becoming such a big part of our lived experience and collective dialogue, it’s showing up in more films,” said Anna Jane Joyner, CEO of Good Energy, which created the Climate Reality Check.

“I think we will definitely see the trend tick up, too,” she added. “This is the world we live in… Filmmakers are experiencing [climate change] in their lives. Their experiences are definitely going to influence the stories they tell.”

Here are the 2026 Oscar nominees that passed the test:

• “Arco,” a French animated film about a time-traveling boy who journeys to the year 2075 and discovers (among other things) a “protopian” world where humans haven’t solved climate change but have found ways to adapt and limit the damage (nominated for best animated feature);

• “Bugonia,” which stars Emma Stone as a pharmaceutical executive kidnapped by a conspiracist beekeeper who thinks she’s an alien bent on killing pollinators and destroying humanity (nominated for best picture and other awards);

• “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the latest entry in the classic franchise, which includes discussion of how changing climate conditions can impact dinosaurs and humans alike (nominated for best visual effects);

• “The Lost Bus,” a story about the 2018 Camp fire that killed 85 people and largely destroyed the California town of Paradise (nominated for best visual effects)

Additionally, “Sirāt” (nominated for best international feature) takes place in a desert ravaged by apocalyptic drought. But although global warming is happening, none of the characters demonstrate explicitly that they know it’s happening — a requirement for passing the Climate Reality Check. So technically, four movies passed, not five.

Sadly, I haven’t seen any of those films. I want to see them now, though.

I write about climate, so of course I think this stuff sounds interesting. But I’m also a human being living in a world growing hotter and more dangerous. I need stories that help me understand and process the scary stuff taking place all around me. That’s true for everyone. It’ll only grow more true as global warming worsens.

“It’s becoming a more and more pervasive part of our lives,” Joyner said.

I also think it’s cool and noteworthy that Hollywood keeps releasing and promoting films that touch on the climate crisis, given the Trump administration’s eagerness to weaponize the U.S. government against entertainment companies whose content runs afoul of its agenda. We’ve seen this authoritarian tendency again and again, from the Jimmy Kimmel suspension to the “60 Minutes” settlement to the FCC’s DEI policing.

I wouldn’t call the continued existence of global warming on the silver screen an act of political courage. These are aren’t in-your-face climate stories like Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” or Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

But the fact that major studios haven’t ordered screenwriters and producers to scrub all climate references — the terrifying “obey in advance” approach that has taken root in some sectors of American society — is a victory.

And although some of the climate angles in the Academy Awards nominees are subtle or small, that’s not a bad thing. There’s a role for all kinds of storytelling, at least if we want to remind a lot more people to care about climate. Romances, thrillers, comedies — they can all spotlight climate, one way or another.

That’s why Joyner was pleased by the wide range of genres represented by the Oscar nominees that passed the Climate Reality Check this year.

“It’s not just the ecoterrorists, or the environmentalists shaming people about their plastic straws,” she said. “That’s a really good sign. There’s complexity and creativity in how to write about [climate] in the most critically acclaimed films.”

The Oscars take place Sunday, March 15. Conan O'Brien is hosting. Personally, I’m pulling for “One Battle After Another” to win best picture.

Bigger picture, I’m pulling for more filmmakers to think seriously about the climate crisis. Looking beyond Oscar nominees, just 2.8% of scripted movies and TV episodes released from 2016 through 2020 included any mention of the words “climate change” or a long list of related keywords, according to USC researchers.

Has the picture improved since 2020? We’ll know soon. Good Energy is updating the USC analysis to include movies and TV shows released through 2024 — an effort that involves scrutinizing tens of thousands of additional scripts. They plan to finish their report in the next few months.

Joyner said to expect progress — although perhaps not as quickly as she once hoped for. A couple of years ago, she told me she wanted to see 50% of movies and TV shows pass the Climate Reality Check by 2027. Since then, she’s adjusted her expectations.

“I don’t think it will be by next year,” she said. “But I think by 2030, it’s doable.”

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In other news

Along the Colorado River:

• California, Arizona and Nevada absolutely hate the Trump administration’s ideas for conserving water and propping up reservoirs. (Ian James, L.A. Times)

• San Diego has so much desalinated water, it might sell some of its Colorado River supplies to Arizona and Nevada cities. (Ian James again)

• If Glen Canyon Dam stops being able to produce hydropower, electricity costs are likely to rise across the rural West. (Brandon Loomis, Arizona Republic)

The energy transition:

• Lawmakers in 28 states have introduced bills that would let people install do-it-yourself, plug-in solar systems — aka “balcony solar.” Some of the lawmakers are Republican, too! (Alison F. Takemura, Canary Media)

• California wants to install six million home heat pumps by 2030. A big obstacle? High electric rates. (Ben Christopher and Alejandro Lazo, CalMatters)

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted to allow Bill Gates’ nuclear company, TerraPower, to start building the nation’s first new commercial reactor in nearly a decade. (Brad Plumer, New York Times)

The great outdoors:

• Because running a beloved local ski resort isn’t hard enough, climate-induced weather whiplash is wreaking havoc on Mt. Baldy. (Jack Dolan, L.A. Times)

• As a huge fan of Sand to Snow National Monument, it is very frustrating to me that there is still no management plan or signage. (Erin Rode, SFGATE)

• Steve Pearce, President Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management, promised he’d protect Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands national monuments. We’ll see if he sticks to that promise. (Debra Utacia Krol, Arizona Republic)

Trump nonsense:

• National Park Service staff are diligently telling Trump administration officials lots of historical facts and scientific realities they might want to censor, probably to avoid getting fired. (Karin Brulliard and Brady Dennis, Washington Post)

• Trump invited a bunch of tech executives to the White House, then claimed that data centers will now save people money rather than cost them money. How will that work? The details are still unclear. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• Smokey Bear, meet Coalie. No, a ridiculous new mascot promoted by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum won’t save the coal industry. (Michael Hiltzik, L.A. Times)

Last but certainly not least, Bill McKibben wrote about Trump and war and oil — and the potential for renewable energy to help create peace.

Until next time

When news broke Thursday that Paramount had won the bidding war to buy Warner Bros. — beating out Netflix in the battle to control the legendary Hollywood studio — one of my first questions was: What will this mean for CNN’s climate journalism?

By way of background, Paramount — itself a storied movie and television studio — was purchased last year by Skydance Media, a company run by film producer David Ellison and backed by his father Larry Ellison, Earth’s sixth-richest man and a friend of President Trump’s. Paramount owns CBS News, and after David Ellison took over the company, he installed anti-woke opinion writer Bari Weiss as the network’s editor in chief. Shortly after that, CBS gutted its climate reporting team as part of a massive round of layoffs across Paramount, as I reported at the time.

Now the Ellisons are poised to control Warner Bros., which owns CNN.

