I didn’t expect to feel especially patriotic going into the Fourth of July weekend, and the headlines weren’t helping.

Wildfires raged across the parched American West, with the possibility of fireworks igniting more infernos. Fossil fueled extreme heat tormented the Eastern U.S., forcing the cancelation of parades in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. World Cup matches were played in potentially dangerous heat, threatening players and fans alike — even as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network raked in hundreds of millions of dollars selling TV ads during climate-spurred hydration breaks.

Murdoch wasn’t the only vulture profiting off the climate crisis as America celebrated its 250th birthday.

The prediction market Kalshi — where you can place monetary bets on the outcome of real events, including sports, elections and wars — has been running a World Cup-themed ad. A few seconds in, Croatian soccer legend Luka Modrić sees the following question on the Kalshi app: “Will 2026 be the hottest year ever?”

It’s a real thing: Kalshi currently offers a whole page of climate-related wagers. As of Monday evening, Kalshi offered 75% odds against 2026 being the hottest year.

You can also try Kalshi’s competitor, Polymarket, where it’s possible to place bets on wildfire activity — how big wildfires will get, how much they’ll destroy, etc.

That’s America at 250: Even death and destruction are packaged into simple financial products you can access on your phone, most likely to your detriment.

Meanwhile, President Trump and his cronies seemed eager to dishonor our nation’s history in the run-up to July 4. They agreed to pay another energy company to cancel another offshore wind farm — that’s four now. They handed out pardons to men who had violated the Clean Air Act by modifying diesel truck engines to let them pollute more. They refused to bring back reservations or adequate funding to national parks, stirring fears of disastrous overcrowding at Yosemite.

Despite all that, they sought to portray themselves as heirs to Teddy Roosevelt — one of America’s greatest conservationists. Trump flew to North Dakota last week aboard his Qatari-gifted luxury jet to inaugurate the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. He was joined by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who’s been busy screwing around with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and otherwise scrambling to beautify D.C. — the stuff Trump actually cares about.

And as for American climate policy?

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright downplayed Europe’s record-breaking heat wave. Three federal firefighters died in Colorado amid the Trump administration’s overhaul of firefighting tactics. Prominent conservatives, including Senator Ted Cruz, slammed Zohran Mamdani for asking New Yorkers to set their air conditioners to 78 degrees — even though that’s exactly what Texas advised during a previous heat wave.

So I felt a little down on America heading into the semiquincentennial.

Fortunately, the feeling didn’t last all weekend.

Maybe enjoying a baseball game at Dodger Stadium restored my faith — even though the Dodgers lost, and even though the Dodgers’ starting lineup was “sponsored by 76,” your friendly neighborhood oil company.

Maybe it was visiting the Autry Museum of the American West, which has a fabulous new exhibit about the social and political movements that have helped make L.A. such a diverse, thriving, ever-evolving city, white nationalists be damned.

Maybe it was watching the latest episode of Larry David’s HBO sketch comedy series “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness.” It features a posthumous appearance by Rob Reiner, who plays George Washington and helps skewer Donald Trump.

Or maybe it was spending Friday at Disneyland, one of my favorite places. The newly opened Soarin’ Across America ride emphasizes the great outdoors, offering sweeping views of the Grand Canyon, Denali National Park, a Louisiana bayou, South Dakota’s Custer State Park and more. The nighttime fireworks show started with narration and images evoking America’s Indigenous peoples, before describing the U.S. as “a vibrant palette of cultures and colors.” I found myself cheering.

Not exactly revolutionary, but coming from Disney? In Trump’s America?

This country is deeply flawed; arguably it’s gotten worse lately. But we can’t succumb to despair. We need experiences that remind us what we still love about this place. We need reasons for hope, even patriotism.

Fortunately, we have lots of reasons. Even as Trump cracks down on political speech, Americans keep cracking jokes. Even as temperatures rise, we keep enjoying baseball. We keep gathering on Main Street, U.S.A. We’re staying informed, and protesting, and voting. We’re working hard to build a better tomorrow, powered by sun and wind.

I’ve never wagered a penny. But if I were a betting man, I’d bet on America — on democracy, pluralism and climate progress. Whatever the odds, I’d take them.

Maybe together, we can improve the odds.

In other news

First, the feds:

• President Trump’s EPA suggested it it would test for microplastics in drinking water. Guess what? It will not! (Susanne Rust, L.A. Times)

• A Supreme Court decision giving the president greater control over independent agencies could have huge implications for energy policy. (E&E News)

• An appeals court said the Trump administration can keep removing national park signs on climate and slavery, at least for now. (Maxine Joselow, New York Times)

Next, the states:

• Rhode Island’s Democratic governor, Dan McKee, vetoed a bill that would have required large buildings to report their energy use, citing “housing affordability challenges.” (Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current)

• Seventeen states are suing California to block its single-use plastics regulations. Meanwhile, three environmental groups are suing in the other direction, arguing that the rules aren’t strong enough. (Susanne Rust, L.A. Times)

• A leading Democratic in the California Assembly, Cottie Petrie-Norris, wants to kill $194 million in funding for school HVAC upgrades that would keep kids cool and clean the air they breathe during wildfires. (Jeff St. John, Canary Media)

More climate backsliding:

• Princeton University reneged on its promise to divest from fossil fuel companies. (Brett Tomlinson and Julie Bonette, Princeton Alumni Weekly)

• Google’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 18% — and its water use rose 34% — in 2025. Thank you, AI. (Amy Harder, Axios)

Cleaning the air:

• I’m not sure why it’s taken Los Angeles nearly two years to take another shot at phasing out urban oil drilling after its first attempt was thrown out in court. But I’m glad to see it happening. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• A study estimates five Americans die every single hour from toxic car pollution. (Dharna Noor, the Guardian)

• You can now get electric vehicle rebates in California again! It’s $3,500 for a new EV and $1,750 for a used EV. (Caroline Petrow-Cohen, L.A. Times)

• If you think carbon capture is going to make much of a difference anytime soon, check out this investigation. (ProPublica, Drilled)

Last but not least, a surprising turn of events: The Trump administration says it will seek a new trial for the 30-year-old man charged with igniting the Palisades fire, after the jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict. The jurors voted 10 to 2 for acquittal.

As I’ve noted several times, press coverage and public discourse around the Palisades fire has focused almost entirely on the ignition source and the government’s response, with global warming an afterthought at best. It’s unsurprising but no less unfortunate. We can’t solve a problem we don’t talk about.

Fortunately, talk is the easy part. Please go talk about climate!

Late last year — after Bill Gates published a lengthy screed claiming that the threats posed by global warming had been exaggerated — I called a bunch of scientists to ask how they felt about the state of the American Climate Discourse.

Frankly, I was frustrated. Ever since President Trump’s reelection, many left-leaning politicians had started engaging in “climate hushing,” choosing to stop talking about the climate crisis — typically advised by strategists who saw climate as a losing issue. The New York Times began publishing opinion pieces arguing that Democrats should cater to the political center on climate and energy. Many blue-state governors stopped pursuing aggressive climate plans. Some of them rolled backed existing plans.

The vibe shift reverberated across society. Legacy news organizations laid off climate reporters. Prominent companies ditched their climate goals. Billionaires slashed their climate philanthropy and investments.

In retrospect, Gates’ screed was hardly a surprise. A few weeks earlier, the Microsoft co-founder had groveled before Trump at the White House; of course he was going to throw climate under the bus. “Climate” was out.

Still, I was frustrated. The Trump administration was working furiously to dismantle America’s renowned scientific institutions, and liberals were tripping over themselves to defend the sanctity of science. And yet when it came to climate change, maybe the most important scientific issue of modern times, none of the loudest, most influential voices in leftist and center-left circles belonged to scientists.

In fact, the folks dominating the climate conversation sounded like they hadn’t spent much time talking with scientists.

So a few months after Gates published his memo, I called nine climate scientists and asked for a gut check: Was I losing my mind, or had something gone terribly wrong in the Climate Discourse?

Short answer: No, I hadn’t lost my mind. Yes, something had gone wrong.

The scientists offered a wide range of nuanced opinions about American politics and climate messaging — too wide-ranging and nuanced for me to write a story, at least at the time. But ahead of America’s 250th birthday this weekend, I’ve been thinking back to those conversations.

The scientists didn’t agree on everything. But they were united by their own pent-up frustration — that America isn’t doing more to confront the climate crisis.

“I have been baffled by the rush to say, ‘Climate change is not existential, this is not a big deal, we shouldn’t care about it,’” NASA scientist Kate Marvel said.

Soon after we talked, Marvel resigned from NASA, citing Trump’s attacks on science. But whatever constraints she might have felt at the space agency, she didn’t hold back during our call, ticking off a few of the many reasons to support clean energy: cheaper electricity, less air pollution, keeping up with China.

“It’s weird to me that at the exact time that all these true and compelling arguments are possible, we’ve just retreated to not talking about it at all,” she said.

David Ho, a marine biogeochemist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, expressed similar bewilderment about Gates, who argued in his memo that spending money on climate limits the funding available to fight disease and poverty.

“I didn’t understand the motivation,” Ho said. “It seems he should understand that the things that he cares about are affected by climate.”

Ho was less charitable toward Matt Yglesias, a popular centrist pundit who has urged Democrats to embrace oil and gas. Ho called Yglesias’ commentary “a bit unhinged.”

“I don’t take him seriously. I have him blocked on Bluesky,” he said. “I just think he’s unserious. But he does have a platform, and I guess people do listen to him.”

Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine, sees a distinction between pundits like Yglesias and capitalist power brokers like Gates. The former shape public opinion; the latter shape policy and technology.

Gates “is one of the people who could actually influence markets,” Gill said. “He has so much more power to move the needle, as a business leader, than any of us.”

From Gill’s perspective, the problem with both men — and with others who downplay global warming — is that creating urgency to act is already hard enough. The world is very nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial times, a grim milestone that scientists had hoped to avoid. Limiting warming to 2 degrees — the next big target on the horizon — won’t be easy.

Given the political obstacles to ambitious climate action in the U.S., does it even make sense to keep talking about 2 degrees? Should we just do the best we can?

Gill summed up the key conundrum.

“How do you create urgency around reducing emissions as much as possible, as fast as possible?” she asked. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

Like many scientists, Katharine Hayhoe — a Texas Tech professor and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy — is wary of continuing to emphasize targets like 1.5 or 2 degrees. Temperature thresholds can motivate people to act. But they can also mislead people into believing that humanity is doomed if the threshold is crossed.

To be clear, the doomsday mentality is wrong: Any climate scientist will tell you that a little less warming always means less suffering, less illness, less death.

But even as Hayhoe helped shape global climate goals, she “always worried that if we didn’t make it [to 1.5 degrees], people would give up.”

“Unfortunately I feel like that’s what’s happening now among policymakers: ‘Oh well, we didn’t make it. Let’s move on to the price of housing and eggs,’” Hayhoe said.

Still, she doesn’t think temperature targets are a waste of time.

“I truly believe that people have tried harder because we had a 1.5-degree goal than they would have if we had a 2-degree goal,” she said.

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These are the types of questions that have defined the Climate Discourse my entire adult life: Should climate advocates avoid abstract concepts like global temperatures and focus exclusively on the economic case for cheap renewable energy? Should they use words like “extreme weather” instead of “global warming”? How about reframing the energy transition as a jobs and public health agenda?

It annoys me how much oxygen these arguments take up, when in reality no one can police the messages hawked by who knows how many thousands of activists, pundits, politicians and influencers. Most folks are ultimately going to say whatever they want to say. We have free speech in this country.

But we can also choose who to listen to. We can choose whose voices to elevate.

This Fourth of July, let’s use our freedoms wisely. Let’s choose scientists.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, thinks limiting global warming to 2 degrees is possible — and he sees it as “a political decision, not really a scientific or technical issue.” He described Big Oil as the main obstacle, calling fossil fuels “probably the most powerful special interest in the history of humanity.”

“They have revenues of [trillions of dollars] a year, and they’re doing everything they can to stop us,” he said.

Dessler has come to consider temperature targets distracting. He’d rather talk about the geopolitical instability caused by fossil fuel dependence; the deadly air pollution spewed by oil and gas; and the amazing economics of solar and wind. He pointed out that the U.S. “could pretty easily get to 80% or 90% [emissions reductions] at low cost or negative cost” — a fact that many Americans would struggle to believe.

“In some sense, all problems in society go back to the media environment, and social media,” Dessler said. “No politicians suffer from lying. They get away with it.”

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Here’s the question I find most relevant: Given our broken information ecosystems, what does it mean to cut emissions as fast as possible? How fast can we actually move away from oil, gas and coal, without sparking a misinformation-fueled backlash that threatens the whole enterprise?

I asked several scientists about the delicate dance between climate imperatives and political realities.

Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, thinks “the best thing we can do is to throw as much money as possible at clean energy,” creating jobs and building support for climate solutions — including in red states. But he acknowledged that this is basically what the Biden administration did with the Inflation Reduction Act — and the Trump administration still gutted the law.

“If we want to make the politics of more ambitious climate action possible, we have to make climate more resonant with the public,” he said.

Indeed. So how do we do that?

Like all the other scientists I talked with, Hausfather was humble, reminding me that he’s not a communications expert or social scientist. But he offered a few suggestions. He think it’s crucial to beat back false claims that clean power will make people’s lives more expensive — nobody wants to pay more for stuff.

At the same time, he believes affordability arguments can only accomplish so much if Americans don’t also care about the climate crisis. Limiting warming to 2 degrees will require massive emissions cuts from the U.S.

“It’s not like 2 degrees is a magical line, just like 1.5 degrees wasn’t a magical line,” he said. “But once you get much above 2 degrees, you get a lot worse impacts.”

Karen McKinnon, a climate scientist at UCLA, made a point that I doubt many folks would disagree with — that when it comes to building support for phasing out oil and gas, the best strategies involve highlighting local, deeply personal harms.

“This isn’t about 2 degrees Celsius,” she said. “This is about, do you get to send your kids to summer camp? Do they get to swim in the lake, or is the camp burning?”

McKinnon sees hope in the explosive growth of solar power and electric vehicles, led by China. She wishes America would catch up. When centrist pundits urge Democrats to embrace oil and gas, she doesn’t understand the logic.

“It’s just a poor economic decision,” she said.

Michael Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and longtime lightning rod for climate deniers, sees a burgeoning “climate defeatism” on the left and center-left. He thinks a lot of well-meaning people “feel besieged, both by what’s happening with the climate and what’s happening with the politics.” Some of them are giving up on aggressive climate action, at least for now. Others are coping by telling themselves that the climate crisis isn’t actually so bad, à la Gates.

“It expresses itself in the form of denial, a different kind of denial,” Mann said.

That’s his theory, anyway. He wishes more people understood how much progress is being made through solar, wind and battery technology growth.

“The greatest threat to meaningful climate action is the belief that we can’t act,” he said. “I like to balance urgency with agency.”

So who can spread the word that climate change is urgent, and we’re not powerless? How can we translate all these ideas into action?

Jonathan Foley, a climate scientist who leads Project Drawdown, said we “absolutely need political leadership.” But in the meantime, he’d love to hear a “clarion call” from faith leaders and scientists. He suggested Pope Leo XIV and leading Swedish climate researcher Johan Rockström as esteemed figures who could collaborate on some kind of climate message, cutting through the noise and speaking to people’s hearts. Maybe they could even help investors identify worthy climate solutions.

“We have all the things we need right now to stop climate change,” Foley said. “Some of them are expensive. Most aren’t.”

If Foley’s rhetoric sounds audacious — well, that’s why I love it. Unlike most political people yapping about climate, he’s thinking big instead of ducking for cover.

What’s more, he thinks scientists have a role to play in fixing our broken discourse — and I couldn’t agree more. Scientists don’t know everything about politics, but neither does anyone — including political operatives. Even better, scientists tend to be smart, thoughtful people who follow policy and politics. We should strive to learn from them — and not just from their peer-reviewed studies.

That’s me talking, by the way, not Foley. He was exceedingly modest, although he did tear into Gates, saying the billionaire “never understood climate to begin with.”

“I’ve seen a lot of other philanthropists question themselves based on what Bill Gates wrote,” Foley said. “What a mess that was. I was so disappointed in that.”

My advice: Stop listening to Gates, start listening to Foley. And as you’re celebrating America this July 4, raise a glass to the scientists who make this nation great. Bask in the honest-to-goodness patriotism of baseball, apple pie and science.

Then next time you hear a pundit claiming that global warming isn’t salient to voters, or a presidential candidate arguing that clean energy goals are too expensive, or a tech bro insisting that climate change is no big deal — pause and ask yourself, what would a climate scientist say?

Then try to find out. Our democracy will be better for it.

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In 10 years, a lot of things will be different — some for worse, some for better.

Solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles will be even cheaper. The Colorado River Basin will be even drier. The world will be even hotter. The United States will elect its next president — hopefully building on a robust track record of new climate laws. Los Angeles will have achieved its 2035 goal of 100% clean power — unless it doesn’t. How strong or weak will the oil industry be? What about the insurance industry?

Those are a few of the questions and considerations that come to mind for me when I think about 2036. What about you?

Actually, how about this: What do you want the world to look like in 10 years?

Let’s get creative: Write a climate-related headline (or headlines!) that you’d like to see a decade from now. Make it optimistic, or fanciful, or even a bit vindictive, if you’re so inclined. Then send it to me by replying to this email (or if you’re a paid subscriber, by leaving a comment on this post).

