This is particularly vital as energy costs have become an everyday point of discussion for Massachusetts families, businesses, and policymakers. High prices during one of the coldest winters in years forced too many families to keep their homes at unsafe temperatures. A brutal blizzard left hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts households in the dark for days. And now, gas and oil prices are soaring due to the US-Israeli war against Iran. These events all underscore the same challenge: Our energy system requires immediate attention so that the decisions being made have a real impact on the affordability, resilience, and reliability of our electric grid—now and for the future.

It is no surprise that in the energy affordability bill within the Massachusetts State House, and Governor Maura Healey’s recent executive order targeting energy supply, solar energy is raised as a key solution to help the state cover its increasingly high energy needs while making the cost of electricity more affordable. As these discussions evolve, it’s vital to remember not just the value proposition of distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar and battery storage, but also the importance of ensuring its benefits reach everyone in the commonwealth, especially underserved communities where these investments have the greatest impact on both affordability and resilience.

A new report from Applied Economics Clinic (AEC), commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and its partners Clean Energy Group and Vote Solar, offers key insights to help inform state efforts to unlock its vast solar and storage potential in environmental justice (EJ) neighborhoods—where people of color, low-income people, and limited-English proficient speakers live. Electrification with Equity IIestimates the technical potential of behind-the-meter (BTM) solar and solar paired with storage in EJ neighborhoods, looks at housing conditions to better tailor programs that enable adoption for end users, maps the overlap with extreme heat and energy burden data, and offers insight on the barriers and their solutions to scale up deployment in and for EJ communities. It is a companion to another new report from AEC that looks at solar and storage issues and opportunities in Massachusetts more broadly. This report was developed in collaboration with an advisory committee bringing perspectives from different sectors—including environmental justice organizations, affordable housing, and clean energy developers—to reflect on-the-ground experiences and priorities for EJ neighborhoods.

Here are a few key findings around BTM solar and storage technical potential, as well as key barriers and recommendations to successfully unlock these valuable resources.

Solar and Storage Potential in EJ Neighborhoods

EJ neighborhoods across the Commonwealth have an enormous BTM solar potential. Building on DOER’s 2023 Technical Potential for Solar study and using the 2023 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, AEC estimates that the technical potential of BTM solar in Massachusetts EJ neighborhoods is 31 gigawatts (GW) of solar, enough to power all of the state’s almost 3 million homes. The potential for BTM storage paired with solar is estimated to be 13 GW.

Activating this resource is key to fulfill the state’s decarbonization and affordability goals. Peak electricity demand in Massachusetts is predicted to reach 24 GW by 2050, double the 2020 peak of 12 GW. This means that the technical potential for new BTM solar and BTM solar paired with storage (simplified as “BTM solar and storage” in this blog) in EJ neighborhoods is greater than the expected increase in peak demand. Despite the overall success of the SMART program at facilitating the growth of solar and storage, data shows that just 1% of the program’s allocated solar capacity is located on low-income properties. 

The Commonwealth is heavily dependent on fossil gas (also known as natural gas), which provides more than 65% of in-state net electricity generation. Covering increases in peak demand with clean generation is crucial given that more than 80% of polluting power plants—with their associated health risks—are located in or within a mile of EJ neighborhoods.

In addition, not only do BTM solar and storage adopters save directly on their bills, but these cost saving benefits flow to all ratepayers because these resources help with lowering peak demand. Addressing the peaks minimizes the need for expensive transmission and distribution investments and reduces wholesale electricity prices.In fact, during a 100^oF peak event in June 2025, a study from Acadia Center found, BTM solar saved New England consumers at least $8.2 million on one of the most expensive days of the year for the grid. Those savings are particularly impressive considering how small the BTM solar deployment is across Massachusetts, and makes actualizing the full potential even more appealing.

Access to BTM solar can lower bills alleviating the energy burden of households.

The average energy burden—the percentage of a household income that goes into paying for energy—in Massachusetts is about 3%. It rises to 10% for low-income populations, and, as high as 31% in certain neighborhoods. When looking at EJ neighborhoods facing higher than that statewide average energy burden, this study finds a technical potential of 11.4 GW of solar paired with 4.9 GW of storage. A 2024 study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) shows that rooftop solar reduced the median 2021 energy burden for low-income adopters from 7.7% to 6.2%, pointing to the value that BTM solar can provide in alleviating energy costs for those that need them the most.

BTM solar and storage can advance energy security and support communities’ energy resilience. EJ communities are more likely to live in dense urban areas and neighborhoods that lack green spaces, exposing them to the urban heat island effect. These communities are also more likely to live in places with inefficient heating and cooling systems, costing these households more in energy. For this study, AEC finds that more than 90% of Massachusetts’ total BTM solar and storage potential in EJ neighborhoods is within a hot spot area, underscoring the value that deploying solar in these areas can bring.

A 2025 Berkeley Lab study found that low-to-moderate income households generating 80-100% of their electricity needs with rooftop solar leads to significant reductions in energy bills. This can translate into households being able to keep their homes at comfortable temperatures, especially when facing extreme heat. Access to BTM solar and storage can also provide backup power during grid disruptions, including for resilience hubs in community buildings and shelters bringing cooling and other essential services during outages.

Barriers to unlocking this solar potential

Although the Commonwealth offers a suite of energy, climate and housing programs, the BTM solar and storage potential in EJ neighborhoods remains largely untapped.

The study found the main barriers for deployment, include financial challenges, technical issues, workforce roadblocks, market conditions, and program coordination. Lack of incentives for renters and condo owners requires special attention, as only a third of BTM technical potential in EJ neighborhoods is located in single family homes.

The state has clear energy targets and procurement requirements for specific technologies such as offshore wind, but there is no specific carve out for BTM resources including solar and storage. Likewise, most clean energy programs lack equity participation targets or incentives hindering the flow of benefits to those that need them the most.

Solutions to unlocking this solar potential

The Commonwealth has a mandate to ensure the equitable distribution of energy and environmental benefits. However, to date, most of the state’s solar and storage policies and programs have no explicit and enforceable equity provisions.

This analysis identifies a suite of recommendations to tackle these challenges, including incorporating equity-focused funding, incentives, targets, and carve-outs to successfully overcome underinvestment in EJ neighborhoods and ensure that these communities have direct access to the benefits that on-site solar and storage can bring. Greater and context-specific focus on communications and outreach are tools that will help EJ communities understand better the value that solar and storage has to offer them. Attention to transparency from clean energy solicitors will also be crucial to build trust and protect EJ communities. And securing employment opportunities for trainees will only strengthen the commonwealth’s clean energy economy.

The full study elaborates on existing program gaps and recommendations to soundly advance an equitable clean energy transition.

We need action from Massachusetts policymakers

BTM solar and storage are proven technologies that have a lot to offer to the Commonwealth, and in particular, to its most vulnerable populations. Advancing these resources in EJ communities is key for addressing the energy affordability crisis, improving public health and making communities more resilient to extreme weather.

The recommendations included in the new Electrification with Equity II report are common-sense solutions informed by existing programs, and build on proven experience in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

Provisions supporting solar and storage are reflected in the latest version of the “An Act relative to energy affordability, clean power and economic competitiveness” (House Bill 5175), including around plug-in solar and solar permitting. As the Massachusetts legislature discusses ways to strengthen this energy affordability bill, our recommendations focused on offering targeted incentives, and electric system readiness should be integrated into this crucial bill.

That means establishing equity participation targets and include carve outs for distributed energy resources. The Clean Energy Equity Act (House Bill 3540, Senate Bill 2303) sets a framework for the fair allocation of clean energy benefits. And An Act Maximizing and Optimizing Small-scale Assets in Communities (House Bill 3521, Senate Bill 2270) stablish goals for the deployment of distributed energy resources—including solar and storage—in the commonwealth.

Further, we need policymakers to support MassSave as an effective way to advance solar and storage readiness. Proposed cuts to MassSave at a time when it’s increasingly serving low- and moderate-income households contradicts any effort to make energy more affordable and will hinder the limited resources the program has to support electric upgrades. With over 50 percent of our region’s electricity generated from gas, families are already exposed to price volatility; cutting Mass Save leaves them even more vulnerable to demand spikes from extreme heat and harsh winters.

Massachusetts policymakers, we’re counting on you to ensure that the benefits of a clean energy economy are successfully unlocked for our neighbors in the Commonwealth’s environmental justice communities, at last.

The commentariat’s view of the future is narrowly focused on assembling military capabilities and demonstrating the resolve to use them. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times believe the war in Iran created a “munitions gap” that has “significantly drained” the store of weapons the United States needs to deter China and defend Taiwan. The Atlantic suggested Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz might teach China how a blockade of Taiwan can paralyze a conflicted US president. The Japan Times said senior US defense officials struggled to convince skeptical Asian allies that US security guarantees remain credible.

This circumscribed discussion of the Taiwan-related implications of the Iran war is encouraging a reluctant US Congress to reconsider President Trump’s request for a massive increase in defense spending. Opponents continue to argue it would further undermine an already shaky US economy. No one imagines it would help reopen the Strait of Hormuz or relieve the economic pain of its ongoing closure.

Declassified US and Soviet accounts of the Taiwan Strait Crisis suggest that understanding Iranian intentions may be more productive than increasing US capabilities. The Eisenhower administration refused to talk to China’s communist leaders and consequently misunderstood their language and behavior. That led to a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait that carried a greater risk of nuclear war than the Cuban missile crisis. 

The parallels between these two situations are striking and instructive.

Aggressive allies with powerful lobbies

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press that President Trump decided to attack Iran because Israel planned to strike Iran on its own. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly met with Trump on multiple occasions to press the case for war. Senator Lindsay Graham, building on years of lobbying by hawkish Republican Party donors and right-wing religious organizations, worked hard to help Netanyahu secure Trump’s acquiescence.

In the mid-1950s, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who led a Republic of China (ROC) government that fled to Taiwan after losing control of China, lobbied President Eisenhower to support a major military offensive to reclaim the mainland. Powerful allies in Congress and the US military, like Senate Majority Leader William Knowland and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Arthur Radford, helped Chiang make his case. Influential media barons including Time’s Henry Luce and right-wing religious zealots from the John Birch Society amplified calls to “unleash Chiang” in the fight against communism. 

Rubio repeated this McCarthy-era slogan when describing the US-Israeli bombing of Iran. Over the years it has become a euphemism for the core Republican Party belief in the efficacy of aggressive military solutions to geopolitical problems.

Isolation and embargo

For decades, the US government actively helped suppress the revolutionary movement that led to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in November 1979. After Iranian students seized the US embassy and took hostages, President Carter froze Iranian assets, imposed economic sanctions, and severed diplomatic relations with the new Iranian government. Successive administrations continuously tightened those sanctions, with a modest respite after President Obama negotiated an agreement to place limits on Iran’s nuclear energy program in 2015. President Trump abrogated the agreement and imposed even tighter economic sanctions three years later.

The US government also helped suppress the revolutionary movement that led to the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. It continued to recognize Chiang’s rump government in Taiwan as the sole legitimate sovereign of all of China. It imposed an economic embargo and policed it with a naval blockade. The brutality of the Korean War, as well as the long and acrimonious negotiation to end it, convinced Eisenhower that talking to the Chinese communist leadership was a waste of time. After the armistice ending the fighting in Korea was signed, the United States continued to aid and encourage Chiang’s repeated military attacks from ROC-held islands close to the Chinese coast.

In both cases the US government used a combination of economic warfare, military threats, and diplomatic isolation that led to the marginalization and impoverishment of a sovereign adversary. Severe restrictions on social and cultural contact inhibited constructive communication, making it extremely difficult to develop the mutual understanding and respect needed to manage adversarial relationships without resorting to violence. 

Bad-faith negotiations

In addition to withdrawing from the nuclear agreement with Iran, President Trump attacked the Islamic Republic—twice—during what appeared to be encouraging talks about a substitute agreement. A ceasefire intended to pause the second and more extensive round of attacks was supposed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump immediately undermined that possibility by imposing a naval blockade on any ships entering or exiting Iranian ports. He made a series of unsubstantiated statements the Iranians claimed were misleading and manipulative. He spoke as if his goal was to compel Iranian capitulation. 

Eisenhower treated the Chinese communists with an equal measure of arrogance and contempt. In the spring of 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon publicly threatened to attack the Chinese mainland with nuclear weapons if the Chinese military did not stop shelling the ROC forces harassing Chinese air and naval traffic from the offshore islands. Radford, Dulles, and other anti-communist ideologues convinced Eisenhower that if those islands fell, the rest of East Asia would follow like dominoes. Eisenhower was fully prepared to strike, but a request from Indonesia to the PRC to represent China at the Bandung Conference prompted him to wait. Diplomatic entreaties from almost every other participating nation convinced Eisenhower to finally agree to PRC requests to open negotiations aimed at resolving the crisis in the Taiwan Strait.

The negotiations dragged on for three years. Every time the Chinese communists made concessions to US demands, including a commitment to forgo the use of force to dislodge the ROC government in Taiwan, Secretary of State Dulles moved the goal posts. He instructed US negotiators that the only US objective in the talks was to avoid being blamed when they broke down. After Dulles unilaterally downgraded US representation at the talks, the Chinese communists resumed shelling the offshore islands.

Lessons from Taiwan’s past for Iran’s present

Misunderstanding, miscommunication, and an unwillingness to negotiate in good faith with the Iranian leadership are serious problems that require both immediate and sustained US attention. 

President Nixon, in secret negotiations that were vociferously opposed by the Taiwan lobby and its many supporters in Congress, decided to speak respectfully with the Chinese communist leadership about its concerns. Those conversations encouraged Nixon to make meaningful concessions in the interest of the greater good of both nations. His visit to China in 1972, amid the ideological fervor and political violence of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, changed US public perceptions of the country overnight. The subsidence of US public hostility towards the communist Chinese opened the door for a decades-long geopolitical realignment that produced economic and security benefits for both countries that greatly outweighed the domestic political costs.

Something similar can take place between the United States and Iran today. Like China, Iran is an equally proud and ancient civilization led by a radical revolutionary government that would have a compelling interest in responding to a conciliatory change in US behavior.  

Another lesson Taiwan holds for Iran is that bilateral breakthroughs to resolve an urgent situation—in this case restoring the free flow of a critical set of global commodities—shouldn’t be negotiated in secret without informing other countries and peoples that have a vital stake in the outcome.  

Nixon lied about the deal on Taiwan he struck with Mao. He lied to Congress, to US allies, and to the American public. Today, many of the economic and security benefits accrued from the US-China rapprochement are now in jeopardy because the concessions Nixon made were not acceptable to many of the external constituencies he deceived.

The third lesson is that successful diplomatic outcomes take a long time to negotiate and can only be sustained with constant and unending effort. One of the benefits of abiding by the Cold War–era adage that “politics stops at the water’s edge” is that it helps protect negotiated results across administrations. US adversaries can’t enter substantive agreements if they fear future US administrations won’t honor them.

Seven years passed between Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with communist China. Carter was unsettled when he discovered the secret concessions Nixon made, especially his failure to get the Chinese communist leadership to agree to forgo the use of force to reunify the two rival Chinese governments. In the end Carter decided that the United States should keep its word. Congress, which was not only never consulted but also intentionally deceived, tried to impose its will through the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which broke every significant commitment that Nixon and Carter made by maintaining de facto diplomatic relations with a rival Chinese government and providing it with arms. 

One final lesson is that our troubles in Taiwan and Iran are intimately connected to the state of US domestic politics. There can be no peace abroad without some degree of consensus at home. 

The long-term future of the Strait of Hormuz is now bound up in complex multinational religious, ethnic, economic, and territorial disputes with long and complex histories. It will take decades of sustained diplomacy to resolve these disputes peacefully. If the US government is unwilling or unable to commit to seeing that process through, the only other choices available are to continue suffering the political, economic, and moral costs of participating in the violence, or to withdraw.

The Trump administration and its allies in Congress have conspired to slow the transition to clean energy in this country, undercutting solar and wind power, propping up coal plants, and backing fossil fuels over renewable energy at every turn. Clean energy, though, has pushed back, and pushed forward. Solar in particular came into the second Trump administration with a whole lot of momentum, and that momentum has carried renewable energy to many new heights lately.

Here are four examples of impressive renewable energy progress, how they came about, and what to watch for next.

US solar blows past its generation record

What happened: US solar generation in 2025 was a stunning 28% higher than in 2024. The electricity flowing from all our solar—on rooftops and parking lots, in fields and deserts—was equivalent to the amount used by every household across 14 states in the Midwest and Northeast, from Wisconsin to New Jersey and up to Maine. Solar generation in a single month (July 2025) was more than a full year’s worth of solar generation just a decade ago.

How it happened: A lot of solar capacity has come online lately. 2024 was a record year for new solar installations in the United States, 21% higher than the previous record-setter. While new installations in 2025 were down from that height, last year still had the second-highest tally ever. Texas installed a Texas-sized amount of that recent solar, California followed, and Indiana took the #3 spot, up from #15 in 2023. The total capacity by the end of 2025 was enough to meet the electricity needs of tens of millions of US households.