That’s a scary prospect for lots of reasons.

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The past never dies in California’s Imperial Valley.

As I drove east last week along Interstate 8, a desolate desert highway straddling the U.S.-Mexico border, my tour guide Brian McNeece pointed ahead toward Pilot Knob, a small volcanic peak. He asked if I could see the light gray area partway up the peak, where the rock was terraced. He told me it was a quarry. In 1905, the Colorado River’s torrential flow tore through a flimsy irrigation canal, flooding the Imperial Valley and creating the Salton Sea. Rocks were needed to dam the raging river and protect towns and farms. An emergency quarry was set up at Pilot Knob.

The rocks did the job, eventually. Crisis averted.

“It took, in the end, seven attempts to close the gap in the river,” McNeece said.

One hundred twenty years later, the Salton Sea persists. So do the fifth-generation farmers whose ancestors settled the Imperial Valley, and the nearly half-million acres they continue to irrigate with Rocky Mountain snowmelt, using more Colorado River water than the headwater state of Colorado. McNeece, a retired English professor and amateur local historian, was eager to show me the dilapidated structures where water was first diverted in the early 1900s.

But for a place stuck in time, Imperial can’t avoid grappling with the fierce urgency of now: Rising temperatures. Climate-fueled megadrought. Corporations hungry to build solar farms, lithium mines and data centers.

Recent months have proven especially nerve-wracking as farmers face the likelihood of water cutbacks amid perilously low reservoir levels at Lake Mead — an emergency brought about by global warming, and arguably by 120 years of overconsumption.

“This is the crisis time for the Imperial Valley in very many ways,” McNeece told me, as we watched the sun set from Imperial Dam near Yuma.

Even if the past never dies, people do. And amid the tectonic shifts in California’s far southeastern corner, a killing has rocked the valley.

When I last wrote about 59-year-old Kerri Abatti’s tragic slaying, her husband Mike Abatti — a prominent farmer and former elected official, whom I spent years covering for the Desert Sun newspaper — hadn’t been named as a suspect. That changed in late December, when he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Kerri and Mike had been going through contentious divorce proceedings. Police say she was shot at a home they owned in Pinetop, Arizona, with the shot fired through a window from the backyard. The story is eerily similar to the death of Mike’s maternal grandmother Gertrude Studer, who was shot and killed by Mike’s grandfather John at their Imperial Valley home in 1950. Gertrude, too, had filed for divorce amid “marital difficulties,” according to the Calexico Chronicle.

Before Mike was arrested and charged, I often wondered if he was above the law. In a kingdom of farm barons, he was practically royalty, owning thousands of acres that in 2012 accounted for roughly 1% of the valley’s entire water use. He served on the board of the powerful Imperial Irrigation District. He never faced legal consequences for the allegedly corrupt power supply deals he struck with IID after leaving the board, which cost the public tens of millions of dollars.

As Imperial Valley Press editor Arturo Bojórquez wrote recently, Abatti “personified the kind of regional power that feels untouchable.”

More than anything, Abatti wielded his power to try to win the water wars that have defined Imperial’s modern history.

At times, his wife helped him.

In October 2013, shortly before Mike sued IID over a policy that could limit his water use during drought years, Kerri read a letter on his behalf at an IID board meeting. He was out of town attending a funeral. She put on her glasses; her delivery was halting at times, but confident. She explained why the proposal was unfair.

Later in the meeting, another commenter urged the board not to be swayed by “a few people that have been suing the IID to get their ways” — a reference to Mike, who had already sued over a previous version of the water conservation plan.

Kerri returned to the lectern. This time she spoke off the cuff, growing angry.

“We have three children who we are hoping can continue to farm here in the valley, and be productive citizens so that other people can have jobs,” she said. “As a family, we have fought tirelessly for the good of the valley.”

“And that lawsuit that you’re referring to is because we want those water rights for the entire valley, and we want the water to stay in the valley for all of the people, not just for ourselves,” she added. “Why would I do that with my children’s college fund, or wherever that else would come from? It’s for the entire valley.”

After glaring fiercely at the offending commenter, she stormed off.

The lawsuit Mike filed the next month — one of many water-rights battles he and his brother Jimmy and their father Ben Sr. have waged against IID — would end in failure when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

But Mike did win a surprising first-round victory thanks to a local judge with ties to his family. As I reported for the Desert Sun, Judge L. Brooks Anderholt had done work for Jimmy’s farming business before his election to the bench. Much earlier in his life, he had worked as an irrigation foreman for Ben Sr. In 2012, when he was campaigning for office, he received contributions from both of their businesses.

Despite that history, Anderholt didn’t recuse himself from Mike Abatti’s lawsuit. And in a decision that toppled a century of precedent, he essentially ruled that farmers, not the public, controlled the largest water rights on the Colorado River.

If Anderholt’s decision had stood, Mike and his allies would have had a powerful new legal tool to try to block IID from joining agreements to leave water in Lake Mead and prevent shortages across the West. Fortunately, the ruling was reversed on appeal.

But like I said: The past never dies. Mike and Kerri’s children now find themselves in probate court, dealing with the transfer of their mother’s estate to her rightful heirs — not an easy task given that their father stands accused of murdering her.

The judge assigned to the probate case? Anderholt.

I wanted to review the probate filings, as well as certain public records only available in El Centro, the county seat. To get there, I drove through the Cuyamaca Mountains from San Diego, where I was attending a solar industry conference last week. I woke up early, hopping on I-80 and heading east through light rain. I crested Tecate Divide at 4,140 feet and started my descent.

Soon the sky cleared. By the time I reached the wind turbines on the desert floor, 39 degrees had become a sunny 64. The trip took two hours.

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The journey from coast to desert wasn’t always so easy. In his best-selling 1911 novel “The Winning of Barbara Worth,” Harold Bell Wright took great pains to describe the arduous trip to a lightly fictionalized version of Imperial — in his telling, a beautiful but unforgiving land known as the Hollow of God’s Hand. The multiday horseback ride could turn deadly if travelers hit a sandstorm or ran short on water.

Here’s how Bell described the moment the desert came into view:

“From horizon to horizon, so far that the eye ached in the effort to comprehend it, there was no cloud to cast a shadow, and the deep sky poured its resistless flood of light upon the vast dun plain with savage fury, as if to beat into helplessness any living creature that might chance to be caught thereon.”

Denizens of today’s Imperial Valley are far from helpless: They use more Colorado River water than the rest of California combined, growing most of America’s winter vegetables. They’ve conquered the desert.

And still they’re vulnerable.

