Democrats Need New Stories

Some Democratic governors are abandoning climate policy in favor of affordability. But that’s a false choice.

Democratic governors’ affordability politics is trashing “what remains of U.S. climate policy,” Politico reports this week. The piece points to New York Governor Kathy Hochul trying to delay legally binding emissions targets; Maryland Governor Wes Moore “backing legislation that would slash energy efficiency charges from utility bills”; Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro pulling out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (a cap-and-trade program); New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill using funds intended for clean energy to offset utility bill hikes; and Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee “proposing to delay Rhode Island’s renewable energy standard, curb and rework solar incentives, and cap utilities’ ratepayer-funded energy efficiency spending”—all of which, Politico notes, “would torpedo the state’s aggressive climate timelines.”

It’s even worse than that, as Will Peischel wrote for TNR last week. Blue governors are also openly embracing natural gas as part of an “all of the above” energy strategy (a phrase long since discredited as having led, under the Obama administration, to a disastrous boom in fracked gas and methane emissions). “We have gas pipeline expansion on the Algonquin—that’s good!” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey recently said, although in 2022 she bragged about blocking two other pipelines in her work as attorney general. Hochul recently approved the Williams NESE pipeline “after the project twice failed to gain required approvals from state environmental regulators,” Peischel noted. And Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont “supports building a compressor in the town of Brookfield, which would cram more gas through an existing pipeline.”

It’s easy to portray these moves as inevitable and pragmatic—Democrats making the best of a tough situation and deciding to try to maximize gains in the 2026 elections. If Dems win big in 2026, climate policy will stand a better chance than it would have under Republican rule. But this logic crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. Even Politico—which has a history of pushing the false dichotomy between affordability and climate—isn’t falling for it. Hochul’s proposal, for example, “won’t lower bills,” the article notes. Cutting renewable energy funds and energy efficiency programs will hurt money-bringing industries and trigger job losses. Meanwhile, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is showcasing an alternative path: trying to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, portraying the move as ultimately a cost-saving measure that will raise money for energy efficiency programs.

There are lots of other ways that politicians could champion affordability politics without abandoning climate change. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s free bus proposal could incentivize the use of public transit instead of cars while helping people cut one of the infamous “big three” costs: housing, food, and transportation. Pretty much any program encouraging public transit could help both emissions and pocketbooks. That includes, as Liza Featherstone notes this week, congestion pricing, a policy frequently (and, as subsequent data has shown, misleadingly) demonized as hurting working people. While the right wing and some moderates often portray congestion pricing as imposing further burdens on commuters, “given the volatility of gas prices and car insurance, relieving people of the need to drive by using revenue to improve public transit is an urgent matter of economic justice,” Featherstone argued.

These sorts of measures won’t work as well in rural areas, of course—but then, the East Coast states mentioned above are home to large urban populations.

Energy efficiency, in general, is one of the easier ways to help people save money. True, it can take some time to kick in: Paying for homeowners and landlords to install insulation and awnings, for example, isn’t an instant fix. But there are also ways to speed things up, such as via point-of-sale rebates. And cost savings from the new pipelines Healey and Hochul are advertising are somewhere between long-term and entirely fictional: New fossil fuel infrastructure takes a lot of time to build and is typically paid for by the consumer via utility bill hikes.

The list of options goes on and on: utility rate freezes (Hochul rejected this). Policies to promote green energy and energy efficiency without charging it to ratepayers. Policies to tackle rising food, housing, and health care costs.

There’s little excuse at this point for politicians accepting and perpetuating myths about a trade-off between climate policy and affordability. Data abounds that climate-friendly policies can save people money, and that climate change will put the cost-of-living crisis into overdrive.

Stat of the Week15 minutes

That’s how long a committee known as the “God Squad,” convened by the interior secretary, took to discuss matters before agreeing to exempt drillers in the Gulf of Mexico from restrictions imposed by the Endangered Species Act, according to The Washington Post. The decision is anticipated to jeopardize the continued existence of the Rice’s whale, which is only found in these waters. Read more about the God Squad in Jonathan Rosenbloom’s piece for TNR here.