I’ll pick some outstanding entries and create a poll for folks to vote on their favorites. The winners will get one-year paid subscriptions to Climate-Colored Goggles, free of charge.

If you’ve never written a news headline, that’s OK! The goal isn’t to get yourself a job at the New York Times or CNN (or on Substack). It’s to force ourselves to step outside the climate gloom and doom we’re enduring in the present, and to imagine — even for a few minutes — what a better future might look like, not so long from now.

I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s ideas.

Also, keep this in mind: We’re writing headlines, not run-on sentences (and certainly not paragraphs). Keep them snappy!

In California’s ‘Lithium Valley,’ Simbol Materials lives

Now that we’ve zoomed forward a decade, let’s zoom back.

Ten years ago this month, I scored one of the cooler scoops of my young journalism career: Tesla had offered to buy a promising lithium startup at California’s Salton Sea for $325 million. I obtained a confidential letter from Elon Musk outlining the offer.

“Tesla is prepared to move quickly to negotiate a potential transaction,” Musk wrote.

The deal never happened — more on that in a minute — and within a few months the cleantech startup, Simbol Materials, had ceased operations.

But a decade later, Simbol’s lithium extraction technology continues to captivate some of the world’s savviest investors. Which brings us to this week’s news.

On Monday, Berkshire Hathaway Energy and Occidental Petroleum announced the “successful advancement” of their lithium extraction technology “using geothermal brines in California’s Imperial Valley.” The companies said they “achieved important technical milestones,” including production of lithium chloride, conversion of lithium chloride to lithium hydroxide and manufacture of battery-grade lithium carbonate.

Translation: Two of America’s energy powerhouses — one a pillar of Warren Buffett’s corporate empire, the other a Houston-based oil major — say they’re inching closer to cracking the code that Musk so badly wanted to crack.

You won’t find this in the press release, but the Berkshire/Occidental partnership was made possible by technology originally developed by Simbol.

After the startup went bust, its assets changed hands several times, eventually landing with a new firm called TerraLithium — which was ultimately acquired by Occidental. In 2024, Occidental decided to test Simbol’s tech by teaming up with Berkshire, which owns a fleet of geothermal power plants along the Salton Sea’s southern shore.

Like other geothermal power producers, Berkshire drills into natural pockets of deep underground heat, pumping up superheated fluid called brine and using the steam to turn turbines, generating 24/7 climate-friendly electricity. One of the big drawbacks is that it’s not cheap. Geothermal power from beneath the Salton Sea is especially costly; the scorching-hot brine is thick with lithium and other minerals, corroding pipes and necessitating expensive maintenance.

On the bright side, if you can figure out a way to extract the lithium before injecting the brine back underground, you can sell it for a profit, improving your economics — and fueling the energy transition. Lithium is a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage.

That’s why Musk was willing to pay $325 million for Simbol, long before EVs started outselling gas cars across much of the world. Although several companies say they’ve developed cost-effective tech to remove lithium from Salton Sea brine, nobody’s built a commercial facility yet.

Hence the long-standing fascination with Simbol. Whatever the company figured out in the early 2010s, it keeps impressing engineers and investors — now including those at Berkshire and Occidental.

Their press release says nothing about Simbol. But all of Occidental’s TerraLithium patents list Simbol’s former chief technology officer, Stephen Harrison, as one of the inventors. The next-most-cited inventor is Simbol’s former CEO, John Burba.

If Simbol invented such great lithium extraction technology, why didn’t the deal with Tesla go through? And why did the much-hyped startup then collapse?

I’m still not totally sure. But as I reported in 2016, Simbol commissioned a valuation that estimated the firm to be worth $2.5 billion. A former Simbol executive told me at the time that its board of directors hoped to strike a deal with Tesla for $1.6 billion — far more than Musk wanted to pay. The startup also faced a lawsuit from one of its co-founders, who alleged financial wrongdoing.

So what comes next? On Monday, a Berkshire executive said the successful tests “will be used to inform future engineering, scale-up assessments and project planning.”

Fingers crossed that everything keeps working out, because extracting lithium from geothermal brine is a lot less environmentally harmful than traditional mining — not that we won’t need some mines too, if we want to phase out fossil fuels.

For paid subscribers only: Join me at Intuit Dome on July 14

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Amid a flurry of ominous headlines about the American West’s most important river, there’s a crucial story that’s received hardly any press coverage.

I’m talking about this month’s elections for the Imperial Irrigation District — and a last-minute infusion of mysterious dark money, which I’m reporting here exclusively.

Tucked into California’s scorching southeastern corner, the Imperial Valley consumes more Colorado River water than the entire state of Colorado. The vast majority flows to a few hundred families who collectively grow most of the nation’s winter vegetables — and also lots of alfalfa, aka cattle feed.

All of which makes the publicly elected members of the Imperial Irrigation District’s board of directors five of the most important people in the Western U.S. If we want to conserve enough water to prevent Lake Mead and Lake Powell from crashing, we need their cooperation — and it’s never a guarantee.

Over the last 25 years, IID has nearly derailed several high-profile water conservation deals. Board members are always wary of disrupting Imperial’s agricultural way of life — and of upsetting farmers, for whom water is power.

So I try to follow IID elections. And this month, things got weird.

If you’ve heard about anything in Imperial County lately, it may be a huge data center proposed by lawyer and businessman Sebastian Rucci. Rucci’s company got involved in the June election, spending $35,000 to support a challenger to IID incumbent Alex Cardenas — a big sum for a race that ultimately yielded just 4,400 votes.

They money didn’t help; fueled by name recognition and anti-data center sentiment, Cardenas won overwhelmingly, defeating Carlos Duran, who previously worked as a spokesperson for Rucci.

But it’s easy to understand Rucci’s thinking. Imperial Valley farmers routinely spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on local elections. In low-turnout races that can be decided by a few dozen votes, a little cash can go a long way.

Anyway, Rucci’s outlay generated some press. But Cardenas had his own benefactor.

Three weeks before the election, a political action committee called United Imperial Valley PAC registered with Imperial County, according to campaign filings. It quickly spent at least $11,550 on mailers and text messages supporting Cardenas.

It also spent at least $13,647 on mailers and text messages supporting IID incumbent Karin Eugenio, who chairs the district’s board (and also won reelection handily).

So where did the money come from?

United Imperial Valley PAC reported $44,300 in contributions, all coming from four companies with out-of-state addresses: Balboa Geothermal Group (New Mexico) and Purewatt Minerals, Utility Bridge Energy and Wells Precision Metals (Wyoming). The names make them sound like energy or mining companies, which would make sense, given the Imperial Valley’s world-renowned geothermal and lithium resources.

The thing is, I researched all four companies, and they seem pretty flimsy.

Three of them were registered as businesses just weeks before they gave thousands of dollars to United Imperial Valley PAC, and I can’t find evidence that the fourth is even registered as a business. Actually, I can’t find substantial info about any of them.

If I had to guess, these companies were created for the sole purpose of hiding the true source of the $44,300 in campaign contributions.

Which maybe isn’t surprising, because another political action committee seemingly used the same tactic in Imperial County two years ago.

During the final weeks of a contentious race for board of supervisors, a group called Economic Prosperity for Imperial County, or EPIC, received $29,500 from three out-of-state companies: Geothermal Ventures (Texas), Wellpoint Mining (Wyoming) and Western Data Center Development (New Mexico). Like the energy-coded companies this year, I couldn’t find substantial info about any of them.

I suspect whoever was behind the dark money in 2024 was responsible again this year — although I could be wrong.

Beyond the obvious similarities, Wellpoint Mining and Wells Precisions Metals share an address in Wyoming. Also, EPIC’s candidate of choice in November 2024 (who won by the skin of her teeth) was Martha Cardenas-Singh, Alex Cardenas’ sister.

The most revealing connection, though, is that EPIC PAC and United Imperial Valley PAC both employed Republican political consultant Marc Troast.

Troast has a history of making trouble. In 2016, the Desert Sun reported, he resigned from a job running a congressional campaign after posting a picture of himself firing what appeared to be a combat rifle the day after the deadliest shooting in U.S. history. A few years later, he helped run a congressional campaign for a carpenter named Raul Ruiz, who happened to share a name with the Democratic incumbent.

More recently, he worked for far-right Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s failed gubernatorial campaign.

United Imperial Valley listed one of Troast’s employees as its treasurer, and his office address as its address. EPIC listed the same treasurer and address.

But when I asked Troast about United Imperial Valley, he claimed ignorance.

“I am unaware of that particular committee,” he said in an email. “I do own Campaign Finance Services which does bookkeeping for various committees.”

“My staff handles compliance,” he added.

Seriously? When I pressed him for details, he acknowledged that one of his staffers “does compliance for [United Imperial Valley] and has no decision making authority.”

So to recap, we have tens of thousands of dollars flowing through shadowy companies to elect some of the most consequential people in Western water — with support from a firebrand political consultant who says he knows nothing about it.

Again, where’s the money coming from?

If Cardenas knows, he’s not telling. He sent me an email saying he “can only speak on behalf of my campaign and activities directly related to it.”

“I am unable to provide comments regarding any independent expenditure committees or their activities during this election cycle, as I have no involvement with, knowledge of, or authority over their operations,” he wrote.

I also talked with Eugenio, who said she knew nothing about United Imperial Valley PAC or why it supported her. Unlike Cardenas, whose email read like carefully crafted legalese, she sounded genuinely alarmed.

“I don’t know anything about them,” she said. “I’ve always been very, very selective of who I accept money from, because it is public.”

“It’s very concerning and upsetting,” she added. “And I had enough money on my own that I generated from non-dark money.”

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One clue as to the possible source of the funds?

In 2024, the Desert Sun’s Janet Wilson linked several of EPIC’s early contributions to former IID board member Erik Ortega, who runs medical transport companies. Janet discovered that several California businesses giving large sums of money to EPIC had identical addresses to companies headed by Ortega.

After Janet’s story published, EPIC’s contributions started coming from the shady out-of-state entities I described above.

I emailed Ortega to ask if he knew anything about United Imperial Valley PAC or was the source of any of its funds. He didn’t respond.

By now, you may be ready for a big reveal. Or maybe you’re wondering what the dark money means in practice for the Colorado River, and for the tens of millions of people from L.A. to Las Vegas to Salt Lake City who depend on its waters.

To which all I can say is, stay tuned for more reporting — including Part 3 of “Death in the Desert,” my series on another former IID director, Mike Abatti, who’s awaiting trial on charges of murdering his wife.

Imperial is a place of endless intrigue — much of it intertwined.

All along the Colorado

High-stakes negotiations:

• To prepare for a possible interstate Colorado River lawsuit, Arizona lawmakers added $6 million to a legal fund. (Alex Hager, KJZZ)

• Utah Senator Mike Lee threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal water conservation funding from California, Arizona and Nevada if any of them files suit over water rights. (Marcus Reichley, Cronkite News)

• The Colorado River states cobbled together a water survival wish list. It includes more than 80 projects costing tens of billions of dollars. (Alex Hager, KJZZ)

Lithium at the Salton Sea:

• Imperial Valley College created an amazing program to train folks for the lithium boom. Only the boom hasn’t come. (Erin Rode, the Hechinger Report)

• What do people living near the Salton Sea think of lithium extraction plans? Two reporters parked themselves at the only restaurant in Niland to find out. (Rebecca Plevin and Zoë Meyers, Capital & Main)

About that data center:

• The Sierra Club is suing Imperial County over its approval of Sebastian Rucci’s data center. (Kori Suzuki, KPBS)

• Rucci’s company is suing IID to access Colorado River water. (Kori Suzuki, KPBS)

• The Imperial County supervisors sharply changed course on data centers overall, approving a 45-day moratorium. (Philip Salata, inewsource)

Last but not least, I loved this story from Jonathan P. Thompson, author of The Land Desk, on the spelling and etymology of Lees Ferry, aka Lee’s Ferry, aka Lee Ferry, one of the most important spots on the Colorado River — except nobody can agree exactly what it’s called.

A few more stories…

Climate communications:

• Good on the Houston Chronicle for putting former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond’s history-changing climate denial in the headline of his obituary.

• Bad on NPR for laying off not only its chief climate editor, Neela Banerjee, as I reported this month, but also longtime climate correspondent Jeff Brady, as he announced on LinkedIn.

• Why do journalists always call climate scientist Daniel Swain? “He uses language that is both precise and deep but very accessible.” (Jason Dove Mark, the Atlantic)

MAGA watch:

• The federal government will pay another energy developer $765 million to walk away from four offshore wind leases — including one off the coast of California. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• A judge ordered federal officials to restore exhibits about climate, slavery and more at national parks. (Hallie Golden and Kimberlee Kruesi, Associated Press)

• The Trump administration is auctioning off tens of thousands of acres of public lands that almost certainly contain no oil or gas — and a journalist tracked down the sketchy Utah resident who made it happen. (Joan Meiners, Arizona Republic)

And everything else:

• FIFA does not appear to have a wildfire smoke plan for the World Cup. Hopefully North America doesn’t catch fire! (Tik Root, Grist)

• Golden mussels have invaded California, clogging water infrastructure across the state. (Kurtis Alexander, San Francisco Chronicle)

• From California to Texas to New York, solar, wind and batteries are pushing fossil fuels to the margins this spring. It’s unprecedented. (Julian Spector, Canary Media)

Finally, the California Chamber of Commerce endorsed Xavier Becerra, the first time the powerful business lobby has ever supported a Democrat for governor. This caught my attention because the Chamber has helped defeat “Make Polluters Pay” legislation and is currently suing the state over its climate disclosure laws.

Hopefully Becerra is not the kind of governor his big-money backers seem to think he will be. To paraphrase what I wrote last week: Becerra, please prove them wrong.

Until next time

During the final weeks of California’s gubernatorial primary, I didn’t hide my opinion of Xavier Becerra, the Democratic front-runner.

I criticized California’s former attorney general for questioning the state’s ability to meet its climate targets, especially as oil giants spent heavily to support his campaign. I described billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer as a far better choice for governor.

Leading environmental groups reached similar conclusions. Several endorsed Steyer; none backed Becerra. One activist told me Big Oil was “choosing its governor.”

Now the people have spoken. Becerra received the most votes, with Republican Steve Hilton finishing second, meaning they’ll advance to the general election. Steyer is on track to finish a close third. Barring anything wildly unexpected, deep-blue California will elect Becerra as its next governor.

I’m disappointed by the outcome. I’d love for Becerra to prove me wrong.

Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has spent the last few years backpedaling on climate policies — slashing rooftop solar incentives, weakening a program to limit carbon emissions, expanding oil drilling and extending the life of gas plants. Newsom and his appointees have undermined other environmental priorities, including single-use plastic regulations, virtual power plant and community solar incentives, indoor air quality protections and energy efficiency standards.

Newsom abandoned his pledge to shut down the Aliso Canyon gas field. Meanwhile, he’s stood idly by as oil-friendly Democrats kill “Make Polluters Pay” bills that would hold fossil fuel companies financially liable for climate damages.

Aggressive climate action isn’t easy. Solar and wind are certainly cheaper than fossil fuels, but I don’t envy policymakers navigating the short-term tensions of the energy transition: oil refinery closures, sky-high electricity rates, the stew of lies peddled by President Trump and right-wing media.

Still, that’s no excuse for ignoring the reality of accelerating global warming — or for using “affordability” as an excuse to do Big Oil’s bidding.

I suspect Becerra will keep doing most of the things Newsom has done well, including continuing California’s dogged pursuit of 100% clean power.

But if Becerra wants to keep calling California a climate leader, that’s not enough. He should work with the environmental groups that opposed him, and find a way to make them like him more than Chevron does. He should also figure out why PG&E spent at least $13.5 million to defeat Steyer, and try to redirect some of that ire at himself.

If Becerra does all that, fantastic. I’ll write about it.

If he doesn’t — if he’s Newsom 2.0, or worse — environmental groups should be ready to fight back, vocally and adversarially.

Some of those groups may want to avoid upsetting a powerful new governor. But come on, it’s 2026. The time for pulling punches has long since passed.

Exclusive: An update on Disneyland’s air quality mishap

I reported last month that Disneyland’s promise to convert its 71-year-old Autopia ride from gas-guzzlers to electric vehicles was motivated — at least in part — by an alleged air quality violation.

To recap: In early 2024, the California Air Resources Board sent Disney a “notice of violation” alleging that Autopia’s gas engines were out of compliance with emissions rules. Five months earlier, Disney had voluntarily disclosed that the engines — which were built by Honda — weren’t properly certified. As part of a settlement deal, Disney paid a $56,250 penalty and agreed to overhaul Autopia.

But the documents didn’t answer several key questions: What, if anything, was wrong with the engines? Had they emitted excess pollution? And what had prompted Disney to report the problem to the Air Resources Board?

Citing Disneyland officials, the Orange County Register reported that there was “no impact to the environment.” But Disney wouldn’t answer my questions. State officials wouldn’t give me much information, either.

So I sent a California Public Records Act request to the Air Resources Board, seeking a copy of Disney’s settlement compliance plan. I thought maybe it would shed light on the situation.

A few days ago, I got a redacted copy, with confidential business information blacked out. You can read it here.

Short summary: There’s nothing revelatory in the document (at least nothing that isn’t blacked out). But there are a few intriguing tidbits.