Lake Mead is two-thirds empty; a few hundred miles upstream, Lake Powell is even emptier. Federal officials are considering massive water cuts that would target cities and farmers in the Colorado River’s Lower Basin, including California. And although the river is drier than ever, the threat to Imperial isn’t new: Since the turn of the 21st century, farmers have faced intense pressure to sell water to growing cities.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that Mike Abatti has worked zealously — obsessively — to protect his water supplies. A century ago, the Hollow of God’s Hand was nearly laid to waste by flood; now it’s drought standing in for the devil.

Abatti, meanwhile, is an alfalfa farmer in the drying West, clinging desperately to the past and lashing out at anyone who tries to stop him. Even his own family.

After leaving El Centro, I drove to Holtville, the small town where Mike grew up and the self-proclaimed “Carrot Capital of the World.” I had a meeting with Mike’s cousin Wally Leimgruber, a former county supervisor and opponent of Mike’s efforts to wrest control of the water from the public — a fight Leimgruber has embraced even though it’s pitted him against his own brother Ronnie.

Leimgruber had some papers for me — including a nasty email Mike sent him in 2019, at which point Leimgruber was consulting for IID. Mike was not pleased.

“Go find another job,” Mike told his cousin. “Start at Lego Land. Its a happy place.”

Leimgruber also shared a 2018 social media post by Mike’s sister-in-law Judy Abatti, the wife of his brother Ben Jr. It’s well-known in Imperial that Mike and Ben Jr. aren’t on good terms — a fact that was easy to discern from Judy’s post, which shared a story I had written about Mike, their other brother Jimmy and their father Ben Sr.

“These people are just greedy and ruthless and ridiculous,” Judy wrote.

Leimgruber agreed. He described Mike Abatti as “good guy” when he was younger — a wrestling coach in Holtville, a guy “just like any other young farmer.”

But over time, Mike grew obsessed with controlling the water. His three children left Imperial. Kerri left him, moving to their home in Arizona and filing for divorce. They fought over spousal support. After he was charged with murder, statements from their daughters were read in court, sharing their fears that “they [were] going to be harmed” if Mike were released on bail, as a prosecutor put it.

Asked why Mike had changed, Leimgruber mostly blamed greed.

“Truly, [it’s] the love of money that’s the root of all evil,” he said.

Indeed, for all the noble rhetoric — like Kerri insisting, “we have fought tirelessly for the good of the valley” — Mike’s priorities are unmistakably selfish. Back in 2015, he was willing to settle his lawsuit against IID so long as the agency promised to supply him, Jimmy and their father with “the water they reasonably need.” All other farmers would be hung out to dry.

IID refused to settle. Mike lost in court. But he kept on agitating. In August 2023 — nine days before Kerri left him — he and Jimmy wrote a letter to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation urging the agency to consider decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam and draining Lake Powell. No, Mike hadn’t suddenly become a conservationist committed to restoring Glen Canyon to its past glory. Rather, he was worried that efforts to keep Powell from crashing would lead federal officials to release less water downstream to Mead — potentially limiting water availability in Imperial.

These days, Mike has bigger problems. Two decades after he won election to the IID board — and nine years after Anderholt ruled decisively in his favor — this is how his address appears on a document I downloaded in El Centro:

H Pod, Cell 5
100 Code Talkers Drive
Holbrook, AZ 86025

For the record, that’s a jail cell in rural Arizona. Abatti is being held on a $5.5-million bond. His lawyers say he’s suffering from liver failure.

Should he ever again walk free, he may find himself returning to an Imperial whose hallowed past has given way to a grudging present. After years of relentless pressure to reduce water use, many farmers are choosing to cut back incrementally instead of fighting for every last drop. IID has shed its reputation as a problem child in Western water talks; the agency’s vice chair, JB Hamby, is now California’s lead Colorado River negotiator. Abatti’s lawsuits have failed to halt progress.

It’s not clear how long the good times will last. Mead and Powell keep dropping, and the seven Colorado River states can’t seem to decide how to keep them from crashing — in other words, which states should cut back how much.

If the feds brings the hammer down on California — or if it starts to look like Mead could hit “dead pool,” cutting off Imperial’s water supply entirely — the farm barons might stop playing nice. Some of them already think Abatti was right all along.

Will Imperial keep inching toward the future, or revert to the past? A lot is riding on Hamby, a 29-year-old political wunderkind who was elected to the IID board at age 24 after annihilating Abatti’s friend Bruce Kuhn.

When I caught up with Hamby last week at his office in El Centro, he sounded a bit stressed, or maybe just tired. He’d recently returned from Washington, D.C., where he met with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and several Colorado River Basin governors in a failed effort to negotiate a water-saving deal before a Valentine’s Day deadline set by the Trump administration. The deadline had passed a few days ago, but discussions continued. Hamby didn’t have much time to chat; he needed to fly to Phoenix.

Still, Hamby said he wasn’t “living in a worried state.” The Colorado River Basin had weathered past crises. California had saved water. It was willing to save more.

“Our farmers in this community have stepped up in a tremendous way,” Hamby said.

Except for Mike Abatti — unless he had stepped up?

Like a desert farm kingdom tormented by flood and drought — yet no less dependent on hydrology for its survival — life is full of contradictions. Even as Abatti fought like hell to keep water flowing to his fields, he hedged his economic bets, developing solar projects that stood to take huge expanses of farmland out of production — and create enormous potential for water savings.

Mike’s second career in energy was made possible by a Sacramento-area engineering firm called ZGlobal. I explored their relationship in a 2018 exposé.

But the story didn’t end there; maybe the past does die on occasion, but it rarely stays buried. Stay tuned for Part 3.

As the Dodgers got to work at their Arizona spring training facility on Tuesday — Shohei Ohtani slinging 98 mph fastballs, Hyeseong Kim grinning through push-ups, manager Dave Roberts making a motivational speech — a dozen climate protesters gathered outside Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Some of their signs read:

Climate Change Is Bad for Baseball

Dodger Fans Against Fossil Fuels

Dodgers — Stop Taking Big Oil $

This had happened before. Ever since I wrote a June 2024 column urging the Dodgers to end a sponsorship deal with oil giant Phillips 66, activists had regularly gathered at the corner of Stadium Way and Vin Scully Avenue to lament the team’s refusal. Nearly 30,000 people had signed a petition calling on the team to cut ties with Phillips, owner of the 76 gasoline brand, a longtime Dodgers advertiser.