The frantic, high-tech fight to stop climate-fueled dengue fever

Mosquito-borne dengue fever is making a striking and disastrous comeback, Zoya Teirstein reports, and climate change could accelerate it. To people who might erroneously believe the U.S. is safe from this disease, Teirstein’s piece offers both a history lesson and a warning.

In the United States, mosquitoes are viewed as a nuisance, rather than the public health disaster they have long been in tropical nations like Brazil. That wasn’t always the case: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, was established in 1946 to fight malaria around U.S. military bases. It was wildly successful in that mission, all but eradicating the disease from the country by the early 1950s with the help of the devastating chemical DDT. The agency learned a valuable lesson through that effort that still resounds today: Eradicating vector-borne disease is possible “in nations with temperate climates and seasonal malaria transmission.” But what happens when the climate becomes less temperate? Native and invasive tropical plants and animals move north, as average temperatures rise and winter freezes become weaker. Subtropical states—Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—begin to tropicalize, a process that will be all but complete by the end of the century, according to a 2021 report published by the United States Geological Survey, the Department of the Interior’s science agency. “Tropical mosquitoes that can transmit encephalitis, West Nile virus, and other diseases,” the report said, “are likely to further expand their ranges, putting millions of people and wildlife species at risk of these diseases.”

In the United States, mosquitoes are viewed as a nuisance, rather than the public health disaster they have long been in tropical nations like Brazil. That wasn’t always the case: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, was established in 1946 to fight malaria around U.S. military bases. It was wildly successful in that mission, all but eradicating the disease from the country by the early 1950s with the help of the devastating chemical DDT. The agency learned a valuable lesson through that effort that still resounds today: Eradicating vector-borne disease is possible “in nations with temperate climates and seasonal malaria transmission.”

But what happens when the climate becomes less temperate? Native and invasive tropical plants and animals move north, as average temperatures rise and winter freezes become weaker. Subtropical states—Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—begin to tropicalize, a process that will be all but complete by the end of the century, according to a 2021 report published by the United States Geological Survey, the Department of the Interior’s science agency.

“Tropical mosquitoes that can transmit encephalitis, West Nile virus, and other diseases,” the report said, “are likely to further expand their ranges, putting millions of people and wildlife species at risk of these diseases.”

Read Zoya Teirstein’s full report at Grist.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Trump Is Now Bribing Energy Companies With Your Taxpayer Dollars

What everyone gets from a strange deal to pay a company nearly $1 billion to abandon a wind project

This week, the Trump administration announced that, after having lost every single court case over its attempt to halt East Coast offshore wind projects, it will now simply pay one of the companies roughly $1 billion to abandon ship. Crucially, however, it is not just paying France’s TotalEnergies to back off—the company will now invest in oil and gas development in Texas instead.

On its face, this would appear to be a pretty bonkers plan. “The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power,” The New York Times’ Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer wrote earlier this week. “It comes as the war in the Middle East has shocked global oil markets, prompting concerns about energy supplies.”

So let’s break this down into what each party gets out of it.

It’s not hard to see why TotalEnergies decided to take the deal. Offshore wind is extremely expensive to build, and delays and uncertainty—you know, of the sort the Trump administration has cultivated by issuing random stop-work orders—can easily make it a bad investment. Joselow and Plumer quote CEO Patrick Pouyanné as saying that they’ll still invest in renewable energy—but in the United States, specifically, “offshore wind is too expensive from our point of view.”

Then there’s the Trump administration. As I wrote in early February, there was always not just a risk but a high probability that the administration’s five-nil courtroom defeat on offshore wind would goad Trump and his underlings rather than discourage them. The president and MAGA followers have a particular hatred for offshore wind (even as some of the MAGA crowd start to embrace solar). So as long as offshore wind projects are being shuttered, they can conceivably claim some kind of victory.

Of course, being seen to fork over $1 billion in taxpayer money for this victory, after failing in court, could somewhat blunt the effect, making the administration appear weak and wasteful.

But the administration has taken pains to present the deal as doing more than saving face. “[Interior Secretary Doug] Burgum also cited national security as one of the factors motivating the agreement,” the Houston Chronicle’s Rachel Nostrant reported. “Wind turbines, even those offshore the U.S., are potential targets for drone strikes, Burgum said.” (If this was the argument featured in the classified Defense Department report that was the basis for the Trump administration’s original pause on the projects, you can sort of see why the judges weren’t convinced.)