What’s next: The pace of new installations will be driven in part by deadlines and restrictions imposed by last year’s megabill, and will also depend on the vagaries of the tariff regime under this administration. This year is sure to break the record for solar generation yet again, though, with all of 2025’s installations leaping into action and more solar coming online every day. Preliminary results suggest that solar electricity generation year-to-date is more than 20% higher than in the same period last year.

US wind breaks record after record

What happened: Wind power is the largest source of renewable energy in this country, and it keeps growing. For example, last month in New England, wind farms added up to a record amount of peak generation—more than 30% above where the region’s wind record had stood just six months earlier. Plus, a record-breaking project is starting to come online in the US Southwest: SunZia will be the largest wind project in North America—and, with its associated transmission line, the largest US renewable energy project ever.

How it happened: InNew England’s case, a lot of credit goes to offshore wind. While the region’s land-based wind farms play an important role, what’s new are the injections of power from offshore wind turbines. Vineyard Wind, located in the waters off Massachusetts, has been generating power from a majority of its turbines since last year, and will be fully online very shortly. Once it’s completed, it will be the first large-scale offshore wind project in the United States—indeed, in all of the Americas. Add in strong offshore winds, and you have a recipe for some awesome generation—including at times when the region needs it most.

In the case of SunZia, the “how” includes a whole lot of patience. The project involves a remarkable 916 wind turbines in New Mexico and a 550-mile transmission line to carry the power to Arizona, where it goes on to serve customers in California. And it took over two decades, most of that in permitting, to get to this stage.

Even as it is coming online, SunZia is breaking other records: the amount of wind generation showing up in California’s electricity mix has leapt to new records multiple times in the last few weeks.

What’s next: Overall, the way forward for wind power is much fuzzier and more challenging than it should be, in part because of the Trump administration’s particular animus toward it, especially offshore wind. So one thing to watch for is the progress of the various lawsuits against the administration, which are trying to put an end to their various illegal moves to block wind farms.

But some next steps are clearer, including for the handful of offshore wind projects that are moving forward.

• The workers responsible for bringing Vineyard Wind to life installed the blades on the final turbine last month, so once the electrical systems and final tests are done, it’ll be all systems go.
• Revolution Wind, also in the area south of Massachusetts/east of Long Island, is itself almost fully built, and just started sending power to New England too. That contribution will ramp up as the project moves to completion.
• The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, under construction, will be the largest in the country and one of the largest in the world when it comes fully online next year; last month it sent its first megawatt-hours to the mid-Atlantic electricity grid from some of the turbines already in place.
• Two other offshore wind farms also under construction, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind, will soon be strengthening the New York electric grid.

Onshore, the new SunZia wind and transmission capacity will continue to show up in increasingly high levels of wind for California.

And wind records will continue to be broken elsewhere. Each of the other regional transmission organizations (grid operators) across the country—in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, New York, the midcontinent, Texas, and the Southwest—have scored records in the last few months.

US renewable electricity passes the 25% mark

What happened: Renewable energy generated more than a quarter of US electricity in 2025 for the first time.                                                               

How it happened: All that new renewable energy capacity adds up to more renewable electricity. Wind maintained its spot as the top renewable source, accounting for more than 10% of US generation last year. Solar’s fast growth brought it to almost 9%—four times its contribution in 2018. Hydro power was the next largest contributor, at 5.5%.

What’s next: Though there’s been considerable variability over the years, renewable energy’s contribution to overall US electricity supply has increased by an average of 1.2 percentage points per year. The federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts that renewables will be the source of the most growth in generation in 2026, with solar increasing 17% and wind 5%.

US renewable electricity out-generates gas on a monthly basis

What happened: In March 2026, for the first time ever, US renewable electricity beat gas generation over the course of a full month. Renewables accounted for 35% of generation, vs. gas’s 34.4%, according to Canary Media.

How it happened: Spring is always a strong time for renewable energy—the sun is shining, the winds are blowing, the waters are flowing. And the interlude between winter’s cold and summer’s heat is when demand for electricity is lowest. That all means less demand for gas. This recent crossover milestone, though, is principally a consequence of all the new renewables capacity of late.

Renewables’ strong showing last spring meant that these sources plus nuclear generated more than half of US electricity in March 2025 for the first time ever. That is, fossil fuels fell below the 50% mark. That happened again in April 2025 and March 2026.

What’s next: Watch for more months when renewables outperform gas, and fossil fuels get pushed below 50% (as a prelude to much greater push-downs in the years ahead); spring, and then fall, will be where that phenomenon will be more likely. More such achievements will require renewables continuing to grow and outpace increases in demand at a time when demand for electricity is growing more rapidly than it has for years—and all while contending with a major push for new gas-fired power plants and a Trump administration aggressively thwarting new clean energy deployment. But renewables have proven themselves time and again.

More 2025 wins, around the world

Renewable energy is making even more of a mark globally. Here’s a sample:

• According to analyst firm Ember, wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the European Union for the first time over the course of 2025.
• In Colombia, solar power alone supplied more electricity than coal on an annual basis for the first time.
• Solar globally grew by a record amount in 2025, said the International Energy Agency (IEA), with China accounting for more than half that growth, the European Union achieving record numbers, and India posting 60% growth.
• Solar was “the single largest contributor to growth in global energy supply in 2025,” the IEA said—”the first time on record that a modern renewable source has led global primary energy supply growth.” Solar supplied more than 25% of that increase, compared to 17% for gas.
• Wind installations globally also hit a record (also led by China).
• Overall, the world installed a record amount of wind and solar—17% more than in 2024.

Lots more clean energy is on its way

Renewable energy’s momentum is a product of the many advantages it offers. Renewable energy is not just the cleanest but often the cheapest source of new electricity in the United States. Solar and wind have the advantage of potentially being faster to get installed than new gas plants, given the multi-year backlogs for gas turbines. And worldwide disruptions have brought into stark relief more of the risks of dependence on fossil fuels.

None of that means that new fossil fuel plants won’t get built, particularly given a big thumb on the scales from the White House. It does mean, though, that where clean energy is allowed to compete, the outcomes will likely to continue to testify to those advantages.

And projections bear that out. Solar, wind, and energy storage (batteries) combined had a record year in 2025, and made up more than 90% of new energy capacity in this country, according to industry association American Clean Power. And they will make up 93% of what gets built in the power sector in 2026, forecasts the EIA. All that will add up to more clean energy, and give us even more possibilities for phasing down fossil fuels and accelerating the transition to a clean and just energy future.

The transition to clean energy is a marathon, not a sprint. The people and communities behind clean energy in its many forms and uses will continue to push boundaries and break record after record. Count on it.

This isn’t just casual curiosity. Communities facing floods, families displaced by wildfires, and governments planning infrastructure need accurate information about how a warming climate affects the risks and impacts we all face.

Attribution science has emerged over the past few decades to answer precisely these questions. And like any scientific field, it deserves thoughtful examination of its methods, limitations, and contributions.

Today, attribution work spans interconnected dimensions. Event attribution asks whether climate change made a specific weather event more likely or severe. Source attribution traces contributions back to specific emitters and sectors. Impact attribution connects climate-driven changes to real-world damages: lost lives, destroyed homes, disrupted livelihoods, and strained public systems. Together, attribution science can help to form a more complete chain of understanding.

Attribution quantifies the contribution of climate change to extreme events

The connection between climate change and extreme weather is well established. In their most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that “Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.”

Think of climate change like adding fuel to a fire: The spark might have existed anyway, but the fuel makes it burn hotter and spread further. Weather would exist regardless of emissions from human activities; however, the weather we all experience is changing. Attribution research follows that fuel—from the fire’s intensity, to who poured it on, to what burned because of it.

Put more scientifically, attribution research investigates these changes in weather, asking whether climate change has made an event more likely, more severe, or both. It can also help us to understand how emissions from specific sectors have altered climate events and show us the contribution of climate change to impacts from such events.

Counterfactuals make attribution studies possible

Attribution methodology compares the actual event against modelled scenarios of what might have occurred in a world without human-induced warming. By running simulations with and without anthropogenic emissions, researchers quantify how the probability or intensity has shifted. This counterfactual approach is standard across many scientific disciplines, from epidemiology to economics, and is at the heart of all attribution science.

Here is an example of what a counterfactual might actually look like (figure 1 below). This figure from Perkins-Kirkpatrick et al 2024 shows how climate change shifts the odds of extreme heat. The dashed curve represents a counterfactual world without human-caused warming, while the solid curve shows a world with today’s warmer climate. Because the temperature distribution has shifted to the right, very hot days are now much more likely. The shaded areas illustrate this change in risk: an extreme temperature that was rare in the past (p0) becomes significantly more common today (p1).

In order to set a counterfactual, the researcher needs to define what version of the world they are comparing against, and the biggest decision point here is which time frame to use. This choice is based on the specific research question being asked. A study examining long-term climate trends might compare today’s conditions to pre-industrial times, while one focused on policy impacts might use a more recent baseline. In attribution studies examining the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate change, counterfactuals become especially salient given the industry’s decades of documented disinformation campaigns that delayed climate action. By modeling what climatic conditions might have been but for the industry’s actions—such as had they disclosed internal research or ceased obstructive practices at key moments—scientists can quantify not only how much warming occurred, but how much could have been avoided.

Attribution science is a mature scientific discipline

The first peer-reviewed event attribution study appeared in Nature in 2004, examining the 2003 European heatwave that killed tens of thousands of people. This research emerged from academic researchers at University of Reading and University of Oxford in the UK. Until this study was published, scientists had used attribution methodologies to attribute trends in global average surface temperature to climate change, but had never before linked an individual event to climate change, making this study a huge scientific and methodological achievement in the field.

Since then, the field has developed substantial methodological infrastructure to support continued research and development. The National Academies of Sciences published a comprehensive review in 2016, establishing frameworks to assess event attribution research quality and confidence levels. The IPCC has systematically evaluated event attribution literature across multiple assessment cycles, increasing confidence statements as methods improved and evidence accumulated.

Today, attribution studies appear in prominent scientific journals including Nature, Science, Environmental Research Letters, and PNAS. These studies undergo peer review—a standard scientific process—by independent experts who evaluate methodology, data quality, and the author’s characterization of uncertainty.  In order to be responsive and help ensure science is available to inform decisions makers, the research group World Weather Attribution has pioneered rapid event attribution assessments. Using peer-reviewed methods, this group of experts produces near-real-time analysis to help inform the public about the role of climate change in specific events.

While there are well accepted methods, this is also a growing field that’s learning and advancing. We are also seeing improvements as computational power increases, observational data expands, and understanding deepens. In journal articles and at conferences, scientists engage in the practice of science by actively debating best practices for baseline selection, model ensemble construction, and uncertainty quantification. This internal critique is healthy science at work.

Evaluating and communicating uncertainty

All rigorous science includes an evaluation and communication of uncertainty, and attribution research is no different. Climate modeling experts are always balancing complexities: countless variables interacting in a changing climate system. That’s why attribution papers routinely report confidence intervals, probability ranges, and explicit statements about methodological limitations.

But not all event types carry the same uncertainty.

For heatwaves, confidence is relatively high because the physics are straightforward (more trapped heat = hotter temperature). For other event types like hurricanes or floods, confidence is lower because multiple factors influence outcomes and models have greater limitations. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report reflects this nuance, expressing high confidence for heatwave attribution while noting lower confidence for tropical cyclones and some precipitation events.

This variability in confidence between event types isn’t a weakness—it’s the manifestation of standard scientific practice. Researchers are careful to match their claims to what the evidence supports. When media headlines simplify these nuances, that’s a communication challenge, not a scientific failure.

How attribution science is used

Attribution research serves multiple purposes across different sectors—none more important than the others, but each drawing on the science in distinct ways.

For communities and planners, attribution science informs practical decisions about infrastructure, insurance, and emergency preparedness. A city designing flood defenses needs to know whether historical rainfall records still represent future risk. An agricultural region needs to understand changing drought probabilities. A utility company planning grid resilience needs to anticipate heatwave frequency. Attribution science can be used as one tool to help shape budgets, building codes, and local planning.

For researchers, attribution science advances fundamental climate understanding. By examining how specific events unfold in different climate scenarios, scientists test and refine climate models. This can improve projections for future conditions, strengthening the foundation for climate science.

For policymakers and legislators, attribution findings help quantify climate risks that inform emissions targets, adaptation funding, and regulatory standards. When laws require climate risk disclosure or mandate resilience planning, attribution science provides the evidentiary backbone.

For litigators and their clients, attribution research helps establish connections between emissions, climate change, and specific harms—evidence for courts to weigh in the context of legal standards that vary by jurisdiction and claim type.

Attribution science is robust, growing, and more important than ever

The path forward requires continued investment in attribution research, improved observational networks, better climate models, and clearer communication of what studies can and cannot conclude. It also requires recognizing that scientific uncertainty isn’t ignorance—we often know enough to make informed decisions even while continuing to refine understanding.

Attribution science has matured into a valuable tool for understanding climate change impacts. Like all science, it has limitations that researchers openly acknowledge. But its core findings that human-caused climate change is affecting weather events in measurable ways rest on solid methodological foundations and contribute meaningfully to both scientific understanding and practical decision-making.

Communities facing climate risks and impacts deserve nothing less than rigorous, transparent science. Attribution research, conducted through peer-reviewed channels with appropriate uncertainty communication, delivers exactly that.

This unseemly political maneuver must be seen for what it is: An attempt to silence independent scientists, shut down evidence-based decision making, and keep the public in the dark.

Politicization of the National Science Foundation

The move is troubling because the National Science Board plays a critical role in oversight, accountability, and transparency in how the nation’s premier scientific research agency makes decisions on everything from major research investments, to international partnerships, to merit criteria for grantmaking. Without a functional National Science Board in the near term, the agency is left without the guidance and oversight of independent experts, and the public is left without information on how NSF is carrying out its mission. And it’s worth remembering that mission is to serve the public. As my colleague, Dr. Carlos Javier Martinez puts it, “For the past 75 years, the NSF has quietly powered innovations that shape our daily lives, from the classroom to the smartphone, from the weather report to the internet.”

There are many reasons this should concern us, because it is not the first instance of political interference in the National Science Board and NSF during President Trump’s second term. Last year, eminent scholar and former deputy assistant to the president, Dr. Alondra Nelson resigned her seat on the National Science Board, citing a loss of integrity in the institution and political interference from Trump officials in the board’s deliberations. In March, the administration put up an unqualified, conflicted nominee to lead NSF. And earlier this month in an apparent move to obey in advance, the NSF preemptively killed its Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate, citing the proposed presidential budget.

Abandoning science advice

These NSF moves add to larger threats to the federal science advisory system. Since the current Trump administration started, scores of federal advisory committees at science agencies have been disbanded, frozen, or otherwise disrupted—a trend that is similar to disruptions in science advice during the president’s first term.

The pattern is alarming, not only because of the lack of science advice that government officials are now receiving, but also because the Federal science advisory committee system under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) provides an important layer of transparency and accountability for science-based decisions across the government. FACA requires committees to deliberate in public and take public comment. As a result, we in civil society have access to what science advice the government is receiving, and can hold them accountable when they don’t take it. Firing members of the National Science Board cuts science—and the public—out of the picture.

A risk for more interference in federal science

Alarmingly, firing of the qualified and vetted members of the National Science Board clears a path for the Trump administration to appoint conflicted and unqualified individuals in their stead, who could provide political cover for the Trump administration to avoid science-based and mission-aligned decisions at NSF. Such concerns are not just hypothetical. So far this term, the Trump administration has:

• Stacked the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) with tech industry CEOs;
• Filled a quarter of the seats on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board with employees of the chemical industry it regulates; and
• Illegally and secretly stood up a Climate Working Group of climate contrarians to undermine EPA’s Endangerment Finding, the scientific and legal unpinning for the agency’s climate actions, to name a few.

But who’s keeping score? (We are, in fact. And the count is up to 562 attacks on science this term.) 

The rise of independent science outside of government

We must not accept these anti-science actions. Instead, scientists across the country must resist by ensuring independent science advice continues beyond the halls of US government institutions. Thankfully, many in the scientific community have been taking matters into their own hands and stepping up to ensure science advice continues.  These independent science activities have popped up across scientific fields, with courageous scientists volunteering their time and expertise to inform and advise the public and decision-makers at all levels of government.

You can join us by opposing Trump’s unqualified and conflicted nominee to run NSF, launching an independent science advisory committee if you are in a position to do so, and staying tuned to what’s happening. We in the scientific community must watch diligently what the administration does next and insist on evidence-based decisions at NSF and beyond.  

