The California Legislature adjourns in 11 days, and lawmakers still haven’t passed a no-brainer bill — introduced back in January — that would make it easier for renters to spend a few hundred dollars on solar panels, plug them into a wall, drape them over a balcony and start saving money on electricity immediately.

What happened to the affordability crisis? And also the climate crisis?

The bill will probably pass — but only after a crappy last-minute amendment. And only after 11 other states have passed similar legislation.

What happened to California being a climate leader?

“It’s one of those bills where you’re like, ‘Wait, why didn’t we do this before?’” said Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), author of the Plug and Play Solar Act.

When I spoke with Wiener this week, he was feeling good. His legislation promoting plug-in solar, aka “balcony solar,” had sailed through the Senate months ago on a 35-1 vote. Now it was headed to the Assembly floor.

“This is a low-cost way for renters and homeowners to lower their energy bills and be part of the clean energy transition,” Wiener said. “It’s a game changer.”

The journey had been bumpy, though. A few days earlier, the bill had gone through the mind-bogglingly stupid and nontransparent “suspense file” process, which gives Sacramento power players an opportunity to kill or rewrite legislation via backroom dealmaking, with no explanation to the public.

Wiener’s legislation made it out alive but battered.

The key feature of Senate Bill 868 is that it would allow renters and homeowners to buy balcony solar panels from retailers like IKEA or Home Depot and plug them in without applying to their electric utility for an interconnection agreement — a costly and potentially time-consuming requirement.

But when the bill cleared the suspense file, it included a surprising new provision: the interconnection exemption would expire on January 1, 2030.

Meaning if you want to purchase plug-in solar panels after that date, you’ll need your utility’s permission — unless the Legislature extends the exemption.

“It’s a real bummer. It means that we’re going to have another fight ahead of us,” said Cora Stryker, co-founder of plug-in solar nonprofit Bright Saver.

Who lobbied for the 2030 sunset date? Although I don’t know for sure, I’ve reviewed correspondence showing that adding a sunset date was a priority for one of the bill’s most influential critics: Pacific Gas & Electric.

Yep, everyone’s favorite investor-owned utility is once again trying to suppress clean energy solutions that don’t boost shareholder profits. After years working to undercut rooftop solar — a successful campaign that helped prompt state officials to slash solar incentives — PG&E is gunning for balcony solar too.

Only this time, some of the company’s usual allies have jumped ship.

PG&E and its fellow utility giants, San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, persuaded many politicians to oppose rooftop solar incentives with help from powerful electrical workers’ unions, whose interests tend to align with the utilities. If the utilities are profitable, it means a steady stream of high-paid union work.

But the unions decided not to fight plug-in solar. More than a dozen chapters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers took neutral stances on Wiener’s bill, as did two leading union groups. Even Edison broke ranks, telling me that it no longer opposes SB 868 after the latest amendments.

Undeterred, PG&E and SDG&E have argued that balcony solar panels pose a safety hazard, in part because they could send small amounts of excess electricity onto the grid — energy that could damage equipment or zap unsuspecting electrical workers. A PG&E spokesperson told me that although the 2030 sunset date is helpful, “it does not fully address our concern.”

“Customers deserve the protections that come from clear safety standards … from the outset, rather than after several years of market adoption,” spokesperson Paul Doherty said in an email.

It’s not just shareholder-owned utilities opposing the bill. Two groups representing public power agencies — including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District — have raised similar concerns.

“It boils down to safety,” Derek Dolfie, senior director of energy for the California Municipal Utilities Association, told me via email.

I’m not a technical expert, so I can’t offer my personal judgment. But under Wiener’s bill, only plug-in solar products certified to a special new standard being developed by a national testing lab — and compliant with the state electrical code — would qualify for special treatment. Which makes me wonder whether the utility “safety” argument is a canard, or at the very least misguided.

Because if there really were a safety issue with plug-in solar, electrical workers could be in danger. And they don’t think they’re in danger.

“We now have a set minimum standard for the safe installation of these things that won’t put people at risk,” said John Doherty, secretary/treasurer of the California State Association of Electrical Workers, explaining why the group dropped its opposition.

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Even with the unions sitting on the sidelines, someone managed to weaken the bill, securing the amendment to bring back interconnection requirements in 2030.

When I reached out to Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) — who chairs the Appropriations Committee and thereby handles the “suspense file” — I was told that PG&E had nothing to do with the 2030 sunset date.

Wicks’ spokesperson shared a statement from a committee staffer, who said the 2030 sunset would “prompt the Legislature to revisit the exemption in a few years to address any problems that might arise, especially problems both investor-owned utilities and municipal utilities express worry about.”

“If the roll out goes as well as [balcony solar] proponents expect, I am sure there will be legislators falling over themselves to author the reauthorization,” the staffer wrote.

I certainly hope so! Then again, it’s possible PG&E will have better luck crushing the clean energy technology a few years from now.

It’s also possible the company will have a staunch ally in the governor’s office in 2030. I’m still holding out hope for Xavier Becerra, but he did place first in the June primary after PG&E spent at least $13.5 million to defeat his main rival, Tom Steyer.

Whatever the future holds, the immediate future looks relatively certain: The plug-in solar bill will probably clear the Assembly easily, before returning to the Senate for a final vote and then heading to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk. As hostile as Newsom is toward rooftop solar — and as friendly as he is toward the utilities — I suspect he’ll sign it, especially with the unions neutral.

After that, hopefully, we’ll see a virtuous cycle. There are millions of renters and low-income families in California for whom rooftop solar has long been out of reach. Once some of them start buying plug-in solar panels, more companies will enter the market and system prices will fall. That will fuel more sales, and more companies introducing products, and lower prices — exactly what happened with rooftop solar.

California being California, the ripple effects could be global.

“I couldn’t be more excited about this bill,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group. “We’re going to open up one of the largest markets in the world to balcony solar.”

Still, it’s frustrating that an easy climate and affordability win is so difficult in a state as progressive as California.

Utah — seriously, Utah! — was the first state to pass a balcony solar law, in March 2025. Since then, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont and Virginia have joined the club. In Massachusetts, lawmakers are currently working out the differences between plug-in solar bills that passed the House and Senate.

Similar laws are awaiting gubernatorial signatures in New Jersey and New York. And even though New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has done some terrible climate backsliding lately, solar advocate Hannah Birnbaum, who co-founded the nonprofit Permit Power, fully expects Hochul to sign off on balcony solar.

“At least in New York and New Jersey, it has not really met with opposition,” she said.

Sitting here in Sacramento, that’s a breath of fresh air.

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A few months ago, I asked everyone to send me their dream headlines from 2036. What would you want the world to look like a decade from now?

After narrowing down the submissions to a dozen of my favorites, I made a poll and asked you to vote on the best headlines. Now we have our winners.

Hundreds of people voted. Here are the top finishers:

• 1st place: Exxon declares bankruptcy, CEO Darren Woods faces climate damages trial (submitted by Ali Wines)

• 2nd place: For the first time in 25 years, teens spend more time in nature than on their devices (submitted by Rick Brown)

• 3rd place: Gen Alpha can’t believe we once cleared rainforests for burgers (submitted by Carolyn Englar)

Congrats to Ali, Rick and Carolyn, who will each win one-year paid subscriptions to Climate-Colored Goggles. And thank you to everyone who participated! It’s important for us all to think creatively about how the future might look different and better than the present. Otherwise, we won’t try very hard to make it happen.

A few observations about the winning entries.

Ali’s headline received the most votes, but it wasn’t the only submission imagining a future where oil companies go bust, or where their executives are held accountable. I was forced to choose a finalist from several spicy options.

So at least among readers of this newsletter, there’s enormous frustration with Big Oil — a frustration that has not translated into legislative action in California lately.

Carolyn’s headline, meanwhile, was one of the only submissions dealing with meat, despite its huge importance to the climate fight. Voters flocked to the idea of a future without burger-driven deforestation, which is wonderful. Although I do wonder if the plethora of energy-centric headlines split the vote. I was surprised by how few people voted for a headline forecasting the end of gas appliances.

The volume of support for Rick’s headline — the one about teens spending more time in nature than on their devices — caught me by surprise.