But on Tuesday, something was different: L.A. activists were joined by demonstrators in nine other cities, from sea to shining sea. In San Francisco, Sacramento, St. Louis, Cleveland and Boston, they rallied at stadiums whose teams accept ad dollars from oil and gas companies. Protests took place at:

• Oracle Park (team: San Francisco Giants; sponsor: Phillips 66)

• Golden 1 Center (Sacramento Kings; BP)

• Busch Stadium (St. Louis Cardinals; Phillips 66)

• Progressive Field (Cleveland Guardians; Marathon Petroleum)

• TD Garden (Boston Celtics; Gulf Oil)

Climate activists also showed up at four other stadiums:

• Lincoln Financial Field, home to the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, whose sponsors include NRG Energy, a utility that gets most of its power from fossil fuels

• Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which will host games during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a tournament whose major sponsors include Saudi Aramco

• Citi Field (home to MLB’s New York Mets), whose naming rights are paid for by Citigroup, the world’s third-largest fossil fuel funder in 2024

• Providence Park, where Bank of America — the world’s second-largest fossil fuel funder in 2024 — is a sponsor of Major League Soccer’s Portland Timbers

Some of the rallies were as small as one person. The biggest had a dozen. But the key takeaway was the geographic reach. As far as I’m aware, this was the first national day of protest against fossil fuel advertising in U.S. sports history.

“Our chief aim today is simple,” lead organizer Zan Dubin told the crowd at Dodger Stadium. “One, we do want to stigmatize sportswashing. And two, we want to inspire.”

Dubin has worked relentlessly to pressure the Dodgers to dump Phillips 66, enlisting support from the Sierra Club Angeles Chapter as well as state Senator Lena Gonzalez, who wrote to Dodgers owner Mark Walter imploring him to end sponsorships with oil companies. In a recent press release, Dubin included a quote from Sierra Club chapter director Juanita Chavez, daughter of legendary labor leader Dolores Huerta.

“The Dodgers rejected stadium cigarette ads decades ago for good reason. Bans on tobacco advertising lead to fewer people smoking,” Chavez said. “The team showed a similar responsiveness to fans last year, albeit too little and too late, by turning away federal immigration agents and pledging funds to help immigrant families.”

“We’re asking Dodger owners to show the same concern for their fans’ health and our planet by refusing to allow Big Oil to advertise in their stadium,” she added.

The campaign to end fossil fuel advertising in sports hasn’t yielded any wins yet, at least not in the U.S. But big movements always start small, with determined bands of righteous people going up against long odds and entrenched injustices. On Tuesday, activists endured pouring rain in San Francisco. In Atlanta, a protester brought his 83-year-old mother, who held a sign asking, “Did You Know There Is a Climate Crisis?” In New York, three nuns read, “A prayer for our earth,” a selection from Pope Francis’ climate change encyclical “Laudato Si.”

In L.A., protesters raised signs in English, Spanish and Japanese — an appeal to the Dodgers’ multicultural fan base. Several passing drivers honked in support. One guy parked, got out of his car and stopped to sign the petition.

In another encouraging sign, the L.A. Times sent a photographer to the protest and ran a picture in Wednesday’s paper. I hadn’t expected the Times to keep covering the anti-Phillips 66 campaign after I left the paper, so that was cool to see.

When I asked Jonah Henry, an activist wearing a Dodgers T-shirt, why he joined the protest, he called the team “one of the most well-respected institutions in the city of Los Angeles, across race, across class, across political party.”

“By advertising for Phillips 66, the Dodgers are giving public legitimacy to a fossil fuel industry that is actively destroying our planet and destabilizing our democracy, doing everything in its ability to delay the renewable energy transition,” he said.

I also spoke with Lisa Hart, who runs the L.A. Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance. While admitting she “couldn’t care less about baseball” — she called it “one of the most boring sports imaginable” — she said she’s frightened by how oil and gas companies use teams like the Dodgers to ingratiate themselves with the public.

“This is so insidious. It’s like baseball, apple pie and fossil fuels,” she said. “We have to bring it to people’s awareness.”

Some athletes are raising awareness, too. Just before this month’s Winter Olympics began in Italy, a climate group unveiled a petition signed by more than 21,000 people, — including many pro athletes, among them gold medal-winning U.S. skier Alex Hall — calling on the International Olympic Committee to reconsider accepting fossil fuel sponsorships. A few days later came an open letter, this one signed by 88 Olympic and Paralympic athletes, urging the IOC to ban fossil fuel sponsorships.

When will the first domino fall? I don’t know.

But the question needs to be “when,” not “if.” Wonderful as it is that solar and wind power are cheaper than oil and gas, the fossil fuel industry won’t be defeated on cost alone — not fast enough for a stable climate, anyway. The industry will live or die on political and cultural battlefields. In statehouses and stadiums.

In other news

The Southland:

• Last year, Southern California air quality regulators rejected a proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances after being overwhelmed by more than 20,000 public comments in opposition. It turns out many of those comments were generated by artificial intelligence. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• After the Eaton fire, Altadena residents asked SoCal Edison to bury electric lines to limit wildfire risk. Now Edison wants some residents to pay more than $20,000 to connect their homes to newly buried lines. (Melody Petersen, L.A. Times)

• After decades of local pressure, California plugged a horribly leaky South L.A. oil drilling site whose operators refused to clean it up. (Tony Briscoe, L.A. Times)

On our public lands:

• Several groups are suing the Trump administration to restore information about civil rights and climate change at national parks. (Brady Dennis, Washington Post)

• President Trump has nominated an executive at a parks concessionaire to lead the National Park Service. The concessionaire was previously involved in a nasty legal dispute involving Yosemite. (Kurt Repanshek, National Parks Traveler)

• Three of Theodore Roosevelt’s great-grandsons are urging Republican senators to block mining in a national forest established by Roosevelt in one of his last acts as president. (Maxine Joselow, New York Times)

More Trump stuff:

• Trump is ordering the Department of Defense to buy electricity from coal plants, which will definitely benefit the military. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• California and 12 other states are suing the Trump administration over billions of dollars in canceled federal energy funding, including money set aside by Congress for hydrogen and energy efficiency. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• ExxonMobil and other firms are bankrolling Trump’s “Freedom 250” propaganda bash for America’s 250th birthday. (Judd Legum, Popular Information)

Around the West:

• Federal officials now project that Lake Powell will “most probably” drop below minimum power pool — meaning the dam won’t be able to produce hydropower — before the end of 2026. (Jonathan P. Thompson, The Land Desk)

• Scientists haven’t seen this little snow in the West in decades. One reason why: Since December 1, there have been 8,500 daily high temperature records broken or tied in the West. (Dorany Pineda and Seth Borenstein, Associated Press)

• New Mexico lawmakers rejected a bill that would have required net-zero climate pollution by 2050. Seven Democratic senators joined with Republicans to kill the bill. (Dan Boyd, Albuquerque Journal)

Less than a week after sending layoff notices to most of its climate change reporters, the Washington Post published an editorial applauding the Trump administration for ripping up the federal government’s authority to regulate climate pollution.

The headline: “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach.”

Read the thing if you want. But know that the Post’s opinion page was revamped by the newspaper’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos last year, a few months after he blocked the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Unsurprisingly, the Post’s argument for ripping up the “endangerment finding” — and declaring that greenhouse gases do not endanger public health — was nonsense.