For instance, Honda bears at least some responsibility for the mishap. The document says Honda “failed to certify” the engines, seemingly due to an “administrative error.” In August 2023, Honda sent Disney a notification. Soon after, Disney “communicated the newly learned information” with the Air Resources Board.

That roughly tracks with a statement Honda sent me last month.

“Honda takes seriously its obligation to comply with all applicable California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations and when it discovered a non-compliance with a certification requirement in 2023, it reported that fact to CARB and remediated the issue,” a spokesperson said in an email.

The compliance plan doesn’t explicitly require Disney to convert Autopia to electric vehicles, saying only that the company will “retire gas-engine powered Autopia fleet” and “continue search for suitable clean technology.” But Disneyland officials told the Orange County Register last month that they’re “working on the design, engineering and testing of a fully electric Autopia ride vehicle prototype.” So it sounds like they’re sticking to the promise they made two years ago, when they first told me that Autopia would be going all-electric.

One more tidbit of special interest to Disneyland fans like me? The compliance plan sets a 30-month deadline for retiring the gas cars — and the settlement was finalized on August 1, 2024.

That means Autopia in its current form must shut down by February 1, 2027.

In other news

Election roundup:

• In the Los Angeles mayoral primary, progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman will advance to the runoff against Mayor Karen Bass. I wrote about why Raman’s climate plan and track record made her the best choice.

• Monterey Park, California, became the first city in the country to ban data centers by public vote. (Blanca Begert, L.A. Times)

• Texas GOP primary voters selected an oil and gas regulator who “posted a social media poll asking whether Jews or Muslims were a bigger threat to America.” His campaign was funded by oil tycoons. He’ll likely win the general election. (Carlos Nogueras Ramos, the Texas Tribune)

Checking in on MAGA:

• The Trump administration’s latest nonsense is a $700 million federal investment in coal — including an Oakland export terminal. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• As North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum made big plans for a Teddy Roosevelt presidential library, set to open July 4, 2026. Now that he’s gutting protections for public lands as President Trump’s Interior secretary, things have gotten awkward at the library. (Alex Heard, Re:Public)

• With apologies for burying one of the most important stories of 2026, the Trump administration is trying to shift control of scientific research funding from actual experts to political appointees — a proposal that could destroy American science. (Ella Nilsen and Andrew Freedman, CNN)

Climate backsliding:

• New York lawmakers are no longer requiring the state to slash climate pollution 40% before 1990 levels by 2030. Here’s hoping Xavier Becerra doesn’t follow New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s lead. (Ysabelle Kempe, Canary Media)

• Recent changes to California’s cap-and-invest program will not only weaken the state’s ability to meet its emissions targets, critics say — they could cause wildfire prevention funding to dry up. (Noah Haggerty, L.A. Times)

• Another possible casualty of the cap-and-invest changes? Funding for clean water in communities currently drinking toxic water. (Ian James, L.A. Times)

The information landscape:

• The Washington Post’s opinion page was overhauled by Jeff Bezos — and its new podcast is mixing in some climate denial. (Natalie Korach, Status)

• Bill Gates was forced to own up to an affair with a Russian nuclear physicist who did work for his nuclear energy company, TerraPower — and who was referenced in Jeffrey Epstein’s emails. (Emily Glazer, the Wall Street Journal)

• Some social media influencers and Republican lawmakers now claim that Frito-Lay won’t buy potatoes grown on any land where solar panels were ever installed. Yes, this is totally made up. (Austyn Gaffney, Canary Media)

Finally, I was sad to read that Politico is shutting down E&E News, which does great climate and energy journalism. I’m glad nobody is getting laid off, and I hope Politico keeps climate front and center even as it shifts toward energy-centric reporting.

But like UCLA’s Evan George, who wrote about the shift for his excellent newsletter, The Drain, I worry that Politico could be falling victim to the same mentality as other news outlets and deciding that climate simply isn’t so important anymore.

Hopefully that isn’t the case; only time will tell. Here at Climate-Colored Goggles, my focus on the climate crisis will stay sharp and true.

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Brent Suter won’t be remembered alongside the likes of Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali.

But the Los Angeles Angels relief pitcher is making history all the same this week, taking a principled stand as the first American professional athlete — so far as I know — to speak out against oil and gas sponsorships in sports.

Shortly after the Angels clobbered the Dodgers on Sunday, Suter gave me a call. He’d spent the weekend pitching beneath the gigantic 76 gasoline ads at Dodger Stadium. Soon he’d be back in Anaheim for a three-game series against the Houston Astros, whose players wear Occidental Petroleum patches on their jerseys.

Suter doesn’t like any of it.

“Certainly I can’t go over the line with any criticisms of companies sponsoring us, as an employee or as an athlete in Major League Baseball,” he said. “But certainly I’d prefer clean energy companies.”

“For someone who studies environmental science and all that,” he added, “it’s a little bit of a conundrum.”

Indeed, Suter isn’t your average baseball player. He studied environmental science and policy at Harvard, pursuing a passion that began his sophomore year of high school, when he and his mom saw Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” He knew that working on climate would be his “life mission.”

But he was also a good baseball player, and he was selected by the Milwaukee Brewers late in the 2012 draft. He made his major league debut in 2016 and has played for the Brewers, Colorado Rockies, Cincinnati Reds and Angels over the last decade, logging 529 strikeouts and a 3.63 ERA over 635 innings — solid numbers.

Meanwhile, he’s stayed engaged on climate. He supported a carbon-fee-and-dividend bill in Congress. He helped launch Sidelining Carbon, an initiative to offset climate pollution from sports team travel. He serves on the advisory board of EcoAthletes, which works with athletes to promote climate action and sustainability. He was actually the group’s first member.

“When we got him, I was like, ‘Oh, maybe we have something here,’” said EcoAthletes founder and CEO Lew Blaustein.

Suter’s latest cause is his boldest yet.

Climate advocates have increasingly accused fossil fuel companies of partnering with sports teams to launder their reputations as hotter heat waves, worsening wildfires and other climate impacts endanger players and fans. In Europe, athletes and activists have been calling out “sportswashing” for years — as seen on “Ted Lasso.”

But until recently, American activists largely ignored fossil fuel advertising in sports. That started to change in 2024, after I wrote a column calling on the Dodgers to cut ties with longtime sponsor Phillips 66, owner of the 76 gasoline brand. Since then, more than 28,000 people have signed a petition urging Dodgers ownership to dump 76.

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The Dodgers have refused, but the campaign has gone national, with activists protesting fossil fuel advertisers at arenas across the country. The Sierra Club Angeles Chapter and Third Act SoCal announced Wednesday that they’re planning their next series of protests at nine stadiums across North America on June 21, tied to the FIFA World Cup, which starts this week.

The press release announcing the June 21 protests quotes Suter — a big endorsement for an emerging movement still looking for its first win.

“As an athlete, I care a lot about promoting companies that share my values, and I also care a lot about our planet,” Suter says in the press release. “Have I used and directly benefited from fossil fuels in my life? Absolutely. Do I believe that continuing to fully depend on fossil fuels as a society is dangerous? Absolutely. We need to find ways to power our society in cleaner ways, and I want to represent companies that want to be part of the solution.”

When I spoke with Suter, I asked him: If he were in charge, would baseball teams stop accepting oil and gas sponsorships?

At first he hedged: He’d be OK promoting fossil fuel companies “who are making big strides into the clean energy space.”

Then he paused and thought about it some more.

“I don’t even know if those [companies] exist,” he said. “Come to think about it, I don’t think it exists. A lot of greenwashing out there.”

I asked something even harder: Would Suter be willing to play for the Astros, with those Occidental patches on their sleeves? What about the Cleveland Guardians or the Texas Rangers, which also advertise Big Oil on their jerseys?

Good question, he said, mulling it over.

“None of those teams have approached me in free agency seriously,” he said.

Suter is 36 years old, a veteran relief pitcher likely to retire in the next few years. He’s said his post-baseball career will focus on sustainability. I doubt his decision to take a stand on sportswashing will go down as a watershed moment in sports history.

But it’s becoming more difficult for teams to ignore the climate crisis.

For the next month, the eyes of the world will be on the World Cup, with scientists warning that extreme heat could imperil players and spectators. Even if athletes don’t get sick, extraordinary temperatures could impair player performance.

FIFA’s response has been mixed; the soccer federation mandated three-minute hydration breaks during each half but scheduled many games during the hottest part of the day in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, to facilitate optimal TV viewing times in Europe. FIFA won’t allow fans to bring reusable water bottles to games, claiming they’re a safety hazard. And one of its biggest sponsors is Saudi Aramco.

Warmer winters and declining snowpack, meanwhile, are making it harder to find feasible spots for the Winter Olympics. And pro athletes aren’t the only ones feeling the heat; high schoolers are subjecting themselves to riskier temperatures and seeing games canceled due to fossil fueled wildfires and unhealthy smoke.

In 2024, a UCLA Law survey found that at least 59 U.S. sports teams are sponsored by oil giants, or by utilities that rely primarily on fossil fuels. As global warming gets worse — and as activists keep up the pressure — I suspect it will only get harder for teams to justify promoting oil and gas.

All of which is a long way of saying: Suter may be the first American pro athlete to call out fossil fuel advertisers, but I doubt he’ll be the last.

“He’s great to have as our first,” Blaustein said. “We need to clone him.”

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There’s a funny idea that gets bandied about by sports fans — usually when they’re mad at athletes for supporting causes they don’t like — that sports are supposed to be apolitical. I suspect this idea would have confused Jackie Robinson and other social justice-minded athletes, many of whom — still today! — use their platforms to bend the arc of the moral universe.

I’m thinking about folks like basketball player Jason Collins, who bravely came out as gay in 2013, making himself the NBA’s first openly gay player (and who sadly died last month at 47). Folks like Dodgers star Mookie Betts, who kneeled during the national anthem in 2020 to protest police brutality. Folks like Megan Rapinoe, who with other members of the women’s national team sued the U.S. Soccer Federation, accusing it of paying women less than men.

To be clear, Suter isn’t comparing himself to any of them. He’s not trying to make a lot of noise. He just wants to be part of building a better future.

“I love supporting clean energy companies,” he said. “I love supporting people that are doing well and doing good.”

Still, he thought long and hard before speaking out.

“The first guy through the wall can sometimes get bloody,” he said.

So let’s give Suter some love. Next time he jogs in from the bullpen, cheer him on. If you don’t watch baseball, he’s on Instagram. Some likes are in order.

And if you want to protest sportswashing on June 21? Here’s the list of locations, including Dodger Stadium and SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Golden 1 Center in Sacramento.

This won’t be your last chance. There’s a lot of baseball left to play.

Catch up on Climate-Colored Goggles

Behind on your inbox? Been there. Here are some of my favorite recent newsletters:

• June 3: The case against climate cynicism

• May 27: Ted Turner, a modern-day wilderness warrior

• April 29: Jane Goodall’s love affair with Disney

• April 13: The desert solar project that refuses to die

In other news

Fire on the landscape:

• The Grand Canyon’s North Rim is back open to visitors following a devastating fire. Some folks lined up at the gate before the 6 a.m. opening; others hiked from the South Rim the night before. (Eva Terry, Deseret News)

• Researchers are studying whether exposure to wildfire smoke makes it harder to conceive children. (Susan Shain, High Country News)

• Hexavalent chromium — a highly toxic, cancer-causing metal — stayed in the air for months after the 2025 Los Angeles fires. (Tony Briscoe, L.A. Times)

• “These fish continue to amaze me.” The Santa Monica Mountains’ last steelhead trout survived the Palisades fire — and had babies. (Lila Seidman, L.A. Times)

The energy transition:

• California is now home to the first major battery installation in the U.S. that can supply electricity for eight hours rather than four — a big step toward 24/7 clean energy. (Julian Spector, Canary Media)

• The company behind Nevada’s controversial Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine says it expects to announce a new funding partner this month — a key milestone before construction can begin. (Amy Alonzo, the Nevada Independent)

• Wind and solar generated more electricity than gas worldwide in April — a first. (Dan McCarthy, Canary Media)

On the Colorado River:

• Another poor winter could devastate lakes Mead and Powell, leaving the massive reservoirs nearly dry. (Jake Bolster, Inside Climate News)

• San Diego County may be able to sell desalinated water to Arizona and/or Nevada, helping stave off shortages at Mead. (MacKenzie Elmer, Voice of San Diego)

• President Trump plans to nominate California farmer Aubrey Bettencourt to lead the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. (Alex Hager, KJZZ)

Can’t beat the heat:

• “I felt at times really dizzy and just really tired and walking around like a zombie.” Players endured a scorching French Open. (Tumaini Carayol, the Guardian)

• From January through May, Southern California saw its most unhealthy air days in more than a decade. High temperatures were to blame, cooking pollution into smog. (Tony Briscoe, L.A. Times)

One more thing: If you plan to drink alcohol while watching the World Cup, and it’s hot where you are, be careful. Stay hydrated. Here are some tips from the Associated Press’ Dorany Pineda.

The attorneys rose to make their closing arguments. The charges were seismic: that the meat and dairy industries had run misleading ad campaigns, deceived consumers about plant-based foods and attempted to hide their massive role in the climate crisis.

But as soon as the prosecutors began to speak, things went haywire.

The lawyers reminded the jury — in reality a packed house at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater — that one of the defense attorneys had literally thrown a bag of soybeans into the audience in a fit of anger. This proved that the meat and dairy industries were — wait, what was happening?! The lawyers rushed off the stage and into the crowd. No way: A member of the “jury” had mashed the projectile soybeans into soy milk.

“This is objectively milk!” declared prosecutor Esteban Gast, holding the bag high.

The crowd went wild. Gast and co-counsel Joanna Hausmann — both of them actually comedians, not lawyers — started a theater-wide chant: This is milk! This is milk!

The defense attorneys (also comedians) weren’t having it. Feigning outrage and trying not to laugh — and sporting milk mustaches from an earlier bit — they pointed at the resourceful juror, shouting: Witch! Witch! Murder the witch!

If everything I’m describing sounds totally unhinged — well, it was. It was also very funny. And it captured the spirit of the Hollywood Climate Summit.

Over two days this week, hundreds of people spanning a wide range of industries and job descriptions — environmental science, filmmaking, philanthropy, activism, space exploration, journalism, religion, video games, advertising and more — gathered for a series of panels, workshops and happy hours. Most of the summit was far less raucous than the mock trial, which was marked by “Big Meat” innuendo and a recurring joke about kidnapped children on milk cartons (as well as legitimately valuable testimony from actual experts — full video here if you’re interested).

But everything started to click for me during the chaotic closing arguments.

I go to a lot of climate conferences, and they’re usually dry, exhausting or both — even when I learn a lot and meet interesting people. The science is terrifying, but there are reasons for hope. The energy transition is daunting but doable, if we can somehow get the politics right. And no, the politics are definitely not right.

I could draw you a map of what “climate” is supposed to look like. It’s nothing like the The People v. Big Meat & Dairy.

Confession time: I’ve now been to the Hollywood Climate Summit three times, and I always have fun. It that OK? Is climate change allowed to be fun?

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After the trial ended — the jury voted overwhelmingly to convict the meat and dairy industries, big surprise — I tracked down the soybean witch. I learned her name is Rachel Cellinese, and she’s a graphic designer who helps run Climate Designers LA. She told me she eats vegan and sometimes makes non-dairy milk at home. She and a fellow designer had smushed the soybeans into milk, adding water as needed.

Why bother, when the trial was a gag? They couldn’t help themselves. They wanted to strike a victory against the forces of meat of dairy.

“We wanted to prove them wrong,” she said.

This wasn’t a climate summit, not in the traditional sense; it was live theater, a pep rally, a sprawling interdisciplinary brainstorming session. It also didn’t take place in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the same way that “Hollywood” is now a global industry encompassing everything from big-budget IMAX releases to 90-second YouTube micro dramas, “climate” is no longer just a scientific, economic or even political affair. It’s the story of the century.

And if it’s not a fun story, nobody’s going to care.

So I love the Hollywood Climate Summit. I loved it when Alison Tatlock, an executive producer on Apple TV’s “Pluribus” — which I badly need to watch! — explained how the show deals with environmental psychology. I smiled when marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson told Tatlock she wants to see a romantic comedy that starts with a woman returning home to find a hot, shirtless solar installer on her roof.

“Wait, are you pitching?!” Tatlock asked.

I got a kick out of watching voice actor Erika Ishii struggle through sustainability-themed video games, the audience groaning sympathetically, as researcher Marina Psaros explained how gaming can serve as a gateway drug to real-life environmental problem-solving.

And I marveled as former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman acknowledged that he didn’t have the classic epiphanies about human unity or our shared environment the first time he saw Earth from space — but only, he realized later, because he already understood everything he needed to understand.

“All the things that we allow to divide us, like race, nationality, gender, religion, politics, all those things — [they’re] nowhere near as important as the fact that we are all fundamentally the same, and we all share the same home, and we all live and breathe the same air from the same atmosphere, and we are all here, and we all have to get along, and there’s nowhere else to go,” he said.

“When I talk to some of my colleagues that say that they had that realization the moment they looked out the window and saw the Earth, I want to ask them, ‘What did you think before you went up there?’” Reisman said, drawing laughs. “Somebody once wrote something, which is that ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident,’ that we are all created equal. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. You shouldn’t have to, in my opinion, strap into a rocket and blast off into outer space to figure that one out.”