Throughout the history of the United States, our transportation system has been funded through a host of different types of local, state, and federal taxes and fees. Those fees can largely be broken down into three different categories: 1) general government taxes, including property, sales, and income taxes; 2) user fees, which are simply fees assessed on users of the transportation system like tolls and fuel taxes; and 3) Pigouvian taxes, which are a specific category of user fees that respond to an external harm, such as congestion fees and carbon taxes.

The mix and design of these different revenue sources help shape how we think about our transportation system—who pays, why, and how much can set the tone for whose voice is represented in our transportation decisions. It can shape who benefits from our transportation system and who is ultimately responsible for bearing the costs of that system. In this blog, I walk through a number of these funding mechanisms and what each of these choices could mean for creating a more equitable transportation system.

How funding sources contribute to transportation equity

Each of the funding sources discussed below comes with its own choices, including the assessed rate and who its applied to. Those choices have a direct impact on the relative burden placed on any individual or business trying to access transportation services, and that of course means it has an impact on the equitability of our transportation system.

While user fees are not the largest source of revenue for transportation, it tends to be what people think of when they think of transportation funding. While some registration fees may be tied to vehicle value, which could have some tax progressivity, generally user fees are regressive. In the case of fuel taxes, for example, lower-income households spend a larger share of their income on transportation, generally, and on fuel, specifically, which means they are contributing disproportionately to fuel tax revenue. Additionally, because commercial vehicles do not pay their fair share of road use, private drivers at all income levels are effectively subsidizing commercial trucking.

The largest contributor to transportation funding today comes from general funding from local, state, and federal governments, at roughly 23 percent of all transportation revenue, along with an additional 29 percent of revenue that comes directly from a broad range of directed tax revenue, including from property and sales taxes. With each and every one of us having a stake in how we get around, broad public investment in our transportation system is consistent with the role government plays in the shaping of those choices. To the extent that government funding comes from income taxes, the more progressive that revenue source is likely to be. Conversely, the modern shift towards sales taxes as a growing source of government revenue increases the regressivity of government revenues. That means even general government expenditure could be adding to the disproportionate burden faced by lower-income families.

Pigouvian taxes can help shape behavior, and we’re seeing in New York City right now that putting a price on congestion can help reduce emissions and fund much-needed service upgrades for transit. At the same time, these types of taxes can look an awful lot like user fees and often need complementary policies (as in NYC with its low-income discount) to ensure they do not punish individuals facing a transportation system with limited choices.

In approaching efforts to reshape our current transportation system towards one that is more sustainable and equitable and centers people and communities, how we pay for that system must be part of that equity discussion.

Property taxes

The earliest roads in the United States were the responsibility of local governments and required property owners to provide fees and/or labor to maintain the roads. Since the local economy directly benefits from the transportation system through its provision of mobility for jobs outside the local region as well as the support for the influx of customers, goods, and services, it can make sense to tax the landowners benefiting from the value transportation provides. However, today property taxes make up just 15 percent of dedicated local government contributions to transportation and less than 4 percent of all surface transportation revenue and are primarily used for maintenance and operations. Accounting for general transfer from government funds, it is likely around 7 percent of funding, still a far cry from the U.S.’s origins.

Taxing land value derives revenue from the individuals and businesses benefiting financially from the provision of goods and services enabled by local transportation infrastructure.

A lag in property value increases from improvements can limit transportation development. Property taxes are frequently seen as a regressive funding mechanism for a range of reasons, including inaccurate property assessment, but nuances in local policies have a significant impact on the relative regressivity of specific property tax regimes. Housing restrictions can create regions of haves and have-nots for basic services, as observed during eras of “white flight” to the suburbs or modern NIMBYism.

Tolls

As the United States developed, roads began to play a more critical role in connecting cities, straining local resources for road maintenance and putting more pressure on state governments to facilitate travel. However, in the aftermath of the American Revolution states were still strapped for cash and turned towards private entities to construct and maintain their thoroughfares. From turnpikes (so called because of the pike across the road barring travel until the fee is paid) to the modern toll road, this forces users of the system to pay directly for their travel.

Today, tolls are often assessed differently according to vehicle class, which allows the toll facility to extract some additional funding from commercial vehicles due to the additional wear and tear they impose on the infrastructure. However, tolls generally do not charge for all the costs associated with vehicle traffic such as those related to congestion and pollution. They currently fund just 6 percent of transportation.

Charging users directly for road usage creates a direct relationship between the provision of a service and its cost, like many other public services (water, trash, electric power, etc.).

Tolls create a pay-for-play system that inherently favors higher income households and can impede mobility access for lower income households. Tolls do not account for the full recovery of all the harms from utilizing our roads and are frequently tied directly to the construction and upkeep of specific infrastructure without consideration of the transportation system holistically.

Registration fees

At the turn of the 20^th century, the newly developed motor vehicle numbered in the thousands in the United States. New York was the first state to require each vehicle to be licensed, back in 1901, and with the growing number of vehicles on the road, fees for vehicle registration and, eventually, licensure to drive them, became a growing source of revenue for states funding the proliferation of roads to support these vehicles. Today, vehicle and driver registration fees support about 13 percent of transportation spending.

Registration and licensing can serve safety-related purposes.

Like tolls, registration and licensing requires financial costs up front to participate in our auto-centric transportation system. While some vehicle registration may be based on vehicle or age and, therefore, may indirectly reduce fees for lower-income households, most states operate on a flat fee basis, making these regressive taxes. Moreover, registration and licensing enforcement can reinforce systemic racial bias through pretextual stops, biased penalties, and predatory fees.

Fuel taxes

Oregon was the first state in the country to implement a fuel tax to fund the development of roadways in 1919, but just a decade later fuel taxes represented over half of fees collected from drivers. The federal fuel tax was introduced in 1932 as part of a revenue act in the wake of the Great Depression but was not dedicated to transportation funding until the creation of the Highway Trust Fund in 1956. Over the course of the 20^th century, highway expansion in the United States was funded primarily through fuel taxes, and today fuel taxes account for about 24 percent of spending on roads.

Not all fuel taxes are targeted towards the highway system, however. Some state and local governments dedicate a portion of fuel tax revenue towards general spending, though it is a much smaller amount than the funding from government coffers towards highways. Additionally, a share of state and federal fuel taxes are dedicated to public transit services (about 14 and 18 percent, respectively) and cover just over 20 percent of transit expenditures nationwide.

Fuel taxes are correlated with usage of the service provided, like many other public services, and act both as a (small) incentive to improve vehicle efficiency and as a (small) disincentive against driving.

Fuel taxes are priced independently of the costs of oil and highway usage. Moreover, while there is a long history of fuel taxes being used as a revenue generator for government services, the link between fuel taxes and road use has been used (via the user-pay myth) to oppose non-highway transportation spending. Additionally, a disproportionate share of transportation expenditures for lower-incomes are spent on fuel compared to higher incomes, so fuel taxes are regressive.

Sales taxes

With federal fuel taxes unchanged for over three decades and vehicle and fuel taxes across all levels of government providing a reduced share of transportation funding, many states and localities have turned to sales taxes to close the funding gap with sales tax revenue dedicated to state and local transportation funds or even specific projects. In 1998, sales tax revenue accounted for 6 percent of all dedicated transportation funding—25 years later, it accounted for 14 percent. Including contributions from general government spending, sales taxes now likely make up at least 17 percent of transportation revenue.

Sales taxes are mode-neutral and raise revenue from participants in the local economy, which is inherently linked to the local transportation system.

Sales taxes are even more regressive than fuel taxes and are not tied in any way to transportation use or need.

Congestion pricing

Recently, more attention has been paid to the ways in which price signals via taxes and fees can affect the use of our transportation system. One of the prime examples of this is New York City’s successful deployment of its congestion fee program.

Every vehicle on the road contributes to traffic, and every additional car or truck can slow down the system overall, increasing time for other road users. Congestion pricing is designed to incentivize drivers to either shift travel to off-peak times or find alternatives.

There are many ways of designing a fee, but the important point is that it is tied to traffic flow, either through time (e.g., a different charge for peak vs. off-peak hours), current state of traffic (e.g., dynamic pricing of toll-lanes), or by zone (e.g., a fee for entering congested areas of a city).

Because congestion pricing is a specific form of tolling, some of the same concerns around regressivity/pay-to-play exist. However, exceptions related to income, as in the case of NYC’s program, can help mitigate some of these concerns. Additionally, directly connecting the funding from congestion pricing to the support of alternatives can help facilitate a transition towards less harmful, more equitable choices like transit.

Congestion pricing helps internalize the implicit subsidies our transportation system provides to drivers, better ensuring drivers pay for the real costs of driving. Additionally, most frequently congestion pricing revenues are used to directly fund alternatives, expanding mobility options for a region to help reduce the harms of high-impact traffic areas.

Congestion pricing raises many of the concerns of general tolling, so it can be regressive if additional countermeasures are not taken to mitigate these issues.

Carbon taxes

Another unpriced cost of our auto-centric transportation system is the harm from vehicle emissions. All vehicles on the road produce pollution in the form of tire and brake wear, and all combustion vehicles further contribute tailpipe pollution—all of these forms of pollution result in health harms for the local communities living near our roadways. Additionally, transportation is the largest source of heat-trapping emissions in the United States.

One of the major reasons we have such a fossil-fuel dependent transportation system is because all these harms related to vehicle pollution are not priced into the cost of transportation—drivers may pay for gas, but they don’t pay for the health costs for communities owed to the particulate matter from their tailpipes, and they certainly don’t pay for increased risks of wildfires and other climate-related disasters owed to the hundreds of billions of gallons of gasoline we combust every year in this country.

Pigouvian taxes are fees designed to internalize costs related to a cost currently uncaptured by the market. Carbon taxes are one of the most prominent ideas for how to shift the external costs of climate change back onto the source of climate pollution—in transportation, for example, drivers don’t currently pay for all the climate-related costs of driving, but if we actually added to the price per gallon of gas the monetized climate harms burning that gas in an automobile caused, that would provide a greater signal to the market to use it more efficiently and/or find alternative solutions.

Carbon taxes help internalize the implicit subsidies our transportation system provides to drivers, better ensuring drivers pay for the full costs to the climate resulting from driving.

Many of the drivers of our fossil fuel dependence are systemic, so carbon taxes run the risk of placing a regressive tax on households without choice. Mitigating this impact may involve economic rebates and/or tying revenue to more sustainable alternatives. Further, carbon taxes only address one of the many forms of pollution from vehicles; additional or expanded policies would be required to ensure the full suite of harms are addressed.

Mileage-based fees / road user charges

Fuel taxes are an indirect fee for road use—more efficient vehicles use less fuel to travel the same distance as less efficient vehicles but may result in comparable wear and tear (within similar vehicle classes). If one is interested in directly allocating the costs of the infrastructure to a vehicle, it may be preferable to simply directly charge users for that upkeep through a mileage-based fee, also referred to as road user charges (RUCs) or a vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) fee.

Some RUCs may be weight-based, which better allocates the wear and tear of the trucking industry on our nation’s roads. While there is no federal RUC, the Department of Transportation has funded a number of state-based pilot programs.

Road user charges provide a more direct connection between funding and use than fuel taxes. Additionally, because higher-income households travel more miles and have more efficient vehicles overall, shifting from a fuel tax to a RUC can be a progressive act.

Because a greater percentage of purchases for low-income households are in the forms of goods rather than services, RUCs focused on the most damaging vehicles (commercial trucks) can be even more regressive than general sales taxes.

Personal and corporate income taxes

General government funding represents the largest source of funding for transportation today, and for most states as well as the federal government, the largest source of tax revenue for this spending are taxes on personal and corporate income.

Income taxes are generally the most progressive tax, with rates typically increasing for higher income thresholds.

Exemptions for capital gains or the treatment of business income/losses can significantly reduce the tax rate of wealthier households, flattening the overall tax code.

It’s not just about where the money comes from, but where it goes

There are a host of different ways government and transportation agencies raise revenue for the provision of services, but no matter the revenue source, our system is defined by where that revenue is spent. While most sources of revenue are regressive, progressive distribution of those revenues prioritizing the mobility of lower-income households can help drive towards an equitable transportation system.

While some funding mechanisms may send price signals to users to make more sustainable choices, it’s impossible to take a choice that isn’t available. And so many around the country right now have either the option of an extremely expensive and burdensome car-dependence or underfunded transit alternatives with lengthy headways and/or insufficient coverage to access jobs and other important destinations.

The latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office continue to show that federal revenue does not match federal spending, and at current levels the system is likely to break down by 2028. As I’ve noted throughout this series, funding has failed to keep pace with our choices. But ultimately, what will bankrupt the Highway Trust Fund is not that we have failed to increase fuel taxes—it is that we have failed to support a broader array of mobility choices.

Whether the funding comes from more equitably charging drivers for their impacts or simply by digging even deeper into the Treasury coffers, the next surface transportation bill needs to fund a more holistic, diverse transportation system. Or we will continue to fail to provide folks in the US with the freedom to move.

The science is clear that continued business-as-usual fossil fuel production and use is totally incompatible with a livable climate. The impacts of prolonged fossil fuel dependence have led to daily realities of deadly heat, intensifying floods, worsening wildfires, rising seas, deepening public health harms, water scarcity, and environmental degradation. Many of us have felt these changes personally. And yet, even as governments acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis, the political system has struggled to say plainly what many people have known and the science demands: fossil fuels must be phased out.

Despite the science, international climate talks have struggled to directly address the role of fossil fuels, like coal, oil, and gas. At COP28 in 2023, nations for the first time agreed on transitioning away from fossil fuels but since then have struggled to implement that hard-won consensus. The most recent round of global climate negotiations, COP30, ended without agreement on a roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels.   

Some governments chose not to treat that omission as acceptable. A group of countries, led by Colombia and the Netherlands, stepped forward to create a separate international space, complementing but explicitly not meant to replace the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), focused explicitly on sharing practical measures on how to move away from fossil fuels. (Here’s a description on what the conference is about, and not about). After decades of delay and political obstruction, this decision reflects a shift toward confronting the economic, social, and legal realities of fossil fuel dependence head on, and signals that leadership is emerging and progress is possible in different venues.

At the same time, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago has also launched a process to create a Roadmap for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in a Just, Orderly and Equitable Manner and opened a process to solicit input from all parties on this. At the upcoming UNFCCC intersessional talks in June leading up to COP31, it will be critical to find avenues of progress toward an agreement on this contentious issue. The Santa Marta conference could provide valuable practical insights for that purpose.

From avoidance to acknowledgment and back again

For much of the history of the United Nations (UN) climate talks known as COP, countries have failed to address fossil fuels explicitly. Negotiators focused on emissions targets and temperature goals while sidestepping the sources of those emissions. This avoidance was by design. Coal, oil, and gas sit at the center of powerful economic and political interests, and the fossil fuel industry has worked hard to ensure they aren’t directly named or held accountable.

That is why the climate agreement reached in 2023 during Dubai’s COP28 marked a turning point. While fossil fuels had edged into the negotiations a couple years earlier in Glasgow (where for the first time the decision called for a phasedown of coal), Dubai went further. For the first time in nearly three decades of climate negotiations, the outcome text explicitly called for transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems. The language was imperfect and lacked firm timelines and full clarity, but it nonetheless represented a clear break from decades of avoidance.

But progress at COP28 also exposed the fragility of consensus-based negotiations. As last year’s COP30 negotiations concluded in Belém, Brazil, the latest text contained no mention of fossil fuels at all. The omission was striking, not because the science had changed, but because more than 80 countries had called for a roadmap to end fossil fuels, yet, political resistance reasserted itself, again.

Fossil Fuel influence at climate talks

The repeated failure to explicitly address fossil fuels in climate agreements reflects the sustained influence of the fossil fuel industry within the climate negotiations themselves including the presence of ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods at the climate talks in Dubai and Shell’s claims to have influenced the Paris agreement. It also reflects the continued failure of Global North countries to provide climate finance to enable lower income countries to make the transition away from fossil fuels in a fair and equitable way.

At COP30 in Belém, more than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the talks, making up roughly one in every twenty five attendees. This was the largest concentration of fossil fuel industry representatives ever recorded at a UN climate summit. Industry lobbyists outnumbered the official delegations of nearly every country.

This matters because it shapes what language survives the negotiating process. Proposals that would commit governments to phasing out fossil fuels are routinely weakened or removed, while voluntary and ambiguous formulations remain. When fossil fuels are named at all, as they were in Dubai, the pushback is immediate and well coordinated.

The result is a persistent mismatch between climate science, finance, and climate action. The science calls for a rapid and managed decline in fossil fuel production coupled with a just, funded transition. The negotiations, influenced by those with a financial stake in delay, struggle even to say the words.

When consensus fails, leadership matters

The UNFCCC’s consensus-based approach is vital to ensure that every country—no matter how small or large—has a voice in global climate agreements. Unfortunately, fossil fuel entities and some countries also have a track record of using that as a cover to dilute or obstruct ambitious outcomes.  