I loved the sentiment, or I wouldn’t have made it a finalist. But for a newsletter whose audience is largely focused on climate, energy and water, I wasn’t sure how many folks would be moved by this particular vision of the future.

Well, the voters have spoken: less screen time, more nature time. And the cool thing is, we don’t have to wait until 2036 — or limit participation to teens. We can all start doing this one right now. Having just returned from a hiking trip — where I used my phone as a camera rather a computer — I can attest to the mental health benefits.

Thank you again for playing along — this was fun! We’ll do some more creative games and competitions before too long. Let me know if you have any ideas.

There’s a great big climate-friendly Tomorrowland (hopefully)

As a Disneyland superfan, I was thrilled to learn this weekend that the Walt Disney Company is finally overhauling Tomorrowland. It was last updated in 1998, meaning the future hasn’t looked so futuristic lately. New visions of progress are needed.

As a climate storyteller, I’m immensely curious how those visions might incorporate clean energy, electric vehicles and other sustainable technologies.

We already know that Disney is electrifying the 71-year-old Autopia ride, replacing dirty gas-guzzlers with EVs. When I broke the news in 2024, I urged Disney to update Tomorrowland with other climate-friendly storytelling flourishes, such as solar-panel shade structures, induction cooking and a revived PeopleMover.

I’m holding out hope that Disney’s Imagineers may be thinking along similar lines. Although the company revealed few details at this weekend’s D23 convention, Emily “Emo” O’Brien — the Imagineer overseeing the Tomorrowland revitalization — told reporters that the design team has taken inspiration from Walt Disney’s Opening Day speech, in which he called Tomorrowland “a vista into a world of wondrous ideas.”

O’Brien said the revamped land “will have new open spaces, places for guests to really experience together and dream about that optimistic future.”

Disney’s “optimistic future” will certainly involve space exploration; Tomorrowland’s best attraction is Space Mountain, and it’s not going anywhere, as seen in the concept art above. But it’s possible EVs won’t be the only cleantech. Going back to the days of Walt Disney, Tomorrowland has a history of showcasing cool inventions, from plastics (yikes) to electric appliances (highly prescient). There was even an energy mural in the 1960s that spotlighted solar and wind power.

Discussing Walt Disney’s original vision, O’Brien said the Imagineers “want to keep the heritage and the responsibility to honoring that legacy at the center, but we have to evolve it for our new generations.”

To me, that sounds like a clarion call for sustainability-tinged storytelling. And maybe I’m grasping at straws here, but I can’t help myself: The concept art includes an image of the bright morning sun peaking over the horizon.

One thing’s for sure: If I ran a major cleantech company or trade group, I’d be getting in touch with Disney to gauge the potential for sponsorships. Plans for new rides and experiences are currently being drawn up. This is a chance to win hearts and minds — and rewrite the politics of the possible — long past 2036.

In other news

On our public lands:

• The Trump administration’s gutting of the federal workforce has left firefighters overworked, under-resourced and scrambling to keep up as climate-fueled blazes burn across the West. (Scott Dance, New York Times)

• The guy who oversees the U.S. Forest Service called in extra federal firefighting support for a small fire near his mega-ranch in Idaho, even as many larger blazes burned elsewhere. (Brianna Sacks and Andrew Ba Tran, Washington Post)

• A couple of “environmentalist” ranchers recruited Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his friends to help them preserve the sacred legacy of cattle ranching at Point Reyes. (Susanne Rust, L.A. Times)

The energy transition:

• The California Coastal Commission rejected an oil company’s request to restart offshore fracking. The company can now appeal to the Trump administration — which, I wonder what the feds might say. (Rosanna Xia, L.A. Times)

• During the Biden years, NextEra billed itself as the nation’s largest clean energy company and talked a big game on “real zero” — like net zero, but with no offsets. Now it’s backing away from its climate commitments and bragging about “energy dominance.” (Ajani Stella, Inside Climate News)

• A new study finds that replacing your gas car with an EV immediately — if you can afford the up-front cost — is almost always the climate-smart option, rather than waiting for your gas car to stop working. (Tik Root, Grist)

Climate consequences:

• Global warming is one of several factors turning the Golden State into a hot spot for mosquitoes, ticks and fleas spreading dangerous diseases. Agh! (Susanne Rust and Lila Seidman, L.A. Times)

• “This summer has felt like a sea change in elite sport. Somehow we have reached a stage where it is no longer shocking to see a tennis player collapse on court, like Ekaterina Alexandrova in Memphis.” (Tanya Aldred, the Guardian)

• Add this one to your climate vocabulary: “Snow-eater” heat waves are melting Western snowpack twice as fast, according to a new study. (Kaleb Roedel, KUNR)

Water in the West:

• The week before last, Lake Mead hit a record low. Now it’s Lake Powell’s turn. (Associated Press)

• Lake Powell’s hydropower generation isn’t nearly as important as it once was. Yet the feds are still operating Glen Canyon Dom as if those dwindling electrons were absolutely crucial. (Jonathan P. Thompson, the Land Desk)

• A Denver water provider should have taken climate change into account before expanding a big dam — or so critics say. That’s the claim at the heart of a lawsuit that could have ripple effects across the American West. (Wyatt Myskow and Jake Bolster, Inside Climate News)

Finally, after reading this fascinating column by the L.A. Times’ Patt Morrison, you may be frustrated to learn that California lawmakers just killed a bill that would have required state officials to study the reintroduction of grizzly bears. The bill was killed with no explanation or discussion by the Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.

I was watching the committee meeting, although I was focused on another bill. More to come later this week.

I’m back home in California after 11 days hiking and camping in Washington, mostly at Olympic National Park, with my wife and several friends. The landscapes were jaw-dropping, the weather perfect; I don’t know that temperatures surpassed 80 degrees or dropped below 40. We never caught a whiff of smoke from the fires burning on the far eastern end of the state in Spokane.

Which isn’t to say climate change was totally out of mind; a giant rain gauge at the Hoh Rain Forest visitor center showed that the park typically gets about 75 inches of rain by early August, but it had gotten just 49 inches this year — a dangerous deficit for one of the wettest places in the Lower 48 states.

Nearby, a National Park Service exhibit showed images of Mount Olympus in 1899 vs. 2008, with arrows pointing out how much the glaciers had shrunk.

“The result is less meltwater feeding the Hoh River,” a sign explained. “This decrease affects river flows and water temperature. Over time will cold water aquatic species, such as salmon and bull trout, be able to adapt to these climate-driven changes?”

I didn’t trek up to Washington to do reporting, though; I needed a vacation. And I’m happy to say the wilderness did its job. I feel refreshed, restored, energized.

I’ll be back next week with more newsletters. In the meantime, here are some pictures I took of Olympic National Park:

After emerging from the woods, I learned that state and local officials had finally determined, conclusively, that a Southern California Edison power line did indeed ignite the Eaton fire. Big news, but no time to dwell on it; we were getting ready to camp another night on the Pacific shore, in the park’s coastal section.

This may have been the highlight of the trip for me. As much as I loved the inland scenery, the terrain felt familiar; it reminded me of the Sierra Nevada, but with more moss. The coast, though, was unlike anything I had experienced. Just breathtaking.

After packing up and hiking out, we spent a few nights in Forks, the real-life town that serves as the setting for the “Twilight” books and movies. There was “Twilight” paraphernalia absolutely everywhere, from the shops downtown to our Airbnb’s living room. My friends made me watch the first film, which I had never seen. So as to avoid offending any fans, I will decline to provide my review.

Before flying home from Seattle, we spent a day Mount Rainier National Park. It was worth the long drive; just look at this 14,410-foot volcano:

For all the bad things happening, we live in a beautiful world. I’m grateful.