The summit didn’t shy away from traditional climate subject matter.

A panel on the new Netflix documentary “The Plastic Detox” offered a terrifying look at the health consequences of microplastics. A discussion about Southern California public transit delved into the kinds of policy details — budgets! permitting rules! tax credits! — that would have fired up legislative aides.

But even when the topics were wonky or scary, the conversations were joyful. Folks were bursting with energy and ideas. They were totally convinced that if they pooled their expertise and creativity, they could tell stories that inspire people to care about the climate crisis and take action.

How much of that optimism was forced or naive? Maybe some.

Most of the formal dialogue ignored the 800-metric-ton gorilla in the room: President Trump’s nonstop attacks on all things good and holy. Between sessions, though, I kept hearing grim chatter about the huge drop-off in philanthropic and corporate funding for climate work, which is tied to the hostile political climate. Everyone felt it.

On the bright side, the Hollywood Climate Summit still boasted a robust list of major studio funders, including Netflix, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery.

But I couldn’t help notice that Paramount, recently acquired by ultra-wealthy Trump ally Larry Ellison and his family, had dropped its sponsorship. A summit attendee who shall remain nameless also told me they’d learned that Paramount dissolved its “Green Team,” a volunteer group of employees who organized sustainability projects such as community gardening and responsible e-waste disposal.

So there were undercurrents of doubt pulsing beneath the joy.

There were also a few programming choices that struck me as questionable.

There were lots of panels about the benefits of plant-based foods but hardly any about energy and transportation, which collectively produce far more climate pollution than animal agriculture. And as much as I appreciated the organizers’ efforts to shine a harsh spotlight on the meat and dairy industries, the messaging didn’t exactly mesh with one of their other main goals: finding ways to engage with Republican voters.

If we want to tell climate stories that resonate with broader audiences, cheap solar power and cool electric cars are going to resonate with a wider swath of Americans than fake meat. Sorry, it’s true.

But those are minor complaints; like I wrote earlier this week, cynicism is self-defeating. I love the Hollywood Climate Summit because it breaks down barriers between climate and culture — exactly what I’m trying to do with this newsletter.

By the end of the second day, drinks were flowing, vegan snacks were circulating and it was hard not to imagine that the connections being formed would lead to shows I’d watch someday on streaming (or perhaps on TikTok).

Also, let’s not overlook the fact that a bunch of climate-tinged movies and TV shows have already been made.

The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, a consortium backed by the major studios, launched the Green Title Database last month. Ali Weinstein, the group’s director of content and strategic communications — and a co-founder of the Hollywood Climate Summit — described the database as “a first-of-its-kind public collection of over 350 TV episodes, series, and feature films from 2018 through present that feature climate and environmental themes.”

“After years of going from list to list for examples, constantly struggling to come up with new ideas for how to best represent climate stories while persuading others to write or develop or greenlight their own, I am so proud that I had the opportunity helm a solution, especially one that is open for anyone to use, is super customizable, and allows for others to submit the climate titles they’re viewing in their day to day lives,” Weinstein wrote in a LinkedIn post.

I saw Weinstein at the summit. I hadn’t gotten a chance to explore the database yet, and I was curious: Did it include “Landman,” the Paramount+ soap opera starring Billy Bob Thornton as a Texas oilman who can’t stop lying about wind turbines and dumping on climate activists?

Yep, Weinstein told me, “Landman” is in there.

“We wanted it to be a basis for research,” she said. “Everyone has different thoughts on what is good and bad.”

I love that mindset. “Climate” is big, messy and hard to define. It’s counterproductive to draw boundaries around what — or who — is relevant to the conversation.

I’m not talking about breaking bread with oil executives or techno-fascists. But if you think you know everything there is to know about solving climate change, yet you’ve never talked with an Instagram influencer, or an ad copywriter, or a comedian — well, imagine touring the Hollywood Walk of Fame and convincing yourself you’ve seen the entire entertainment industry. You imagination may need a little expanding.

Tackling the climate crisis will require science and policy. It will also require stories across every form of media. And thank goodness, because stories are fun!

Speaking of, one last story: On Wednesday afternoon, I took a break from the summit and walked to the newly opened Wilshire/La Cienega station on Metro’s D Line. I was inspired by “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” writer Bill Wolkoff, who had busted out his “Ride the D” T-shirt on stage. You can now get from Union Station to Beverly Hills in 21 minutes.

The new station was easy to navigate and gorgeously decorated. By next year, the train will extend to Westwood. It’s no wonder the D Line extension is changing how many Angelenos map the city in their minds.

If you have a mental map of “climate” — the challenges, the solutions, the key players — it’s worth updating every so often. When I started my career as an energy reporter, I never pictured myself watching comedians argue about the ethics of Taylor Swift’s milk-mustache advertisement. Now it’s a normal part of my job.

If you really commit, your mental map will never stop changing. And that’s OK. You don’t have to try your hand at every kind of climate action, any more than you’d try to watch every movie on Netflix — or every movie in the Green Title Database.

But feel free to wander. You never know where you’ll wind up.

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I’ll have more reporting on the Hollywood Climate Summit. For now, see my recent piece on the new documentary “The [Conserv]atives,” which profiles conservative climate activists and was featured at the summit.

Here’s what I wrote the last two days:

• Monday: California’s clean energy leadership is at stake in this week’s election

• Tuesday: NPR lays off its chief climate editor

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When I sat down yesterday to watch “The [Conserv]atives” — a documentary about Republican climate advocates trying to convince their fellow conservatives to see the light — I was deeply skeptical.

I’d previously interviewed Utah Senator John Curtis, who founded the Conservative Climate Caucus before voting to obliterate renewable energy tax credits. I’d gotten to know California lawmaker Chad Mayes, whose decision to rescue the state’s signature climate program was so unpopular among Republicans that he lost his leadership post in Sacramento. For more than a decade, I’d heard folks insist that the conservative climate movement was finally on the verge of going mainstream, for real this time.

Now someone had made a documentary. Great. A trusted source was promoting it, so I figured I’d give it a shot. But I steeled myself to be irritated.

The first scene caught me off guard. It features Benji Backer, just 23 years old and the founder of the American Conservation Coalition, launching his group with a rally on a hot summer day in Miami. It’s pretty grim: Hardly anyone shows up, and protesters relentlessly interrupt Backer, with one shouting, “You’re all RINOs!” (Republicans In Name Only.) Another holds a sign reading, “There Is No Climate Crisis.”

Nadia Gill, one of the co-directors, told me this was the first scene she filmed. But she only realized well into editing that it was where she wanted to start the movie.

She decided it made for a strong opening, because (spoiler alert) not only does Backer fail to build widespread conservative support for climate action, the Republican Party arguably moves backward by the end of the film in 2025.

“The big dream of getting the Republican Party to shift — at that moment [in 2021] it seemed tangible, but by the end it seemed obsolete and impossible,” Gill said.

So no, this isn’t a naive, starry-eyed film. It’s wonderfully messy and instructive, and especially compelling (to my mind) for the access it offers to Backer and former Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a climate-forward Republican who briefly ran for president in 2024. And it doesn’t shy away from the intense partisanship that stymies their efforts. Some of the best scenes include Backer sparring with climate denier Marc Morano in a debate, and Suarez being excluded from a Republican presidential debate — only for the debate to devolve into a climate denial lovefest.

The ending is fascinating. Suarez ultimately endorses Trump. Backer falls the other way, becoming so disenchanted with the GOP — and with political polarization writ large — that he’s not sure he wants to run a conservative environmental organization anymore. He starts a new group called Nature Is Nonpartisan.

Gill called Backer’s transformation “the saving grace of the movie.” She made the film with center-left and center-right audiences in mind, and she worried they would come away feeling cynical if the events of 2024 and 2025 — Trump’s reelection, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” undoing President Biden’s climate law — didn’t force Backer to rethink his choices.

Not that Gill didn’t experience bouts of cynicism herself. Over four years working on the movie, she watched as congressional Republicans toyed with climate policy ideas, to the point where she wondered whether she might “capture the moment” when they finally took decisive action.

Then Trump got elected.

“I was kind of like, ‘Oh my God, why did I make this film? I need to throw it out. But I can’t,’” she said. “Think about Ray, think about Benji, think about Jessica.”

Ray Gaesser and Jessica Moerman are the other conservatives featured in the movie. He’s an Iowa corn and soybean grower, and an advocate for climate-friendly farming. She’s president of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and a believer that caring for God’s creation (including humans) is the Christian thing to do.

Watching the film, I was frankly a little bored by their stories, relative to the national political drama playing out with Backer and Suarez. But Gill saw their work as central to her message. The federal government is broken, she said; the path forward is local. Planting cover crops, like Gaesser. Persuading your neighbors to organize for climate action, like Moerman. Advocating for a community solar installation, like Gill herself is doing in Truckee, California.

“Is it a little mealymouthed or wishy-washy to say, ‘Go to your local community?’” she asked. “If you remain cynical, then yes. But if you don’t remain cynical?”

I’m an optimist, or I wouldn’t bother writing about climate. But I also struggle with cynicism. Of course we need local action, but how much will it matter in the absence of major national action? Of course we need Republicans to get on board, but can the climate really wait for them to get their act together?

As far as Gill is concerned, there’s simply no substitute for the slow, methodical work of building support for climate solutions in your local community, among people of all ideologies. That’s the only way to build a durable bipartisan consensus.

“We spend so much time looking at the legislators and the legislative failures, and not enough time just activating ourselves,” Gill said.

She’s right; we need lots more people activated on both sides of the political aisle. That’s the only way to get Democrats to take aggressive climate action at the federal level, and to get Republicans to stop repealing it whenever they retake Congress. We need an overwhelming groundswell of grassroots demand.

Right now we’re nowhere close. But I choose to be optimistic, because cynicism is self-defeating. Please, if you can help it, don’t ever be cynical.

Case in point: The idea of a climate-conscious Republican Party may sound ludicrous. For now, it is ludicrous. But eventually it won’t be. We can’t let it be.

Information about future screenings of “The [Conserv]atives” can be found here.

When CBS News gutted its climate team, lots of folks told me the company’s new Trump-friendly owners must have given the order. Same thing when the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post laid off most of its climate reporters.

I kept telling folks I saw no evidence of a conspiracy. The sad reality is that climate coverage just isn’t a priority for most newsroom leaders. When required to cut costs, far too often they decide climate is expendable.

Gut-wrenching case in point: NPR’s chief climate editor, Neela Banerjee, posted on LinkedIn last week that she’d been laid off. NPR’s climate desk, she wrote, “no longer exists separately but has been folded into the National Desk.”

“We were 10 people who did ambitious, prize-winning enterprise and broke news,” she wrote.

Banerjee wasn’t alone; 10 journalists across NPR lost their jobs last week. There was no billionaire oligarch gunning for climate, no one trying to appease President Trump and his oil industry patrons. NPR was strapped for cash after Republicans in Congress slashed federal funding. Climate got the short end of the stick.

I haven’t been able to confirm if any other NPR climate journalists lost their jobs. But killing the standalone climate desk is bad no matter what.

Banerjee’s team organized an annual Climate Solutions Week, corralling journalists from NPR member stations across the U.S. to tell stories that “gave audiences a sense of agency and inspiration amid the planetary gloom,” as Banerjee wrote on LinkedIn. Her team also “built a reporting collaborative of more than 50 member stations which covered climate at the local level and became tightly knit in the process,” she wrote.

“We broke down silos within NPR and helped our colleagues at shows, podcasts and desks understand climate change in their contexts,” she wrote.

After this story was published on Monday, NPR spokesperson Juliet Barbara told me that the broadcaster “has not eliminated its Climate team or any other coverage areas; we have reorganized our newsroom.”

“While the newsroom reorganization was driven by financial necessity, we also took care to ensure that climate coverage and all areas of coverage would be preserved and not diminished,” she said in an email. “Integrating the climate team into the national desk means climate journalism is able to be woven into more of our reporting: climate is a cost-of-living story, a politics story, a community story that touches every beat we cover.”

“Our commitment to climate journalism has not changed,” she added.

Indeed, climate is an everything story that all reporters can and should take seriously. But without a dedicated climate desk serving as an internal accountability engine, it’s hard to imagine the same quantity and quality of climate work on the airwaves. Which sucks, because NPR is awesome and important and influential.

On a personal note, I hate seeing Banerjee lose her job because she’s truly one of the best in the business. After working at the Los Angeles Times, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, along with her colleagues at Inside Climate News, for their epic investigation exposing Exxon’s history of hiding the truth about global warming.

Even in a time of dire financial straits, the idea that NPR’s top editors thought they could do without Banerjee — and a standalone climate desk — is crazy to me.

Support climate journalism, folks. And someone, please hire Neela.

What is Patagonia thinking?

I’m a fan of Pattie Gonia, a drag queen and LGBTQ+ activist who has raised millions of dollars for environmental groups. You can find them on Instagram here. They have 1.8 million followers — one-third as many as Patagonia, but still a big number.

I’m also Patagonia fan; as I write this, I have a green Patagonia jacket draped over my chair. But to many environmentalists’ disappointment, the outdoor retailer sued Pattie Gonia in January, claiming trademark infringement.

Pattie Gonia, legal name Wyn Wiley, had filed a trademark application to use their drag queen name for clothing sales and activism. That triggered Patagonia’s lawsuit. The Ventura-based company said in its complaint that it “has been and will continue to be irreparably harmed” by Pattie Gonia’s appropriation of its brand.

The legalities are beyond my ability to pass judgment; the Los Angeles Times parses the details in this story.

The lawsuit is back in the news because Pattie Gonia posted two videos in the last few days: one accusing Patagonia of betraying its progressive values and taking advantage of a hostile political climate toward LGBTQ+ Americans, and another offering to drop the trademark application if the company drops its lawsuit.

“I think they looked at this political moment and thought that they could pull this off without pushback,” Pattie Gonia said.

Unfortunately, Patagonia won’t take the easy out. On Monday — the first day of Pride Month! — the company posted its own Instagram message. It listed multiple demands for dropping the lawsuit — including that Pattie Gonia stop selling clothing and other merchandise under their drag name.

“We wish this lawsuit had not been necessary, and we want to acknowledge any hurt it has caused, especially in the LGBTQ+ community,” the company wrote.

The whole thing is bizarre. Even if Patagonia executives have a case on the merits — and again, I have no idea — what are they afraid of? That they might lose a few sales to an environmentalist doing awesome work? That a handful of bigots might confuse Pattie Gonia with Patagonia and stop patronizing their stores?

Time to get up from my desk and take a walk. Fortunately it’s warm enough outside that I don’t need my jacket.

Say hi at the Hollywood Climate Summit!

If you’re attending the Hollywood Climate Summit this Wednesday and Thursday in Los Angeles, I would love to say hello! Just reply to this email to let me know you’ll be there, or come find me at the event.

I’m planning to send out daily email updates; we’ll see if I can stick to that. It’s a very cool gathering, bringing together artists, educators, scientists and executives working at the intersection of climate and entertainment.

This is my first Hollywood Climate Summit since I started Climate-Colored Goggles in October. Here’s what I wrote last year for the L.A. Times.

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Imagine going to Walmart and spending a couple of hundred dollars on a solar panel, or maybe a couple of thousand dollars on a couple of panels. Then you head home and hang them from your balcony — or prop them up in your yard — and plug them in.

You start generating enough electricity to power your refrigerator and possibly a few appliances. Your electric bill goes down immediately. Your investment pays off within two or three years.

That’s “plug-in” solar — like rooftop solar but smaller, simpler and cheaper. It’s much more accessible to renters and folks who live in apartments.

It’s technically allowed in California, although it exists in a legal gray area. Although it’s taken Europe by storm, only a handful of companies sell plug-in panels in the U.S., in part because utilities typically insist that customers seek their permission first — a costly, time-consuming process.

There’s a solution in sight. Hopefully.

Last month, the California Senate voted 35-1 to approve SB 868 from Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). The bill would clarify that plug-in systems below a certain size are exempt from utility interconnection requirements, so long as they meet safety standards. If the bill clears the state Assembly and is signed by Gavin Newsom, expect a booming market within a few years.

What could go wrong?

Well, Newsom is notoriously accommodating to the utility industry — and SB 868’s few opponents include Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, as well as groups representing public utilities such as the L.A. Department of Water and Power and Sacramento Municipal Utility District. (Pacific Gas & Electric, believe it or not, says it’s willing to support SB 868 with changes.)

If SB 868 clears the Assembly, would Newsom sign it? I asked Bernadette Del Chiaro, a senior vice president at Environmental Working Group. She was part of a panel that I moderated last week at a green building conference in Berkeley.

Her answer: Yes, she thinks he would.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb. It’s always risky to do that,” Del Chiaro said. “But it’s a bipartisan bill. The Senate vote was 35-1. If we get the same kind of broad support in the Assembly, I think it will be really tough for [Newsom] to veto it.”

I was encouraged by Del Chiaro’s response. After the panel, though, it occurred to me how strange it was that I even needed to ask the question.

We live in California, a climate leader and a hotbed for clean energy technology — at least historically. Could our governor really veto such commonsense legislation?

Unfortunately, it felt possible.