“Climate change is a real problem facing humanity, and reasonable people could support government regulation to push down greenhouse gas emissions,” the Post’s editorial board wrote. “There may come a time when the people elected to enact laws decide the modest benefits of regulating greenhouse gases outweigh the considerable economic costs.”

Sorry, the “modest benefits” versus the “considerable economic costs” of regulating emissions? Was this written by a climate skeptic?

The editorial also criticized the endangerment finding being used to justify tougher emissions rules for vehicles: “Despite the obsession with gas-powered vehicles, light and medium-duty cars and trucks [in the U.S.] combined to generate just 1.8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022.”

Um…when considering Earth’s carbon budget, 1.8% is huge. That’s one of the biggest levers in existence, a pot of emissions roughly equivalent to the entire country of Iran. If you’re going to claim that regulating 1.8% of all emissions is a costly waste of time, you might as well argue that fighting climate change is a costly waste of time.

Which, come to think of it, was basically the Post’s argument.

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It’s sad to see how far Jeff Bezos has fallen. This is the guy who just a few years ago promised that his company, Amazon, would meet the goals of the Paris agreement a decade ahead of schedule; he called it the Climate Pledge and was so excited about it that he paid to name a hockey arena after it. He committed $10 billion to fighting the climate crisis through the Bezos Earth Fund.

Fortunately, the Bezos Earth Fund continues to give out money — no small thing. But Amazon’s planet-warming emissions have risen substantially since the Climate Pledge was announced. The company also expects its energy demands to keep growing due to AI data centers, which could push up emissions even more.

Meanwhile, Bezos is ingratiating himself with Trump and gutting the Post, including its climate team. Tuesday’s editorial was only the latest indignity.

To learn more about the federal endangerment finding and why it’s important, check out this story by my former L.A. Times colleagues Hayley Smith and Ian James. When I shared their piece on Bluesky, I received a powerful reply from Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, founder and CEO of Jewish climate advocacy group Dayenu:

I think that’s why the Post’s climate editorial was so disturbing to me, too: Not only did it deny a fundamental truth, it served the cause of injustice. I felt the same way when Bill Gates insisted that global warming isn’t so terrible, and when a New York Times contributor argued that Democrats should embrace oil and gas, and when the Los Angeles city councilmember whose district burned in last year’s Palisades fire — a Democrat! — told her constituents that climate change had nothing to do with it.

These aren’t Fox News hosts preaching to the MAGA choir. They’re moderate voices talking to center-left voters, many of whom probably care about the climate crisis but aren’t especially well-informed.

Not everyone will be swayed by their arguments. But some people will.

Greenhouse gases are dangerous. Keep saying it. Support media that say it.

Valentine’s Day on the Colorado River

Yesterday was Saturday, February 14 — aka Valentine’s Day, aka the deadline set by federal officials for the Colorado River Basin states to reach an agreement to use less water and prevent Lake Mead and Lake Powell from crashing.

The states failed to strike a deal, the Arizona Republic’s Brandon Loomis reported.

It didn’t appear likely that the Trump administration would start rationing water or otherwise penalize the states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — for missing the deadline. At least not right away.

As of last Sunday, Lake Mead was 34% full. Lake Powell was 26% full.

Barring anything unexpected, interstate negotiations will continue. The real deadline is this fall, before current rules for operating the reservoirs expire.

In case you missed it, I had a guest essay in the New York Times this month blaming the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) for the stalemate. I also discussed the negotiations with KJZZ’s Mark Brodie.

A great run regardless

I’m sad to report that the Italian women’s hockey team was shut out by Team USA on Friday in Milan, 6-0. USA will advance to the Winter Olympic semifinals.

Normally I would have cheered for America. But playing for Team Italy was Jacquie Pierri, a New Jersey-raised sustainable energy engineer and vocal climate advocate. I wrote about her remarkable life this month. The fact that Italy made the quarterfinals at all, unexpectedly winning two games, was a huge achievement.

When I asked Pierri what she’d do after the Olympics end, she told me she wasn’t sure — but she’d probably return to a career in sustainable energy.

Even before Friday’s loss, though, Pierri was already back to work fighting for a safer planet. She was one of 88 Olympic and Paralympic athletes who signed a letter urging the International Olympic Committee to ban fossil fuel sponsorships.

I went into the Super Bowl hoping maybe a few auto companies would defy America’s flagging electric vehicle market and run an ad for clean cars.

Instead, Bad Bunny highlighted Puerto Rico’s blackout-prone electric grid — and by extension, the role of climate change and the Trump administration.

In a spectacular halftime show performed mostly in Spanish, the Puerto Rican rapper Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — aka Bad Bunny — sang his hit song “El Apagón” (English translation: “The Power Outage”). As he belted the lyrics — “damn, another blackout” — he climbed a sparking electrical pole. Dancers dangled from other poles around him.

And then, various energy nerds on my Bluesky feed started freaking out.

“thank you bad bunny for highlighting the importance of critical power distribution infrastructure,” wrote Costa Samaras, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

“Puerto Rico hasn't had reliable power in a decade. The grid sends occasional surges through the wires that fry appliances. Electricity rates are among the highest in the entire U.S. Heat waves are getting intense in the summer, and outages mean A/C is no guarantee for an aging population,” said journalist Alexander C. Kaufman.

“omg power lines. I’m going to pass out,” said J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at UC Santa Cruz.

“I will eventually shut up about this but Bad Bunny’s use of the power lines is an outstanding example of how to communicate about climate and energy issues. Not about who is the smartest nerd in the room and spewing numbers but about people’s actual lives. Genius,” Cha added.

OK, some context about Puerto Rico’s electric grid.

The Caribbean island, a U.S. territory since 1898, was devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017. The storm killed thousands of people and destroyed much of the power grid, spurring one of the largest, longest blackouts in world history. Then Hurricane Fiona hit in 2022, triggering additional outages. Both storms were worsened by fossil-fueled climate change. The grid has never fully recovered, with sporadic outages continuing to this day.

Bad Bunny released “El Apagón” in 2022, along with a 23-minute documentary-style video exploring blackouts and gentrification. The song resonated with Puerto Ricans frustrated by local leaders and the U.S. federal government.

“It’s been a touchstone in Puerto Rico,” said Whitney Muse, who worked on Puerto Rican energy issues for the U.S. Department of Energy under President Biden.

Muse spent several years providing technical support for efforts to keep the lights on in Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria, the Federal Emergency Management Agency agreed to spend $9.5 billion to repair the grid. After Fiona, Congress set aside another $1 billion specifically for rooftop solar and battery storage for vulnerable households, including low-income homes and people with disabilities.

“For Puerto Rico to have a resilient and reliable grid that matches what we have in the mainland — that’s the goal,” Muse told me.