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In other news

The energy transition:

• California got more than half its electricity from solar in May, a world record. And every year, the numbers keep rising. (Blanca Begert, L.A. Times)

• Artificial intelligence could help oil and gas companies create up to 13 times more climate pollution, according to a new study — dwarfing the climate impacts of data center energy use. (Emily Atkin, HEATED)

• California utilities are fighting a major bill whose author says it would help cut down on electric rates — and fuel the transition to cleaner cars and heat pumps. (Jeff St. John, Canary Media)

Climate consequences:

• July 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in the Lower 48 states. (Seth Borenstein, Associated Press)

• Nearly 20% of World Cup matches were played in potentially dangerous heat conditions. (Dharna Noor and Seán Clarke, the Guardian)

• El Niño could conspire with global warming to bring California its highest sea levels ever recorded. (Rong-Gong Lin II, L.A. Times)

Trump tomfoolery:

• The Trump administration agreed to pay another energy developer more than $1 billion to cancel several offshore wind farms — including off the coast of California — and invest in gas instead. (Hayley Smith, L.A. Times)

• The administration outright admitted in court documents that it canceled billions of dollars in clean energy grants because they would have benefited states that voted for Kamala Harris. (Tony Romm and Brad Plumer, New York Times)

• Are Trump’s new solar tariffs good or bad for American solar? Depends who you ask. (Julian Spector, Canary Media)

Along the Colorado River:

• The federal government’s Colorado River plan is here. It doesn’t say the words “climate change,” but for once the Trump administration is being forced to reckon with climate change — a sign of just how bad things have gotten at Lake Mead and Lake Powell. (Ian James, L.A. Times)

• Not long after federal officials released their water plan, Lake Mead hit an all-time record low. (Alex Hager, KJZZ)

• The state of Colorado’s largest reservoir, Blue Mesa, is less than 25% full — a sign of hard times in the Upper Basin’s biggest state. (Shannon Mullane, Colorado Sun)

Finally, I’m excited to see L.A. Times Studios restart the Boiling Point podcast, which I hosted when it first launched last year. It’s now hosted by independent investigative reporter Miranda Green, whose work I’ve enjoyed reading for a long time.

The first two episodes feature interviews with Los Angeles Times journalists Grace Toohey and Susanne Rust. The show is worth checking out.

One more thing

On Wednesday, basketball legend Russell Westbrook announced his retirement from the NBA after 18 seasons. I was lucky enough to talk with Westbrook last month; he’s recently become a vocal climate and clean air advocate. You can read more here.

Congrats to Westbrook on an amazing career. Hopefully we’ll be hearing even more from him soon on clean energy, electric vehicles and public transit.

• For the first time since launching Climate-Colored Goggles last October, I’m taking a real vacation. I’m heading out of town for a hiking and camping trip starting this Saturday, so you won’t hear from me for a couple of weeks. Don’t panic! I’ll be back.

• In the meantime, I’m still offering a special deal through Friday, aka tomorrow: 30% off the price of an annual subscription. I’d hoped to sign up 100 paid subscribers this week, and I’m thrilled to say we’re close — 10 more until we hit the target! If it’s in your budget, please click here to help us get over the finish line.

Subscribe by July 31 for a 30% discount

OK, on to today’s newsletter.

You know the Colorado River crisis is serious when the Trump administration is willing to use hundreds of millions of dollars from President Biden’s climate law to help to solve it.

As of Wednesday night, federal officials had yet to release their plan for mandatory water cutbacks along the Colorado — a crucial water source for tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland across the American West. But with a plan expected later this week, details were starting to trickle out.

The L.A. Times’ Ian James reported that Trump’s Interior Department would accept a proposal submitted by California, Arizona and Nevada — the Lower Basin states — to slash their water use by 12%, 31% and 28%, respectively, through 2028. They’ll receive $350 million from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to support water conservation.

The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — will get $100 million in conservation funding. But unlike their downstream neighbors, they won’t face mandatory water cuts. However much water they end up saving, that will be good enough.

It’s always possible the plan will change. I’m eager to see the final details.

While we wait, let’s hear from one of the West’s most thoughtful and well-informed Colorado River chroniclers.

That would be Zak Podmore, author of “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.” Earlier this week, he and I talked for an hour and took audience questions on Zoom; it was a great time. Thank you to everyone who joined us. Paid subscribers to Climate-Colored Goggles can scroll up to watch the full video.

Here are five lessons that stood out to me from our conversation — all of which are relevant to the high-stakes conflict playing out among the states.

1. We’re not doomed. Earth is resilient

My favorite thing about “Life After Dead Pool” is its hopeful message.

Most headlines about the Colorado River these days are gloomy. For instance, the last time Lake Mead and Lake Powell held as little water as they do right now was 1956 — before Lake Powell existed, meaning all the water was in Mead. Powell is currently 23% full; Mead is 27% full. These are the largest reservoirs in the United States.

But Podmore’s book flips the script, offering a firsthand look the amazing ecological recovery taking place as Lake Powell shrinks.

In and around the reservoir, which was flooded by Glen Canyon Dam more than 60 years ago, native vegetation is returning much faster than scientists thought possible — especially in narrow side canyons inundated by Powell. Exploring these remote, newly accessible places inspired Podmore to write his book.

“Instead of hearing the story that I grew up hearing — which was that Glen Canyon Dam had all these negative environmental consequences, it drowned this beautiful place — I was hearing these conversations from these researchers who were talking about the landscape that was coming back, and how excited they were about the way the ecology was recovering, and the way the endangered fish were expanding their habitat,” Podmore said.

“Instead of a story about being too late, it was a story about realizing that I was right on time, as we all are, to see the rebirth of Glen Canyon,” he added.

2. Those who don’t learn from history…

Podmore starts the book by imagining what Indigenous life might have been like in and around Glen Canyon nearly 1,000 years ago — when the region had a far larger population than it does today.

He wanted to show that the Colorado River Basin’s human history began long before white settlement — and that even environmentalists have often ignored the watershed’s Indigenous past.

“I was definitely indoctrinated into the mainstream environmental school of thought as I was growing up,” he said. “I had a copy of the really famous book about Glen Canyon called, ‘The Place No One Knew,’ which was published by the Sierra Club in the ’60s and talked about how nobody cared enough about Glen Canyon to protect it. And then I realized later on that [the] title was very offensive, and [in fact] there were people who knew Glen Canyon very well and lived there for thousands of years, and who were displaced as the waters of Lake Powell started to fill, in the case of many Navajo families.”

Podmore’s opening scene describes a 10,000-gallon stone water tank built by Ancestral Pueblo farmers, the ruins of which were eventually buried by Lake Powell. The tank’s key feature: a drain at the bottom, so that irrigation could continue no matter how low water levels got.

Lake Powell doesn’t have a drain at the bottom. It could certainly use one.

3. The Upper Basin states aren’t doing enough

If Powell’s water levels sink much lower, water won’t be able to pass through the dam’s hydropower turbines, which generate cheap electricity for communities across the West. That wouldn’t be a “dead pool” situation; water could still flow downstream to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead through bypass tubes lower in the dam. But the bypass tubes are surprisingly frail and could break with sustained use.

Translation: We are frighteningly close to “de facto dead pool.” That’s why the Trump administration is ordering everyone to use less water.

Well, not everyone. California, Arizona and Nevada are willing to cut back dramatically, and federal officials seem happy to make them do it. The Upper Basin states — the ones upstream of Lake Powell — say they shouldn’t have to commit to mandatory reductions, in part because they already consume a lot less.

In a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year, I argued that the Upper Basin states need to do more. Podmore agreed.

“It’s a tricky situation, because the Lower Basin has always used more water, and that’s a convenient argument for the Upper Basin,” he said. “But also, there’s more people in the Lower Basin. And the most productive agricultural land that’s irrigated with Colorado River water is located in the Lower Basin.”

“Even with the cuts that the Lower Basin has offered, we still have a long way to go to balance the water budget,” he added. “Everyone needs to pitch in.”

4. Alfalfa isn’t (always) the enemy

Farmers are often vilified for sucking up copious amounts of water — and with good reason. Irrigated agriculture consumes more than half the water in the Colorado River Basin, with alfalfa and other cattle feed accounting for a stunning 32% of overall water use. (This is one of several good reasons to eat fewer hamburgers.)

The Colorado River’s largest water user, by far, is California’s Imperial Valley, where farmers grow vegetables, alfalfa and other crops. There’s no sustainable future for the American West that doesn’t involve Imperial using less water.