Newsom has shown a frustrating willingness to undercut rooftop solar programs that don’t fuel utility industry profits. Meanwhile, eight states have already passed plug-in solar laws, starting with deep-red Utah — meaning California is behind.

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The Golden State has abdicated its climate leadership in other ways, too.

Just last week, the California Air Resources Board — led by a Newsom appointee — revamped the state’s signature climate program, easing carbon emission limits for oil refineries and other large polluters. In addition to fueling global warming, critics say the changes will eliminate $2 billion in annual funding for wildfire prevention, public transit, clean drinking water and more.

Officials argued the changes were needed to keep gas prices and electric rates under control — the same affordability rationale that state leaders have used to justify more oil drilling in the Central Valley, lower rooftop solar incentives, a moratorium on new energy-efficient building codes and other climate backsliding.

“We are responding to real affordability concerns,” Air Resources Board chair Lauren Sanchez said in a written statement last week.

I’m sympathetic, to an extent.

California has ambitious climate goals. Meeting them will be hard. And they won’t matter very much if folks can’t afford to live here — even if the reasons California is so expensive have little to do with climate policy. A lot of policymakers are walking a fine line, trying to keep propelling the energy transition while also responding to the reality that many people are struggling with high energy costs.

We need leaders willing to make tough decisions. Leaders who won’t throw climate under the bus for political expediency. Leaders who can tackle the affordability crisis without embracing short-sighted ideas that hurt more than help.

If you read my piece on the California governor’s race, you know Tom Steyer is my recommendation. The only thing that’s changed since my initial analysis is that I’ve grown even more wary of the other Democratic front-runner, Xavier Becerra.

Chevron followed up its $39,200 contribution to Becerra’s campaign with another $500,000 to an independent expenditure committee supporting Becerra. California Resources Corporation, the state’s largest oil driller, also gave $500,000 to the same pro-Becerra committee.

Even more concerning than the money? Becerra’s response amid mounting criticism from climate activists. First he defended Chevron’s contribution by insisting that the oil company is “not the bad guy.” Then he told Politico that he’s willing to reconsider California’s longstanding climate targets.

“We should absolutely have ambitious goals to phase out fossil fuels. … It’s just, what will our pace be?” Becerra said. “Can we make the 2045 goal? Sure would like to, but I’m not going to hang up our economy and families’ cost of living if we find that we’re not able to meet that goal.”

It’s no wonder oil companies are supporting him. Knowing that California will elect a Democrat, that’s the best attitude they’re going to get.

Becerra’s climate flexibility may sound especially good to oil executives compared to Steyer, who previously told me that polluters “owe the state of California hundreds of billions of dollars” in climate damages.

PG&E, meanwhile, is attacking Steyer, who has vowed to boost rooftop solar and rein in utility profits. The company has spent at least $13.5 million opposing him, the L.A. Times reported. And although Southern California Edison hasn’t spent any money on the governor’s race, Edison says it opposes Steyer.

As for plug-in solar, private and public utilities warn that the technology could pose safety hazards, like fire or electric shock, without some utility oversight. Independent experts, though, say those concerns are wildly exaggerated.

“Corporations hide behind the safety issue all the time,” veteran electrical engineer Bill Brooks said during my moderated panel. “Anything that they don’t like, the first thing that comes out is, ‘It’s a safety issue.’”

Steyer is a fan of plug-in solar. In a recent social media post, he called it “fantastic,” saying “any politician who opposes this technology is either ignorant or is beholden to utility monopolies.”

So how does Becerra feel? He’s taken a dim view of rooftop solar, but maybe he sees plug-in differently?

I reached out to his campaign for comment. No response.

The latest polling shows Becerra leading the field of gubernatorial candidates, with Steyer and Republican Steve Hilton in a close race for second place (and everyone else far behind). The top two finishers will advance to the general election. The last day to vote is tomorrow, Tuesday 6/2.

Whichever Democrat ultimately wins in November, California will maintain its status as a clean energy leader. A quarter-century of momentum is hard to kill.

But the whole point of leadership is to lead people in the right direction. On Tuesday, Californians face a stark choice about where we’re all going.

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Shortly before billionaire media mogul Ted Turner died earlier this month, I caught a screening of “Preserved” at a small theater in Auburn, a former Gold Rush town in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The documentary offered an in-depth look at Vermejo, an 872-square-mile nature reserve hugging the New Mexico-Colorado border. Turner bought the overgrazed, ecologically degraded ranch in 1996, then spent the next few decades restoring it to health, reintroducing bison and Rio Grande cutthroat trout.

By the end of his life, Turner was one of the nation’s largest private landowners, with reserves and ranches across the West and the Great Plains, many of them protected by conservation easements. Obituary writers praised his environmental achievements. But I wasn’t sure if I should join in the adulation. Turner had founded CNN, igniting America’s unhealthy obsession with 24/7 news. He had owned a baseball team steeped in racist traditions (the Atlanta Braves). He had urged other countries to adopt China’s one-child policy. How admirable were his values, really?

Certain parts of the documentary gave me pause too.

When Turner bought Vermejo, gas extraction carried on; an oil company owned the mineral rights, but Turner seemingly wasn’t eager to interfere. I also wasn’t sure how to feel about Vermejo’s extensive ecotourism amenities, some of them luxurious — or about Turner’s argument that people should support sustainable bison populations by eating more bison meat, thus creating economic demand for bison. Turner founded Ted’s Montana Grill, a national restaurant chain with bison on the menu.

Was this guy a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt? Or just another arrogant billionaire who thought he knew better than everyone else?

I called a few hard-core conservationists who saw Turner’s work up close. And guess what? They gave me glowing reviews.

“He was a very down-to-earth guy who was easy to talk to, at least about conservation-related stuff,” said Garrett VeneKlasen, northern conservation director at New Mexico Wild. “He cared so much about the restoration of these landscapes.”

VeneKlasen said the Mexican gray wolf reintroduction program at Turner’s Ladder Ranch had boosted the predator’s numbers and genetic diversity. He lauded Turner’s efforts to establish a safe home for endangered Bolson tortoises at Armendaris Ranch. He credited Vermejo’s Rio Grande cutthroat trout program with helping keep the fish off the endangered species list.

“He must have spent an enormous amount of money on all of this,” VeneKlasen said.

Mary Katherine Ray, wildlife chair of the Sierra Club’s Rio Grande Chapter, lives near Turner’s Ladder Ranch in south-central New Mexico and sometimes sees his bison as she drives to get groceries. Restoring bison populations was Turner’s greatest passion on his two million acres of land; he loved America’s national mammal. His herds alone reportedly account for one-tenth of North America’s bison.

Although Ray has never stepped foot on Ladder Ranch, she’s visited Armendaris, just across the Rio Grande. She described spectacular caves frequented in the summer by Mexican free-tailed bats. They produce huge amounts of guano — a resource that was mined before Turner purchased the property.

“Not everything you can make money on is something you should do. I think that was his philosophy,” she said.

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Still, Ray didn’t mind that Turner made money via lodges, tours, hunting and raising bison for human consumption. She saw how his profits fueled his conservation — and how much better bison were for the landscape than cows.

“If we could clone Ted Turner,” she said, “I would love to have landowners across the state be like him.”

We live in an era where billionaires wield outsized influence on society, generally for the worse: Musk. Bezos. Zuckerberg. Koch. The list goes on.

Turner wasn’t perfect. But it’s refreshing to learn that someone so wealthy had such good values — and spent so much money and time practicing them. Actor and climate activist Jane Fonda, one of his ex-wives, wrote on Instagram that he “taught [her] more than any other person or school classes, mostly about nature and wildlife, hunting and fishing.”

“Hunters and fishermen who follow the law are the best environmentalists,” she wrote.

She added that she can “see him in heaven now with all the wildlife he helped bring back from extinction — the black footed ferrets, the prairie dogs, Big Horned sheep, Mexican Gray Wolf, the Yellowstone wolf pack, bison, the red cockaded woodpecker and so many more.”

“They’re all gathered at the pearly gates applauding and thanking him for saving their species,” she wrote.

So my skepticism was probably misplaced. But any lingering doubts evaporated as I spoke with Judy Adler, who spent 14 years at the Turner Foundation, including five as the nonprofit’s president. Beyond Turner’s well-known conservation work, Adler said, the foundation engaged in “years and years of work and education” to support passage of the Great American Outdoors Act, a landmark bipartisan conservation law.

The Turner Foundation also quietly built support for state-level clean energy policies, including energy efficiency programs to cut utility bills for low-income families. One goal was to grow support for renewable energy beyond traditional environmentalists, by funding nonprofits focused on the economic case for clean power.

“If you think about policy change, you have to think about who is in power, and who are the constituencies they care about,” Adler said. “That certainly was a big part of it — making sure there were diverse allies and we were growing the movement.”

Separately, Turner invested in large-scale solar power, long before solar was cheap or popular. In 2007, Turner Renewable Energy was acquired by solar panel manufacturer First Solar, now one of the nation’s leading clean energy companies.

Despite covering the solar industry for a dozen years, I’d never heard about Turner’s role until after he died — and only then because San José State environmental studies professor Dustin Mulvaney mentioned it on social media. Adler told me Turner “just wanted to do good, and he didn’t care about getting credit.”

Ben Clark, who directed “Preserved,” learned about Turner’s work late in the mogul’s life. But when a friend introduced him to Vermejo, he knew he wanted to make a film. The reserve spanned so many different ecosystems, and it was so big — about the size of Canyonlands, Redwood and Zion national parks combined. The Milky Way was so clear at night. And there were so many animals — massive herds of pronghorn, bison and more.

Clark and a collaborator spent more than 130 days shooting the documentary over the course of two years. Their footage is epic, especially the sweeping aerial shots.

The most dramatic sequence involves scientists tracking elusive mountain lions on a dogged journey across a snowy landscape. For Clark, it was incredible fun.

“Not only were they leading me into places that I would want to go as a climber and an explorer, but also getting to learn along the way,” he said.

Clark would love a streaming release for the film; for now, local screenings across the country are still being scheduled. In a world awash with bad environmental news, he’s happy to spread the word about Turner’s legacy.

“I think having positive stories is the only way we’re going to reach bigger audiences and show people that success is possible,” he said.

Turner suffered from Lewy body dementia and stayed out of the public eye during the final years of his life. But Clark sat down with him while making “Preserved.”

“He was in serious decline. He could hold a conversation, he was curious about the film,” Clark recalled. “But the thing I noticed — having been around a few different people that have really big charisma — is you could tell he was still in there. It’s just, his body was not letting it out.”

“You always see a lot in the eyes,” Clark added. “That guy had a lot going on in there.”

The fate of Turner’s 24/7 news network is uncertain; CNN’s parent company is poised to be acquired by Paramount in a deal backed by Trump ally Larry Ellison.

Out on the land, though, Turner’s legacy will be harder to subvert. Other billionaires could stand to learn from his example.

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Until next time

Confession time: Until last month, I hadn’t read “Abundance.”

The 2025 book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has divided progressives with its provocative argument that environmental regulations are stifling climate progress — and undermining support for Democrats — by impeding construction of solar farms, wind turbines and dense new housing. After a year of hearing people argue about it, I got sick of not fully understanding what all the fuss was about.

At the risk of annoying absolutely everybody, here’s my lukewarm take: I think Klein and Thompson make some very good points! I’m also not convinced their ideas would single-handedly solve the climate crisis, as the internet’s most vocal “abundance bros” would have you believe.

I’m glad I read the book, and I appreciate that Gavin Newsom and other high-profile Democrats are taking it seriously. I also understand why critics are so frustrated by its insistence that environmental regulations are, in many cases, bad for the environment. It’s already hard enough defending those regulations against polluting industries and the Trump administration; now some progressives are piling on, too?

Having written extensively about the need to balance building clean energy projects with protecting wildlife habitat, I figured I’d have mixed feelings about “Abundance.” No surprises on that front.

Nonetheless, the book defied my expectations.

While discussing homelessness in L.A., for instance, Klein and Thompson quote an affordable housing consultant who raises a surprising obstacle to building affordable housing: Projects near freeway are required to have higher-quality air ventilation.

“All the affordable housing development is subject to green building requirements,” says Yasmin Tong, founder of CTY Housing. “The standards in California are higher than anywhere else in the country.”

“You’re not just required to build to the standard, you also need to hire a consultant to confirm you’ve built to the standard,” she adds. “That adds costs.”

Her comments prompt Klein and Thompson to ask whether requiring higher-quality air filtration near freeways makes sense, “when the alternative, for many of the would-be residents, is a tent beneath the freeway.”

“To pose the question sounds callous,” they write. “But to refuse to pose the question, given the need for more housing, is cruel.”

The first time I read this, I recoiled a bit: Of course homes near freeways should have top-notch filtration. Air pollution near highways is terrible. People living near highways are more prone to asthma, heart attacks, strokes and lung cancer.

But the more I dwelled on it, the more I wondered. I thought about all the trade-offs between renewable energy development and habitat conservation. Was this a similar trade-off? Do we live in a world where trying to solve every environmental and public health problem means failing to solve most of them, including the biggest one of all?

According to “Abundance,” the answer is “yes.” The book catalogs how liberals have slowed down badly needed infrastructure projects — high-speed rail, solar and wind farms, apartment buildings near public transit — by bogging them down with far too many costs and requirements. Good costs and requirements, as it happens: prevailing wages for workers, diverse hiring rules, detailed environmental reports, regular audits to ensure taxpayer funds aren’t being wasted, and many more.

Taken individually, those are all good and important things. But collectively, they can result in never-ending boondoggles like California’s bullet train.

Blue cities and states “too often add too many goals to a single project,” Klein and Thompson write. “A government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all.”

So what’s the solution?

Based on the fiery discourse around “Abundance,” I feared the book would call for a total unwinding of foundational environmental laws. Fortunately, it doesn’t. Klein and Thompson recommend permitting reform only for climate-friendly energy, instead of an “all of the above” approach that benefits oil and gas.

Bigger picture, they acknowledge the trade-offs inherent to environmental policy.

“It is not always clear how to strike the right balance,” they write. “But a balance that does not allow us to meet our climate goals has to be the wrong one.”

On the whole, the book felt a lot more nuanced than much of the small-a “abundance” rhetoric I’ve encountered online.

Last week, for instance, pundit Matt Yglesias published, “The case for clean energy abundance,” in which he berated climate activists for promoting energy conservation (seriously!) and described true abundance as “a desire to create so much electricity that nobody’s bothering to conserve.”

For Yglesias, environmentalists are the enemy. He castigates green groups constantly, convinced that if only environmental crusaders would shut up about keeping oil in the ground, “normal” Americans would be more likely to vote for Democrats.

If you’ve mainly heard about “abundance” from abundance bros like Yglesias, I can understand why it might sound awful! The internet has a fascinating way of making basically anything toxic. We should all read more books.

We should also resist the temptation to believe in climate silver bullets.

For all the things I think “Abundance” gets right, it mostly ignores the villains of the climate story: fossil fuel companies, automakers, plastic manufacturers, Big Ag — the folk fighting like hell to keep cooking the planet. They will keep fighting like hell, and thanks to America’s dysfunctional democratic institutions, they will probably succeed — even if Democrats make it easier to build clean energy.

Eventually, economics will kill off the dirty industries — but not nearly soon enough to avoid some truly scary warming. Building clean energy won’t vanquish the climate crisis, at least not on its own; Democrats need to confront the root causes, too.

“Abundance” has another major flaw: It largely ignores rooftop solar (and really any clean energy solution that isn’t large-scale infrastructure). Which is a shame, because rooftop solar is super popular and increasingly affordable, and also has the benefit of not destroying wildlife habitat. But Klein and Thompson don’t seem interested.

So if you’re not an “Abundance” fan: Yeah, I sympathize. It’s frustrating that the most influential climate book in recent times leaves so much to be desired.

But also: If you haven’t read it yet, maybe give it a shot. Like I said earlier, it defied my expectations — in part because most of the book had nothing to do with energy.

Klein and Thompson make the case that government can be a powerful force for good in American life — an idea rarely articulated anymore by Democrats. They call for far more investment in medical research and basic science, and a greater appetite for risk-taking with taxpayer funds. (No risk, no reward.) They note that the moon mission was wildly unpopular throughout the 1960s. But President Kennedy pursued it anyway.

“Leaders define what counts as a crisis,” Klein and Thompson write. “And leaders are the ones who choose to focus.”

With courageous political leadership, they suggest, the U.S. could choose to make the climate crisis a national priority. It’s a stirring call to action for the next Congress and president: Don’t just read the polls. Learn the science, consult the experts and do what needs to be done.

What needs to be done, then? “Abundance” offers a reasonable starting point, but it’s far from a comprehensive guide. Let’s all read some more books.

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‘An Inconvenient Truth’ turns 20

I was 13 years old when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out; I asked my parents to drop me off at the movie theater. I don’t remember what inspired me to want to see it, or how exactly I felt afterward. But I know the film made an impression on me: deadly heat waves, worsening storms, rising seas, melting glaciers. My eyes were opened.

And not just mine. Al Gore’s scientifically grounded presentation of global warming as an urgent threat helped define a generation of American climate discourse, teeing up U.S. support for the Paris Agreement and the eventual passage of President Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Even amid fossil fuel industry resistance and the Republican Party’s burgeoning hostility, climate advocates kept winning.