As the COP30 text dropped, the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands announced that they would co-host the first International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, to be held in April 2026 in Santa Marta, Colombia. The announcement was a clear statement that there are governments are no longer willing to compromise ambition at the expense of people around the world.

History shows that this kind of leadership is often how change happens. When multilateral forums stall, smaller groups of committed governments have stepped in to redefine what is possible. These efforts do not replace established intergovernmental processes. They create pressure, ideas, and political space that eventually reshape them.

By initiating a process focused explicitly on fossil fuel phaseout, Colombia and the Netherlands are responding to long standing calls from frontline communities, Indigenous peoples, climate vulnerable nations, and experts who have argued that climate action must confront fossil fuel production itself, not only emissions at the tailpipe or smokestack.

What this conference is designed to do

The first International Conference on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels is intended to move the global conversation from recognition to implementation. Its purpose is to develop practical pathways for ending fossil fuel expansion and managing a fair and orderly transition away from fossil fuels.

The conference is structured to address gaps that have remained unresolved in global climate talks. Over several days, participants will engage directly with the technical, economic, fiscal, labor, governance challenges of fossil fuel decline, and opportunities for transitioning to clean energy. This includes how to manage public revenues and jobs in fossil fuel dependent economies, how to expand access to clean and affordable energy, and how to halt new fossil fuel projects while addressing existing harms.

The meeting is also oriented toward shared outcomes. Participants are working toward the foundations of a global roadmap for fossil fuel phaseout, alongside principles and financing frameworks for a just transition.

Equally important is how the conference is organized. Scientists, workers, subnational governments, Indigenous and Afro descendant communities, and civil society are all part of the process, ensuring that transition pathways are informed by evidence, lived experience, and public participation.

The conference represents the first giant step in an effort to turn fossil fuel phaseout from a contested demand into a coordinated global project, grounded in responsibility, fairness, and shared leadership.

What a fast, fair fossil fuel phaseout really means

A fossil fuel phaseout is often misrepresented by fossil fuel interests as an abrupt shutdown or an unrealistic ideal. In practice, it is a structured process that is already underway.

Phaseout means a rapid and sustained decline in the production and use of coal, oil, and gas, with the goal of reaching near-zero use. While some limited applications may remain difficult to eliminate entirely, most fossil fuel use can, and must, be replaced through direct electrification, renewable energy, efficiency, energy storage, and demand-side solutions.

Fast means acting on responsible timelines consistent with climate science and technological feasibility, prioritizing deep emissions cuts in this decade rather than deferring action. Technologies needed to drive these reductions already exist and are increasingly cost-competitive and more efficient.

Fair means centering people. It requires addressing the disproportionate pollution burdens borne by low-income communities and communities of color, supporting workers and regions affected by the transition, and ensuring universal and democratic access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy. It also means that wealthy nations and fossil fuel producers, which bear the greatest historical responsibility for emissions, must move first and provide financial support to enable transitions elsewhere.

A just phaseout does not rely on unproven or marginal solutions to excuse continued fossil fuel expansion. While technologies like carbon capture or carbon removal can play limited roles, they cannot reduce environmental injustices and public health harms of fossil fuels and are not substitutes for immediate and sharp reductions in fossil fuel production and use.

Achieving a just fossil fuel phaseout is requires more than a technological shift

Moving away from fossil fuels requires a coordinated process that combines proven clean energy solutions, deliberate planning, and sustained public investment to ensure that people and communities benefit rather than bear the costs of change. Many studies show that a rapid shift to clean energy is good for the economy and public health, even as it helps address the climate crisis. Fossil fuel price volatility is also a significant challenge for people’s pocketbooks, especially for those with the lowest incomes. Meanwhile, renewable energy resources like wind and solar, coupled with battery storage, are quickly becoming the cheapest sources of new power in most places across the world.

But technology alone does not deliver a just transition. Phasing out fossil fuels affects real people whose livelihoods and community services have long been tied to extraction and combustion. That is why a fast and fair phaseout requires proactive policies to support workers and communities before disruption occurs. Evidence-based transition plans include wage replacement, continued health coverage, pension protections, retraining, and job placement assistance for displaced workers. These investments are modest compared to the overall cost of the energy transition and are essential to ensuring that workers who powered the economy for generations are not left behind. Communities also need targeted support to diversify their economies, stabilize public budgets, and plan for a future beyond fossil fuels.

A just transition to clean energy also needs to  ensure that the benefits  reach everyone, especially the most vulnerable communities. Renewable energy can reduce energy costs and pollution overall, but without intentional design, they risk reproducing existing inequities. When designing a roadmap we must ensure that Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and low-income communities have full access to the new jobs, economic development, and entrepreneurship initiatives that accelerated commitments to clean energy will yield. While renewable energy will likely lower costs overall, low- and moderate-income households should be particularly supported in accessing clean energy technologies and reducing their energy burdens. And through it all, frontline communities directly affected by changes in energy policy and practice should have power in decision-making processes.

Drawing the roadmap

The fight for a fossil fuel phaseout is, at its core, a fight for honesty and a question of political will. Honesty about what is driving climate change. Honesty about who bears its costs. And honesty about what it will take to build a safer, healthier, and more just world.

The absence of fossil fuels from COP30’s text is a reminder that progress is not guaranteed and powerful interests don’t give up easily. But the leadership shown by countries stepping forward, and by communities demanding change, makes clear that silence is no longer acceptable.

A global phaseout of fossil fuels is necessary and achievable. The task now is to accelerate it—fairly, deliberately, and together—and to ensure that the roadmap we build leaves no one behind.

Operators botched a safety test and took the reactor into an unstable state, causing a rapid rise in power that triggered violent steam explosions that blew apart the reactor core and surrounding structures. Fires burned for days. A massive amount of radioactivity dispersed across the former Soviet Union and much of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were evacuated or relocated from contaminated areas, and a 30-kilometer radius “exclusion zone” was established that is still in place today. Dozens of emergency personnel died within weeks from acute radiation syndrome, and thousands of children developed thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine exposure. Ultimately, tens of thousands of cancer cases throughout Europe are projected to occur from the radioactive pollution caused by the disaster.

The United States and many other countries have sought to distance themselves from the potential for a Chernobyl-like accident by asserting that their nuclear regulators would never have licensed a reactor with the safety flaws of the RBMK (a Russian acronym for “high-power channel-type reactor,” the Chernobyl-4 design), and that light-water reactors (LWRs), by far the most common type of power reactor in operation, are far safer. While this argument has some validity, soon after the accident it became clear the safety benefits of LWRs compared to the Chernobyl-4 RBMK were not as great as advertised—a point later illustrated by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi triple LWR meltdown in Japan. And today, many of the regulatory requirements and standards that underlie this confidence in the safety of the US nuclear fleet are being thrown by the wayside as the Trump administration recklessly pushes to “unleash” nuclear energy as quickly as possible.

It can’t happen here… or can it?

After the April 1986 Chernobyl accident, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the independent nuclear safety and security agency created a little over a decade earlier to oversee commercial nuclear facilities, conducted a review of its potential implications for the safety of US nuclear power plants. In the process, the NRC convinced itself that such a catastrophe could simply not happen here. The agency highlighted numerous factors that distinguished the Soviet approach to nuclear power plant design and operation from that of the United States and other Western countries. Chief among these were requirements for nearly leak-tight, robust “containment” structures, strict limits on operation in unstable states that could experience rapid, uncontrollable power increases, and offsite emergency plans to protect the public in the event of a serious accident. Consequently, the NRC concluded that “no immediate changes are needed in the NRC’s regulations regarding the design or operation of U.S. commercial nuclear reactors.”

While the NRC did not believe its regulations were inadequate after Chernobyl, it certainly didn’t suggest they were too tough at the time. But in subsequent decades, the agency has been under constant pressure from the nuclear industry and many lawmakers to weaken its standards. This resulted in the lax oversight that allowed the Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio to come close to experiencing a serious loss-of-coolant accident and potential meltdown in 2002, and forced the NRC to temporarily slow down the pace of deregulation. But ultimately, the industry influence campaign culminated in the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in May 2025, which have undermined the foundation of independent nuclear facility licensing and oversight that Congress put in place over 50 years ago when it split the Atomic Energy Commission into separate regulatory and promotional agencies—the present-day NRC and DOE.

And the worst is yet to come. The NRC is in the process of rewriting all its regulations and guidance in response to EO 14300, “Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” with the explicit purpose of watering down safety and security standards to accelerate licensing of new facilities and reduce oversight of operating ones. And EO 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” directed the DOE to create a pilot program that would expedite the approval of three new nuclear reactors with the goal of achieving “criticality” (initiating a neutron chain reaction) by July 4, 2026—requiring an unprecedented and reckless rate of speed for construction and commissioning.

As a result of this vast lessons-unlearned exercise, companies may soon be building reactors across the United States that have more in common with Chernobyl than most people may realize. For example, in March, the NRC issued a permit in record time to TerraPower, a company co-founded by Bill Gates, to construct a 345-megawatt power reactor called the “Natrium” in the town of Kemmerer, Wyoming. The NRC approved the Natrium, a fast-neutron reactor, even though the design lacks a containment structure, is vulnerable to rapid, autocatalytic power increases, and uses a coolant, liquid sodium, that can catch fire—all adding up to what can be reasonably called a “Cowboy Chernobyl.”

Chernobyl lessons: learned and unlearned

In 1989, following its review of the causes of the Chernobyl accident, the NRC issued a report entitled “Implications of the Accident at Chernobyl for Safety Regulation of Commercial Nuclear Power Plants in the United States.” The report listed a number of specific areas in response to the accident that warranted attention by the NRC. These included reactivity accidents, accidents at low and zero power, multiple-unit protection, fires, containment, emergency planning, severe-accident phenomena, and graphite-moderated reactors. Today, the NRC, the DOE, and the nuclear industry are all busy unlearning the lessons of Chernobyl in each of these areas. Below, we focus on one of the most critical: the need for containment.

To contain (with a structure) or not to contain (with a structure)? That is the question

Ten years ago, on the 30^th anniversary of Chernobyl, the NRC once again invoked the critical role of reactor containments in differentiating the safety of the US fleet from the Chernobyl design:  “U.S. reactors have containment buildings equipped with walls that are several feet thick and have a steel liner on the interior to help prevent the release of radioactivity during a severe accident,” NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said in a statement. “During the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident, the containment structure served that function effectively.”

Yet only two years later, the NRC decided to abandon its longstanding design principle that “reactor containment and associated systems shall be provided to establish an essentially leak-tight barrier against the uncontrolled release of radioactivity to the environment …”. For new, non-light-water reactors—designs like the Natrium that use coolants other than ordinary water—the agency gave the green light for approving designs without conventional containment structures. Instead, the NRC would also accept so-called “functional” containments, wonk-speak for a regulatory rollback that would allow reactor applicants to take credit for other design features to provide a containment-like function and forgo a physical containment.

In addition to the Natrium, another proposed non-light-water power reactor design without a containment is the Xe-100, an 80-megawatt, “pebble-bed” high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR). Its developer, X-energy, is applying to the NRC to build four Xe-100s adjacent to a Dow chemical plant in Seadrift, Texas. Unlike LWRs, these types of reactors use “tri-structural isotropic” (TRISO) fuel,  which the DOE likes to say is “the most robust fuel on Earth.” X-energy and other HTGR developers claim that the fuel is so safe that a physical containment is not needed.

However, as detailed in this legal filing that UCS helped prepare for a hearing petition filed by the group San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper against the Xe-100 construction permit application, TRISO fuel is not nearly as robust as its promoters claim, and there is significant uncertainty about how it will perform in certain types of accidents. Indeed, X-energy’s own accident analysis shows that the fuel could exceed the maximum safe temperature by several hundred degrees Celsius. The company has simply not made the case at this preliminary stage that the reactor can be safely operated without a containment.

X-Energy has only recently begun a multi-year testing program to attempt to address uncertainties in fuel performance. Nevertheless, the NRC appears poised to allow construction of the containment-less design to proceed before the data from such testing is obtained. But even if the fuel performs far worse than the application assumes, it is highly unlikely that the NRC would require X-energy to undertake an extremely costly retrofit to add containments to the four reactors before allowing them to operate.

Given the emphasis that the NRC formerly placed on the safety benefits of physical containments, why would it take this step? The answer is simple: cost. Physical containment structures, which typically require large quantities of high-quality reinforced concrete, are expensive. A 2020 MIT study found that the containment was one of the largest contributors to the cost of light-water reactors. Thus a quick way to cut nuclear power project costs would be to leave out the containment.  And for some new reactor types and deployment models—think small modular reactors being hauled by truck to your local data center—having a physical containment would be completely impractical as well as unaffordable. 

The problem here is that eliminating physical containments is a truly pound-foolish approach to reducing the high cost of nuclear power, as the Chernobyl experience has shown. What the NRC is allowing them to be replaced with, functional containment, is not an adequate substitute. One of the primary roles of containment is to provide “defense-in-depth”—an extra level of assurance in place to compensate for gaps in understanding of how the reactors themselves will work during accidents. And for new reactor designs with limited or no operating experience, there is an awful lot that the developers and the NRC simply do not understand and cannot accurately predict. Thus, the role of containment in helping to offset the unknown risks posed by new, experimental designs is more important than ever.

But the NRC is approving functional containments for new reactors, such as the Natrium and the Xe-100, based on paper safety studies that have had little to no actual real-world validation. The agency is allowing applicants to exclude accident scenarios from their safety analyses that could demonstrate the need for a physical containment, based on speculation that they are so improbable they do not need to be considered. This is little different than the approach Soviet reviewers took when they approved the Chernobyl design with only a partial containment.

According to the NRC’s 1986 Chernobyl review, “credible accidents with potentially serious consequences” were not discussed in the Soviet safety analysis, “presumably because they [were] considered to be of sufficiently low probability to justify disregarding them in the design basis.” These included “rapid reactivity excursions” and other accident sequences that occurred during the Chernobyl accident. The report also stated that “an important result of the decision to consider only pipe breaks below the reactor as credible is that there is no containment surrounding the outlet piping above the reactor.”

This reasoning will sound familiar to anyone acquainted with the “risk-informed” regulatory approach that the NRC  recently approved for new reactor licensing, which includes processes for addressing questions such as the adequacy of functional containment. In the new 10 CFR Part 53 rule issued in March, applicants are allowed to use either “probabilistic risk assessments” or “systematic risk evaluations” to develop the spectrum of accident sequences that are considered in the licensing basis. The lack of any guidance for carrying out such a “systematic risk evaluation,” including a standard for determining the worst-case accident that needs to be considered in designing a reactor, provides ample opportunity for the kind of subjective cherry-picking that the Soviets used in developing the Chernobyl design and justifying the lack of a full-blown containment.

The NRC’s approval of the Natrium construction permit and its likely approval of the Xe-100 are setting dangerous precedents for all future reactor proposals, most of which are containment-free designs. But fortunately, there has been very little actual new nuclear plant construction yet, and the NRC has ample opportunity to change course before it allows irreversible mistakes to be made. On the occasion of the 40^th Chernobyl anniversary, the NRC should take a hard look in the mirror and reconnect with its 1989 finding that “the most important lesson [of Chernobyl] is that it reminds us of the continuing importance of safe design in both concept and implementation … and of backup features of defense in depth against potential accidents.”

This week also marks the 20^th anniversary of my own visit to see the devastation within the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which is seared into my memory. If anyone still needs convincing that it’s a terrible idea to allow reactors without real containment structures to be built across the United States, I highly recommend the Chernobyl tour (once the war is over of course).

Investors who have long understood these risks proposed resolutions that would request companies to show how they will protect investors if oil and gas demand declines. But those resolutions won’t appear on the proxy tickets of the biggest publicly-traded oil and gas companies due to longstanding corporate efforts to silence shareholders. US-based corporations were particularly emboldened to reject proposals this year thanks to permission granted by the government’s financial regulator. Shareholders, however, are pushing back with lawsuits demanding that companies honor shareholders’ legal rights.

BP: Canary in the corporate coalmine

The drama playing out this shareholder season is especially high at BP, which suffered a sharp decline in stock value in recent years. Though many factors contributed to the company’s woes—including the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster—some investors blamed the company’s previous investments in renewable energy. In response, BP appointed a new CEO and board chair tasked with refocusing company strategy on oil and gas, while retaining its pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

In keeping with its renewed focus on fossil fuels, BP committed two sins of omission on its on its proxy ticket: first, by refusing to include a climate-related resolution, and second, by seeking to nullify previously-approved resolutions on greenhouse gas emissions.

The first instance involves a resolution filed by sixteen institutional investors, including large pension funds, asking BP to report on how it will generate returns for shareholders if demand for oil and gas declines. This is not a rhetorical question: Even before Iran, scenarios modeled by organizations such as Rystad Energy and the International Energy Agency projected demand peaking between 2030 and 2035.