But easy as it is to hate on Imperial, Podmore pointed out that when the Lower Basin uses water, that water stays in the river for a long time, supporting healthy ecosystems along the way. And because Imperial is very far downstream, water flowing to alfalfa farmers there carries huge environmental benefits.

“The way that water gets from the Rocky Mountains to the Imperial Valley — or to Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Phoenix — is through the Grand Canyon. It’s through Glen Canyon. It’s through Canyonlands National Park,” Podmore said. “It’s through all these important and beautiful places.”

“If the Lower Basin agrees to a bunch of cuts — if L.A. builds tons of desalination plants — that would in theory be good, because you have to divert less water from the river,” he added. But at the same time, “that means less water in the river.”

5. Dams are a model for climate action

To be clear, Podmore isn’t advocating for more dams; not only would he like to see Glen Canyon Dam decommissioned and Lake Powell emptied, he think it’s inevitable. There’s a strong argument for it: With climate change draining the Colorado River — a recent study found that this year’s snow drought was made 14 times more likely by global warming — there’s no longer enough water to justify two giant reservoirs. At least not when one of them might hit “dead pool” and crash the whole system.

But while reporting his book, Podmore learned about the federal government’s 20th century dam-building boom, and why it was so popular.

“A lot of [these projects] took off during the Great Depression,” he said. “They were providing good jobs. They were providing water for farmers, and they were providing power to rural areas that didn’t have [power], at subsidized rates.”

“The Bureau of Reclamation built the dams,” he added. “They didn’t outsource through incentives to a private contractor.”

Podmore would love to see government take a similar approach to building renewable energy: solar farms, wind turbines and more. He thinks the feds could do it cheaper and faster than the private sector.

“The federal government fronts the money for the construction project, creates a lot of good-paying jobs in the process, and then sells the power at a below-market rate to pay back the initial construction cost,” he said.

Pie in the sky? Maybe. But why not dream big?

P.S. More CCG Book Clubs to come

I’m excited to keep hosting Zoom conversations with journalists, authors and other experts! Next up will probably be Amy Westervelt, executive editor of Drilled Media and author of the forthcoming book, “Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy.”

The book isn’t publishing until September 22, but Amy graciously sent me an early copy, and it’s excellent — a must-read for climate folks. I’ll send everyone an email when we’ve scheduled the CCG Book Talk.

Like my conversation with Zak Podmore, future events will be open to everyone, but the full videos will only be available afterward to paid subscribers. As a reminder, I’m offering a 30% discount on paid annual subscriptions through Friday, July 31 — meaning tomorrow! Click here to sign up.

Subscribe by July 31 for a 30% discount

Don’t forget to vote: Headlines from 2036

Last month, I asked everyone what they’d like the world to look like a decade from now — and to send me the headlines they want to see in 2036.

You all sent amazing headlines — pithy, thought-provoking and at times totally unexpected. I narrowed down the submissions to 12 of my favorites and created a poll for Climate-Colored Goggles readers to choose the very best.

Voting is still open; click here to pick your favorites! I’ll announce the winning entries (and the people who submitted them) next month.

Webinar: As the West burns

One more video for you. Last week, I moderated a webinar for Covering Climate Now on how journalists can cover the climate-wildfire connection, in all its importance and nuance. I was joined by three great panelists:

• Max Boykoff, environmental studies professor, University of Colorado Boulder

• Zachary Labe, climate scientist, Climate Central

• Kylie Mohr, correspondent and contributing editor, High Country News

Although the discussion was geared toward journalists, the subject matter might be interesting to others, so feel free to watch and share. Thank you to everyone who joined the conversation!

Until next time

Like I mentioned above, I’m going on vacation for a few weeks. Much as I love this newsletter, I’m excited to take a break and spend time in nature.

Thank you for reading, and see you in a bit!

Read more

• First: This week only, I’m offering free subscribers a 30% discount on paid annual subscriptions to Climate-Colored Goggles. You can sign up here. No worries if it’s not in your budget; almost all of my work will continue to be free. But if you can help me out, I’d be extremely grateful. The deal expires July 31.

• Second: Join me Tuesday 7/28 (aka tomorrow) at 4 p.m. PT for a Zoom conversation with Utah journalist Zak Podmore about his excellent book, “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.” You can register here. The video will also be available afterward, although only to paid subscribers.

A volley of stories from California’s leading news outlets left me furrowing my brow this month — not annoyed so much as perplexed.

To hear the Sacramento Bee tell it: “Even as voters say they still care about the environment, beneath those responses lies rising concern about the costs that climate and environmental policies impose on families’ pocketbooks.”

Turning to the Los Angeles Times: “Most [voters] said they back the state’s climate goals but balk at higher energy costs for renewable power.”

Or as L.A. Times columnist George Skelton put it: “People strongly favor fighting climate change — at least in concept — until it adversely affects them directly.”

Those articles and others stemmed from an environment-focused survey published by the Public Policy Institute of California, an influential think tank with a staff of nearly 100 people. Its board of directors includes a former top aide to Gavin Newsom, a senior executive at Southern California Edison, several well-connected lobbyists and two former U.S. Cabinet secretaries. When the PPIC speaks, politicians listen. Executives listen. Journalists listen.

And not without good reason. I’ve followed the PPIC’s research for years, particularly its water policy work, and found it to be interesting and insightful.

But reading about the new survey, something bothered me, and I couldn’t figure out what. So I decided to take a closer look.

Much of the coverage that piqued my interest dealt with two survey questions. Here they are, along with the results among likely voters:

• Do you favor or oppose the state law that requires 100 percent of the state’s electricity to come from renewable energy sources by the year 2045? Favor: 59%; oppose: 40%

• In order to help reduce climate change, would you be willing or not willing to pay more for electricity if it were generated by renewable sources like solar or wind energy? Willing: 40%; not willing: 59%

On the whole, the media coverage was exactly right: Californians support ambitious environmental policies but don’t want to pay more for renewable energy. The PPIC offered roughly the same analysis on its own blog, stating that Californians “value the state’s environmental goals and policies” but “are frugal about efforts that may help reduce emissions, like renewable energy.”

Here’s my finicky question, though: Why such a narrow, outdated framing of renewable energy? Especially one that pits climate and affordability against each other?

Without a doubt, transitioning the economy from fossil fuels to renewables carries up-front costs — and Americans are sensitive right now to anything that might make electricity or gas more expensive. In the PPIC survey, two-thirds of California likely voters described energy costs as a “big problem.”

But simply asking folks whether they’d be willing to pay more for renewable energy perpetuates a frustrating false dichotomy.

To my mind, the not-so-subtle implication is that renewables drive up electric rates — even though the reality is far more nuanced. Solar and wind are the cheapest sources of new power; in the long run, they save us money by reducing healthcare costs from fossil fueled air pollution, lessening our exposure to volatile oil and gas prices and averting costly disasters like oil spills. You also may have heard that global warming is quite expensive!

To be fair, there’s only so much nuance you can jam into a survey question.

But I was feeling a little ornery, so I got in touch with Mark Baldassare, the PPIC’s statewide survey director. He was extremely thoughtful and open to feedback, even as he told me he didn’t think the survey implied that renewables are driving up costs.

“I feel like [that question is] neutral on the topic of whether it’s more or less costly to have renewable energy,” he said.

Baldassare said he’s hesitant to change the “willingness to pay for renewable energy” question in future iterations of the survey because he’s been asking it since 2016, giving policymakers and the public a useful trend line. This year, fewer likely voters than ever said they’d be willing to pay more for renewables — just 40%, down from a high of 56% a decade ago. Much as the question irritates me, that’s helpful to know.

To Baldassare, one of the survey’s key takeaways is that electricity has gotten way too expensive in California. He believes state officials need to take urgent action to get electric bills under control.

“People are really concerned about climate change. Those findings come out year after year, and that hasn’t changed,” he said. “The problem is the cost of electricity. To me, that’s a utilities problem.”

He’s absolutely right. California’s climate goals hinge on people choosing to stop burning stuff, like gas for home heating and oil for driving to the grocery store. But they’ll only embrace electrification if electricity is affordable. And unfortunately, electric bills are bloated, for reasons that have little to do with cheap renewable power.

