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The companies that made billions selling the fuels that destabilized the climate can afford to help fix the grid that’s collapsing under it. We talk a lot about the cost of energy, but not enough about what’s actually driving it.
Across the country, electricity bills are climbing not because of regulation, as the industry claims, but because of the growing costs of theThe other side wants you to believe it’s “climate” that’s driving up prices, and they’re right, just not in the way that they mean. It isn’t climate mandates or clean-energy standards. It’s climate disasters. And the truth is, the fastest way to lower costs isn’t to slow down the energy transition, it’s to speed it up. Clean energy brings cheap, reliable power online faster and protects families from the kind of fuel price spikes that come withhave already passed versions that require the biggest polluters to chip in for climate damage. These laws follow the same principle that governs toxic-waste cleanup. If you made the mess, you help pay to clean it up. States are starting to realize that the funds from a climate superfund could cover part of the cost of hardening the grid, things like replacing wooden poles with steel, elevating substations that flood every few years, building microgrids so hospitals and schools can stay open during blackouts, and funding new and more reliable clean energy projects. These projects would help to ease the pressure on ratepayers while making the systems themselves more resilient. For years, utilities and regulators treated big storms as one-off emergencies. A few poles went down, they rebuilt them, everyone moved on. But the “one-off” has now become, dare I say, the “new normal.” Into replace equipment and clear lines, and then regulators approve a new rider or adjustment that gets added to customer bills. It’s the same story across the country. The next time a storm knocks out your power or a bill arrives higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis arriving as a tab in your mailbox.for residential customers. What began as infrequent emergency response spending has become a permanent part of doing business for utility companies across the country.from the Center for American Progress and the Natural Resources Defense Council shows how big this problem has gotten. Utilities in 49 states and, DC have already raised rates or proposed to raise within the next two years. By 2028, those hikes will add nearly. That’s billions with a b. And for many families, that means another $30 or $40 a month on top of everything else they’re already struggling to afford. The reasons are tangled together. The grid is old and failing faster under stress. The price of natural gas has spiked again, partly because exports of natural gas have linked American prices to volatile global markets. And new power-hungry data centers are popping up so quickly that utilities are scrambling to build the power plants to feed them. But one of the biggest single drivers remainswill stress every part of the energy system and that failing to adapt will cost billions of dollars more in the long run. Yet the way we pay for that adaptation hasn’t changed at all. Utilities rebuild, regulators sign off, and the public pays. Fossil-fuel companies whose emissions are fueling the disasters that make all this necessary contribute all of nothing. It’s tempting to think of this as just another utility issue, a problem for regulators and accountants and not us. But to me, it’s really a measure of how far the climate crisis has crept into our daily life. The next time a storm knocks out your power or a bill arrives higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis arriving as a tab in your mailbox. We can keep pretending it’s inevitable, or we can start sending the bill to the companies that profited from creating the problem. Climate superfunds won’t solve everything. But they’d at least start to balance the scales. The companies that made billions selling the fuels that destabilized the climate can afford to help fix the grid that’s collapsing under it.We're on the Verge of Exceeding 1.5°C of Warming, But It's Not Too Late for Action With the mounting economic and human toll of climate disasters and the benefits of affordable, renewable energy so clear and urgent, there is still space for genuine progress and alignment at COP30—and world leaders must seize it!—against a backdrop of incredibly challenging geopolitical and climate realities. Grossly insufficient action from world leaders has already resulted in worseningbenefits of affordable, renewable energy so clear and urgent, there is still space for genuine progress and alignment at COP30—and world leaders must seize it!, cannot be overstated. Across the world, frontline communities bearing a disproportionate toll of climate impacts need solutions that prioritize their needs—not the profits of big polluters andseeking to evade their responsibility for driving the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the complicated logistics and high accommodation costs for this COP are already creating concerns about inclusivity, especially for those with fewer resources., not just a list of future aspirations. They have been engaged in diplomacy all year, bilaterally and multilaterally, to try to lay the groundwork for consensus at COP30 even in the face of geopolitical tensions.