BP excluded the resolution, claiming it attempts to boss around the company’s board, though Shell included an identical resolution filed by the same investors on its proxy statement. Oddly, BP accepted a similar resolution filed by the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility calling on the company to report on how its plans to increase oil and gas investment squares with declining-value trends in oil and gas exploration. BP asked shareholders to reject the proposal, raising the ire of shareholders like the gigantic California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) pension fund. CalSTRS recently announced it had moved $600 million out of oil and gas majors to reduce the fund’s exposure to climate risk.

In the second instance, BP’s management is asking shareholders to revoke two older resolutions—one from 2019 and one from 2015—asking the company to report emissions from its operations, among other metrics. BP says recent government policies make the reporting unnecessary, but investors say the loss of information diminishes accountability, particularly given BP’s climate commitments.

Investors published an open letter earlier this month criticizing BP’s rejection of the demand-related resolution and the move to end the disclosures, calling for the deposition of BP’s board chairman to boot. “This is, ultimately, a question about whether the commitments a board makes to its shareholders are upheld,” the investors wrote.

Regulators’ neglect drives shareholders to court

The biggest US oil companies are aided in the boardroom this year by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the government’s financial regulator, abdicating its foundational responsibility to mediate resolutions.

The 1934 law that created the SEC states that companies must vote on shareholder proposals that follow the law’s guidelines. If companies and shareholders disagree on whether a proposal followed those guidelines, they historically appealed to the SEC to review the proposal. SEC Chair Paul Atkins said in November 2025 the agency will no longer fill that role, allowing companies to reject proposals at will—and forcing disenfranchised shareholders to sue.

Many companies targeted resolutions related to climate change. The investor advocate As You Sow filed a resolution in January asking the insurance company Chubb to study whether subrogation—a legal process allowing insurers to recover costs from at-fault parties—could reduce losses resulting from climate change. Insurance premiums have climbed in the wake of climate-related disasters as companies pass losses on to homeowners.

The resolution pointed out that attribution science “has developed sufficiently to assign responsibility for climate change to responsible parties,” forming the basis of recent legislative proposals in California and Hawaii. When Chubb refused to include the resolution on its proxy ticket, As You Sow filed a lawsuit alleging Chubb violated the 1934 law.

Big Oil CEOs and anti-regulatory crusaders will likely call these lawsuits excessive. They should pause and recall the lawsuit ExxonMobil filed against shareholders in January 2024 to block a resolution asking the company to set global warming emissions reduction targets. Though the SEC’s adjudication process was still in effect, ExxonMobil bypassed it to send investors a message, pushing ahead with the lawsuit even after the proponents dropped the resolution. The lawsuit created such a chilling effect that ExxonMobil shareholders have not had the opportunity to vote on any climate-related resolutions since.

Energy shocks show resolutions’ relevance

Given President Trump’s illegal war of aggression against Iran, resolutions demanding that companies address a lower-demand future seem prescient. Prior to the war, energy outlooks by BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil projected an increase in oil and gas demand, and their production plans reflect that optimism. Surveys comparing corporate and non-corporate energy outlooks show that corporate scenarios generally project higher demand for fossil fuels, in part because they tend to have lower estimates of changes in consumer behavior and overlook the rapidly decreasing costs of renewable energy sources. They also neglect to mention their lobbying against policies that would reduce demand.

The new energy map created by the Middle East conflict calls those assumptions into question, adding another level of risk to an already risk-plagued industry. Though oil companies usually devote some boilerplate language in their annual filings to the risk posed by political upheaval, they do not address the fact that oil and gas are more vulnerable to geopolitical risk than other forms of energy. A global pivot away from fossil fuels and toward renewables in order to shore up energy security is a very real possibility. Such a move is already at work in Europe, and studies show that geopolitical risk depresses fossil fuel demand and increases renewable energy investment even in the BRICS economies. As high carbon emitters, oil and gas companies are also more impacted by government policies and litigation related to addressing the harms of climate change to people and the economy.

The resolutions blocked by oil and gas companies this year attempt to address this reality: “Transparent disclosure of how BP would navigate declining demand scenarios is…essential not only for assessing company-level resilience, but also for understanding risks to shareholders’ diversified holdings,” resolution sponsors stated in their letter.

Among those reckoning with reality, a consensus is building that the risks associated with the fossil-fuel status quo are too high—for people’s health and pocketbooks, the economy, and for the climate. CEOs can battle with investors in the boardroom and courtroom, but they can only keep that reality at bay for so long.       

But what exactly is El Niño, and what makes this event super? And what happens when El Niño interacts with fossil fuel-caused climate change—the long-term increase in global temperatures that is already turbocharging extreme weather events around the world? Unfortunately, the two of them together might be bad news for our climate system.

El Niño events are a natural part of Earth’s climate system

El Niño events are characterized by warmer-than-usual ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Equatorial Pacific off the coasts of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. Despite the ocean surface warming being rather small in area compared with the rest of the world’s massive oceans, the impacts of El Niño events are far-reaching. They affect weather patterns around the world, even at home here in the United States.

Super El Niño events are more intense than regular El Niño events. In a super El Niño, the eastern Equatorial Pacific experiences an extreme amount of warming, bringing about an even more forceful change to weather patterns around the world.

El Niño events, and even super El Niño events (though more rarely), have likely been happening for at least the last 10,000 years. Because of their far-reaching impacts on the world’s weather patterns, El Niño may have led to the demise of several ancient civilizations including the Moche and the Inca.

El Niño is part of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This oscillation is defined by three states: an ENSO neutral phase, a La Niña phase, and an El Niño phase. During ENSO neutral conditions, easterly winds flow across the tropical Pacific, pushing warm water toward Indonesia. Sometimes, these winds strengthen, pushing more warm water into Indonesia, cooling the Central and Eastern Pacific, and causing a La Niña to develop. An El Niño is characterized by weaker easterly winds in the Pacific, pushing less warm water to Indonesia and warming the Central Eastern Pacific more than usual. For more information, check out this excellent climate.gov blog on ENSO, where you’ll learn about how the ocean and atmosphere work together to bring about the different states of ENSO.

El Niño and climate change together is bad news for us

2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, and the past three years (2023-2025) averaged more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. This is all due to fossil fuel-caused climate change. Earth also typically experiences a warmer year than usual when an El Niño event is present (check out the section “El Niño impacts on the rest of the world” below). Combine this with global warming, and you get a very warm year, often record-breaking. If a super El Niño event develops later this year, it could push Earth to new global temperature records.

Check out this figure above: the orange lines on the right represent different model forecasts for global surface temperature anomaly later this year. Some climate models show global temperatures briefly exceeding 2.0°C above preindustrial levels, driven by the potential super El Niño later this year combined with global warming. This would be the first time in recorded history the planet reaches a temperature anomaly this warm, and not to mention we just passed the 1.5°C warming threshold for the first time in 2024!

While the majority of models predict global monthly temperature anomalies will remain below 2.0°C, the fact that there’s a nonzero chance of +2.0°C happening is shocking, and would signify a major acceleration in fossil fuel-caused climate change, pushing us closer to crossing some tipping point thresholds. Needless to say, we don’t need climate change and El Niño mixing. And since El Niño is a natural part of the climate system we can’t control, maybe we should back off on emitting fossil fuels and causing global warming!

El Niño impacts in the United States

El Niño events affect weather patterns around the world, including here in the United States. The figure below highlights these changes during an El Niño: the northern part of the country usually experiences warmer weather than normal, and the southern part of the country is usually wetter and cooler than normal.

The thing is, it’s not a guarantee these regions will experience these conditions during an El Niño. For example, while coastal California typically sees more rain in the winter than usual during an El Niño, it actually saw less rain than normal during the 2015/2016 super El Niño, which was one of the strongest El Niño events on record. However, California’s two wettest years on record since 1951 were both El Niño years (1982-1983 and 1997-1998), and El Niño years on average do result in more rain than La Niña and ENSO neutral years in California.

Of course, some extra rain for the Southwest would be helpful next fall and winter. The west, especially its interior portions, is undergoing a short-term drought due to a dry winter season this past year, and a longer-term megadrought that started 26 years ago. Additionally, the west experienced record-shattering temperatures last month that were virtually impossible without climate change. Some cities broke their all-time maximum April high temperature records in March! The heatwave worsened an already-terrible drought, with record-low snowpack across much of the west developing, which could lead to an active upcoming wildfire season.

Could the El Niño bring some much-needed rain to the West? Could it bring too much rain like the intense flash floods of the 1997-1998 El Niño? It’s still too early to say. It’s worth noting that El Niño’s impacts in the US are typically restricted to only late fall and winter months. So any extra rainfall influenced by El Niño won’t arrive until then at the earliest.

El Niño impacts on the rest of the world

El Niño events affect weather patterns around the world as well. If there’s an El Niño present during the summer and fall season, which is likely for this year, it can actually suppress hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. This is because El Niño causes an increase in the amount of descending air over the Caribbean.

In order for a hurricane to develop, it needs rising, moist air. Without rising air, you don’t get hurricanes. This fact is reflected in the latest hurricane season forecast from Colorado State University, which is predicting a slightly below-average season due to the likely development of El Niño this summer.

Impacts don’t stop in the Caribbean though: El Niño typically suppresses the Indian monsoon, while southern African nations, Indonesia, and Australia typically experience drier and hotter conditions than usual. Because of this, El Niño events impact crop yields around the world (check out the figure below from NASA).

Lastly, it’s important to note that during strong El Niño events, Earth typically records a new maximum global temperature record, as I mentioned earlier. This is because of two things: one, the planet is warmer overall during an El Niño event, and two, fossil fuel-caused climate change is gradually warming the planet. The warmest years up to a certain point are caused by the combination of El Niño, a natural part of Earth’s climate system, and climate change, which is human caused!

Take a look at the figure below. You can think of El Niño as kind of an escalator, slowly pushing global mean temperatures to new records thanks to climate change.

It’s worth noting that 2024, the hottest year on record, actually occurred during an ENSO neutral year, and 2023, which was the third hottest year on record (or tied for second, depending on the source), occurred during a La Niña. But scientists are also still debating why 2023 and 2024 were so hot. All this to say it’s not a guarantee that an El Niño event will push the planet to record warm temperatures.

Climate Change and El Niño in more detail

El Niño is a part of ENSO, which is a natural oscillation in Earth’s climate system. But we live in a changed world due to the burning of fossil fuels. The world is warming at an accelerating pace, and because of that warming, the planet’s ocean and atmosphere system is fundamentally different.

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth assessment report found no clear evidence of an impact of climate change on ENSO (summarized nicely by a climate.gov blog here), a study published in 2023 found that variability in ENSO was changing due to climate change. Check out the figure below by climate.gov: before 1960, El Niño and La Niña events existed, but they weren’t that intense.

After 1960, it’s clear we began to see more intense swings between La Niña and El Niño. In the 2023 study by Cai and colleagues, they found that this change in ENSO amplitude is actually a signal of fossil fuel-caused climate change, and this behavior shows up in historical climate model simulations with added heat-trapping gases, like carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.

El Niño’s relationship with climate change doesn’t stop there. In a study published in 2024, scientists found that the impacts of ENSO on weather patterns around the world (called “teleconnections”) will worsen. Regions whose weather patterns change as a result of ENSO can expect those changes to become more extreme under climate change. And in a groundbreaking paper released just last month in Nature, scientists found that ENSO will also drive more extreme changes in regional ocean surface temperatures as a result of these strengthening teleconnections.

Again, if a super El Niño event develops later this year, Earth could be in for record-breaking global temperatures. Stay tuned as we continue following the developing El Niño this summer.

One of the barriers slowing down clean energy development has been long wait times to connect projects to the grid. The interconnection process is how generating projects receive approval from California’s grid operator (CAISO) to connect to the grid. CAISO runs a series of studies to determine whether a project can safely connect to the grid, or if additional grid upgrades are needed to accommodate the new project.

The interconnection process is a critical step to getting new clean energy resources online. However, it had gotten bogged down by an overwhelming number of applications and become a notable barrier to connecting new clean energy. This blog post will cover CAISO’s reforms to the interconnection process and their effectiveness at addressing the long wait times.

How did the interconnection process work prior to reforms?

CAISO used to run interconnection studies for all projects submitted to them. Interconnection studies are tricky because the ability of a project to connect to the grid also depends on the other generating projects already connected, and planning to connect, to the grid. For example, if a planned project drops out, the studies that incorporated that project become less precise. This dependency makes interconnection studies more complicated as more projects are being studied. Although the time to get through the interconnection process was slowing down, the number of projects being submitted was manageable for the process to move along.

In 2023, CAISO decided that was no longer the case. During its annual application window, which are named clusters, with 2023 being Cluster 15, CAISO received 347 gigawatts (GW) of interconnection requests from 541 projects, compared to 373 projects in Cluster 14 and 155 in Cluster 13. This large spike in Cluster 15 was on top of 185 GW already sitting in the interconnection queue. For perspective, CAISO also noted that only 165 GW of new resources would be needed to meet the state’s 2045 clean energy portfolio.

What reforms were implemented?

To address the interconnection issue, CAISO initiated reforms, implementing an Interconnection Process Enhancement (IPE) 3.0 in 2023 with three steps to improve the process. First, CAISO extended the deadlines for Cluster 14 studies, and paused Cluster 15 studies to give the agency time to reform the interconnection process for Cluster 15 requests and beyond. The next step was focusing on these new reforms.

At a high level, the reforms were intended to limit the number of projects being studied and prioritize projects to align with grid needs, market interest, and project viability. Specifically:

• CAISO now accepts only enough projects to meet 150 percent of the available capacity based on the point of interconnection’s transmission constraints. This limits the number of projects being studied to a more manageable number.
• All projects requesting to connect to the grid are now scored and ranked to decide which projects pass the 150 percent capacity threshold to reach the study stage. This prioritizes the projects being studied.

The scoring system uses metrics across commercial interest, project viability, and system need to rank projects with indicators in each of these categories below. Commercial interest points are given by load-serving entities (LSE), and other large electricity buyers and project viability are provided by project engineers.

Projects with the highest scores at each point of interconnection move to the next stage up to the 150 percent limit. As a note, because the 150 percent capacity is based on transmission constraints at each point of interconnection location, projects with the highest overall scores may not necessarily move forward, since some points of interconnection are more competitive than others.

The final step of IPE 3.0 modifies CAISO’s transmission plan deliverability (TPD). The TPD process allocates deliverability capacity for projects connecting to the grid. Projects must secure deliverability capacity to be eligible for resource adequacy, which is often important for project developers to secure project financing and buyers. Updating the TPD process was needed to align it with the other reforms and ensure that the most viable projects received deliverability capacity.

Has the new initiative been effective?

With the final step of IPE 3.0 approved only earlier last year, it’s difficult to fully assess the impact of the reforms. Broadly, the goals outlined at the outset—reducing project intake and queue management—have been successfully addressed. Cluster 15 has been reduced to a significantly more manageable number of projects that will go through the interconnection studies, and these projects are seemingly more viable by being further along in the development process. When the application window was initially opened in 2023, 541 projects totaling 347 GW were submitted. Following the implementation of the new process, 145 projects totaling 68 GW were passed to the stage for interconnection studies.

Cluster 15 is a good initial case study for the reforms. While generally a smooth process, there are a few notable issues that stand out:

1. Cluster 15 reveals the high variation of project scores that pass into the validation stage. Low scores were able to move to the next stage in some areas, whereas high scores did not pass in other areas depending on how competitive the area was and how much capacity was available.
   • Recommendation: More geographically granular data on transmission constraints would be useful for informing where projects could be sited. This would ensure that projects with higher scores, and are thus more viable, are being moved forward across the grid.
2. A notable number of projects were withdrawn after passing the 150 percent threshold stage. The number of projects decreased from 177 to 145 with an associated decrease of almost 30 percent of capacity. Even with the increased likelihood that these projects are completed, additional withdrawals could create concerns that CAISO is no longer moving enough projects forward.
   • Recommendation: The CAISO should consider another assessment window after projects are withdrawn to allow the next highest scoring projects to move through.
3. A potential deficiency in the process is an equity component to support environmental justice objectives. The scoring system does not consider and could even systemically disadvantage projects that serve these communities. For example, a recent petition at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission noted that Tribes face more financial challenges to obtaining the high commercial readiness deposits in the interconnection process. The scoring and ranking process under IPE 3.0 could systematically exclude projects that may not be as financially viable, but serve critical grid reliability needs of Tribal or disadvantaged communities.
   • Recommendation: Future IPEs should implement pathways to ensure equitable access in the interconnection process for all communities to access clean energy.

The IPE is an iterative process, and many of the initial reforms in IPE 3.0 triggered additional issues that need to be discussed. The next iteration, IPE 5.0, launched this past year to address new and lingering issues such as managing stagnant projects in the queue. This continued engagement is important to ensure the processes for connecting clean energy generation to the grid are evolving to match the clean energy needs of the state.