That’s how we get declining support for certain climate policies — like Newsom’s plan to end the sale of (most) new gas cars by 2035. It polled worse than ever in the latest PPIC survey, with just 34% of likely voters expressing support (down from 49% in 2022).

“I would hope that people read these findings and say we need to do something about the cost of electricity,” Baldassare said.

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I hope so too. But Newsom and the Legislature have already spent several years trying to tackle affordability. And although they’ve made a few good decisions, they’ve also developed a nasty habit of killing or attempting to kill worthy clean energy programs. They’ve gone after community solar incentives, energy efficiency standards, even HVAC upgrades for overheating schools — often prodded by electric utilities or other industries that misleadingly claim these programs are too expensive.

That’s why I couldn’t help but feel frustrated by the survey question, and by the simplistic way the results were inevitably reported. “Affordability” is all the rage in center-left politics these days; same goes for “climate hushing.” Even before Xavier Becerra emerged victorious in California’s gubernatorial primary — with help from Chevron and Pacific Gas & Electric — the conventional wisdom in Sacramento was that climate action has gotten too expensive, and Californians aren’t willing to pay another dime.

Which is a shame, because climate-fueled wildfires and heat waves are increasingly making life hell in the Golden State.

Not that any of this is the PPIC’s fault. To the group’s credit, its actually asked a bunch of questions about climate impacts, finding that overwhelming majorities of likely voters see water supply, air pollution, wildfires and extreme weather events as problems. Two-thirds believe the effects of climate change have already begun.

Fact check: They’re right!

Sadly, those details didn’t make it into any of the news coverage I found. And even if they had, I doubt they would have mattered much, in terms of narrative formation or bias confirmation. “Californians don’t want to pay more for renewable energy” is an easy story to tell, especially when so many powerful voices are already telling it, and so many people want to believe it.

But I’m an optimist, and I have faith that new narratives and data points can still change what people think and say and feel over time. So I was encouraged when Baldassare told me he was open to modifying next year’s environment survey — possibly by adding follow-up questions about renewable energy. He said he might even ask for my advice.

Which is why I want your advice: If you were surveying Californians about renewable energy, what would you want to know? Think big picture: What information would it be helpful for policymakers and the public to have, coming from a well-respected source?

Share your ideas via email, or in the comments. If they’re good, I’ll pass them along.

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There’s already lots of research showing that gas stoves fill our homes with nasty air pollution, including cancer-causing chemicals and toxins that increase the risk of kids getting asthma.

Still, a study published this month blew my mind.

Led by Dr. Ash Sehgal, a professor at Case Western’s School of Medicine, researchers recruited families from across the Cleveland and Akron areas where at least one person had asthma. Using funds from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, they replaced gas stoves with electric induction stoves in 91 homes.

And then they did something unprecedented: They studied whether people got less sick after they stopped cooking with gas. It was the first time time scientists had replaced gas ranges with electric ranges and examined the health impacts.

For 72 homes where at least one resident suffered from “poorly controlled asthma,” the team measured health outcomes before and after the gas-to-electric switch: How often were participants awoken by asthma at night? How much time did they spend wheezing? How much shortness of breath did they experience? Did they need to visit the emergency room? Did they have to stay home from work or school?

Lo and behold: Across every health metric studied, people got better. Not just better, actually — dramatically better.

“Our improvement was about twice as much as you typically see with medical treatment of asthma,” Sehgal told me.

Let that sink in: twice as much improvement as with medical treatments of asthma.

We’ll get to the caveats, the climate policy implications and the Gavin Newsom of it all.

But first a frustrating fact: As amazing as the study was, it could have been even more amazing if the Trump administration hadn’t killed most of the funding.

Read more

Last month, I asked you what you want the world to look like in 10 years — and to send me the headlines you’d like to see a decade from now.

Thank you to everyone who joined the fun! Nearly 60 people submitted more than 100 headlines. There were so many satisfying and creative ideas; narrowing down the list to a dozen of my favorites wasn’t easy. But I did my best:

• Last U.S. coal plant shut down ahead of schedule due to spiraling maintenance costs

• Exxon declares bankruptcy, CEO Darren Woods faces climate damages trial

• Data centers were supposed to house the ‘technology of the future.’ Now, abandoned warehouses are providing critical shelter for bats and raccoons

• For the first time in 25 years, teens spend more time in nature than on their devices

• Asthma rates hit record lows as pollution disappears

• With 100% of new car sales now electric, buyback program for legacy gas-powered cars ready to scale

• Solar has now been the largest source of new power worldwide for 15 years straight

• Clean air milestone: Last natural gas appliance replaced with cheaper, cleaner heat pump

• It’s official: More people bike in L.A. than Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris combined

• Gen Alpha can’t believe we once cleared rainforests for burgers

• U.S. beats Australia, offers free clean energy during all daylight hours

• Central Arizona Project canal is completely covered and powered by solar panels, with Colorado River water still flowing in it

Now it’s time to vote: Click here and choose the three you like best. The people who submitted the three winning entries will get yearlong paid subscriptions to Climate-Colored Goggles, free of charge.

More importantly, I will announce the winners and tell everyone how awesome you are. That is, assuming you want me to!

OK, stay tuned for the results.

Get ready for big news on the Colorado

U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says the Trump administration’s plan for divvying up water shortages along the Colorado River will arrive next week. Details here from my former L.A. Times colleague Ian James.

My extremely non-urgent question: Will the details drop before or after Tuesday, 7/28 at 4 p.m. PT? That’s when I’m hosting a Zoom conversation with Utah journalist Zak Podmore about his excellent book, “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.”

Zak holds the increasingly popular view that Westerners be better off without Lake Powell, one of two gigantic reservoirs along the Colorado (along with Lake Mead). I’m excited to ask him about his reporting, and to hear your questions!

If you can’t join Zak and me on Tuesday, I’ll send out the video afterward — but only to Climate-Colored Goggles paid subscribers. Subscribe here if you’re interested!

A few other Colorado River headlines:

• California keeps stepping up to protect the reservoirs — with financial support from the federal government, anyway. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will pay Southern California water users up to $65 million to leave up to 200,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead. (Lila Seidman, L.A. Times)

• Colorado announced a state-run conservation program. Don’t go looking for any guarantees about how much Colorado River water the state will conserve, though. (Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism)

• The Trump administration says the razorback sucker, a fish native to the Grand Canyon, is no longer endangered — it’s just “threatened” now. Conservationists disagree. (Shaun McKinnon, Arizona Republic)

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In other news

The energy transition:

• Several of the world’s largest solar projects are getting built and planned in California’s Central Valley as farmers stare down the reality of dwindling water supplies. (Blanca Begert and Ian James, L.A. Times)

• Enhanced geothermal is so hot, even the leading old-school geothermal company, Ormat Technologies, is getting in on the game with a project in Nevada. (Maria Gallucci, Canary Media)

• U.S. electric vehicle sales in the first half of 2026 were down 23.8% from the first half of last year. Thank you, President Trump and Republicans in Congress. (Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News)

MAGA nonsense:

• The Trump administration declared that when species are listed as “threatened,” it will no longer be illegal to kill them. (Jake Spring, Washington Post)

• Trump didn’t just slash 91% of Bears Ears National Monument — he eliminated the first-of-its-kind tribal commission that helped manage the monument. (Anna V. Smith, High Country News)

• The president claims we have an energy emergency. He is also doing everything in his power to make sure you use as much energy as possible, obliterating a decades-long bipartisan consensus on efficiency. (Brad Plumer, New York Times)

Words and deeds:

• A federal judge blocked California’s “Truth in Recycling” law, agreeing with industry groups that it might violate companies’ free speech rights. (Susanne Rust, L.A. Times)

• Politico has one of the world’s largest climate reporting teams. Meanwhile, its parent company is controlled by a private equity firm with major investments in natural gas. The company is also run by a guy determined to steer the political discourse toward the right. (Amy Westervelt, Drilled)

• The World Cup’s new hydration breaks have media companies “salivating” as they think about all the money they can make selling TV ads during future soccer matches, ESPN reports — in a story that doesn’t mention why hydration breaks are now necessary. (Spoiler alert: climate change!)