“…one thing is already clear: we will not be able to contain the global warming below 1.5°C in the next few years. The overshooting is now inevitable, which means that we are going to have a period, bigger or smaller, with higher or lower intensity, above 1.5°C in the years to come.”, the fact that the world is now on the verge of exceeding 1.5°C of warming on a long-term basis—after already surpassing it temporarily for—was not inevitable. It is an absolutely enraging, shameful, and heartbreaking consequence of continued delays and obstruction of ambitious action. The fault lies entirely with gutless, self-interested political leaders—especially those from richer, high-emitting nations—and theNo country—not even the United States—can stop global climate action AND it will take a lot of countries acting together to tackle this problem at the scale and with the urgency required. Breaching 1.5°C will undoubtedly unleash further damaging and irreversible climate harms on the world, but it is not a cliff edge. Climate impacts unfold and accelerate on a continuum, and even now, at about 1.3°C of global warming, we are—and have been—seeing profound harms to people and the planet.over this dire problem we have caused—will make a crucial difference in the extent of the harms to come and what we can do to prepare for them. How much past 1.5°C temperatureslasts, will depend crucially on our emissions choices. Those factors will make a tremendous difference for the magnitude of impacts like climate-drivenin the future. We must also ramp up our investments in resilience to help prepare people for graver threats as temperatures increase., can set off additional multi-century accelerating sea-level rise beyond what is currently locked in, and that cannot be turned back once it gets going even if we manage to bring temperatures back down after overshooting 1.5°C.Secure justice for people on the frontlines of the climate crisis; and Demand accountability for fossil fuel companies and others who have contributed the most to the climate crisis. show that global carbon dioxide emissions were at an all-time high in 2024, with the biggest increase from 2023 to 2024 since modern measurements began. In addition to emissions from burning fossil fuels, a strikingly anomalous factor in 2024 was the high levels ofProgramme Emissions Gap report further underscore these realities and highlight the very real risk that without immediate action the world could be on track for a global average temperature increase of more than 2.5°C, even approaching 3°C above preindustrial levels. A, themed "Running on Empty," will highlight the huge shortfall in investments in resilience to help frontline communities cope with climate impacts already locked in due to heat-trapping emissions primarily from richer nations. Together, these reports form a dismal assessment of political leaders who are still not acting in line with what science or equity shows is necessary, despite years of high-minded promises and even as people are enduring crushing climate impacts.While the context for COP30 is daunting, and the process of negotiations ahead is likely to be frustrating, global cooperation is absolutely essential to solve this challenge. There are no shortcuts around that. Every country must have a role, a responsibility, and a voice—no matter how big or small, or how powerful or not they are. That said, richer nations and major emitters of heat-trapping emissions have unique responsibilities to act boldly.every nation recognizes the utmost importance of the Paris Agreement goals for their self-interest and the global collective interest to limit dangerous climate change. Thecountries, and others step up to fill the leadership vacuum and drive forward ambitious climate action? Many US states, subnational governments, and businesses also remain committed and will be in Brazil to show the other face of the US.underscores the huge gap in ambition, with most major emitting countries still far off course in terms of their emissions trajectories, putting the world at risk of over 2.5°C of warming. Many countries have yet to even announce their updated NDCs. Closing that ambition gap will require rapid implementation, transparent progress tracking, and stronger accountability mechanisms before 2030.and a breakdown of trust between richer nations and lower income nations because of the paltry finance pledges offered. This year, it will be critical to rebuild that trust, including sending a strong signal about a plan for provision of finance for both cutting emissions and for adaptation—the latter of which has long left behind and is an urgent priority for developing nations.Fittingly, this Brazilian COP taking place in the Amazon must prioritize a strong agreement to help protect tropical forests, a crucial aspect of climate action, centering the needs and perspectives of the people and other species who live in and depend on them. Negotiations on theWill COP outcomes be protected from interference from fossil fuel interests?and water down global climate agreements that they see as a threat to their profits. Their lies and disinformation about climate science and renewable energy are a significant obstacle to progress and must be called out and resisted. While civil society representatives do not have a seat at the negotiating table, our voices as observer groups in the broader COP space are crucial to remind political leaders of who they are supposed to be serving and that they must prioritize fairness and science in their deliberations. Through engagement with country negotiators, side events, press conferences, and public demonstrations, we will work to register our views loudly and clearly., illuminating who the real climate champions are and who are the obstacles. COP30’s success depends on whether countries can rise above narrow self-interest and recommit to ambitious action. It depends on whethercan unlock progress and leadership from new quarters. It depends on isolating the Trump administration and resisting its anti-science rhetoric and actions, as well as its efforts to upend multilateral diplomacy to solve global challenges.. But much as the US is an outsize actor on the global stage, this international climate meeting with 190+ countries is also a reminder of the wider world and each country’s vital place in it. The 1.5°C goal is enshrined in the Paris Agreement because of the bravery of small island nations that carried the refrain of "at COP21 in 2015. Vanuatu and a group of small island nations led a heroic effort to secure a landmarkthis year, affirming states’ legal obligations to address climate change. Meanwhile, renewable energy is taking off around the world because it is now the cheapest form of electricity in most places. No country—not even the United States—can stop global climate