They didn’t stop global temperature increases from surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious target. But with 1.5 degrees front of mind, they bent the emissions curve downward, helping avoid worst-case scenarios for humanity. They did so by building a political movement around ideas articulated in Gore’s film: that global warming is a crisis; that certain temperature thresholds should be avoided; and that translating science into policy is paramount.

“We have everything we need, save perhaps political will,” Gore said in the movie.

“An Inconvenient Truth” — which was released 20 years ago this Sunday — can feel like a relic today, when the U.S. is led by MAGA grifters and even many progressives have decided climate action is a losing political message. In California and New York, governors are softening existing clean energy commitments and declining to fight for new ones. Elsewhere, even saying the words “climate change” is increasingly frowned upon for elected officials. “Climate hushing” is all the rage.

But you know what? Not talking about a problem doesn’t make it go away.

Just ask Gore. Two decades later, the science he presented in “An Inconvenient Truth” looks pretty darn accurate. And his film definitely made an impact.

No single documentary could have such a big influence today; the media landscape is too fractured, our attention spans too short, the nation’s politics too polarized.

But if enough people with enough influence spent enough time talking about climate science, they’d make a difference.

In other news

Climate backsliding:

• California regulators are poised to weaken a crucial climate program next week, undermining the state’s ability to achieve its 2030 emissions reduction goal. (Jeff St. John, Canary Media)

• Gavin Newsom keeps trying to kill America’s biggest virtual power plant. (Blanca Begert, L.A. Times)

• New York Governor Kathy Hochul persuaded legislators to roll back key elements of the state’s emissions reduction law. (Jon Campbell, Gothamist)

On our public lands:

• The Senate confirmed Steve Pearce, a former member of Congress from New Mexico, to lead the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. He has previous argued that “we do not even need” most federal lands. (Chris D’Angelo, Public Domain)

• President Trump’s destructive border wall is militarizing the southern end of the Continental Divide Trail. (Alicia Inez Guzmán, High Country News)

• Climate change and habitat destruction are killing Joshua trees. Hidden networks of underground fungi could help them survive. (Alex Wigglesworth, L.A. Times)

The energy transition:

• Nineteen new wind turbines will produce as much electricity as 400 old turbines in California’s Altamont Pass. The U.S. could more than double its onshore wind capacity with no new land via “repowering.” (Justin Gerdes, Quitting Carbon)

• Berkeley is reducing emissions by requiring home sellers to make green upgrades such as heat pumps, solar panels and batteries. (Todd Woody, Bloomberg)

• “I believe data centers, the only place that they exist, is in hell.” A tiny California city is drafting a five-year moratorium on data centers. (Philip Salata, inewsource)

Around the world:

• As Trump’s war in Iran sends oil and gas prices soaring, Europeans are investing in rooftop solar, EVs and electric heat pumps. (Eshe Nelson, New York Times)

• Costa Ricans are flocking to low-cost Chinese-made EVs to avoid paying high oil prices. (Jack Ewing, New York Times)

• This summer’s FIFA World Cup, with 104 matches across North America, will be the most polluting soccer tournament ever. (Blanca Begert, L.A. Times)

Last but not least, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been driving around the country with his wife and nine kids for a reality TV show funded by companies he regulates, including Toyota, Boeing, Shell, United Airlines and Comcast, per the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Tangel and Sharon Terlep. Just another insane scandal.

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Until next week

Big Solar is still trying its darnedest to win over the Trump administration.

The Solar Energy Industries Association announced this week that it had hired Tim Pawlenty, the Republican former governor of Minnesota, as its president and CEO. In a press release, he called the sun “the safest, most natural, and largest nuclear reactor in the world” — a technically accurate but nonetheless curious description. It’s almost like the solar industry is straining credulity to market itself to folks who love “natural” solutions and nuclear power.

Look, it would be amazing if the Trump administration started approving solar farms on public lands. But every time it seems like President Trump’s appointees might ease up on clean energy, they attack with renewed vigor.

As I’ve written previously, I think the solar industry desperately needs a new strategy. Begging a bunch of oil industry shills to be nice to them isn’t working.

But solar executives seem to feel otherwise, and I’d love to know why. So I’ve asked for an interview with Pawlenty. Here’s hoping I have a Q&A to share with you soon.

Big Oil wants Xavier Becerra

When I wrote last week about the California governor’s race, I mentioned that one of the leading Democrats — Xavier Becerra, the state’s former attorney general — took a $39,200 campaign contribution, the maximum allowed, from oil giant Chevron.

Some folks responded that $39,200 didn’t seem like an especially large number. Would that kind of money really influence Becerra?

Well, more news on that front: On Wednesday, California Resources Corporation — the state’s largest oil driller, with operations in Los Angeles County, Ventura County and across the Central Valley — reported that it had given $500,000 to an independent expenditure committee supporting Becerra.

RL Miller, founder of political action committee Climate Hawks Vote, tipped me off to the half-million-dollar contribution.

“I think Big Oil is choosing its governor,” she said. “They are indicating very clearly which side they’re on.”

Miller remembers delivering a petition with 70,000 signatures to Becerra’s office in Los Angeles in 2017, urging the attorney general to investigate Exxon Mobil’s history of hiding the truth about global warming — a history that had recently been exposed by investigations in the L.A. Times and Inside Climate News. Becerra never launched an investigation. His successor, Rob Bonta, eventually sued Exxon and other fossil fuel companies over what his office called a “decades-long campaign of deception.”

Becerra spokesperson Jonathan Underland declined to comment on the support from California Resources Corporation, noting via email that the campaign has “no control or influence” over independent expenditures.

Control or not, Miller fears Becerra would be a friend to Big Oil.

“They have chosen Becerra as the person who will do their bidding,” she said.

Crunch time on the Colorado

In February, I wrote a New York Times guest essay bemoaning the Colorado River’s dwindling reservoirs, and criticizing the river’s Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — for failing to agree to mandatory water cutbacks.

Three months later, the problem persists.

The Upper Basin states still won’t promise to use less water. Instead, they’re calling for “immediate mediation” to stop Lake Mead and Lake Powell from crashing, as the Salt Lake Tribune’s Brooke Larsen reports.

Meanwhile, the Lower Basin states just keep promising to use less water. This month, California, Arizona and Nevada said they’d be willing to conserve 3.2 million acre-feet through 2028, the L.A. Times’ Ian James reports.

As negotiations drag on, the hydrology gets worse. Powell is set to receive just 13% of its normal spring runoff, per the Colorado Sun’s Shannon Mullane.

One leading expert believes the states need to reduce Colorado River water use by 3 to 4 million acre-feet per year — one-fourth or more of their total consumption.

“That can only happen if there are mandatory, enforceable reductions in every state,” Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the University of Colorado Law School, told the L.A. Times. “It’s just not possible … without all seven states.”

The Trump administration is getting sick of waiting for the states to work things out. It’s thinking about imposing mandatory cuts in the next few months and reevaluating them every two years, according to the Arizona Republic’s Brandon Loomis.

That would be fraught, to say the least. Think about midterm congressional elections, then imagine stressing out just as often about your drinking water.

Probably we’ll stress out no matter what — climate crisis and all. But on the Colorado, consensus is better than conflict. I don’t want to live in “The Water Knife.”

Today is my third straight day with original reporting and commentary. Like most of my work, this piece is free to read. But if you can afford to pay, I hope you’ll help me keep going.

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When Disneyland officials promised to convert the kid-friendly Autopia attraction from noxious gas engines to electric vehicles, they didn’t mention that California air pollution regulators were breathing down their necks.

“As the industry moves toward alternative fuel sources, we have developed a roadmap to electrify this attraction,” a Disney spokesperson told me at the time.

Turns out there was a lot more happening behind the scenes.

In March 2024, I started asking Disney why Autopia was still running on fossil fuels, forcing Disney-lovers like me to breathe putrid, cough-inducing fumes. Especially in the park’s Tomorrowland section, it made no sense.

Lo and behold, Disney took action. Seemingly in response to my questions — and to prodding by climate activists — the company committed to shutting down the ride by October 2026 and eventually reopening it with a fleet of EVs.

A huge victory for clean energy. And yet, as I learned last week, not the whole story.

A month before I started pestering Disney, the California Air Resources Board sent the company a “notice of violation” alleging that Autopia’s gasoline engines were out of compliance with air quality rules. Disney couldn’t have been surprised. According to the notice, Disney had voluntarily disclosed five months earlier that the engines — which were manufactured by Honda — weren’t properly certified.

The notice indicated that Disney would have a chance to resolve the alleged violation via settlement — which is exactly what happened.

In August 2024, Disney finalized a settlement, agreeing to pay a $56,250 penalty. The deal included a compliance plan.

“As part of the compliance plan, they agreed to go electric,” California Air Resources Board spokesperson Lindsay Buckley told me last week.

So Disney isn’t electrifying Autopia simply because it’s the right thing to do?

Well, it depends on how you look at it.

“They made the decision to go electric without much [pressure] from us,” Buckley told me. “They could have chosen gasoline or a fuel alternative, but they didn’t.”

As I wrote in the first edition of Climate-Colored Goggles, I think it’s incredibly cool that for millions of kids who visit Disneyland, their first experience driving a car will come behind the wheel of an electric vehicle. This is the kind of fundamental cultural change that can transform politics and policy, given enough time.

The fact that I helped persuade Disney to switch from gas-guzzlers to EVs — or so I thought — was one of the things that prompted me to start a newsletter about climate and culture. So it’s a little surreal to realize now that the sequence of events was more complicated than I understood.

I might have been none the wiser except for a recent article in the Orange County Register, which reported that Disney would retire Autopia’s gas-powered engines in early 2027 — a few months later that originally promised. The article also described the changes as part of “an agreement with the California Air Resources Board.”

That was news to me, so I asked the Air Resources Board for a copy of the agreement. The agreement mentioned a notice of violation, so I asked to see that too.

Reading the documents, it was hard to figure out whether the Honda-manufactured engines emit excess air pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides. The Air Resources Board couldn’t help me, saying its hands were tied by the legal settlement.

As best I can tell, the legal problem is that the engines were modified, which brought them out of compliance with their 2014 certification.

But who did the modifying — Disney or Honda? It’s not clear, although the notice of violation says Disney “manufactured go-carts with the uncertified engines.”

Disney didn’t respond to any of my questions. Citing Disneyland officials, the Orange County Register reported that the $56,250 penalty was “the result of an administrative oversight that was promptly corrected with no impact to the environment.”

A Honda spokesperson also declined my request to explain what went wrong.

There’s a lot we don’t know. This much is clear, though: Disney’s decision to electrify Autopia wasn’t just an act of corporate goodwill. It probably wouldn’t have happened without government regulation, which continues to matter a hell of a lot.

And it may not have happened without a handful of climate activists who submitted air quality complaints about Autopia to state and local officials in late 2022 and early 2023. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I wonder if those complaints prompted regulators to check in with Disney, leading the company to discover the engine issue and report it to the authorities.

One of the activists was Zan Dubin, and she’s OK with not knowing whether it was activism, journalism or regulation — or some combination — that persuaded Disney to make the right decision. To her, the lesson is the same: Take a stand.

“When you see something, do something,” she said.

And now, she can be happy that EVs are coming to the Happiest Place on Earth.

“This isn't just the upgrade of a historic Disneyland attraction,” she said. “It’s the resounding endorsement — heard around the globe — of the urgent need for clean transportation by one of the world’s most beloved brands.”

She couldn’t help adding: “This should save Disney a whole bundle on gas, too.”

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Today, I’m publishing an interview with Nithya Raman, one of the candidates to replace Bass. My story includes an exclusive first look at Raman’s climate plan.

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When Nithya Raman announced that she would break with her ally Karen Bass and challenge the incumbent Democrat for Los Angeles mayor, I was delighted.

Having covered Bass’ environmental policies, I felt ready for a change. The leader of America’s second-largest city isn’t exactly a climate laggard — she’s kept in place the ambitious goals set by her predecessor, Eric Garcetti, including 100% clean power and 70% locally sourced water by 2035. But she’s hardly bursting with climate enthusiasm, either. She’s done little to advance a long-simmering effort to phase out neighborhood oil drilling amid industry opposition. She suspended an all-electric building rule after the Palisades fire. When L.A. faced a budget crisis, she proposed saving a few hundred thousand dollars by axing the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.

Raman, by comparison, has spent her time on City Council advancing cleaner air and better urban planning. She wrote a policy banning most gas appliances in new homes and businesses. She served on the board of the regional air quality regulator — at least until Bass quietly removed her. Unlike Bass and many of her colleagues, she didn’t try to block a state law designed to help developers build more apartments near bus stops and train stations.

So I was pleased when Raman got in the race.

At the same time, I was surprised to see some progressive factions snub her, or even coalesce around Bass. Were they annoyed that Raman waited until the last minute to declare her candidacy? Were they unwilling to buck an L.A. Democratic machine that has long discouraged challengers from rocking the boat? Or were they displeased that Raman had arguably strayed from her democratic socialist roots?

I’m not a close enough observer of L.A. politics to answer those questions.

But if you’re a climate voter deciding what to do in the June 2 primary, I’m confident in saying that Raman is a better choice than the incumbent — especially now that I’ve talked wither her about her climate plan, which was released today.

To hear Raman tell it, global warming is an air quality issue, a public safety issue and a quality-of-life issue. Her preferred solutions include electric appliances, electric cars and electric trains, as well as more parks, more trees and more shade structures at bus stops. She also wants a moratorium on new large-scale data centers.

“I think for many Angelenos, [climate] isn’t just an abstract value,” Raman said in an interview. “But really it is something that is playing out in their daily lives.”

Before going into more detail, I should note that Bass released a Climate Action Plan last month too.

In some ways, the 93-page plan — which is an official city document, not a product of Bass’ reelection campaign — is impressive. It showcases 52 “Green New Deal” climate targets spanning energy, water, air quality, transportation and parks.

But although some of the targets are new, many have been on the books for years. The most ambitious goals were established by Garcetti.

“Largely it’s just a reiteration,” said Greg Pierce, the senior director of UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation.

Notably, the plan says nothing about the role of L.A.’s chief heat officer, Marta Segura — not surprising, given that shortly after it was released, Segura was quietly fired, as I reported Monday. The plan is also silent on the city’s climate emergency office, which Segura led. The office is now down to one staffer, even though City Council refused to go along with Bass’ plan to eliminate it entirely.

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Under Garcetti, the fact that Los Angeles was one of just three U.S. cities or counties with a chief heat officer was a point of pride for City Hall. No longer, it seems.

“My impression is that [Bass] is not that interested in the environment, and never has been,” said Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “Her sustainability plan just seems flat.”

Raman’s plan, which is posted on her website, didn’t knock my socks off. It’s relatively brief and at times light on detail; it also arrived late in the campaign. If you’re looking for a truly climate-first candidate, you may come away disappointed. Raman is no Tom Steyer.

But broadly speaking, her plan hits the right notes, especially in combination with her transportation and street safety platform. She’s certainly better than Bass.

A few reasons why.

Raman’s plan is explicit: The city should adopt state building codes that incentivize new homes and businesses to be all-electric. Unfortunately, the gas ban that Raman wrote a few years ago was repealed due to a court decision banning such policies. But there are other tools for encouraging builders to avoid gas hookups, and Raman wants to use them.

She also wants to accelerate efforts to end oil extraction within city limits — another policy that City Council already passed once but was forced to repeal due to a lawsuit. Just like ditching gas appliances, ending oil drilling would result in cleaner air — and hopefully lower rates of asthma and illnesses such as cancer.

Bass generally supports those ideas, too. But Raman believes the mayor has had plenty of time — and she’s right. Our lungs can’t wait. The climate crisis can’t wait.

The last few years, “what may be missing is political urgency,” Raman said.

During the Garcetti administration, she added, “environmental goals were central to the future of Los Angeles.”

“I don’t think you would say that today. The mayor waited nearly four years to release a climate strategy,” Raman said.

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Raman said she’d prioritize climate when making appointments to agencies such as Metro, the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. I was especially glad she mentioned the water district, or “Met,” which supplies a big chunk of L.A.’s water. I’ve covered Met extensively, and I’ve always been flabbergasted by Bass’ apparent lack of focus on the agency, given the precarity of L.A.’s water supply amid historic, climate-fueled drought.

“These are all places where climate goals can be pushed,” Raman said. “There has not been a concerted push to achieve strategic climate goals for the city, and I think that’s very palpable.”

One bright spot for Bass is the Department of Water and Power, where staffers have been working feverishly to reach 100% clean energy by 2035. Until recently, they were led by one of the mayor’s best hires, Janisse Quiñones.

Unfortunately, Quiñones stepped down in March, lured back home to Puerto Rico by an offer to run the company that operates the island’s power grid. I’ll be fascinated to see who Bass hires as DWP’s next general manager.

Same goes for chief heat officer. After I reported Monday that Segura had been fired, a Bass spokesperson sent me a statement assuring me the job would be filled.

“Extreme heat is one of Los Angeles’s most dangerous climate hazards, and it will only become more severe without urgent action,” the statement read. “We are in the final stages of appointing a dynamic new Chief Heat Officer, and we are excited for them to advance Mayor Bass’ Climate Action Plan, including developing the City’s first Heat Action and Resilience Plan, expanding L.A.’s tree canopy in our most heat-vulnerable communities, and implementing functional cooling strategies citywide.”

“We thank Marta for her service,” the statement added.

Better than nothing. Still no comment on whether all the open positions at the climate emergency office will be filled, though.