Last but not least: California officials say the state’s investor-owned utilities can no longer shut off power to customers for nonpayment when temperatures exceed 90 degrees, CalMatters’ Alejandro Lazo reports. That still feels pretty high to me! The previous threshold, if you can believe it, was 100 degrees.

Until next time

While training for the 2020 Summer Olympics, Melissa Humaña-Paredes decided she couldn’t stay quiet any longer.

Humaña-Paredes is one of the world’s best beach volleyball players; she would eventually win a silver medal for Canada during the 2024 Olympics in Paris. But first, the Southern California resident had to battle through extreme heat at the Tokyo Games, which would go down as the hottest Olympics ever.

Humaña-Paredes and her coaches spent extraordinary amounts of time developing ways to keep her core body temperature down.

“We were making custom ice vests that we could wear in our warm-ups, wear in our time-outs,” she said. “The conversations were no longer about how to maximize performance. It was about, ‘How are we going to stay healthy?’ And, ‘How are we going to avoid heat exhaustion?’”

Humaña-Paredes reached the quarter-finals in Tokyo. The struggle was real.

“We were spending a lot of time and energy on trying to find these solutions, or these band-aids to this problem of the climate crisis,” she told me last week, during a summit hosted by the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. “And that’s when I was like, ‘We’ve got to get to the root of the problem.’”

Elite snowboarder Bea Kim has reached a similar conclusion.

Only 19 years old, Kim represented the U.S. at this year’s Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina, a mountainous region marked by melting glaciers; she finished eighth overall in the halfpipe. Her career is just getting started, but she’s a quick study. There aren’t many good training spots for top-tier snowboarders, and they’re growing less reliable as fossil fuel combustion produces warmer, less-snowy winters overall.

Kim recently returned home to Southern California from three weeks in Australia, where conditions were supposed to be perfect for training. Not so much.

“I only ended up snowboarding for a day and a half,” she said. “Saw a lot of kangaroos, but not a lot of snowboarding.”

She knows she’ll see winter weather get more extreme throughout her lifetime. But already, she’s heard stories.

“You get to the same places at the same time every year, and so you get to know the locals,” she told me at last week’s summit. “You talk to them and they say, ‘Oh, this has been the craziest winter we’ve ever had, and that’s why we’re not snowboarding, because it’s dumping 10 feet of snow, and it’s shutting the whole town down, and it’s shutting the whole mountain down.’”

At a time when many politicians are going quiet on climate — the “climate hushing” phenomenon — Kim and Humaña-Paredes are sounding the alarm. Instead of playing it safe, they’re playing offense.

To be sure, volleyball and snowboarding aren’t America’s most lucrative sports. When Kim and Humaña-Paredes post on social media about climate action, they have less to lose than, say, an NBA star.

Enter Russell Westbrook, one of the greatest basketball players of the 21st century.

Like Kim and Humaña-Paredes, I talked with Westbrook at the Road to 2028 Summit, a gathering of activists, investors and state and local policymakers at Inglewood’s Intuit Dome, home to the L.A. Clippers. Organizers announced nearly $600 million in new commitments to advance clean air, clean energy and clean transit in the Los Angeles area, exactly two years ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics.

Westbrook — who previously played for the Clippers and Lakers and is now a free agent after a stint with the Sacramento Kings — was the summit’s co-chair. He served as one of the opening speakers, explaining how important it is for kids in his L.A. County hometown, Hawthorne, to be able to breathe cleaner air. He stated plainly that all environmental issues are important to him — climate included.

After Westbrook left the stage, I chatted with him while looking out over the court — a real thrill for me, since I watched him play for UCLA when we were both teenagers. He told me he grew up taking the bus, and he remembers not having shade structures at bus stops. Now he understands better the connections between climate, heat, lack of shade and poor air quality — issues he’s looking to address through his foundation.

“You can focus on all of them,” he told me.

One way Westbrook is cleaning up the air: driving an electric vehicle. He has two cars, but he prefers his Porsche Taycan EV. He drives his gas car so rarely, actually, that he once forgot to fill the tank and ran out of fuel.

“I hadn’t stopped at a gas station in so long,” he said with a laugh.

Most pro athletes don’t moonlight as climate advocates. But in many ways, they’re perfect for the job.

“When they speak about climate change, they are not commenting on an abstract political issue; they are describing changes they are already experiencing,” British social scientists Sam Hampton and Steve Westlake wrote last week. “And the strong emotional connection between fans and athletes makes them powerful messengers.”

In an essay summarizing their research, they acknowledged that athletes “are often seen as unlikely climate advocates, because most elite sport depends on frequent flying, commercial sponsorship and resource-intensive events.”

At the same, “people with lived experience can become trusted and effective communicators. Sport stars are no exception,” they wrote.

Intuitively, it makes perfect sense. But it only works if fans are receptive.

Hampton and Westlake offered some advice for athletes, pointing to research finding that people “respond better to advocates who are open about the tensions they face than those who present themselves as flawless.”

That’s been Humaña-Paredes’ approach. And fans have rewarded her.

“We can’t preach perfectionism. We have to be imperfect advocates,” she said. “I’m very open about how much I travel. I track all of my kilometers that I travel on airplanes to competitions throughout the year. I translate that into a carbon emission amount, and I donate that amount to vetted climate charities every season. And I share the stats with people.”

“Sometimes I do get called a hypocrite still,” she added. “But more often than not, the conversations that I engage in, the responses that I get, are overwhelmingly positive. And people just want to help, and they just want to learn. And a lot of times when I’m at a tournament, people come up to me and they thank me for speaking about it.”

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Kim, too, said she’s faced hardly any blowback, even as she’s spoken at the United Nations and visited Capitol Hill in collaboration with the group Protect Our Winters. She knows climate change is politicized, and why many pro athletes stay away. But it doesn’t worry her.

“A lot of athletes are just there to play their sport and perform,” she said. “But climate change is a human issue. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, what you do for your job, what your background is — climate change affects everybody. We as athletes have fallen onto this platform, and it feels wrong to not say anything.”

“A lot of people do want change,” she added. “They’re just are scared to speak up.”

She’s right: Studies show that the vast majority of Americans want government to take stronger climate action. But most people massively underestimate how many of their fellow citizens feel the same way. There’s a “perception gap” on climate, and the result is climate hushing. Silence only works when everyone else is doing it.

So I’m grateful to Kim, Humaña-Paredes and Westbrook — and other athletes doing similar advocacy — for refusing to stay silent. I admire their bravery and leadership. They’re setting an amazing example for politicians and newsrooms, and for everyone else not telling nearly as many climate stories as they should be.

People know global warming is happening. They feel it every day. They need to be assured they’re not alone.

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Watch the video: Olympic athletes talk climate

If you’re interested, here’s the full video of my panel, which also features climate scientist Kaitlyn Trudeau from the nonprofit Climate Central:

Two upcoming events: Wildfires and climate, and the Colorado River

This Thursday, 7/23 at 9 a.m. PT, I’m moderating a Zoom conversation about wildfire, climate change and media coverage. The event is being hosted by Covering Climate Now and is geared toward journalists covering wildfires and related stories. But everyone is welcome to join. You can register here if interested.

We have three great panelists lined up: Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central; Kylie Mohr, a correspondent and contributing editor at High Country News; and Max Boykoff, an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. If you can’t make it, that’s OK — I’ll send out the video afterward.

Also, a quick reminder that next week, on Tuesday, 7/28 at 4 p.m. PT, I’m leading a conversation with Utah-based environmental journalist Zak Podmore about his prescient book, “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.” The Trump administration is slated to release a highly anticipated water shortage plan for the Colorado River any day now. You can register for the Zoom here.

If you can’t join Zak and me next week, I’ll send out the video afterward, but only to Climate-Colored Goggles paid subscribers. You can subscribe here!

In the three months since Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass quietly fired one of her top climate officials, there’s been no word about a replacement — at least not publicly.

I broke the story here at Climate-Colored Goggles that Bass had unceremoniously dumped Marta Segura, L.A.’s chief heat officer, with no announcement and no public explanation — just ahead of the hot summer months, when Segura would otherwise be charged with helping Angelenos protect themselves from extreme heat. Only after I inquired did the mayor’s office release a statement thanking Segura for her service and saying officials were “in the final stages of appointing a dynamic new Chief Heat Officer.”