Across the country, grid operators are struggling to complete interconnection studies in a timely manner, and connect clean energy projects to the grid. With the current federal administration hostile to clean energy, states like California need to remain steadfast in the transition to a clean grid. CAISO’s interconnection reforms are an important step in accelerating that transition.

As Congress starts to reveal the results of closed-door discussions and start public bill markup, it’s an important moment to take stock of all the voices in the room influencing the debate. In July 2025, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) put out a call for public comments on advancing a surface transportation proposal focused on the nation’s most fundamental infrastructure needs. While we can’t expect a response from the administration, reviewing the comments ourselves provides a sampling of the ideas people are bringing in and what we’re up against.

The coalition behind a people-oriented and science-based transportation system

Past UCS research has shown that having more transportation choices, like walking, biking, and public transit, are a key part of a clean, prosperous, and just future. The reduced need to drive can lead to a potential $201 billion in energy infrastructure savings and a reduction of $128 billion in public health costs, along with saving US households nearly $6 trillion dollars in vehicle ownership costs through 2050. That’s all in addition to the long list of other benefits of more transportation options, such as supporting economic development and combating social isolation.

Because of this, we have science-based recommendations for better policies that Congress should consider. This ranges from investment in a federal program to run more transit, to maintaining our nation’s roadways before investing in more expansion, to supportive programs for vehicle electrification, to proportional representation in transportation planning agencies. You can see UCS’s full priorities here.

And we’re not alone. We are working alongside hundreds of partner organizations that are advocating similarly to support more transportation options. Some of these allies include:

• Community-based transportation advocates and coalitions like Move LA, Transit Forward Philadelphia, Our Streets (Minnesota), Missourians for Responsible Transportation, and MOVE Ohio, who organize thousands of individuals for more transportation options in their communities. Particularly active in this comment are bicycle advocacy organizations like Boise Bicycle Project, Central Indiana Cycling, and the League of American Bicyclists (national) highlighting the importance of safety and investment for biking and pedestrian infrastructure.
• National and local environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, GreenLatinos, Sunrise Movement KC, MountainTrue (North Carolina), and the CHARGE coalition recognize how more transportation options are not only essential for stewarding the climate and natural resources, but also are essential for affordable household costs and supporting vibrant neighborhoods.
• Business organizations like Greater Washington Partnership, the Real Estate Board of NY, and A Better City (Massachusetts) recognize that “high-quality, frequent transit strengthens our regional economy by efficiently connecting people to jobs, education, and healthcare.”
• Labor unions like the Transport Workers Union and Amalgamated Transit Union have firsthand experience on how to create high-quality jobs and support transit across the country.
• Disability rights groups like the American Federation for the Blind, Paralyzed Veterans of America, and Disability Rights South Dakota, and organizations advocating for older adults like the Maine Council on Aging, emphasize the role of transit in allowing people, especially nondrivers, to get to work, medical appointments, and be a part of society.
• Transportation experts like the American Planning Association and the American Society for Landscape Architects, who recognize that “investments should prioritize integrated mobility networks, transit, biking, walking, not solely vehicle throughput.”
• Many more community organizations like Genesis Interfaith Organizing (Bay Area), Sunflower Community Action (Kansas), and community health groups like Together for Brothers (New Mexico), who know how crucial the freedom to move is to their communities.

These organizations represent communities across the country—rural and urban—and people of all walks of life. But our voices are not the only ones in the mix…

Public agencies are crucial and need to go further

Because transportation policy can get obscured in detailed, technical language, oftentimes legislators turn to their constituent public agencies—state departments of transportation, metropolitan planning organizations, transit agencies—for guidance. This should be a shining example of evidence-based policymaking, but the history of transportation policy portends otherwise.

As my colleague Steven Higashide writes, “simply put, many interstate segments were built where they were because planners, engineers, and politicians did not value the neighborhoods they passed through or the people who lived there.” As a result, more than 475,000 households and a million people were displaced, according to USDOT estimates, and many more have been harmed by neighborhoods torn apart and the car dependent system we have today. Sometimes, these were decisions made on explicitly racist grounds, as was the case of I-65 being rerouted through a historic Black neighborhood in West Montgomery, Alabama.

It’s crucial to learn the lessons of the past for prioritizing community needs for more transportation options, but many have not. State departments of transportation (DOTs) such as those in Florida and Texas, do not hide their disdain for social equity and anything besides highway funding and their desire to be able to build more with less accountability. Other DOTs, including the group represented by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), make sure to include transit and other modes in their calls for more funding and more authority, but obscure how the high share of funding going towards highway programs causes an unsustainable and unjust status quo.

Local and regional transportation organizations offer a case for hope. The Local Officials in Transportation coalition comprises thousands of local governments and regional planning organizations that want to have more direct control of federal funds. This reflects a frequent tension with state DOTs, who often have greater control over project selection, over projects that are out of touch with local contexts. While these proposals are promising, in either scenario, outcomes hinge on processes ensuring community priorities within local, regional, and state agencies that lack transparency, are susceptible to political forces, and/or have boards that do not proportionally represent their constituents.

Transit agencies have perspectives that are even closer to community needs. From large agencies like the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to smaller ones like those represented by the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA), these agencies recognize the importance of investing in transit, especially in the context of fiscal cliffs that many are facing. One particularly strong voice is the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), calling for a number of improvements and increased investment in recognition of transit’s 5-to-1 economic returns on investment. Though, to the extent that these agencies accept the “80-20 split”, where 80% of federal transportation funds go to highways and 20% for public transit, transit agencies are getting a raw deal, where each dollar in transit investment comes with more than four times as much into a car-dependent status quo. 

To be sure, public agencies do the crucial work of keeping our communities mobile and connected. But they often are unable to advocate for a more visionary future and are saddled with the inertia of “the way things have always been done.”

Industry lobbying holds us back

All the while, the set of industries that receive over 75% of all transportation spending, namely the auto, oil, roadbuilding, and trucking industries, have been lobbying to keep the money flowing to a fossil-fueled and car-dependent status quo. Ranging from the American Road and Transport Builders Association (ARTBA) to the American Trucking Associations (ATA), these organizations have continued for decades to lobby Congress, raise money for political campaigns via PACs, and promote outdated science via affiliated research foundations.

These organizations are out in full force now advocating for their self-interest. Some clearly only advocate for more highway funding, like ATA or the Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America (SIGMA), while also advocating to remove the federal excise tax on new heavy-duty trucks, which constitutes nearly 40% of trucks’ financial contributions to our transportation system. In other words, while contributing more than 90% of the damage to our roadways, these industries want taxpayers to keep paying for their responsibility.

Many more industry groups are part of an “infrastructure consensus,” which coalesces around more money for the status quo (including a pittance for transit) and cutting regulations that make it harder to build. The premise is appealing—that infrastructure is a public good and an underrecognized long-term investment that we need a lot more of.

The truth is that not all infrastructure is created equal. Some, like the nation’s highways, came with a history of both progress and immense pain. The highway system decimated thousands of businesses yearly, worsened segregation and inequality, and resulted in transportation’s large health and climate impacts. Meanwhile, economists have increasingly realized that the highway system is mature, and that the rate of return for consumers per dollar in highway expansion is ten times less than it was at the start of interstate construction.

Meanwhile, what these parties get right is that transit has seen chronic disinvestment. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) goes as far as to say “additional federal funding support for transit operations is necessary to preserve safe, reliable, and efficient transit service.” This is a significant step for any industry organization with an interest in road-building, but they clearly show their priorities when they recommend $1 trillion in road and bridge funding, with only $152 billion for transit.

The facts of the matter are that the US transportation system isn’t working. It’s the second-highest household expense, and on its own, contributes more heat-trapping emissions than some of the largest countries in the world. The auto, oil, roadbuilding, and trucking industries represent particularly loud voices in the room who are advocating for more of the same, spending millions on lobbying and political campaigns to do so.

The public overwhelmingly favors more transportation choices

The majority of the public comments to USDOT, adding up to more than a thousand individuals, want a transportation system with more options. This makes sense. Across political parties, more than 80% of car users report having no choice but to drive, and nearly four times as many voters support increasing public transportation funding as support reducing it.

These comments span a wide range. There are harrowing stories of loved ones who were killed on our transportation system and how lives were changed forever. There are calls for bringing about the mental and physical health benefits from more active transportation modes like biking, There are self-identified Democrats and Republicans highlighting the fiscal benefits of multimodal transportation, and much more. Some highlights from these comments:

• “If our goal is to create the least fair and most inefficient and most expensive means of transportation in the world then [continuing] to put personal vehicles as the highest priority is the best way to accomplish it.”
• “Commuting by bike has had a noticeable impact on my mental health (as stated by my wife), not to mention my physical health! Oh and the money we save! I could go on and on!”
• “I need to drive a car for work and I am tired of congested streets. We don’t need more freeways or expansions.… Expansions also don’t work long term. What works long term is more public transit and better bicycle networks.”
• “I am a traffic engineer and urge USDOT to continue to support multi-modal projects. This is the most fiscally conservative pathway towards building financially solvent communities.”

It’s time to shed tired ideas

It’s clear that the science and the people are on the same side, and together we can push for federal transportation policies that better support our communities. Whether you’re a staffer in the halls of Congress or just someone who knows there’s a problem with our transportation system, we hope that you’ll work with us as we push for a cleaner, more prosperous, and just transportation future.

While it may not feel like Louisiana is teeming with data centers just yet, the boom in energy-hungry artificial intelligence is poised to change the landscape. We’re talking about multiple cities’ worth of electricity demand being added to the grid over the coming decade.

New modeling by the Union of Concerned Scientists has found that data center growth could leave Louisianans paying for billions of dollars in additional electricity system costs over the next 15 years. And under current policies, the AI facilities in the state are set to be powered largely by fossil fuels, bringing potentially billions of dollars in public health costs and tens of billions in global climate damages.

Preparation for this type of massive, yet highly uncertain, load growth requires careful attention by regulators and policymakers tasked with protecting the public. In other parts of the country, data centers have brought risks of costly and dangerous power outages while also raising utility bills at a time when energy costs are already rising for several other reasons. And depending on how data centers are powered, they can bring significant harms to public health and the global climate. Unfortunately, Louisiana’s current policies and regulatory approaches are not well set up to address the wide array of risks posed by the data center boom.

Fortunately, there are steps that policymakers and regulators, particularly the staff and elected officials at the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC), can take to protect their constituents from these risks and ensure that Big Tech’s burdens don’t fall on Louisiana residents and businesses. Let’s get into the details.

Data centers set to make Louisiana’s grid way more expensive

Depending on the extent of data center load growth, our findings show that over the next 15 years, Louisiana’s wholesale electricity system costs could be a cumulative $14 billion to $26 billion higher than they would be without data center growth. We call these the “Mid” and “High” data center growth scenarios, respectively. This analysis draws from state-level results from our Data Center Power Play report, a national-level study using the Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) modeling framework that was released earlier this year.

Louisiana ratepayers are at risk of paying substantial electricity system costs caused by data centers. “Bulk” electricity system costs are only at the wholesale level. Calculation was done by comparing the Mid and High Data Center Growth scenarios with a No Data Center Growth counterfactual scenario. Source: UCS

These costs are only at the wholesale level—essentially, the costs to build and operate large-scale power plants and transmission lines. It doesn’t reflect ”ratemaking” at the LPSC, the process whereby those wholesale costs are allocated to residents and other businesses.

However, the dollar amount reflected on energy bills includes other costs as well, such as the utility company’s profit margin.  These additional costs are covered by retail ratepayers, like residents and businesses. And Louisiana does not have comprehensive protections to insulate ratepayers from data center-triggered costs. In fact, the LPSC’s recent fast-track approval pathway, established through the recent “Lightning Amendment,” clears the way for potentially more than half of such costs to be passed to other ratepayers.

Data centers’ projected impact on the average Louisiana utility bill is uncertain, because that depends so heavily on how the LPSC allocates the wholesale electricity system costs between different types of customers (e.g., residential, commercial, industrial). But with electricity system costs potentially $26 billion higher due to data center load, and without comprehensive protections in place for other ratepayers, Louisianans are at risk of substantially subsidizing—to the tune of billions of dollars—Big Tech’s AI ventures.

Status quo would keep Louisiana over-reliant on a single fossil fuel: gas

About 75% of Louisiana’s electricity generation is currently from fossil gas power plants, making it one of the most gas-reliant states in the nation. Our analysis shows that under current policies, the state will meet growing demand with even more gas. This includes demand from data center companies, which thus far have not made any attempt to plan for flexible operations (essentially reducing demand during times of grid stress) in an effort to reduce overall costs and the need for new fossil fuel plants.

Therefore, without policy changes, the Louisiana power grid’s overdependence on a single fossil fuel, gas, would sustain into at least the 2040s, making up roughly two-thirds of the electricity mix in our 2041 modeling results.

Under current policies, Louisiana is projected to stay overreliant on gas-fired electricity. Source: UCS

The unpredictable spikes in utility bills that Louisianans are all-too-familiar with would therefore continue, since utilities pass fuel cost increases directly to their customers. The latest spike was caused by Winter Storm Fern in January 2026, which sent gas prices soaring above $30 per million British Thermal Units (MMBtu)—the highest in at least 29 years. For perspective, the price was around $3 per MMBtu just a week earlier. Though the effect on utility bills is not yet clear, ratepayers will feel the impacts of those price increases in the coming months even if they use the same amount of power.

While short-term commodity price changes aren’t captured by long-term modeling frameworks like ReEDS, those spikes can still have significant real-world impacts on energy burdens.  Some Louisianans were paying bills in 2025 that were 29% higher than the year before due to increases in gas prices. And during a 2022 price spike, some customers were paying double the fuel charges—these days roughly 20-30% of a total bill—than they were paying the year before.

Diversifying away from price-volatile fossil fuels and toward zero-marginal-cost resources like wind and solar can help protect ratepayers from these types of bill increases. Otherwise, Louisiana households will continue to be forced to fund the unpredictable costs of utilities’ overreliance on those fuels, whose price is sensitive to an increasing number of extreme weather events, and global conflicts such as the wars in Ukraine and Iran. While the US has thus far been insulated from the latter in terms of gas prices, that is not all guaranteed to be the case as the war continues.

Data centers set to bring higher public health and climate damages           

Beyond utility bill increases, data centers are also set to trigger higher public health costs and climate damages from Louisiana’s gas plants. Our findings show that the public health damages could range from $1.5 billion to $3 billion from 2026-2041 due to increases in nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) emissions, two pollutants that can cause respiratory and cardiac issues.  While these public health harms can cross state lines as pollutants flow downwind, the impacts are predominantly local.

Data centers drive billions of dollars in public health and climate damages as Louisiana relies on gas plants to meet growing electricity demand. Calculation was done by comparing the Mid and High Data Center Growth scenarios with a No Data Center Growth counterfactual scenario. Source: UCS

Over the same period, data center-driven increases in heat-trapping emissions from Louisiana fossil fuel plants could trigger $35 billion to $87 billion in global climate damages. While these damages are felt globally,  Louisiana already experiences a number of impacts that scientists expect to worsen as climate change continues, including hurricanes, heat waves, and sea level rise. It is therefore imperative that the state make concerted efforts to reduce both toxic air pollution like NO_x and SO₂, as well as heat-trapping emissions like carbon dioxide and methane.

But how much data center demand will actually come online?

One big question remains: how much data center growth is actually coming to Louisiana? The short answer: no one knows.

Regulated utilities have financial incentives to overestimate demand and overbuild, because they earn ratepayer-funded profits on capital infrastructure spending. We therefore have to take data center demand estimates from utilities with a skeptical eye.  

To account for the uncertainty, UCS ran multiple data center demand scenarios at the national level. Our “Mid Growth” scenario is in the range of other national-level studies. (See this blog for more on our latest national data center analysis.) However, in Louisiana specifically, looking at recent announcements in a vacuum makes the “High Growth” scenario seem far more likely, and maybe even conservative.

Our High Growth scenario projects about 5 GW of data center load added to Louisiana’s grid by 2041. Let’s compare this to Meta Platform’s plans for a new data center near Rayville, LA. The size of the data center expansion is thus far confidential, but Mark Zuckerburg said last year that the facility could grow to 5 GW, which would consume roughly six times the electricity as the entire city of New Orleans on an annual basis. Last year, the LPSC approved Entergy Louisiana’s application to build 2.3 gigawatts (GW) of gas capacity for this data center. And Entergy recently filed another LPSC application to build seven new gas plants totaling 5.2 GW on top of the already approved 2.3 GW, all for the expansion of Meta’s data center.

There’s much more to be said about this new application and who will end up covering the costs. But for now, I want to underscore the significant remaining uncertainty with the data center landscape in Louisiana and beyond, even as the press releases and LPSC applications make it all seem like a foregone conclusion.