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Unfortunately, the goal still isn’t fully realized. Billions of dollars in Hurricane Maria recovery funds remain unspent. And now the Trump administration has canceled $800 million intended for solar and storage.

“They still don’t have what can credibly be called a reliable power system,” Muse said.

Muse was watching the Super Bowl on Sunday, and she was thrilled when Bad Bunny started singing “El Apagón.” She too posted on Bluesky.

“Bad Bunny’s done it well for years,” she wrote approvingly.

Did most viewers see Bad Bunny scale a utility pole and think blackouts, climate change, solar power? No, of course not. But probably a bunch of folks not already familiar with the song (like me!) looked it up and learned some stuff. There’s also been lots of media coverage the last few days of “El Apagón” and its significance.

The value to the climate discourse is even greater given the broader political context: Bad Bunny has been one of the loudest voices in the entertainment world standing up to Trump’s racist immigration raids. At the Grammys, he began one of his acceptance speeches by saying, “ICE out!” To close the halftime show, he named every country in North and South America while holding a football with the inscription, “Together, we are America.” Predictably, Trump and the MAGA crowd freaked out.

The Super Bowl broadcast is already one of the biggest platforms in American public life. This year, that was more true than ever.

So thank you to the NFL for sticking with Bad Bunny, despite the inevitable backlash — and thank you Bad Bunny for making climate justice part of the conversation.

Oh, about those Super Bowl ads

I watched most of the Super Bowl ads, and I’m sorry to inform you there was nothing encouraging from a climate or clean energy standpoint.

Unlike the good old days of February 2022 — when the Super Bowl featured five car commercials focused on electric vehicles, including one that actually used the phrase “reduce our carbon footprint,” one that promised “no greenwashing” and another that included electricity crackling through Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veins — this year was was an EV desert. There were four auto industry ads, none of which made much effort to market vehicles that don’t burn gasoline.

The only minor exception was Volkswagen, whose 30-second spot included a fleeting shot of an electric minivan. Toyota spotlighted a crossover SUV available as a regular hybrid or a plug-in hybrid. As I’ve written previously, hybrids are better than gas-only cars but not true climate solutions.

The rest of the ads weren’t any better.

For instance, I counted about a dozen ads touting artificial intelligence tools, which are fueling a data center building boom. Without getting into a long discussion about the value of AI, there’s no question that data center development is unleashing a rush to build polluting gas plants. And even when tech companies choose renewables, they may be making it harder for the rest of us to ditch fossil fuels. Amazon just outbid an electric utility for a massive solar project in Washington state.

So as much as I liked “The Office,” I didn’t enjoy the ad that put Brian Baumgartner (Kevin the accountant) back behind a desk, more productive than ever thanks to AI. I found myself wishing that some philanthropist — whoever wants to take over for Bill Gates, maybe — had paid for a climate-themed ad, like Science Moms did last year.

No such luck. Fans were, however, treated to a sports betting ad that featured Kendall Jenner taking off in a private jet.

The Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots, 29-13. About 125 million people watched, according to Nielsen.

On social media, the halftime show scored billions of views.

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In other news

Trump report:

• The Trump administration is on the verge of overturning the “endangerment finding,” which allows the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. (Lisa Friedman and Maxine Joselow, New York Times)

• A judge ruled that the Trump administration’s fake climate science panel violated federal law by flouting transparency rules. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• A new poll finds that more than half of right-leaning voters support large-scale solar, not that Trump is listening. (Ysabelle Kempe, Canary Media)

The power grid:

• It’s not just federal land — the Trump administration is blocking hundreds of wind and solar farms on private property. (Brad Plumer and Rebecca F. Elliott, New York Times)

• Offshore wind is getting all the attention, but a combination of local opposition, disappearing tax credits and the Trump administration’s refusal to grant permits has caused onshore wind development to grind to a halt. (Dan Gearino and Anika Jane Beamer, Inside Climate News)

• Lithium-ion batteries once again got cheaper in 2025. It’s amazing how they keep doing that! (Dan McCarthy, Canary Media)

Electric vehicles:

• “It’s been about a month since we were last together. Now, every time I climb back into my Ford Mustang Mach-E, I can’t stop thinking about you.” A Wall Street Journal columnist tried a Chinese EV. She fell in love. (Joanna Stern, WSJ)

• Turkey’s share of new vehicle sales that are battery electric is almost as high as California’s. (Ajit Niranjan, the Guardian)

• Amazing new study: For every additional 200 electric cars in ZIP codes across California, unhealthy nitrogen dioxide emissions decreased by 1.1 percent. (Tik Root, Grist)

Western wildlife:

• Trump is back to work building his border wall. New sections could be a death sentence for bighorn sheep along the California-Mexico border, cutting them off from their water sources. (Lila Seidman, L.A. Times)

• In a major California Endangered Species Act success story, a wolf has come to L.A. County for the first time in more than a century. (Lila Seidman, L.A. Times)

• California officials approved a controversial plan for professional hunters to kill all the mule deer crowding out native wildlife and plants on Catalina Island, part of the “Galapagos of North America.” (Lila Seidman, L.A. Times)

Around the West:

• It's looking very much like the Colorado River states won’t reach a water-saving deal by a February 14 deadline. (Ian James, L.A. Times)

• A bill in California would allow the state to sue oil and gas companies to cover rising insurance costs from climate disasters. (Laurence Darmiento, L.A. Times)

• Meta is spending millions of dollars in Sacramento and other state capitals on TV ads to influence policy decisions about data centers. (Eli Tan, New York Times)

Meanwhile, in Milan Cortina

I wrote last week about Jacquie Pierri, the New Jersey-raised hockey player/green energy engineer currently playing defense for the Italian women’s team in the Winter Olympics. I’m happy to report that Italy “pulled off the unthinkable,” as Reuters put it, winning two games and reaching the women’s hockey quarterfinals for the first time.

Pierri and her teammates have a tough task ahead. They’ll take on the dominant Team USA on Friday at 12:10 a.m. Pacific time, airing later that day on Peacock.

A victory for Italy would be a stunning upset. But anything is possible. If we want to avert ever-more-dangerous climate change, we certainly have to believe that.

Until next time

(Forgive the typo: “Marve’s” should be “Marvel’s.”)

Jacquie Pierri grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, studied mechanical engineering at Brown University with a focus on energy, then popped over to Europe for her master’s in sustainable energy systems. She lived in Barcelona and Stockholm, researching ice rink refrigeration and how to cool the ice with less energy. Later she moved to Italy, where her dad was born. She worked for a startup capturing heat from compost, then for a group focused on ecologically sound construction.

OK, I may have skipped a few parts.

Pierri loved playing hockey as a kid — a joy she shared with her brother and father. She played Division I at Brown all four years before moving to Canada, where she spent five years playing professionally for the Calgary Inferno, winning a Canadian Women’s Hockey League championship in 2016.