Since then, radio silence.

So I was surprised to learn from multiple attendees at a climate event on Tuesday that a new chief heat officer was already in place.

Bass’ office started telling environmental groups two weeks ago that the mayor had appointed Daniela Simunovic, her senior director of climate and sustainability, to the heat job. Simunovic previously worked at the California Air Resources Board.

When I asked Bass’ office for comment, a spokesperson confirmed the news, telling me that Simunovic started the new job on May 31. Like her predecessor, Simunovic is also running the city’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.

“Many stakeholders and City partners have been working closely with her and are excited to have her lead the office, including during the current Extreme Heat Warning in effect for the City of L.A.,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Politically, the whole thing is low-key baffling to me. Bass has never exactly been a climate champion — she took tons of well-deserved flak from environmentalists when she tried to eliminate the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office in 2025, hoping to save a little money. Activists were pissed when she dismissed Segura, too. And now she’s fighting to win reelection against a progressive challenger, Nithya Raman, with a strong climate plan. Why not put out a press release touting the new chief heat officer and stressing her commitment to keeping Angelenos safe?

All that said, I’m glad the job’s been filled. The chief heat officer can play a key role in coordinating between city agencies and marshaling resources in advance of heat waves, with a special eye toward protecting the most vulnerable. You may have heard that fossil fueled heat waves are very deadly.

But even if Simunovic is great at the job, one person can only do so much. The Bass administration has declined to fill four open positions at the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, leaving just Simunovic and Gordon Haines, the deputy chief heat officer. City Council wouldn’t go along with Bass’ plan to eliminate the office, but the mayor has hollowed it out anyway.

So here’s hoping Bass does more — a lot more — to try to win over climate-conscious voters ahead of the November election. As I wrote during the primary, Raman was the clear choice for climate voters. For now, that’s still the case.

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CCG Book Club: Crunch time on the Colorado River

As I mentioned last week, I’m excited to host a live conversation on Tuesday, 7/28 at 4 p.m. PT with environmental journalist Zad Podmore, author of the book, “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.”

There’s never been a more perilous moment than right now in modern humanity’s relationship with the Colorado. Several scholars noted this week that the last time Lake Mead and Lake Powell held this little water combined, Lake Powell didn’t exist yet — meaning all the water was in Lake Mead. It’s a harrowing thought.

I’ll ask Zak about what he’s learned over many years of reporting on falling water levels and shortsighted decision-making at Powell — including why some folks think draining the reservoir is the best way forward for the tens of millions of people who rely on the Colorado River.

You can register for the Zoom here. There will be time for audience Q&A. If you can’t make it on Tuesday, 7/28 at 4 p.m. PT, the video recording will be available afterward for Climate-Colored Goggles paid subscribers. (Subscribe here!)

In the meantime, a few recent Colorado River stories:

• Arizona’s San Pedro River, which flows to the Colorado, ran dry at a key spot for only the second time in 122 years. (Sarah Henry, Arizona Republic)

• Will the Trump administration release cold water from Lake Powell to protect threatened native fish in the Grand Canyon, like federal officials have done in years past? The Interior Department isn’t saying. (Alex Hager, KJZZ)

• State and federal officials will finally study how much water evaporates from the Colorado River’s Upper Basin reservoirs. (Brooke Larsen, Salt Lake Tribune)

In other news

The clean car transition:

• The technical hurdles weren’t easy to overcome, but you can finally travel America and explore the great outdoors in an electric RV. (Michael J. Coren, Washington Post)

• Sometimes the headline says it all: “I’ve Seen More Improvement In Two Years Of Reviewing EVs Than I Did In A Decade Testing Gas Cars” (Mack Hogan, InsideEVs)

• Trump’s UFC fighting buddy Dana White is now starring in an atrocious Ram Trucks ad, explicitly selling the idea that LOUD TRUCKS are GOOD and AMERICAN. (Drew Magary, Defector)

The grid transition:

• Why haven’t there been major power outages during the recent U.S. heat waves? Lots of new solar and wind farms. (Kathryn Krawczyk, Canary Media)

• Hawaiʻi Governor Josh Green is the latest climate backslider. His team is fudging the numbers to make it look like natural gas would save residents lots of money, relative to staying the course on 100% clean energy. (Canary Media, Hawaiʻi Public Radio)

• Just like at Google and Amazon, AI infrastructure is causing Microsoft’s climate pollution to soar. The company’s carbon emissions were up 25% last year. (Monica Nickelsburg, KUOW)

Trump nonsense:

• President Trump explained his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decision to dismantle Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments with this breathtaking lie: “You can’t go hunting, you can’t go fishing, you can’t do anything, you can virtually not even walk on it.” (Chris D’Angelo, Public Domain)

• The Trump administration now says you can destroy an endangered animal’s habitat without “harming” the animal. It’s totally nuts. Multiple lawsuits have been filed. (Catrin Einhorn and Maxine Joselow, New York Times)

• U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is canceling federal funding for bike lanes, claiming they are “DEI.” No, this is not a joke. (Edith Olmsted, the New Republic)

Around the West:

• Salt Lake City hit an all-time record 109 degrees on Sunday — two degrees higher than its previous record of 107. (Sean P. Means and Samantha Moilanen, Salt Lake Tribute)

• The Trump administration approved Cadiz Inc.’s long-simmering plan to pump ancient groundwater from the Mojave Desert and sell it to Southwestern cities. But Cadiz still needs California’s approval as well. (Ian James, L.A. Times)

• Groundbreaking new research, funded by California legislation, has finally allowed scientists to predict deadly cliff collapses along the Pacific coast with amazing accuracy. (Rosanna Xia, L.A. Times)

I’m not much of a soccer fan, and unlike many Americans, I haven’t been swept up by World Cup fever. But it’s been impossible to avoid catching glimpses — at restaurants and bars, visiting friends and family, scrolling social media.

Almost any time I glance at a screen, there’s a certain ad lining the sides of fields across North America: ARAMCO.

That would be Saudi Aramco, the oil giant owned by the Saudi Arabian government. In 2024, the company inked a four-year sponsorship deal with FIFA, estimated to cost $400 million. For Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto leader, plastering the World Cup with ads is part of a longstanding strategy to improve Saudi Arabia’s image, attract tourists and diversify its economy, while maintaining its status as a leading oil exporter — even as the climate crisis worsens.

So far, the strategy appears to be working — with help from President Trump.

“Whether through Aramco or other state bodies, the influence the Saudis are trying to exert is pretty significant,” said Nicholas McGeehan, director of London-based human rights nonprofit FairSquare, which last month released a thorough report on Aramco’s relationship with FIFA.

“Aramco is a supervillain,” McGeehan said.

It’s been a decade since bin Salman unveiled Vision 2030, a master plan to modernize the kingdom’s economy and bring more women into the workforce. Experts say the crown prince wants Saudis to live healthier, more fulfilled lives. He also wants international tourists to stop seeing Saudi Arabia as a human rights abuser that kills journalists, and instead view it as a hot vacation spot with world-class resorts, comedy and sports, including the 2034 World Cup.

That’s where those FIFA ads come in handy.

“The World Cup has an audience that is larger than anything comparable. The world is watching,” said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

It’s not that U.S. viewers are seeing Aramco ads and deciding they no longer care that in 2018, Saudi agents killed and dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi — a murder the CIA concluded was ordered by bin Salman.

Like all sponsored content, the effects are more subtle.

“The objective is not necessarily reaching an individual. It’s a subliminal association of Saudi with FIFA, Saudi with the World Cup,” Ulrichsen said.

In the immediate wake of Khashoggi’s high-profile slaughter, the idea of Saudi Arabia hosting a World Cup would have been “unthinkable,” Ulrichsen said. But by the time FIFA chose the Gulf nation to host the 2034 tournament, the decision felt “inevitable.”