To understand the uncertainty, we don’t have to look any farther than Meta itself. Right after Entergy got approval to build the first 2.3 GW of gas capacity for the data center, the tech giant fundamentally changed the financial structure of the planned AI facility. Meta offloaded 80% of the data center project ownership onto Blue Owl Capital—a much riskier company—and gave itself the option to exit the data center lease after just four years. The electricity infrastructure being built, meanwhile, will last for decades. Meta has financially shielded itself greatly, in no small part by getting a ratepayer guarantee of this long-lasting infrastructure.

Worries about an AI bubble bursting have only grown since UCS conducted this modeling in late 2025. These worries are due to a number of factors, including circular financing, lack of AI profitability in comparison to massive capital expenditures, private credit scares (of which Blue Owl is at the center), and now, Donald Trump’s war in Iran.

If the AI bubble isn’t bursting in the way some warn, and our High Growth scenario proves to be on the conservative side, then the need for safeguards is even more urgent, because the impacts will be that much greater. Policymakers at the LPSC should act now to protect communities from the wide array of risks stemming from the growth in data centers.

Looking ahead: better protections from data center threats are needed

As discussed above, we estimate that the growth in data centers could cause up to $26 billion in additional Louisiana electricity system costs between 2026 and 2041. The state would remain alarmingly overdependent on gas for its power sector needs, leaving ratepayers highly vulnerable to unpredictable price shocks. The additional pollution from these fossil fuel power plants specifically to serve data centers would trigger up to $3 billion in public health damages and up to $87 billion in global climate damages.

Fortunately, the commissioners at the LPSC have the ability to stave off a situation which is untenable for many of their constituents, particularly since an estimated 50% of households in the state are already financially struggling.

We recommend several reforms in our issue brief that would begin to put the state on a path toward a cleaner, more affordable, and more reliable electricity system. Included in these recommendations is an improved process for long-term utility resource planning, as well as comprehensive, mandatory ratepayer protections from data center-triggered costs.

We also recommend that the state take advantage of its significant clean resource potential, including by embracing long-range transmission planning by regional transmission grid operators MISO and SPP. Further, reforms are needed to enable a wider set of stakeholder voices to inform decisionmaking at the LPSC. For far too long, utilities have had disproportionate influence at the agency, and that is being perpetuated in part by low transparency and arbitrary barriers to participation.

The time is now for Louisiana utility regulators to protect their constituents from data center threats, and you can urge them to do so at this link. They should not continue to cater to Big Tech and utility company interests at communities’ expense.

This is a problem even in the best of times, but recent events are underlining the implications of excess fertilizer use. Now more than ever, understanding the true cost of this resource is key to building a food and farm system that is both economically resilient and environmentally sustainable.

Rising costs may bankrupt more farmers

Recent developments in the corn market underscore how fertilizer prices, production decisions, and broader policy adjustments are intertwined. Fertilizer costs represent a substantial share of operating expenses for US farmers, ranging between 33% and 44% for corn and 34% to 45% for wheat. That alone places enormous pressure on farm budgets.

Then came the tariffs of early 2025. These added an estimated 8% to 15% increase in agricultural input costs at a time when margins were already strained. More on this can be found in a blog post by my colleague Dr. Omanjana Goswami, who discussed the implications of tariffs on fertilizer costs. The situation worsened as key export markets contracted. Soybean exports, for example, declined from 985 million bushels in 2024 to 218 million bushels in 2025, while the dismantling of a USAID purchasing program eliminated another $2 billion in crop demand. The United States is experiencing a historic agricultural trade deficit as a result.

Compounding these pressures is the war against Iran, which effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, an essential shipping route for inputs used in fertilizer production, further disrupting global fertilizer markets and driving up input costs for farmers. My colleagues Dr. Goswami and Dr. Kathryn Anderson explored these impacts in recent posts.

These disruptions come at a moment when the United States is estimated to have a bumper harvest for corn. This record-high supply, combined with shrinking markets and persistently high fertilizer prices, will cause many more farmers to face extreme financial pressures. More farmers filed for bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2025 than in any full year since 2021. Given these dire financial conditions, reducing costs becomes not just a matter of improving efficiency, but a matter of economic survival.

The environmental price we don’t talk enough about

When excess fertilizer doesn’t stay on the farm, the costs flow downstream, literally and metaphorically. Excess fertilizer runs off into waterways and pollutes drinking water. In fertilizer-intensive states like Iowa, this is linked to rising cancer risks and infant health harms. Excess fertilizer also contributes directly to heat-trapping emissions, including nitrous oxide, which is 273 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and harmful air pollutants like particulate matter and ozone lead to poor air quality. Excess fertilizer is also responsible for toxic algal blooms in lakes and rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. Algal blooms are not only bad for human health, but also result in losses in tourism spending, shoreline property values, fishing revenue, and biodiversity.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the total annual impact of agricultural nitrogen pollution on health, drinking water, and recreation and fisheries is a staggering $157 billion. Taxpayers and local communities ultimately bear the burden of these downstream impacts through increased water treatment costs, pollution cleanup costs, public health expenditures, tourism income losses, and the taxes we pay to subsidize conservation programs. Recognizing these hidden costs, which my fellow economists and I call externalities, is essential if we want to address both the environmental and economic viability concerns of agriculture.

Conservation programs that cut fertilizer use can help keep farmers afloat . . .

Farm bankruptcies in 2025 were up 46% from 2024 due to high input prices and low output prices. Many commodity crop farmers have had a long-term dependence on federal subsidies for profitability. This is a clear warning sign that something isn’t working. Fertilizer makes up the highest operating cost, and evidence suggests that up to 50% of fertilizer applied in fields remains unused by the crop. The clear solution to this is applying less fertilizer; after all, the least expensive pound of nitrogen is the one you don’t have to buy.

The good news is that US Department of Agriculture (USDA) conservation programs could both cut costs for farmers and reduce the pollution associated with fertilizer overuse. These programs offer practical, proven pathways to reduce fertilizer dependence, lower input costs, and protect natural resources.

Federal conservation programs fall under Title II of the farm bill, which authorizes the provision of financial incentives and technical assistance for addressing environmental concerns such as soil health, erosion, and water quality and quantity. The Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, the Conservation Reserve Program, the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) are all managed by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

In both the 2014 and 2018 farm bills, Congress set aside roughly $6 billion to $6.5 billion for conservation programs each year (in 2023 dollars). This is relatively small compared to the much larger share of farm bill spending that goes toward commodity support and crop insurance that reinforce the current system.

When implemented correctly, conservation practices significantly improve environmental outcomes. Our study shows that CSP and EQIP can reduce heat-trapping emissions from fertilizer. More broadly, Title II conservation programs result in significant gains for soil health, and other environmental benefits such as reduced soil erosion and improved wildlife habitat. In addition, conservation practices can help cut costs for farmers: a nutrient management plan, for example, can save farmers approximately $30 per acre in fertilizer costs.

. . . But the programs are underfunded and understaffed

With the frequency and severity of extreme weather events increasing, and the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture following suit, it is all the more important to invest in conservation practices that have positive effects not only on the environment, but also on farmers’ input use and, ultimately, profitability. Yet, demand for these programs far outstrips available funding. In fiscal year 2024, only about 43% to 44% of EQIP applicants and 53% to 55% of CSP applicants were funded, even with increased funding from the Biden administration; funding rates are likely to decline as those temporary funds expire, particularly if the current House farm bill proposal to cut EQIP by $1 billion is enacted. This suggests that farmers, being land stewards, are eager to adopt conservation practices but need technical and financial resources to support them, especially early in their transition.

At the same time, conservation programs alone are not enough. Annual appropriations for NRCS field staff and technical assistance are critical to delivering these programs effectively, but they have not kept pace with demand. Without adequate appropriations, even expanded conservation funding will fall short of reaching farmers at the scale needed.

At a time when farmers are facing unprecedented financial strain, expanding access to conservation programs is not just an environmental imperative but a critical economic lifeline. As Congress negotiates the next farm bill, it has a clear opportunity to address the economic and environmental burdens of fertilizer use. By expanding investment in conservation, alongside sustained appropriations for NRCS staffing and technical assistance, Congress can empower farmers to lower their costs, help them achieve their conservation goals, and reduce the environmental impacts that affect us all.

Repealing the clean energy standards would be a step backward, failing to solve reliability or cost concerns while ignoring the real emerging challenge: load growth from AI data centers. In fact, UCS analysis of this load growth demonstrates that to ensure a clean, affordable, and reliable energy future, Michigan must strengthen the clean energy standards—not abandon them. It also reveals loopholes that would increase fossil fuel use, even without the repeal.

In this blog, I’m going to break down the structure of the current clean energy standards in Michigan, demonstrate how load growth from data centers puts them to the test, and explain how they must be strengthened to keep moving toward a clean, healthy, and affordable energy future.

The basics of Michigan’s clean energy standards

There are three key points to keep in mind about the clean energy standards:

The categories of energy sources overlap. Wind, solar, and hydro-power are included in the definition of “renewable energy,” while “clean energy” includes renewables in addition to other low carbon energy sources, such as nuclear and fossil gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS) (see Figure 1). While labeling some of these sources as “clean” is a bit of a misnomer,  I’ll refer to them as clean here to be consistent with the Michigan standards.

Michigan’s energy standards phase in over time. The renewable energy requirement started at 15% in 2024, increases to 50% in 2030, before reaching 60% in 2035. The clean energy requirement starts at 80% in 2035 then jumps to 100% in 2040.

The standards only apply to retail electric sales to “end users” in the state, while also allowing for renewable and clean energy to be purchased outside of Michigan.

Despite the clean energy standards, Michigan’s emissions increase

The Union of Concerned Scientists recently published an analysis of potential load growth from data centers in the United States, demonstrating how that growth affects the grid under different policy pathways. We included a deep dive in Michigan, which produced a surprising result: despite the clean energy standards, heat-trapping emissions from power plants increase steadily over time (see Figure 2). 

This effect appears across all load scenarios, but because data centers drive massive new demand, they act as a “stress test” for Michigan’s clean energy standards. Our analysis shows that while the standards reduce emissions early on, emissions begin rising steadily after about 2035.

A look at the underlying generation mix helps explain how this is possible. Figure 3 shows the shares of energy generation across renewables, other clean energy, and fossil fuel (coal and fossil gas without CCS) under the “current policies” scenario in our analysis.

This highlights the problem: shouldn’t renewables plus other clean sources hit 100% by 2040? Let’s explore why that isn’t the case in our modeling results.

Clean energy standards don’t apply to exports

The first big caveat to Michigan’s clean energy standards is that they only apply to energy sales within the state: any electricity that is exported elsewhere is exempt. According to our analysis, exports increase dramatically over time (see Figure 4).

These exports are not subject to the clean and renewable energy standards. This “export loophole” allows utilities to cover their retail sales with clean and renewable energy, while fossil plants can continue running and exporting the energy they produce without limits.

As demand grows due to data centers, our modeling shows that this loophole becomes more consequential, with exports increasing steadily under current policies. But under a different clean energy pathway (which I’ll detail below), exports are subject to clean energy requirements, meaning they don’t cause emissions to increase.

While that growth in exports is significant, it’s still not enough to explain why carbon emissions are increasing over time.

Utilities can buy clean and renewable energy if they don’t make enough themselves

The next caveat is that Michigan utilities can buy credit for renewable and clean energy that they don’t generate themselves. This is where things start to get complicated. Utilities have three basic pathways to meet the state’s clean and renewable standards:

• Generate clean/renewable energy themselves
• Purchase clean/renewable energy directly
• Purchase clean/renewable energy attributes

For renewable energy, the second pathway is often referred to as “bundled renewable energy credits” (or “bundled RECs”), where a utility both buys the energy from a renewable generator and takes credit for its renewable attributes. Typically, this means the utility is paying for the energy from a specific renewable energy project.

The third pathway is “unbundled RECs,” where a utility only pays for the renewable attributes, without the associated energy.

To oversimplify, a utility buying bundled RECs is replacing some of the energy it would sell to its customers with renewable energy generated somewhere else. But a utility buying unbundled RECs is continuing to sell dirty energy to its customers, and paying what amounts to a fine. Unbundled RECs are the indulgences of the energy world.

Fortunately, Michigan has limits on how many unbundled RECs can be used to meet the clean energy standards; they have to come from within the same regional markets that Michigan is a part of (MISO or PJM, depending on the utility), cannot exceed 5% of the utility’s total, and can’t be used for compliance after 2035.

While these limits are a good thing, and bundled RECs are certainly preferable, there’s still a big caveat: Since utilities can just purchase bundled RECs to cover their obligations for retail sales within their territory, there’s nothing stopping power plants from continuing to generate dirty electricity to sell somewhere else.

How does Michigan meet the standards while fossil generation increases?

Now that we understand some of the loopholes in the clean energy standards, let’s take a look at how Michigan is actually meeting these requirements in our modeling, despite the rising emissions. Figure 5 shows the mix of in-state and imported energy credits that are used to meet each of the requirements in 2035 and 2050.

In 2050, Michigan relies on significant imports of clean energy from other states to meet the 100% clean energy requirement which takes effect in 2040, even meeting the requirement ahead of schedule in 2035. The shares for clean energy exceed 100% for a few reasons, but mostly due to the fact that Michigan generates more energy than it needs, leading to exports to other states.

Due to some nuance in how the model calculates and reports renewables requirements, the figure doesn’t quite show Michigan hitting the 60% requirement that takes effect in 2035, but we can see that imports here are also required to comply.

In contrast to the mix of energy credits used to comply with the standard, Figure 6 shows what the shares of actual generation (including exports) look like.

The results show a system where legal compliance and physical reality diverge. Michigan is not actually decarbonizing its energy supply, and it’s getting worse over time—even as it complies with the clean energy standards. Most glaring from our results is that in 2050, Michigan would be “meeting” its clean energy standards while nearly 60% of energy generated in the state comes from fossil fuels.

A better path: regulating emissions directly

To explore more robust clean energy policies, we proposed an alternative scenario based around a CO₂ Reduction Policy in our data center load growth analysis.

The key feature of this policy is that it regulates actual power plant emissions, including both imported and exported energy. This approach closes the loopholes in the existing laws: utilities can continue to sell to (or buy from) other states, but all of that energy is subject to emissions limits, not just the portion that’s sold to end users in the state.

Table 1 shows how we modeled phasing the policy in over time, compared to the existing renewable and clean energy requirements. Though the fossil fuel industry is likely to object sharply, this phased approach gives utilities a reasonable planning timeline for compliance.

You can see the impact in Figures 7 and 8. First, the generation plot shows that renewable and other clean energy sources increase their share over time, approaching 97% of the total by 2050.

Finally, Figure 8 shows that across all load scenarios, CO₂ emissions decrease over time, eventually going below zero due to technologies like biopower with CCS (which explains the last 3% from Figure 7).

Looking ahead

As data centers add enormous new load to the grid, significant new generation will be needed. The existing clean energy standards place guardrails on what types of generation are allowed, guiding the state towards a clean and renewable future. But as we’ve seen, the loopholes in these standards allow utilities and power producers to rely on accounting mechanisms to meet the letter of the law while still expanding fossil fuel generation.

This has measurable negative impacts: under the existing laws, our analysis shows that the expected growth in data centers would lead to $118 billion in climate damages and $1.6 billion in health damages by 2050 due to air pollution and emissions from fossil fuel power plants in Michigan.

Michigan’s clean energy legislation in 2023 was a strong start, but as load growth from data centers reshapes the system, stronger policies are needed. Rather than moving backward with misguided attempts to repeal the clean energy standards, they must be strengthened with actual limits, regulating emissions of heat-trapping gases directly. Policies that focus on actual emissions ensure that every megawatt-hour of electricity moves the system closer to the clean, healthy energy future Michiganders deserve.

I recently attended a conference in which a Bosnian politician, Sabina Ćudić, described a problem she faces that also affects scientists. She said, “I think [many professionals] are… somewhat embarrassed that they’re in politics. And there is this kind of distance: I could be somewhere else, doing something smarter, I could be paid better. There is almost a resentment towards politics.”

We see that often in science, too. Politics is sometimes perceived by scientists as something for others to do, or something to avoid. But politics is how our society is run. Politics is peoples’ lives.

For many of us watching National Institutes of Health (NIH), we are seeing clearly how the decisions made by the Trump administration affect basic science, and how changes to science agencies affect our society and people’s lives. 

Attacks on NIH began on day one

Starting Jan 21, 2025, the day after Inauguration Day, the National Institutes of Health was barred by the White House from posting notices to the Federal Register. It is hard to exaggerate the massive implications of this seemingly minor change: it blocked new grants from being awarded by preventing peer review panels from being scheduled.

This block was only one part of a larger effort to slow funds at NIH going out the door, as I described in another essay in April 2025. The White House plan seemed to be to use rescission to cut the NIH budget, bypassing the Congressional appropriations process. More actions that hampered the grant-making process followed, from reviews of banned words, mass firings, new paperwork justifications for many processes, and upfront funding requirements. The spending slowdown came to a head in July when OMB, led by Russell Vought, the Project 2025 co-lead, issued a memo that stopped NIH from making new grants. Vought then declined to deny plans to include NIH money in a future rescission package, seemingly confirming the goal to cut the NIH budget this way.