Then there’s the matter of what else that $1 billion is buying: not just less wind power for New York and North Carolina but more oil and gas development for Texas. The North Carolina project was relatively small, projected to be able to power “around 300,000 homes and businesses starting in the early 2030s,” according to the Times. The New York one was larger, projected to power more than a million such buildings in both New York and neighboring New Jersey.

The administration seems willing to screw over some people in these states while directing money to Texas instead. And that’s not a huge surprise: As I noted last week, the administration is also softening its stance on solar projects in a way that could benefit Texas—and its crusade against offshore wind or wind turbines on federal lands doesn’t hurt Texas at all, given that Texas’s substantial wind capacity is onshore, and on private lands.

The money TotalEnergies is redirecting to Texas, from the limited details available right now, probably will benefit some people there, or at least one company. “One of the projects receiving the reallocated funds will be Rio Grande LNG,” the Chronicle reported, “a Brownsville natural gas export facility owned by Houston-based NextDecade.” Just last week, news broke that a project to expand Rio Grande LNG was going ahead. The money TotalEnergies is redirecting to Texas is also supposed to go to “conventional oil” development in the Gulf and shale gas.

None of this is likely to put a dent in the energy crisis triggered by Trump’s war on Iran. Rio Grande LNG’s new project—a so-called fourth “train,” which lets the facility increase output—isn’t projected to be completed until 2030. Also worth mentioning: Right now, shale gas in the Permian Basin is so abundant that it frequently hits negative prices, and producers burn off the gas instead, rather than paying someone to take it—simply dumping more methane into the atmosphere. Paying someone to develop more natural gas in this region isn’t an obvious win for energy market efficiency.

While this sort of deal—attack, lose, and then bribe someone to do what you want—may seem counterintuitive, particularly for an administration that championed frugality early last year, it does seem to be in keeping with the Trump administration’s negotiating strategy of late. Bombing Iran, then being caught unprepared by its control of the Strait of Hormuz, and then handing it a $14 billion windfall in eased sanctions? There are certain similarities, these days, between the administration’s foreign and domestic policy.

Stat of the Week$3.59 billion

That’s the total amount spent building data centers last year, which—for the first time—makes it more than the amount spent building offices.

Petromasculinity Is Eating Itself and Destroying Us All

Climate journalist Amy Westervelt pens a thoughtful essay about the oil industry, war, and authoritarianism—but also about the assumption that oil is needed for the good life:

A decade or so ago I was trawling through the archive of Standard Oil of California’s (now Chevron’s) shareholder magazines and was struck by how many of them during the 1970s had been dominated by anxiety and fear—not over OPEC or access to Arab oil, but over how good Americans had gotten at conservation and efficiency. How quickly people had realized they didn’t actually need to drive so much or have such big cars or leave the lights on or crank the air-conditioning. They had realized that moderating a little bit even made their lives better sometimes—walking or biking instead of driving, being in community with their neighbors on the bus or train, saving money on electric bills. In the early 1980s, as production increased and the embargo lifted, oil executives were in an outright panic. Americans didn’t seem to be in a rush to let their new lifestyles go, what was an oil company to do? The answer was increase production, tank the price of oil to a point where people would start over-consuming again, and take the short-term financial hit in exchange for long-term gain.

A decade or so ago I was trawling through the archive of Standard Oil of California’s (now Chevron’s) shareholder magazines and was struck by how many of them during the 1970s had been dominated by anxiety and fear—not over OPEC or access to Arab oil, but over how good Americans had gotten at conservation and efficiency. How quickly people had realized they didn’t actually need to drive so much or have such big cars or leave the lights on or crank the air-conditioning. They had realized that moderating a little bit even made their lives better sometimes—walking or biking instead of driving, being in community with their neighbors on the bus or train, saving money on electric bills. In the early 1980s, as production increased and the embargo lifted, oil executives were in an outright panic. Americans didn’t seem to be in a rush to let their new lifestyles go, what was an oil company to do? The answer was increase production, tank the price of oil to a point where people would start over-consuming again, and take the short-term financial hit in exchange for long-term gain.

Read Amy Westervelt’s full newsletter at Drilled.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

What’s Behind MAGA’s Strange New Crush on Solar Energy?