action AND it will take a lot of countries acting together to tackle this problem at the scale and with the urgency required. In Belém, I know I will find inspiration and courage from the global climate justice movement, from Indigenous Peoples who have stood firm to defend their lands and communities in the face of, and from passionate young people who are the planet’s future. I know I will come back reenergized for the right and necessary fight here at homeCaveat—this post was written entirely with my own intelligence, so who knows. Maybe it’s wrong. But the despairing question I get asked most often is: “What’s the use? However much clean energy we produce, AI data centers will simply soak it all up.” It’s too early in the course of thisindustry claimed that information technology would need half the nation’s electricity by 2020, so a strong economy required far more coal-fired power stations. Such claims were spectacularly wrong but widely believed, even by top officials. Hundreds of unneeded power plants were built, hurting investors. Despite that costly lesson, similar dynamics are now unfolding again.And it’s possible that even if AI expands as its proponents expect, it will grow steadily more efficient, meaning it would need much less energy than predicted. Lovins again: For example, NVIDIA’s head of data center product marketing said in September 2024 that in the past decade, “we’ve seen the efficiency of doing inferences in certain language models has increased effectively by 100,000 times. Do we expect that to continue? I think so: There’s lots of room for optimization.” Another NVIDIA comment reckons to have made AI inference 45,000× more efficient since 2016, and expects orders-of magnitude further gains. Indeed, in 2020, NVIDIA’s Ampere chips needed 150 joules of energy per inference; in 2022, their Hopper successors needed just 15; and in 2024, their Blackwell successors needed 24 but also quintupled performance, thus using 31× less energy than Ampere per unit of performance. But that doesn’t mean that the AI industry, and its utility and government partners, won’t try to build ever more generating capacity to supply whatever power needs they project may be coming. In some places they already are: Internet Alley in Virginia has more than 150 large centers, using a quarter of its power. This is becoming an intense political issue in the Old Dominion State. As Dave Weigelcandidate for governor sticks with her predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, in somehow blaming solar energy for rising electricity prices , while the Democratic nominee, Abigail Spanberger, is trying to figure out a response: Neither nominee has gone as far in curbing growth as many suburban DC legislators and activists want. They see some of the world’s wealthiest companies gettinginto the grid without locals reaping the benefits. Some Virginia elections have turned into battles over which candidate will be toughest on data centers; others elections have already been “My advice to Abigail has been: Look at where the citizens of Virginia are on the data centers,” said state Sen. Danica Roem, a Democrat who represents part of Prince William County in DC’s growing suburbs. “There are a lot of people willing to be single-issue, split-ticket voters based on this.” Indeed, it’s shaping up to be the mother of all political issues as the midterms loom—pretty much everyone pays electric rates, and under Presidentthey’re starting to skyrocket. The reason isn’t hard to figure out: He’s simultaneously accelerating demand with his support for data center buildout, and constricting supply by shutting down cheap solar and wind. In fact, one way of looking at AI is that If this sounds conspiratorial, consider this story from yesterday: John McCarrick, newly hired by industry colossus OpenAI to find energy sources for ChatGPT is:in the first Trump administration’s Bureau of Energy Resources in the Department of State while under former Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo.. But it’s all of them. In the rush to keep their valuations high, the big AI players are increasingly relying not just on fracked gas but on the very worst version of it. As The trend has sparked an unlikely comeback for a type of gas turbine that long ago fell out of favor for being inefficient and polluting… a technology that’s largely been relegated to the sidelines of power production: small, single cycle natural gas turbines.gas, or f-gas, which can be potent greenhouse gases, and may mean datacenters’ climate impact is worse than previously thought. Other f-gases turn into a type of dangerous compound that is rapidly accumulating across the globe.air or water pollution has yet been done, and companies are not required to report the volume of chemicals they use or discharge. But some environmental groups are starting to push for state legislation that would require more reporting. Look, here’s one bottom line: If we actually had to build enormous networks of AI data centers, the obvious, cheap, and clean way to do it would be with lots of solar energy. It goes up fast. As an industryOff-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.“Renewables and battery storage are the lowest-cost form of power generation and capacity,” according to Next Era chief executive John Ketchumdo that because the Trump administration has a corrupt ideological bias against clean energy, the latest example of which came last week when a giantEsmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power–equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen, and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the But now it’s dead. One result will be higher prices for consumers. Despite everything the administration does, renewables are so cheap and easy that. To beat that means policy as perverse as what we’re seeing—jury-rigging tired gas turbines and refitting ancient coal plants. All to power a technology that… seems increasingly like a bubble? Here we need to get away from energy implications a bit, and just think about the underlying case for AI, and specifically the large