“I do want to give [Bass] credit for continuing the clean energy and clean water goals, especially in the Trump era. I do think she’s been dealt a difficult hand with the fires,” UCLA’s Pierce said. “But I don’t think we’ve really moved the needle forward.”

Raman isn’t perfect. But when the other top-polling candidates are Bass and Spencer Pratt — a MAGA-aligned former reality TV star — this should be an easy decision for climate voters. Keep Bass under 50% and help Raman, not Pratt, advance to the runoff.

You probably already received your ballot in the mail. Make sure to vote by June 2, for this election and all the other ones.

See you tomorrow

Yes, I’ll be back again tomorrow with another scoop. Three days in a row!

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This time last year, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called for eliminating the city’s climate emergency office. Even for Bass — who had never prioritized climate action — the money-saving proposal was stunning, coming not long after the climate-fueled devastation of the Palisades fire.

Fortunately, City Council said “no” amid a public outcry. Crisis averted.

Or so it seemed.

Several sources tell me that Marta Segura — who led the climate emergency office since its inception in 2021 and also served as L.A.’s chief heat officer — was quietly fired by the Bass administration last month, with no replacement.

Meanwhile, the city hasn’t been hiring to fill a growing list of vacancies at the climate office. With Segura gone, there’s just one staffer left, down from six.

The mayor’s office didn’t announce Segura’s firing. Word trickled out among activists and City Council members over the last couple of weeks.

For Maro Kakoussian, director of climate and health programs at Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, Bass has been a frustrating mayor — quick to waive clean energy rules, slow to end neighborhood oil drilling. Dumping the city’s first-ever chief heat officer was merely the latest disappointment.

“There’s no transparency with how these decisions are being made,” Kakoussian said. “As we’re getting ready for another extreme heat season — and these mega-events like the World Cup — none of it makes sense.”

Indeed, I’ve long struggled to understand Bass. The first time I spoke with her, when she was running for mayor in 2022, she downplayed the risks of heat, saying that older folks dying in their homes has “historically been a problem in Chicago” but not in Los Angeles. Fact check: Extremely false!

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Hopefully Bass has learned better; she’s certainly spent the last four years saying all the right things about heat and climate. When I asked last year why she was trying to eliminate the climate emergency office, for instance, a spokesperson assured me that climate “will continue as a core responsibility of every department.”

In other words, who needs a dedicated climate office when City Planning and Public Works can prioritize climate initiatives internally?

Problem is, climate tends to get lost when it’s not your main job. Hence the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, which is charged by City Council with coordinating between agencies and marshaling resources in advance of heat waves, with a special eye toward protecting the most vulnerable. That includes the elderly, folks who can’t afford air conditioning and homeless individuals.

The climate office has also worked on longer-term efforts to cool the city, including tree-planting and adding shade structures at bus stops.

Bass is “effectively ensuring that Los Angeles remains a city that only reacts to catastrophes rather than one that actively prevents them,” said Andy Shrader, who served as an environmental adviser to Paul Koretz, the former City Councilmember responsible for creating the climate emergency office.

“Mayor Bass is committing a strategic blunder of historic proportions,” he added.

Will Bass replace Segura, or replenish the staff of the climate emergency office? I have no idea. The mayor’s office didn’t respond to my request for comment. (SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM OF STORY)

I did get a chance to talk with City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who’s challenging Bass in a fiercely contested mayoral primary. We were chatting for a different story — check your inboxes tomorrow! — but I made sure to ask her about Segura’s firing.

Raman told me she was disappointed by the news, and by what she described as Bass underutilizing the chief heat officer.

“It’s an important role, and [it] had the potential to be much more than just a symbolic nod to one of the most challenging issues related to climate,” she said.

If she were mayor, she added, she would think about the role “much more expansively.”

Meaning what?

“Thinking about that person as someone who could lead and anchor a strategy around shade across the entire city, who could plan before the Olympics to push that agenda forward, who could really engage with the Public Works department to ensure that shade and structures and shelters and trees could be built, and were being built,” she said. “That’s the kind of ambitious work that someone in that role could be doing.”

Ballots have already been mailed to Angelenos. If you care about climate, should you vote for Raman over Bass?

That’s a great question. Check back for another email from me tomorrow!

UPDATE, 5/11/26: After publication of this story, I received the following written statement from Bass’ office:

“Extreme heat is one of Los Angeles’s most dangerous climate hazards, and it will only become more severe without urgent action. We are in the final stages of appointing a dynamic new Chief Heat Officer, and we are excited for them to advance Mayor Bass’ Climate Action Plan, including developing the City’s first Heat Action and Resilience Plan, expanding L.A.’s tree canopy in our most heat-vulnerable communities, and implementing functional cooling strategies citywide. We thank Marta for her service as the City’s inaugural Chief Heat Officer.”

Another endorsement for Steyer

Remember last week, when I made the case that Tom Steyer is the obvious choice for California governor, at least if you’re a climate voter?

A quick update: Since then, the Sierra Club endorsed Steyer, adding to the long list of environmental organizations supporting the billionaire activist.

Meanwhile, environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben wrote an opinion piece calling out gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra for declining to investigate Exxon Mobil — despite public pressure to do so — when he was California attorney general.

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In other news

The energy transition:

• California’s first solar-over-canal project is a success. It’s small, though, totaling less than one-third of a mile. (John Holland, Fresno Bee)

• California regulators won’t let SoCalGas charge ratepayers $266 million to plan a sprawling hydrogen pipeline network, which likely would have cost billions more to build. (Jeff St. John, Canary Media)

• Colorado just became the third state to legalize balcony solar. Virginia will almost certainly be next. (Sam Brasch, CPR News)

Public lands and wildlife:

• San Diego Gas & Electric wants to build a sprawling transmission line through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. (Tammy Murga, KPBS)

• The Trump administration is evicting hundreds of bison from federal grasslands in Montana to benefit cattle ranchers. (Jack Healy, New York Times)

• AI deepfake scammers are coming for cute animal videos. The stupidity is — well, it’s deeply stupid. (Lila Seidman, L.A. Times)

Various villains:

• Ahead of the World Cup, Saudi Aramco — the world’s biggest climate polluter — is spending an estimated $400 million to sponsor FIFA. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• The conservative intelligentsia is running seminars to try to convince judges not to believe climate science. (Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica)

• California is investigating an energy company that agreed to take a payout from the Trump administration to cancel an offshore wind farm. (Jennifer McDermott, Associated Press)

Climate infrastructure:

• Los Angeles finally opened a subway line beneath Wilshire Boulevard. Here’s why it took 65 years. (Jenny Jarvie, L.A. Times)

• Californians will vote in November on whether to limit environmental reviews for renewable energy projects. (Paul Rogers, Bay Area News Group)

• Please join me in booing the Democrats in various states who want to cut energy efficiency funding to reduce electric bills. It would save a little money in the short term but cost everyone more in the long run. (Sarah Shemkus, Canary Media)

Last but not least, happy 100th birthday to David Attenborough! Legend.

Until tomorrow

Remember when I wrote about Jackie Robinson Day, environmental injustice, fossil fuel barons and the lasting legacy of segregation?

With ballots being mailed this week, and less than a month until primary day, lots of Californians are still deciding who they’d like to see replace Gavin Newsom.

If you’re trying to choose between the two leading Democrats, here’s my advice.

One of them is endorsed by Jane Fonda, Bill McKibben and Rebecca Solnit, as well as EnviroVoters and the political arms of the Center for Biological Diversity, the Climate Center, Third Act, NRDC and Climate Action California.

The other one took a $39,200 check from Chevron to fund his campaign. He defended the money by insisting that Chevron is “not the bad guy.”

The first wrote a book about the clean energy revolution. He’s now being bombarded by Pacific Gas & Electric-funded attack ads.

The second has taken a dim view of rooftop solar. He suggested he’d make it a priority to “go after” solar installers “who are out there to swindle families.”

The first candidate is billionaire investor Tom Steyer. The second is Xavier Becerra, California’s former attorney general.

I’ve followed the race closely — I moderated a climate forum with the top candidates — and to my mind, this is an easy choice.

I would expect Becerra, if he wins, to handle climate much the same as Newsom has the last few years: keen to defend California’s existing accomplishments but not eager to take bold new steps. At least not if they involve politically costly confrontation with utility companies or the fossil fuel industry.

Steyer would mark a break with the status quo. It’s plain from his track record that he wouldn’t hesitate to buck powerful interests for the sake of climate.

For context, Steyer’s transition from generic hedge fund manager to political activist has been driven by his concern over climate change. It started in 2010, when he spent $5 million leading the campaign to defeat Proposition 23, a ballot measure backed by Big Oil (including Koch Industries) that would’ve suspended California’s foundational law to reduce climate pollution. Steyer succeeded.

He went on to found NextGen Climate (now called NextGen America), a progressive advocacy group focused on youth engagement and voter registration. He spent nearly $30 million backing a ballot initiative that closed a corporate tax loophole and funded clean energy. He was the biggest individual donor to Proposition 50, which countered GOP gerrymandering, and also to Prop 56, which raised California’s tobacco tax.

Steyer spread his wealth outside California, too, spending tens of millions of dollars supporting climate candidates in Florida, Virginia, Washington and elsewhere. After a failed presidential run, he wrote the thoughtful book, “Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War.” In recent weeks, he’s talked about his climate and energy plans in lengthy podcasts with journalists David Roberts and Emily Atkin, showcasing an impressive grasp for detail and nuance.

One of Steyer’s main proposals: making it easier for people to lower their utility bills by installing rooftop solar. His whole campaign is built around a populist message of tackling California’s high cost of living by raising taxes on wealthy folks like himself and forcing corporations to play by the rules. He’s attacked the state’s biggest utilities with special vigor, promising to “break up the electric monopolies” so that PG&E and its brethren will stop stifling rooftop solar to pad their profits.

That helps explain why PG&E is spending so much money to defeat him. Along with Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, PG&E has long urged state officials to cut rooftop solar incentives. Under Newsom, they’ve succeeded. Seemingly wary of alienating the utilities — and labor unions that represent utility employees — Newsom has put politics above the climate crisis, letting his appointees cut incentives and failing to support other clean energy solutions disfavored by the utilities.

Becerra, I fear, would bring more of the same.

When I asked about rooftop solar at the climate forum, Becerra offered faint praise. First, he suggested that solar is a largely out of reach for low-income Californians — an increasingly outdated criticism — before pivoting to his desire to protect families from bad actors in the solar market. He said briefly he’d like to expand access to solar but gave zero details on how he’d do that.

When Steyer talks about “breaking up” the investor-owned utilities, he isn’t actually calling to dismantle PG&E, Edison and SDG&E. If you read the electricity plan on his website — he also has a climate plan and a gas price plan — you’ll see what he means. He wants to appoint regulators who will lower utility profit margins, limit the need to build expensive power lines and prioritize rooftop solar, batteries and microgrids.

As for Becerra? The scant “energy and utilities” page on his website frames the clean energy transition as an obstacle to affordability. He’s behind the times.

He’s also hard to trust on fossil fuel industry accountability.

Steyer has expressed strong support for a “climate superfund” bill — also known as “Make Polluters Pay” — that would hold oil and gas companies financially liable for climate damages. There are similar laws on the books in New York and Vermont. But the proposal hasn’t gone anywhere in Sacramento, partly because Newsom has shown no interest in supporting it. Steyer could change the game.

It’s much harder to know where Becerra stands. When I asked him whether polluters should pay for climate damages, he worded his reply carefully: “Yes, they will be at the table, but they will definitely have to pay their fair share.”

Yes, they will be at the table. He used that expression — “at the table” — several times during the climate forum. Charitably, he was trying to frame himself as a consensus-builder. Uncharitably, he was trying to avoid taking firm stances.

“We have to make sure that everyone is at the table, including the polluters,” he said.

So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by what he said last week when asked about Chevron giving tens of thousands of dollars to his campaign.

“It’s a free country,” he said. “Chevron — that’s the problem with politics — they’re not the bad guy. Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle? You need Chevron, I need Chevron, my people of the state of California need Chevron.”

Rob Bonta, who succeeded Becerra as California attorney general, is currently suing Chevron (and several oil other giants) for what his office describes as a “decades-long campaign of deception” to hide the dangers of global warming.

Sounds like the bad guy to me.

The sad thing is, Becerra has a decent track record. He spent his term as California attorney general suing the Trump administration to defend the state’s environmental policies. He has a long history of elevating climate justice, including when he ran the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden.

But as the climate crisis worsens, and our cities keep burning, California can’t afford Newsom 2.0. We need a governor for whom accelerating the energy transition is a top priority, if not the top priority. That’s not Becerra. It’s Steyer.

For many progressive voters, the main objection to Steyer — and it’s a big one — is that he’s a billionaire, and that billionaires can’t be trusted. Buttressing that concern, Steyer’s opponents — and corporate-funded attack ads — have suggested he got rich on fossil fuels and private prisons. And therefore he’s a hypocrite for campaigning on climate action and abolishing ICE.

Personally, I don’t find the “hypocrite” argument convincing.

Farallon Capital Management, the hedge fund Steyer founded in 1986, did invest in fossil fuel projects and private prisons, most infamously an Australian coal mine and Corrections Corporation of America. But Steyer sold his stake in Farallon in 2012 and makes a compelling case that he’s a new man. While he never should have invested in private prisons, he’s apologized repeatedly. And he’s spent so much money supporting climate action that it’s difficult for me to fault him for his dirty energy mistakes.

If you’re dead set against supporting a billionaire — which, totally fair — my advice is to vote for Katie Porter, the former member of Congress.

Her climate platform isn’t nearly as detailed as Steyer’s, and she hasn’t given climate nearly as same attention that he has. But she impressed me at the climate forum with her detailed knowledge of the issues, and with her suggestion that she would shake up the California Public Utilities Commission. And like Steyer, she earned endorsements from EnviroVoters and the Climate Center Action Fund.

I really think Steyer is the best choice, though, much as I mistrust billionaires. Here’s McKibben explaining how he reached the same conclusion:

Maybe 15 years ago he called me out of the blue to pick my brains about climate stuff; as he talked on the phone, I googled him and established he was a hedge fund billionaire, a species to which I am allergic. I tried to put him off, but he politely insisted to the point where escape would have required real rudeness on my part, and so I proposed he come for a day hike in the Adirondacks, figuring that at the very least I would get some exercise out of it. A week later we were climbing Giant Mountain via Rocky Peak Ridge, one of the harder ascents in the High Peaks, and what do you know he was keeping up with me, and what do you know he was interesting and congenial. Over time we became real friends. He’s bunked in the guestroom at my house, and vice versa (his is nicer); we’ve donated to the same causes (350.org, Third Act; his checks were larger, though perhaps not as a percentage of one’s wealth).

More to the point we’ve carried on a nonstop conversation about climate change, which he rightly understood as the most important question the planet faces. Alone, I think, among major American politicians he could identify not just James Hansen, but climate scientists like Zeke Hausfather, Bob Howarth, and Mark Jacobson… He’s the real deal: he stepped away from his hedge fund because his colleagues wouldn’t divest it from fossil fuel, and he’s been working hard ever since to make progress on the energy transition. I can’t think of a more knowledgeable or committed climate champion in political life in America today.

As I mentioned up top, a bunch of environmental groups are similarly impressed. It was particularly fascinating to me that Steyer won endorsements from the Center for Biological Diversity — which prefers rooftop solar to massive solar farms and has an adversarial relationship with the big utilities — and also NRDC, which tends to favor large-scale solar (and is on relatively better terms with the utilities).

The fact that Steyer got both of these group in his camp is a big deal. I think it speaks to the fact that he’s truly a climate-first candidate, in a way that’s rare at high levels of American politics. I can’t imagine either group thinks he’s perfect. But they must have realized they couldn’t pass up the chance to elect a hard-core climate leader.

I can’t pass up the chance, either. I’ll be voting for Steyer.

If he manages to win, and he does a lousy job, you’ll read about it here. I won’t let him off the hook.

If someone else wins and does a great job, I’ll be thrilled. You’ll hear me say so.

Elections matter. But what happens after matters a hell of a lot more.

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This week, the conservative majority struck another blow against the Voting Rights Act. The week before last, we learned via the New York Times that Chief Justice John Roberts was so eager to stop President Obama’s clean energy regulations in 2016 that he broke with long-established precedent and created a “shadow docket.” Sometimes I wonder how we’ll ever make climate progress with such a regressive court.

But after chatting with three climate law experts as part of a special panel for Climate-Colored Goggles — video above for paid subscribers! — I feel a bit more optimistic.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s a lot to worry about.

This fall, the justices will hear a landmark oil and gas industry accountability lawsuit brought by the city and county of Boulder, Colorado. It’s one of about 30 similar cases filed by local governments against fossil fuel companies, typically seeking damages for climate disasters. Exxon Mobil and Suncor argue that Boulder’s claims are preempted by federal law. If the justices agree, the state court suits would come to an end.

Also bad: Depending on how it’s written, a ruling for the oil companies might nullify “climate superfund” laws in New York and Vermont designed to force polluters to pay for climate damages. In California, a newly elected governor hoping to pass such a law would be stopped in their tracks.