Later, while studying in Europe, she thought she’d hung up her skates for good. But soon after she arrived in Italy, it was announced that the 2026 Winter Olympics would be held in Milan and the nearby ski town of Cortina. Pierri had a new mission.

“I’ve been working on this goal single-mindedly for the last five years,” she said.

She applied for Italian citizenship so she could compete for the national team and honor the legacy of her late father, who died of a heart attack while playing hockey. She joined the EVB Eagles Südtirol, the European Women's Hockey League team in Bolzano. She also found work in sustainable energy.

And in the meantime, she joined EcoAthletes.

The nonprofit works with athletes around the world to promote climate action and sustainability. Pierri is one of 260 EcoAthletes Champions, along with MLB pitcher Brent Suter and WNBA star Napheesa Collier. They use their platforms to advocate for a safer planet — although Pierri, with her unique combination of climate chops and world-class hockey talent, offers an especially informed perspective.

“If you play a sport outdoors, this is dramatically impacting the future of your sport,” she said. “Hockey we play indoors, but most hockey players fall in love with this sport playing outdoors as a kid. Especially Canadians.”

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Pierri has seen the consequences of global warming firsthand. And as she fights for a medal in Milan — the Italian women’s hockey team beat France 4-1 on Thursday in its first game, ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony — she’s acutely aware that the Winter Olympics are threatened by Earth’s rapidly changing climate.

In a report last month, the nonprofit research group Climate Central concluded that warmer winters “threaten the reliability of the cold temperatures and abundant snow required for the Winter Olympics.” Skiing, snowboarding and bobsledding are some of the sports already facing issues such as less snow, fewer viable training locations and increased risk of athlete injury. Apparently falling on artificial snow can feel like falling on concrete.

“Climate change is reshaping winter. Shorter, warmer winters, less predictable,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate at Climate Central.

“We can’t have winter sports if we don’t have winter,” she added.

Winter isn’t going away entirely. But a recent study analyzed warming temperatures and declining snow depths in 93 cities that have hosted or would be ideal for hosting the Winter Olympics. Researchers predicted that 41 of the 93 cities won’t have reliable climate conditions by the 2050s, absent a major acceleration in global emissions cuts. Former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, who led the city during the 2002 Winter Games, doesn’t think Utah will be able to host as planned in 2034.

Trudeau isn’t a big winter sports fan. But her cousin is a professional snowboarder from South Lake Tahoe who won gold medals in 2014 and 2018. She appreciates that putting on the Olympics is already difficult enough.

“These are massive international events that are planned years and years in advance,” she said. “It’s going to get a lot harder to plan them, and a lot more expensive.”

Climate conditions in Cortina are getting dicey.

Since 1956, when Cortina first held the Winter Games, February temperatures in the mountain ski town — where most of this year’s outdoor events will take place — have risen by 6.4 degrees Fahrenheit, Climate Central found. Cortina sees 41 fewer freezing days annually than it did in 1956. Snow depth is decreasing.

February temperatures in Milan, which will host indoor events such as figure skating and hockey, are now 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were in 1956.

Pierri has watched as global warming melts glaciers in the Italian Alps. She’s learned about local winemakers moving to higher altitudes, and dairy farmers whose cows are producing less milk because of extreme heat.

“The lakes used to freeze here more often,” she said. “People remember skating on the lake all winter. Now it freezes one day per winter.”

Pierri didn’t expect to live in Italy. She didn’t expect any of this, really. Hockey was a stopgap, Italy a place she and her family would visit cousins every summer when she was young. Even when she moved to Canada to play for the Calgary Inferno, she also worked for a natural gas company in hopes of “changing things from the inside” and making gas heating less climate-polluting.

But even after she kept playing hockey in Sweden — and after her graduate program unexpectedly gave her a chance to study ice rink refrigeration, a hockey crossover she called “too crazy to pass up” — her athletic career might have been over except for the timing of the 2026 Winter Games announcement. Not knowing what she wanted to do after finishing her master’s, she’d moved to Italy to figure it out. The universe gave her an answer.

Still, representing her dad’s home country in the Olympics was no guarantee. First she had to get her Italian citizenship — which she did two months ago, just in time.

Then, on January 15, she officially made the team.

“Independently, the dream of the Olympics is its own thing. But it definitely had a special component to it, knowing it would be where my dad was born, and honoring our last name, and his last name on the back of an Italian jersey,” Pierri said. “I know he would be super excited if he was still here.”

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So if you didn’t otherwise care about the Winter Olympics: Now you have a climate hero to cheer for. During Italy’s win on Thursday — the country’s first-ever Olympic victory in women’s hockey — Pierri was on the ice as a defenseman. Italy will play a few more first-round games over the next few days (schedule here). They’ll probably need to win at least one more to advance to the quarter-finals.

Outside her family and close friends, Pierri may have no bigger supporter than Lew Blaustein, founder of EcoAthletes. Like her, he’s from New Jersey, so he was able to drive to her hometown Thursday for a watch party with her high school teammates. (She played on the boys’ team, because there was no other team.) He enjoyed seeing how much everyone loved her.

“The ripple effect of her, the impact she’s had on so many people’s lives is incredible,” he said. “You would think Jacquie was George Bailey from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’”

Now Blaustein wants to help Pierri have a ripple effect on the climate.

After years writing GreenSportsBlog, he started wondering why athletes who were comfortable leading beach cleanups and promoting recycling rarely talked publicly about global warming.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t good, because athletes are the most influential humans on the planet,’” he said. “Athletes have led on all manners of social issues for decades: Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe.”

Over time, Blaustein asked environmentally conscious athletes about their hesitance on climate and identified three problems: fear of being seen as “political”; discomfort talking about scientific issues generally; and concern that fans would accuse them of hypocrisy, because they travel so much and thus have high carbon footprints.

Those conversations led Blaustein to start EcoAthletes in 2020. The nonprofit works with pro and college athletes, offering trainings for discussing climate and engaging fans. It also arranges green endorsement deals, coordinates media opportunities and mentors college students for sports sustainability jobs.

“In the green world, there’s a lot of preaching to the choir. Well, sports fans are well beyond the choir,” Blaustein said.

Yes: For climate advocates, sports are one of the very best opportunities to get out of the narrow political and policy arenas where they typically operate and reach a much wider audience. An audience that cares immensely about what happens on the field, on the court, on the ice, and might listen to their favorite players in a way they won’t listen to a politician, or an advocacy group, or a news article.

We’ll have much more to talk about after the Winter Games — and over the next two years, ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. For now, I’m excited to see what happens in Milan Cortina. The Italian women’s hockey team is an underdog, but Pierri, no surprise, likes their chances.