language models that are the thing we’re spending so much money and power on. The AI industry is, increasingly, the American economy—it accounts for almost half of US economic growth this year, and an incredible 80% of the expansion of the stock market. As Ruchir ShirmaThe main reason AI is regarded as a magic fix for so many different threats is that it is expected to deliver a significant boost to productivity growth, especially in the US. Higher output per worker would lower the burden ofby boosting GDP. It would reduce demand for labour, immigrant or domestic. And it would ease inflation risks, including the threat from tariffs, by enabling companies to raise wages without raising prices. But for this happy picture to come to pass, AI has to actually work, which is to say do more than help kids cheat on their homework. And there’s been a growing sense in recent months that all is not right on that front. I’ve been following two AI skeptics for a year or so, both on Substack ., an AI researcher who has concluded that the large language models like Chat GPT are going down a blind alley. If you like to, here is an encapsulation of his main points, published over the weekend. If you prefer that old-fashioned technology of reading , here’s hisLarge language models have had their uses, especially for coding, writing, and brainstorming, in which humans are still directly involved. But no matter how large we have made them, they have never been worthy of our trust. Indeed, an MIT study this year found that 95% of businesses reported no measurable increase in productivity from using AI; theAnd what that means, in turn, is that there’s no real way to imagine recovering the hundreds of billions and trillions that are currently being invested in the technology. The keeper of the spreadsheets is the other, Ed Zitron, who writes extremely long and increasingly exasperated essays looking at the financial lunacy of these “investments” which, remember, underpin the stock market at the moment.ll of those data center deals you’ve seen announced are basically bullshit. Even if they get the permits and the money, there are massive physical challenges that cannot be resolved by simply throwing money at them. Today I’m going to tell you a story of chaos, hubris and fantastical thinking. I want you to come away from this with a full picture of how ridiculous the promises are, and that’s before you get to the cold hard reality that AI fucking sucks. I’m not pretending this is the final word on this subject. No one knows how it’s all going to work out, but my guess is: badly. Already it’s sending electricity prices But maybe it’s also running other kinds of walls that will eventually reduce demand. Maybe human beings will decide to be… human. The new Sora “service” launched by OpenAI that allows your AI to generate fake videos, for instance, threatens to undermine the entire business of looking at videos because… what’s the point? If you can’t tell if the guy eating a ridiculously hot chili pepper is real or not, why would you watch? In a broader sense, as John Burns-Murdoch It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI.lockdowns—usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus. Across the developed world, adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. Notably, the decline is most pronounced among the erstwhile heaviest users—teens and 20-somethings. Which is to say: Perhaps at some point we’ll begin to come to our senses and start using our brains and bodies for the things they were built for: contact with each other, and with the world around us. That’s a lot to ask, but the world can turn in good directions as well as bad. As a final word, there’s this last week from Pope Leo, speaking to a bunch of news executives around the world, and imploring them to cool it with the junk they’re putting out:USDA Tells Grocery Stores They Can't Give Discounts to People Hit by Trump's Food Stamp Freeze Top ICE Official Says Protesters Can Be Arrested for Simply Criticizing Mass Deportation Campaign: Court FilingTrump Targets Another Late Night Comedian, Saying It's 'Probably Illegal' to Make Fun of HimBannon Tells GOP: 'Seize the Institutions' of Government Now or We're 'Going to Prison' After 2028$70 Trillion in Inherited Wealth Shows Global 'Inequality Emergency' Spiraling Out of Control
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Trump Critics Fear 'Presidency Without Limits' as Supreme Court Hears Tariffs CaseBrad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
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Common DreamsCommon Dreams has been providing breaking news & views for the progressive community since 1997. We are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100% reader supported. Our Mission: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
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Common DreamsCommon Dreams has been providing breaking news & views for the progressive community since 1997. We are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100% reader supported. Our Mission: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
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Common DreamsCommon Dreams has been providing breaking news & views for the progressive community since 1997. We are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100% reader supported. Our Mission: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
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Common DreamsCommon Dreams has been providing breaking news & views for the progressive community since 1997. We are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100% reader supported. Our Mission: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
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Common DreamsCommon Dreams has been providing breaking news & views for the progressive community since 1997. We are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100% reader supported. Our Mission: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
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