“The argument would be that state law can’t address this issue at all, that it’s really a matter of federal law,” said Michael Gerrard, founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

The Trump administration could also ask the Supreme Court to revisit a crucial 2007 decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, that allowed the federal government to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Already, Trump’s EPA has repealed the “endangerment finding,” thereby declaring that greenhouse gases don’t endanger public health and welfare. (Fact check: False.) But if SCOTUS were to overturn Massachusetts v. EPA, it would be much harder for future presidents to change course and regulate emissions.

“Although overturning a precedent is always a dicey thing for the court to do, it is possible,” said Ann Carlson, founding director of UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “I think that’s exactly what the administrator of the EPA is trying to accomplish.”

One legal drama I’m kicking myself for not asking my panelists about: the question of whether cities and counties can ban gas appliances in new homes and businesses.

A federal appeals court struck down Berkeley’s pioneering gas ban in 2023. But since then, lower courts in other parts of the country have ruled differently, upholding local policies requiring or incentivizing all-electric buildings. If the issue were to reach the Supreme Court, how might the justices rule?

Impossible to know for sure. But it’s hard to think climate will be top of mind.

Reading through the 2016 “shadow docket” memos — which were leaked to the New York Times, prompting me to convene the expert panel — it’s alarming to realize that the none of the justices, even the liberals, said anything about climate before voting to issue an emergency order blocking Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

That didn’t stop the conservative justices from justifying their decision by citing the alleged costs the utility industry would be forced to incur phasing out coal. Roberts in particular sounded alarmed, calling Obama’s plan “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” with costs “estimated to run as high as ~$480 billion.”

In a footnote, Roberts acknowledged that this cost estimate was “likely at the high end,” considering that it came from report commissioned by regulated industries — including coal. Still, he justified his use of the (outdated!) estimate by citing a White House statement that federal officials hoped to drive an “aggressive transformation” in the energy industry — a quote he found in a Washington Post article.

That wasn’t the only time Roberts let news coverage sway his decision-making.

In his initial memo to his fellow justices, he quoted an interview that EPA chief Gina McCarthy did with with the BBC, in which she suggested that early steps toward the Clean Power Plan’s implementation would make it more difficult for future presidents to revive the coal industry. Her comments must have really bothered Roberts, because he quoted them at even greater length in a second memo, insisting the EPA was trying to undermine the judicial branch — a claim that made little sense to Carlson.

Roberts sounded like he had “just read the newspaper and got pissed off,” she said.

“It just reeks of irresponsibility to me,” she added.

Joanne Spalding, the Sierra Club’s legal director, made another good point about the chief justice’s focus on McCarthy’s public comments.

“I just find it interesting that he was so focused on that, when he has subsequently declined to look at comments of President Trump in cases where [Trump] has much more explicit posts on social media,” Spalding said.

The Sierra Club was one of the groups litigating the Clean Power Plan case back in 2016, intervening on the EPA’s behalf to defend the clean energy rules. Spalding said she and her colleagues believed they might be able to win Roberts’ vote.

Now that she’s seen the memos?

“We were completely delusional,” she said.

To me, that’s the biggest takeaway from the shadow docket memos: John Roberts is a bigger adversary to climate regulation than anyone understood.

So how the hell did the experts leave me feeling optimistic?

Mainly by emphasizing how much we can still accomplish through local government — where most decisions will never go to the Supreme Court.

Spalding talked about the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, which helped force the retirement of more coal-fired power plants during Trump’s first term than during Obama’s second term (or President Biden’s only term). That success stemmed in part from an intense focus on state-level public utility commissions.

Spalding also mentioned last month’s elections for the board of Arizona’s Salt River Project, which saw the Sierra Club help elect a slate of clean energy candidates to run the powerful electric utility — despite brushing up against fierce opposition from the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.

“At the state level, there’s so many things we can do,” Spalding said.

One state that could use help? New York, previously a climate stalwart but starting to move backward under Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul.

“The state legislature and the governor are haggling over whether to weaken the state climate law. It looks like they probably will,” Gerrard said. “New York’s strong climate law was enacted because of citizen activism. We need more citizen activism.”

Carlson shared several intriguing ideas for climate action.

For one thing, California could use its “extraordinary power” under federal law to issue stricter regulations on conventional air pollution from gas-powered vehicles — regulations that are needed to clean up the noxious air being breathed by Angelenos and Central Valley residents. Basically, the state could require a transition to electric vehicles without having to worry about federal interference on climate.

She also had two suggestions for Congress — assuming Democrats take control of the House and Senate in 2026 and win the White House in 2028, still a big “if.”

First, Democrats could amend the Clean Air Act to clarify that it covers greenhouse gases, eliminating the potential for courtroom challenges. Second, they could pursue deeper reforms to the Supreme Court, such as adding a mandatory retirement age for justices, or increasing the number of justices.

Controversial? Absolutely. But to Carlson, worth considering.

“There are a lot of things that could be done,” she said. “Whether Congress has the will to do them is a whole different question.”

As usual, the fate of American democracy — and our planet’s climate — will probably hinge on elections. At the moment, that gives me hope.

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I actually sent the first interview request for this story back in October, right after I launched CCG. Since then, I’ve published more than 50 newsletters — all while continuing to plug away at long-term stories like this one.

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When Disney Imagineer Joe Rohde dreamed up Animal Kingdom in the early 1990s, he knew he wanted guests to learn that “animals exist in a context, and that context includes you.” Even before renowned conservationist Jane Goodall joined the project, Rohde hoped to show families that animals live in the same world as them. That their lives are interconnected.

So he designed a theme park that didn’t offer pristine presentations of nature. The premier attraction, Kilimanjaro Safaris, didn’t take place in the African wilderness. It began in a “profoundly commercial town,” Rohde said, before taking visitors through a game reserve surrounded by ranches and phosphate mines. The poaching crisis was a major plot point.

Those types of storytelling choices, Rohde believed, would put guests in the right frame of mind to appreciate Animal Kingdom’s Conservation Station — a museum-like space with a veterinary clinic that preached the importance of protecting habitat.

“It’s not predominantly an information distribution mechanism. It’s an inspiration mechanism,” Rohde told me.

Goodall, the pioneering chimp researcher who died in October at age 91, distributed plenty of information during her legendary career. She also inspired millions of people with her storytelling prowess.

One of her steadiest collaborators? The Walt Disney Company.

Goodall’s partnership with the entertainment giant began when Disney asked her to advise on animal care and habitat design for the thousands of critters it would house at Animal Kingdom in Florida. The relationship blossomed from there, with Goodall consulting on the documentary “Chimpanzee” and becoming a public ambassador for other Disneynature docs. She filmed Earth Month videos with Disney executives. The Disney Conservation Fund gave more than $7 million to her nonprofit.

Along the way, Goodall formed tight bonds with a cadre of Disney staffers — some of whom she recruited to build her last major project, “Dr. Jane’s Dream.”

“She just had such a grace to her, such a calm presence,” said Claire Martin, a Disney senior manager for biodiversity conservation, recalling her first time meeting Goodall. “She was able to inspire this sense of personal action, inspiration, hope.”

Goodall and Disney may seem like strange bedfellows — one a scientist and nature advocate who reshaped our understanding of chimp behavior, the other a corporation that simulates nature at its theme parks (with help from audio-animatronic apes). For whatever reason, the odd couple never got much press. I checked Goodall’s obituaries in a dozen major news outlets and didn’t find any references to her work with Disney.

But to me, a proud Disney nerd, this is a fascinating story: Why did Goodall agree to help out with Animal Kingdom? And what drew her back to Disney, again and again? Did she simply want the company’s money?

As I talked with several of Goodall’s colleagues, I quickly came to realize this was no financial quid pro quo. Goodall saw Disney as an ideal storytelling partner, a company with an enormous megaphone and a willingness to use it.

She also loved the people she worked with.

“Jane had close friends who she met through Disney, who then became collaborators,” said Anna Rathmann, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute USA. “She had a couple of people from Disney who she invited to be on the board of directors.”

There’s a lesson here for folks who care about confronting the climate crisis. It has to do with bridge-building, the power of narrative and the need for stories that help people make sense of the world they’re experiencing.

We’ll get there. First, let’s talk about pungent elephants.

When Rohde and his colleagues asked Goodall to consider advising them on Animal Kingdom, she’d never been to a Disney park, according to Mary Lewis, her longtime assistant. An initial meeting in Anaheim led to a second meeting at the construction site outside Orlando.

“Jane was very interested because of the large number of animals they wanted to have there,” Lewis said. “She asked a lot of questions over the ensuing months and years.”

Among her questions: Would animals have enough space to roam, and enough high-quality food? What would the veterinary facilities be like? How would aging animals be treated? They wouldn’t be forced to keep having babies, would they?

Ultimately Disney satisfied her: Animals would receive immaculate care. There would be no cages. Guests wouldn’t see every creature on the safari ride, because the animals would be roaming around freely.

“They put in incredible veterinary facilities,” Lewis said. “I remember people saying that it was probably better than an awful lot of hospitals at the time.”

She remembered Goodall was especially pleased when Disney delivered on a promise to construct a “vast great wallowing pool” for elephants, where the massive mammals could “submerge themselves and get covered in mud.”

“There’s nothing like the smell of an elephant,” Lewis insisted.

Unlike some animal rights advocates, who see all zoos as inherently wrong — PETA called for a boycott when Animal Kingdom opened — Goodall took a different stance, to hear Lewis tell it. For Goodall, there were good zoos and bad zoos. She was alarmed by global habitat loss and felt that if zoos could provide safe, healthy homes, they were a better alternative than animals being starved or hunted to extinction.

At a celebration marking Animal Kingdom’s 10th anniversary — one of many trips she made to the park — Goodall paid perhaps the ultimate compliment.

“If I was an animal out of my natural habitat, this is where I would like to be,” she said.

Something else about Animal Kingdom appealed to Goodall: She knew that “most of the young people who go there will never get to Africa or Asia or wherever else to see animals in the wild,” Lewis said. Disney World was “as near as they’re going to get.”

“I’m not saying it’s perfect by any means,” Lewis said. “But if [kids] can see an animal looking healthy and not bored, rigid and rocking itself stupid sitting on concrete with nothing to do all day, then at least they get that experience.”

Kids got a lot more as Goodall leaned into her relationship with Disney.

Most of the money the company gives to the Jane Goodall Institute benefits Roots & Shoots, an action-oriented program that helps young people organize projects such as cleaning up rivers and planting pollinator gardens — whatever they think will benefit their communities. The program operates in at least 70 countries.

“She wanted Roots & Shoots to be the antidote to apathy,” Rathmann said.

To celebrate last month’s release of “Hoppers” — a wonderful animated movie with a powerful message about protecting wildlife habitat — Disney teamed up with Roots & Shoots, encouraging teens to complete projects that support animals. Ten participants chosen by the Jane Goodall Institute won trips to Animal Kingdom.

Disney’s Martin described the grandmother character in “Hoppers” — who helps her rebellious granddaughter, Mabel, learn to appreciate the calming tranquility of nature — as “such a Jane.” Martin saw the film with a group of Roots & Shoots youth.

“The energy and enthusiasm of those young people was such a reminder of why this work is so important,” she said. “They came up and told me how they loved different characters, or that they’re Mabel, and thank you for telling this story, I feel seen.”

Rathmann described Goodall’s work with Disney “part of this broader philosophy she had of joining up with outlets that do storytelling, which Disney does so beautifully.”

“It was a very strong partnership based upon the power of story to inspire, to change minds, to entertain but also teach,” Rathmann said.

Makes sense to me. I started this newsletter because I believe media companies and other cultural power brokers play a crucial role in laying the groundwork for political progress. When I wrote a story that prompted Disneyland to commit to replacing gas-guzzlers with electric cars at Autopia, it was one of my proudest achievements. Before people demand change, they need inspiration. They need stories.

Bill Wallauer gets it. He met Goodall while volunteering with the U.S. Peace Corps in Tanzania in the late 1980s, becoming her go-to cinematographer after scaling a tree to capture the first-ever video of a wild chimpanzee giving birth.

When Disneynature made the “Chimpanzee” documentary, Wallauer was an obvious choice to operate the camera. He spent three years in Uganda securing amazing close-up footage of chimp life. It was a blockbuster, with millions spent on production.

“When the film came out, [Goodall] went to all of the openings and spoke both about the film itself and her programs,” Wallauer told me.

In typical Disney fashion, the tale blends reality and fantasy. The plot centers around Oscar, a cute young chimp whose clan is threatened by neighboring apes encroaching on their territory. Oscar’s mother is tragically killed. But his clan’s alpha male, Freddy, heroically steps in to raise him. All is well.

In truth, the “neighboring” apes filmed by Wallauer were 1,200 miles from Oscar and friends in Ivory Coast. And the leader of the villainous pack — dubbed “Scar,” like the murderous baddie in “The Lion King” — was actually a “gentle guy,” Wallauer said.

“It was a Disney film. It wasn’t a piece of scientific work,” he acknowledged.

Still, the events portrayed on screen could have happened in real life, he said. And he felt there was immense value in using the Disney megaphone to tell a story that could help millions of people, including kids, fall in love with an endangered species.

Wallauer said he’d love to make a documentary about how the climate crisis impacts chimps and their habitat. He’d just need funding — not easy to come by.

“A hard-hitting film about human behavior and climate change would be considered such a downer,” he said. “It’s the same reason that people are so hesitant to watch the news these days. It’s just so damn depressing, they don’t want to think about it.”

“As Jane said, we’re the smartest dumbest animals on the planet,” he added. “Because we’re the only animal who is destroying their own habitat.”

I hope Disney starts telling more climate stories through its films, parks, video games and other platforms. But the execution won’t be easy. As Rohde told me: “You can’t be very pedagogical.”

“That’s not what people are coming for, and they can’t budget their time that way,” he said. “They can’t budget for deep, attentive contemplation.”

“You have to give them emotional content and strong visceral tags that they can carry with them for when they do have time,” he added.

He was talking about theme parks, but I think the same point holds for other forms of entertainment. People don’t want lessons; they want to be moved.

I have to think that’s why Goodall poured so much time and energy into Disney: She realized she’d found a collection of storytellers willing and able to go to the next level, to make people feel while also giving them thoughtful material to chew on later. That’s certainly been my own experience with Disney, from films like “Hoppers” to rides like Kilimanjaro Safaris. As Rathmann told me, Goodall “was guided by instinct.”

“She could have had a relationship with any media company. But there was something that was deeper about Disney,” Rathmann said.

Maybe more than anything, Goodall liked the people. She befriended Beth Stevens, a Disney environmental executive who worked on Animal Kingdom, and Paul Baribault, a Disneynature film executive, eventually asking both to serve on her institute’s board. She grew especially close with one of Animal Kingdom’s chief planners, Rick Barongi, visiting him 10 days before she died. He wrote a beautiful tribute afterward.

Her highest-profile friend was Rohde, who is famous among Disney parks fans for his many dangling earrings, collected from around the world. (Lewis, Goodall’s assistant, called him “quite the most extraordinary man I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet.”) When Goodall first made plans for Dr. Jane’s Dream — an immersive cultural center in Tanzania that will combine art and education to showcase her scientific legacy and animal advocacy — she asked Rohde to draw up the initial sketches.

Several years later, Goodall returned to Rohde with a bigger ask: She wanted him to design the exhibits. He was retired, but he assembled a group of volunteers — mostly former Disney theme park designers, known as Imagineers.

Eventually Rohde and his team bowed out. But by the time Dr. Jane’s Dream reached construction, Goodall had grown dissatisfied with how it was shaping up. Once again, she sought Rohde’s help. They sat down last fall and decided the project had begun to incorporate too much technology. It had strayed from fine arts that could be produced locally — painting, glasswork, sculpture. They made a plan.

“And then she passed away like 10 days later,” Rohde said.

Not long after, he flew to Tanzania and spent a week with the local project team. He’s forging ahead with Dr. Jane’s Dream.

Meanwhile, the theme park he designed features a lasting tribute to his friend. When Goodall visited Animal Kingdom during construction, she climbed the park’s Tree of Life, a gorgeous 145-foot sculpture of a baobab tree featuring carvings of hundreds of animals. She commented afterward that she hadn’t seen any chimps.

Lo and behold, the Imagineers added one: David Greybeard, the first chimp Goodall observed using tools in the wild. The first chimp she bonded with.

Animal Kingdom has changed a lot since then, but environmental storytelling is still embedded in its DNA. Rohde described the “Avatar”-themed land, which he designed, as a Superfund site “where scientists and Indigenous people are working to restore an environment that’s been destroyed by irresponsible commercial behavior.”

Would Disney’s audiences embrace climate stories? Rohde thinks so.

“I travel all around the world. Everyone is thinking about climate change,” he said. “‘We’ve never seen rain like this. What happened to my crops? What happened to all my animals? What happened to all the fish I used to see here?’”

I wish I could ask Goodall what she’d like to see from Disney next. But that’s a question the next generation of Imagineers and filmmakers will have to answer.

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A cramped meeting room in Sacramento office building seems like a strange place to decide the fate of a wild desert landscape hundreds of miles south. But that’s where I was on Monday afternoon, sitting and watching as the California Energy Commission voted 4-0 to approve the controversial Soda Mountain solar project.

Critics said Soda Mountain would disrupt bighorn sheep migration; supporters said those fears were overblown. For more details, see my recent in-depth story.

In theory, Monday’s Energy Commission meeting gave everyone a last chance to make their case. In practice, it felt like bureaucratic performance art.

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