She isn’t sure what she’ll do when the tournament ends — probably something related to sustainability. Whatever it is, I’ll be rooting for her.

The Washington Post produced some of America’s finest climate journalism over the last decade, aggressively covering President Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and winning a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Earth’s fastest-warming places. Alongside the New York Times and the Associated Press, I don’t think any U.S. news outlet published a greater volume of urgent, high-quality climate and clean energy coverage.

Everything changed on Wednesday morning.

The Post sent layoff notices to at least 14 climate journalists, newsroom sources told me, part of a massive round of cost-cutting that will see more than 300 journalists lose their jobs — about 30% of all employees at the Jeff Bezos-owned company.

The climate team layoffs include eight writer/reporters, an editor and several video, data and graphics journalists, I’m told. I’m not publishing their names, since many of them haven’t discussed their situations publicly. But to see the invaluable work they and their colleagues have been doing, check out the Post’s climate page here.

After the layoffs, the Post will have five writer/reporters left on its climate desk, by my sources’ count, and possibly a few other journalists. That’s a far cry from the sweeping vision that then-executive editor Sally Buzbee unveiled in 2022, when she announced a major expansion of the outlet’s climate coverage. She said the Post “has long been a leader in covering the climate and environment” and would nearly triple the size of its climate team to more than 30 journalists.

Buzbee called global warming “perhaps the century’s biggest story.”

“No story is more global than climate, and we are placing reporters across the country and the world to capture it as it unfolds. At the same time, we are reimagining climate journalism to be more visual and accessible, bringing on trusted voices and some of the world’s best visual journalists to tell stories in intimate, visceral ways that we hope will both inform and empower you,” she wrote.

Will the Post try to maintain that commitment, even with a vastly diminished staff? I don’t know. A spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to my request for comment.

Either way, the rise and fall of the climate team serves as a sad reflection of Bezos’ shifting role in American politics. When the billionaire Amazon founder purchased the Post for $250 million in 2013, he was hailed as a savior. He invested in a growing newsroom, which adopted the slogan “democracy dies in darkness.” Trump attacked the paper as the “Amazon Washington Post” for its hard-hitting stories. Bezos joked about sending Trump into space.

Then Trump got elected a second time — and like many ultra-rich executives, Bezos seemingly decided appeasing Trump was more important than principle or morality. Even before the election, when it looked like Trump might win, he blocked the Post editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris, prompting a quarter-million people to cancel their subscriptions. Amazon helped bankroll Trump’s inauguration, as well as his demolition of the East Wing. Amazon MGM Studios spent $75 million buying and marketing “Melania,” a propaganda film about Trump’s wife.

Meanwhile, the Post was losing money — a reported $100 million in 2024. Bezos could have covered the losses easily; Forbes estimates his net worth at $244 billion, making him the world’s fourth-wealthiest person. Even better, he could have reinvested in the newsroom, helping fill our country’s widening information vacuum and betting that it would yield financial dividends, much like it has for the New York Times.

Instead, Bezos chose to eliminate hundreds of jobs, decimating the newsroom of “All the President’s Men” — a decision that may very well please Trump.

“Bezos appears to have embraced a crude calculus: laying off staff and trimming the sails of a once-great news organization sends a message to an audience of one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” former Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote on his Substack.

“After all, since the election Bezos has worked hard to ingratiate himself with Trump,” Kessler added.

The climate team was one of many casualties this week. But the sad loss of another dozen jobs only adds to a sad trend of legacy media organizations pulling back from climate coverage, even as global warming accelerates.

CBS News — following its acquisition by Skydance Media, a purchase backed by Trump-friendly billionaire Larry Ellison — laid off most of its climate journalists in October, as I reported at the time. The L.A. Times, while still producing fantastic climate journalism, saw its environment team shrink by several members last year.

Data from the Media and Climate Change Observatory, an academic research project, showed that climate coverage across five major U.S. newspapers — including the Post — continued its yearslong downward slide in 2025. TV news showed a similar trend.

Former Post climate reporter Chris Mooney discussed the data on Substack.

“I continue to think this is more a zeitgeist thing, where there’s a broader shift away from considering climate change an urgent issue,” he wrote. “Nothing major about the science has changed, of course. But I think there is just fatigue, reflecting in part the domestic and global failures to show significant progress on the issue.”

This isn’t just a U.S. problem.

“Across the globe, coverage has diminished 14% in 2025 from the previous year 2024 and is 38% lower than the highest year of coverage in 2021,” researchers wrote.

Not everything is terrible. If you want climate and clean energy journalism, there are still lots of good options, from the New York Times to the Guardian to Inside Climate News to Canary Media to High Country News. There are also independent folks like me, freelancing and writing newsletters (and hoping you’ll pay for our work so we can keep doing it). I especially like reading Emily Atkin, Miranda Green, Daniel Rothberg Jonathan P. Thompson and Alissa Walker.

One other way you can help: The Washington Post Guild is raising money to support the journalists losing their jobs. There’s a GoFundMe here.

All the good journalism in the world won’t make a dent in the climate crisis on its own. But healthier information ecosystems are a necessary precondition for durable political and economic change.

If more people don’t demand solutions commensurate with the science — loudly, consistently, urgently — they won’t happen. Clean energy dies in darkness.

During a hiking trip to Colorado last August, a couple of friends and I spent a serene morning floating the gentle rapids of the Taylor River, a tributary of a tributary of the Colorado River. Our young raft guide told us the snowpack wasn’t awful, but too many early hot days had melted most of the high-elevation snow. The Taylor was lower than he’d ever seen. We kept scraping rocks he’d never encountered.

“For me personally, it’s like a new river,” he said.

Since then, snow drought conditions have worsened considerably across much of the Colorado River watershed. Folks in Rocky Mountain states — folks like our raft guide — have seen the changes firsthand.

So I felt a twinge of guilt writing this opinion essay for the New York Times, which published yesterday. Here’s how it starts:

Lake Mead is two-thirds empty. Lake Powell is even emptier.

Not for the first time, the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River are fighting over how to keep these reservoirs from crashing — an event that could spur water shortages from Denver to Las Vegas to Los Angeles.

The tens of millions of people who rely on the Colorado River have weathered such crises before, even amid a stubborn quarter-century megadrought fueled by climate change. The states have always struck deals to use less water, overcoming their political differences to avert “dead pool” at Mead and Powell, meaning that water could no longer flow downstream.

This time, a deal may not be possible. And it’s clear who’s to blame.

Go ahead and read the whole thing. But in short, I argue that the river’s Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — aren’t doing nearly enough to conserve water and protect the reservoirs.

I laid out my views in the essay. But some of my reporting didn’t make the final cut, including a few illuminating comments from the state officials scrambling to strike a deal by Valentine’s Day — who may simply be fed up with each other.

Here’s what you won’t read in the New York Times.

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