And why is the administration and its influencer crew drawing a line between solar and wind?

Is MAGA changing its tune on solar energy? Since the start of the year, a dizzying array of social media posts and news reports have pointed to the possibility, even as the administration continues to double down on its anti-wind policies and rhetoric. Why solar? And why now—especially given that President Trump continues to fulminate against its renewable energy cousin, wind power?

Let’s recap, because sorting through this is not easy.

On January 24, Trump shared a video on Truth Social that seemed to endorse rooftop solar for households as a way to free up energy for the industrial parts of the grid and help the United States compete with China. Four days later, The Daily Caller published an op-ed from Newt Gingrich declaring that “American energy must not pick winners and losers,” that the energy market could use “more of everything,” and that “solar and wind power are popular, with 80 percent and 74 percent respectively backing local construction.”

On February 4, Axios reported that a new poll from a Trump-aligned polling firm, commissioned by First Solar, found that a majority of Trump voters support solar. Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s wife and former press secretary to Mike Pence, promptly retweeted it on X, saying, “Solar energy is the energy of the future.… We must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” A little over a week later, Miller posted a chart on X, noting, “Solar is now the dominant source of new U.S. power capacity and is on track to surpass coal in total installed capacity before the end of 2026.”

A week after that, on February 19, Semafor reported a poll from Kellyanne Conway’s firm showing that Trump voters support solar. And the following week, Politico’s Greenwire reported “three agency career officials” confirming that the Interior Department was now “reviewing at least 20 commercial-scale projects that have languished in the permitting pipeline since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025.” Specifically: solar projects. Greenwire noted that this coincides with “the artificial intelligence boom—and the electricity demands helping hike consumer power bills,” and that “some congressional Republicans” have objected to Trump’s complete rejection of renewables.

The next day, February 27, Politico finally shed some light on what might be driving this: The outlet obtained access to a “confidential memo” from early February from renewable energy group the American Clean Power Association, outlining a new strategy to “engage Conway and conservative influencers like Miller” on behalf of solar energy. “As part of the campaign, ACP is working with a series of conservative influencers to secure opinion media placements authored by conservative columnists, former Republican lawmakers, and other credible Republican voices in conservative outlets,” the memo stated. Politico also noted that Conway’s poll had been commissioned by American Energy First, an advocacy group founded by ACP. (Not mentioned in the Politico piece, but notable: AEF first created accounts on X, Instagram, and Truth Social in January. This campaign has ramped up very quickly.)

Miller denied to Politico that she was being paid for her solar advocacy. But four days later, The Washington Post published a piece in which she declined to comment on the payment question. (She did double down on her advocacy, saying that solar “solved” Australia’s “rolling blackout issues” and that solar “should be a driver of the solution” to rising energy costs.)

The Post story pointed to other signs that MAGA may be pivoting. “Among the loudest” of the MAGA solar advocates, it noted, “may be on-again, off-again Trump adviser Elon Musk, whom Miller worked for as he designed and executed the president’s initiative to slash the federal workforce. Musk is now throwing his influence behind a moonshot effort to wrest solar manufacturing away from China.” There are signs of broader adoption too. “In Virginia, a coalition of conservatives pushing for more solar power is printing ‘Make Solar Great Again’ hats.” And a “Richmond-based group funded by industry and philanthropists called Energy Right,” led by an alum from the first-term Trump Interior Department, “has been working with conservatives there to push solar forward in the statehouse and local communities.” Interestingly, the Post reports, Energy Right recently founded the “America First Energy Project” in Louisiana—seemingly unaffiliated with ACP’s American Energy First, but a striking linguistic echo.

Throughout this multi-month saga, the president has been on a more or less constant tirade, interrupted only by breath, sleep, and distraction, against offshore wind—his January speech in Davos being a prime example. This week, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration remains so committed to sinking wind power that, after having its attempts to halt multiple offshore wind projects rejected by the courts, the administration is now contemplating buying off the companies in question: paying one energy company $1 billion not to build the wind farms and to instead invest in natural gas in Texas.

What in the Sam Hill is going on here? Successful lobbying is nothing new, but the speed with which this solar campaign seems to have succeeded is a little unusual, particularly given Trump’s doubling........

© New Republic