FIFA is far from the kingdom’s only tool for buying good vibes.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund bought England’s Newcastle United Football Club for £305 million and helped establish LIV Golf, a competitor to the PGA Tour. The kingdom hosts the Esports World Cup, offering tens of millions of dollars in prize money. Saudi Arabian soccer club Al-Nassr FC is paying Cristiano Ronaldo a record salary to play for them. Saudi Aramco serves as a “premier partner” of the International Cricket Council and the “title partner” of Aston Martin’s Formula One team.

The Saudis have also spent lavishly on comedy, music and film festivals that have brought Cardi B, Pete Davidson, Dakota Johnson and other American entertainers to Saudi Arabia. The events have revved up locals and signaled to well-heeled Westerners that the nation is worth visiting.

Saudi Arabia is growing its footprint in Hollywood, too. The Saudi Public Investment Fund is contributing roughly $10 billion toward the Ellison family’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would help billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison take control of CNN — and make the Saudi government a sizable minority owner of one of America’s biggest movie studios.

The Public Investment Fund is also awaiting Trump administration approval for its $55-billion purchase of video game developer Electronic Arts — not that approval is in doubt. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is involved in the deal.

The Saudi royal family began cultivating Trump and his family early on; in May 2017, the first-term president met with bin Salman’s father, King Salman, in Riyadh, leading to the viral photo of Trump and the king placing their hands on a mysterious glowing orb. The Saudis quickly won Trump’s favor by committing to buy $350 billion worth of U.S. weapons. During a recent White House visit, bin Salman upped the stakes, telling Trump that Saudi Arabia would invest nearly $1 trillion in the United States.

Unsurprisingly, the Trump family has benefited directly: the Saudi Public Investment Fund allocated $2 billion to Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, in 2021.

“It’s about more than a commercial return on investment,” Ulrichsen said. “It’s about proximity. Trying to make sure that U.S. and Saudi interests are intertwined.”

At times, the strategy has paid dividends. Trump has taken to defending bin Salman over Khashoggi’s death, at one point stating simply, “Things happen.”

Still, it’s not clear whether the American public will be charmed quite so easily.

“A lot of people carry around very negative stereotypes of the country,” said Michael Ratney, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under President Biden. “The Saudis understand that attracting tourists is a slow process.”

Ratney suspects bin Salman cares less about public relations and more about making sound financial investments that diversify the nation’s economy. Ratney also pointed to the domestic benefits of opening Saudi society to modern sport and entertainment options — a happier, more physically active populace that’s less prone to diabetes and obesity, and less likely to gravitate toward extremism.

“I don’t doubt that part of [the economic strategy] is getting the Saudi name out there internationally. But I don’t think that’s the main goal,” Ratney said.

At this year’s World Cup, though, name recognition is very much Aramco’s goal. And as fossil-fueled heat waves batter the U.S. and Europe, activists are outraged — not just by Aramco’s partnership with FIFA, but by a longstanding Qatar Airways sponsorship.

“These oil states see football as a way to build their soft power, build international legitimacy,” said Peter Crisp, a campaigner with the European advocacy group Fossil Free Football.

Crisp also slammed FIFA for its role in wrecking the climate.

“There’s an incentive for everyone to be chasing more and more money,” he said.

Under FIFA President Gianni Infantino — who has cultivated close relationships with bin Salman and Trump — the soccer federation has accepted Aramco’s money even as extreme heat increasingly threatens players and fans. For the first time, FIFA required three-minute hydration breaks during every World Cup game this summer.

The tournament’s “iconic moments are always in June and July, but that tradition is running into the brick wall of climate change,” Crisp said.

Heat already kills more people than floods, hurricanes and wildfires combined — and the planet continues getting warmer. With that reality in mind, climate activists and many European athletes have called for an end to fossil fuel advertising in sports.

A similar movement is emerging in the U.S., with climate activists protesting Aramco and other fossil fuel sponsors at World Cup venues. Major League Baseball player Brent Suter recently became the first American pro athlete to speak out against oil industry advertising.

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Alas, the campaigns have yet to claim any U.S. victories. With deep-pocketed foes like the Saudis — and their brazenly corrupt, fossil-friendly allies in the White House — that’s hardly a surprise.

Aramco reported $105 billion in net income last year. Saudi Arabia boasts the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, after Venezuela, and Aramco currently spews more climate pollution than any other company on Earth. Saudi Arabia has been perhaps the biggest barrier to progress at international climate negotiations.

Indeed, for all their talk of diversification, the Saudis plan to pump oil for a long time. Bin Salman’s half brother Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, who is also the Saudi energy minister, has reportedly said that his country intends to be the “last man standing.”

“Every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out,” he said.

If that’s the goal, it’s no wonder bin Salman wants soccer fans to start getting familiar with Aramco. You can’t pump gas from an Aramco station in the U.S. today. But if the Saudis get their way, someday you may have no choice.

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One more thing

It’s been two years since Utah-based journalist Zak Podmore wrote, “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.” But I just read it for the first time, and it’s more relevant than ever.

Later this month, the Trump administration is expected to unveil its plan for cutting water use in the Colorado River Basin — an intervention that’s necessary because the states haven’t been able to reach an agreement on limiting consumption. The cuts will probably hit Arizona farms and cities especially hard, although Southern Californians should brace themselves too. After a century of rampant development — and now a 26-year, fossil fueled megadrought — the American West is running low on water.

Podmore’s book offers a perspective-shifting look at a reservoir central to the crisis.

Currently just one-quarter full, Lake Powell is frighteningly close to “dead pool,” the point at which water can no longer pass through Glen Canyon Dam and downstream to Lake Mead — a key storage vessel for Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Finding a way to boost water levels at Lake Powell is absolutely crucial.

Or is it? As water levels have fallen, incredible canyon ecosystems that were drowned by the dam in the 1960s have sprung back to life with remarkable speed — a story that Podmore documents in his book. He also traces Powell’s complex history and politics, making a thoughtful, nuanced case that its future needs to look different than its past — and that today’s environmental crusaders could stand to learn from the people who built Glen Canyon Dam, not just the activists who tried to stop them.

If that sounds interesting, I hope you’ll join me and Podmore on Tuesday, 7/28 at 4 p.m. PT/5 p.m. MT for a conversation about his book. You can register for the Zoom here. I’ll ask Zak some questions, and then we’ll have an audience Q&A.

If you want to read the book before then, you can purchase it here, or check your local library for a copy.

Although the live Zoom is open to everyone, the video recording will only be available afterward to Climate-Colored Goggles paid subscribers. If you want to watch but can’t make it on July 28, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription.

Speaking of events for paid subscribers…

Join me at Intuit Dome on July 14

Exactly two years before the 2028 Olympics begin in Los Angeles, I’ll sit down with two Olympic athletes at Inglewood’s Intuit Dome: Melissa Humana-Paredes, a silver medal-winning Canadian beach volleyball player, and Bea Kim, a U.S. snowboarder.

We’ll be joined by climate scientist Kaitlyn Trudeau for a discussion about the many ways global warming is affecting sports, and how the sports and climate communities can work together to promote clean air and climate progress in L.A. and beyond.

Our panel will be part of the next Road to 2028 Summit hosted by the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. (I led a similar conversation at the previous summit last year.) The event will bring together policymakers, entrepreneurs, investors, entertainment industry leaders and athletes — including NBA star Russell Westbrook.

Paid subscribers to this newsletter can buy tickets at a 50% discount. They’re still not cheap, but I guarantee you the two-day summit will be fascinating; just check out the speaker list. Discount code coming up after the paywall.

But first…

Send me your dream headlines for 2036!

A few weeks ago, I asked everyone to brainstorm climate-related headlines you’d like to see in the news a decade from now. I’ve received more than 100 entries!

It’s not too late to join the fun — I’ll keep accepting headlines through the end of this week. Then I’ll pick maybe a dozen of the best entries — which will be hard; there are so many good ones! — and make a poll so folks can select their favorites. The top vote-getters will win one-year paid subscriptions to this newsletter, free of charge.

Keep your headlines short and snappy, like you’d find in a newspaper, or on Substack. Feel free to take the assignment seriously — but also don’t be afraid to get creative, or even silly. Most importantly, enjoy yourself!

Climate news roundup after the paywall. But not before...

Time for that discount code

Read more

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.

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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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