In the end, though, the rescission gambit failed. A bipartisan group of Senators urged the White House to allow NIH to spend its full budget, and OMB backed down. That highlights how powerful science can be to the public, and how applying pressure to our lawmakers can yield results. Congress has been unwilling or unable to restrain the Trump administration on many issues this year. But on science, especially on NIH and biomedical science, Congress has occasionally acted in a bipartisan way to push back.

Congress, not the President, should set scientific priorities

But the ban on postings to the Federal Register also reflects a new and more ominous trend. For 80 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. Major agency priorities were set in law, by Congress. From there, as the NIH scholar Natalie Aviles has described, the work of biomedical science support has been run largely by non-partisan civil servants working with external scientists.

For example, when Richard Nixon launched his War on Cancer in the early 1970’s, he announced this in a State of the Union address, and worked with Congress to pass this new priority into law. The same was true for Barack Obama and the BRAIN Initiative at NIH: it was announced in a State of the Union, then passed into law by Congress. Presidents can certainly weigh in, but a multi-year research agenda works best if priorities are set by broad bipartisan support and statute.

Now, things are different. NIH has been politicized and “presidentialized:” its operation and priorities have been increasingly dictated by the president and White House. As just one example, the Trump administration has decreed grant awards must be approved by presidential political appointees. White House or HHS review steps have been added throughout the agency, from review of contracts, review of formerly-perfunctory employee term renewals, review of travel, and even review of weekly money disbursements to grantees, a process that has always been handled by civil servants without presidential interference. Before 2025 there were only two political appointees at NIH, and even these, the NIH and National Cancer Institute directors, were accomplished, respected scientists, not political commissars.

Another critical part of NIH’s operation is the way the scientific community serves in an advisory role. External scientists fill rotating positions on committees: peer review panels, councils, and other advisory committees, which together have had enormous influence over the direction of NIH. This is as it should be. Doing top-notch science is extraordinarily hard—e.g., curing cancer or dementia is difficult. The people in the best position to choose innovative projects for funding, or how programs should be designed for maximum scientific impact, are trained scientists. The US has this scientific talent, and it has been deployed to help run NIH.

This system of governing NIH has worked exceptionally well. Having NIH run by civil servants informed by practicing, expert scientists has created over the past eight decades a “golden goose” of technological innovation. That’s now being wrecked, as independent scientific decision-making is subordinated to the political desires of the president.

NIH must return to independent scientific decision-making

The shift at NIH, from a system where Congress and statutory law set priorities to one where the president does, is a terrible thing for US science.

Most scientific projects are long-term efforts where people must be hired, equipment designed or purchased, and experiments done over several years. It’s not just science projects that take a long time to develop: talent does too. Individual scientists plan years ahead, as students choose whether to pursue PhDs and take on academic positions. Under this new presidential governance scheme, science priorities will swing back and forth with each new president. That instability is a sure way to break a scientific industry.

Fixing NIH will require returning the agency to its former, successful governance scheme, where Congress sets priorities, the agency carries them out, and political appointees of the president stay out of the way. This is also more democratic than presidential control. Congress, as the most democratic branch, represents the public’s priorities, and the US scientific community is engaged as advisors.

Reforms can be done within that framework, but an NIH governance scheme that preserves scientific independence is vital to US scientific success.

The new NIH budget bill is only partial comfort

In FY26 appropriations, Congress has slightly increased the NIH budget, in nominal dollars. That is good news compared to the proposed massive cuts in the President’s budget request. Some other budget bill provisions are also positive, for example avoiding cuts to research buildings and support (indirect costs).

However, all is not saved—in fact, there remain many reasons to worry. First, the bill does little to restrain the presidential transformation that is breaking NIH. The new NIH budget report contains non-binding language to restrain some of the Trump administration’s worst political moves. But what we have seen from this Project 2025 White House is a willingness to move right up to the line of what is written in law—and sometimes step over into brazen illegality. They may just ignore the report language. Indeed, it has already been reported that the White House is ignoring report language instructing NIH to use the longstanding institute director search committee process, including external expert advisors.

Meanwhile, one of the few provisions written in the law to restrain Trump, the multi-year funding provision, allows it at last year’s level—which saw success rates drop by 50%, a devastating cut for many labs. Reports are that this was important to the White House, suggesting they plan to intervene inside NIH further in future.

Finally, there is a reason to worry about even the rejection of budget cuts, which could be a political shield: a way for some Republicans to seem to avoid cutting biomedical research and cures, while allowing Vought and Trump to gut the agency from the inside via presidential control. We will need to be vigilant this year, and push back as hard as possible on the increasing politicization of science agencies.

Why haven’t more scientists acted in the last year?

There are two longstanding norms about the way scientists interact with the public that have hurt our ability to react in the Trump era.

The first norm is that scientists should not be engaged in politics at all. The science community has for decades embraced what some historians call the “social contract for science”—scientists would focus on producing knowledge while remaining relatively apolitical as an institution. The idea was that science’s authority and public trust depended on its perceived objectivity and distance from partisan concerns. This framing dates at least to Vannevar Bush’s ideas for building a US science ecosystem, which heavily inspired the structure of US science after World War II.

But staying out of politics and the public sphere is untenable in the current moment, and not because of what scientists have done.

Despite loud voices on the right claiming that scientists have politicized science, the opposite is true. As with climate change and asbestos before it, powerful and wealthy interests found biomedical science, during COVID, opposed to their partisan agenda. So they ran the so-called “Merchants of Doubt” strategy: they found scientists who would criticize biomedical science and NIH, and elevated them. Such junk scientists, from Scott Atlas to Jay Bhattacharta, were given high-profile platforms on billionaire-owned news networks, and given awards from billionaire-funded think tanks.

It was primarily billionaires, acting through merchants of doubt they boosted, that “politicized” science and NIH.

Biomedical scientists should have learned from the assault on climate science. But given where we are now, we cannot return to the old way of trying to ignore power and politics—if we do that, scientists will just be run over and US science will continue to collapse. We have to find ways to fight for science. When people who know the most about a segment of society disengage from politics, that simply gives an opportunity for the wealthy to remake that part of society in their image.

The second norm is that biomedical scientists and NIH should not speak to the public. This is related to the idea that political advocacy should only be done in the halls of Congress, if it is to be done at all. Mary Lasker, a powerful advocate for NIH and biomedical research for nearly 30 years, was the clearest leader of this explicitly elite-to-elite advocacy model. Lasker “built a powerful lobby that won large research appropriations” through direct relationships with key members of Congress.

This advocacy model, acting primarily inside the halls of Congress, too, must change. Scientists must speak to the public about what is at stake—not just about their own science, but about the value of publicly-funded science to all, and why politics affects science.

Some of NIH’s low profile in the public sphere is because of Congress’ desire to discourage agency public relations efforts. But scientists should urge our institutions to talk up the role of government. I was at an event a year or two ago held by a major NIH grant recipient  known to have received hundreds of millions from NIH. The event had a professionally-produced PR presentation, celebrating all the major scientific advances made and the amazing work done, but I heard NIH mentioned exactly zero times.

Too many people I talk to know about wonderful university research in biology, but associate that with the university: e.g., they know about Harvard research but don’t know that it’s NIH money, public money, behind it. We can speak up and change that: tell people how important the government is to science and disease cures.

Billionaires won’t replace public funding for science

As NIH and US science this year has been devastated, some have looked to billionaire philanthropy to fill the gaps. That’s a dangerous source of funding to depend on. NIH funding is a democratic way to support science. Public funding through agencies relies on direct democratic accountability through Congress, and spreads money to many different investigators.

Applying for NIH funds is a competition where great ideas win. The peer review system is not perfect, but it has done a good job allocating funds for basic research. The worst schmoozer in the room at a cocktail party might write the best grant. We don’t want to rely only on funding models that reward those who are good at flashy sales pitches; we want a stable funding system supporting a broad workforce of many scientists with many ideas. Sustained, strong science, as with all public goods, requires government investment if it is to deliver long-term societal benefit.

Democratic systems of allocating public money have created a robust scientific research system in America. Shifting to a system where a few rich people choose the science they want seems destined to end in disaster.

Fixing science means we all must fight together

The lesson for scientists, as with other attacks on science, is to confront the challenge, not back down. A fight is needed. Institutions must be strengthened. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the American Medical Association’s Department of Investigation published information to protect the public from health fraud and quackery.  Similar initiatives to identify junk science can come out of scientific and medical groups today: scientists and doctors will have to continue to organize with each other and stand up for the public benefit.

We will also need to find ways to support journalism that stands explicitly for public health. Media and social media groups like The Evidence Collective are doing heroic work reaching the public, but have had trouble finding sustainable business models.

The collapse of the US journalism industry in the past 25 years has been part of the collapse in social trust which has undermined trust in science. It is an urgent need for us to figure out how to boost and sustain real journalism that stands up for science and evidence. There has been progress, but Trump administration policies defunding public media have made the problems worse. In the past in America, journalism outlets have been funded by political parties, unions, and even public dollars. Today social media changes the landscape, but not our core needs for trust and truth. Scientists need to join the fight to improve news and information too.

Although most existing institutions have done relatively little to push back, there are many reasons to hope. At NIH, a group of federal workers issued the Bethesda Declaration, working together to share their concerns about what was happening inside the agency. Recently, several brain medical research groups, from the American College of Psychopharmacology to the American Academy of Neurology, issued strong statements in opposition to the Trump administration’s removal of NINDS Director Walter Koroshetz. Stand Up For Science and Defending Public Health are leading scientists and allies in new kinds of fight.

Also, scientists are beginning to get organized on a person-to-person basis. Groups of scientists are working on better communication and sharing information about politics and policy. But much more will need to be done. Just as realtors and car dealers invest time and money in influencing politics, scientists will need to get involved in politics—that is, the core and important issues of how societies function—at least until a stable liberal democracy returns to the United States.

The value of free speech is in its use

One thing I hear from scientists across the country is that they are afraid to speak out. They are afraid of the Trump administration retaliating against them or their university, weaponizing the grant system to punish their speech.

That is a horrible development. One of the most important principles of the American constitutional order is freedom of speech. The Trump administration has launched an unprecedented war on free speech, and we must defend it. In a democracy, people should be free to criticize their government and speak about matters of importance without fear of retaliation. We should work hard to protect scientists and universities that are speaking out for liberal democracy and academic freedom.

What has not been widely discussed in recent years is that government employees are protected by the First Amendment when they speak on matters of public concern. In the landmark 1968 case Pickering v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 majority decision that a public school teacher could not be fired for writing a letter to a newspaper criticizing how his school allocated funds.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing for the Court, declared that “the public interest in having free and unhindered debate on matters of public importance [is] the core value of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment,” and that speech by public servants is protected. Public servants are “the members of a community most likely to have informed opinions” on the operation of government and “accordingly, it is essential that they be able to speak out freely on such questions without fear of retaliatory dismissal.”

That means that government employees, subject to some conditions, have the right to speak about matters of public concern, and that their deep knowledge of those programs has special value to inform public opinion.

But it is not just public employees who should be able to speak out about matters of public concern without fear of retaliation. Too many American citizens and institutions—law firms, university faculty, scientists, even news outlets—this year have been afraid to talk about what is going on with the collapse of American democracy. Let’s find ways to speak out together: the more people who speak out together, the stronger we all are.

What can scientists and the public do?

Science and academia help to define what constitutes credible evidence in a society. This is one reason why authoritarians come after both science and academia.

Public funding has built in the US the greatest science superpower the world has ever known. Freedom of speech, pluralism, freedom of and from religion, integration of talent from around the world, separation of church and state, equality, rule of law: these are all principles that are part of the recipe for successful science. Scientists should not be political partisans, but they should be partisans for liberal democratic principles. And if political parties sort themselves based on those values, that shouldn’t stop us from describing the situation accurately.

Harnessing the power that scientists have is going to require working together and engaging. Find like-minded people near you, meet with them regularly, talk about these issues. Take actions, first small, then larger. Stand up for science and for democracy. We will win if we do that.

We asked Precious Tshabalala and Omanjana Goswami, co-authors of the new UCS report Less Fertilizer, Better Outcomes, about the factors at play and one solution that would bring farmers some relief while protecting public health and the environment.

Q: Despite farmers’ support for President Trump, his administration (both now and in his first term) has pursued policies such as trade wars and targeting immigrant workers that have harmed farmers. The administration has responded by giving farmers a handout. This approach doesn’t make a lot of sense—what do you think is behind it?

PRECIOUS TSHABALALA: Tariffs have often been used as leverage in trade negotiations and to reduce trade deficits, but in this case, farmers end up being collateral damage in the process. Since they’re key constituencies politically, the administration gives them bailouts to keep them from escaping bankruptcy. The farmer aid packages helped during the president’s first term, but now, with an estimated bumper corn harvest and significant market losses through tariffs and cuts to foreign aid, many farmers are at risk of a crisis. Only half of farms will turn a profit this year, farmer bankruptcies have doubled, and the United States is experiencing a historic agriculture trade deficit. The new $12 billion aid package will not be sufficient to offset these losses.

Q: The Trump administration’s tariffs seem to hurt farmers in two ways: by lowering the price of their products while driving up the costs of inputs such as fertilizer and equipment. Is this a fair assessment?

PRECIOUS TSHABALALA: Yes. Tariffs led to retaliatory tariffs and trade measures from other countries, then drove down the price of commodity crops. China, for example, which is a major US export market, imposed tariffs on agricultural products and suspended soybean imports from the United States, seeking alternative sources such as Brazil. Reduced export demand means there is excess supply in the US market and, in turn, prices plummet.

While commodity prices fell, tariffs have simultaneously increased the cost of agricultural inputs. For example, between 25% and 30% of nitrogen fertilizer is imported into the United States, and almost all phosphorus and potassium is imported. Consequently, input costs have increased well above commodity prices, and farmers are operating at a loss even after receiving support from USDA subsidy programs.

Q: The rising cost of one type of input in particular—fertilizer—brings us to your recent analysis that shows farmers are applying much more fertilizer than they need to. Can you elaborate?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Fertilizer overuse is a pervasive problem in today’s agricultural systems, especially on farms that engage in monoculture of commodity crops like corn and soybean. Our report highlights that in 2022, 78% of all cropland in the country—roughly 236 million acres—received synthetic fertilizer input of some kind. Plants cannot use all of that fertilizer, so it remains behind in the soil, leading to environmental damage through runoff, soil degradation, and breakdown into heat-trapping gases that directly contribute to climate change.

In our analysis we highlight that recent peer-reviewed scientific publications show as much as 50% of fertilizer is applied in excess. Agriculture often isn’t associated as a direct source of pollution; our brains automatically think of pristine green and rolling fields when we imagine farms. But despite that beautiful picture, agriculture is actually a major source of pollution in the United States, and overuse of synthetic fertilizer is creating a multi-pronged pollution crisis. It’s not that farmers want to pollute and cause environmental damage—they see themselves as stewards of their land. But farmers are caught in a system that is hard to escape, locking them into cropping patterns that demand more fertilizer.

Q: But don’t farmers know what’s best for their operations? Are they being misinformed?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Farmers overapply fertilizer as an insurance policy to make sure their crops have enough nutrients when needed. Today’s agricultural systems and markets are set up in a way to maximize yield, which puts pressure on farmers to apply more fertilizer. There are no penalties that come with fertilizer overapplication—besides of course the higher costs.

Farm consolidation is also responsible for the overapplication problem. Fertilizer manufacturers and agribusiness corporations aggressively lobby to influence agriculture policy, and their profits rise when producers are dependent on high application rates. Most fertilizer application recommendations for the Midwest come from retailers who sell fertilizer and who stand to profit the most, not from independent institutions that have no conflict of interest.

Q: Fertilizer overuse obviously wastes money that farmers can’t afford to lose given their extremely tight profit margins, but how else does it hurt farming operations?

PRECIOUS TSHABALALA: With heavy use of fertilizer, the soil’s ability to store water and replenish nutrients is depleted, keeping farmers in a vicious cycle of fertilizer overapplication.

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Soil that can’t hold water loses its sponge-like quality and becomes hard and cement-like. This is why once farmers hop onto the fertilizer treadmill it is almost impossible to hop off; they need to supply nutrients from synthetic sources that soils have lost the ability to store naturally.

Q: And besides the impact on farmers, what are the other consequences of fertilizer overuse?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Nitrogen runoff from excessive fertilizer use wreaks havoc on the environment. When washed into lakes and streams, this runoff helps algae multiply very quickly and create massive algal blooms that consume dissolved oxygen in the water, creating low- to no-oxygen areas in aquatic ecosystems called “dead zones,” where nothing can survive. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that appears every summer and spans thousands of square miles has been directly attributed to fertilizer runoff from midwestern farms that is carried down the Mississippi River. It is perhaps the best example of how far-ranging the impact of nitrogen pollution can be.

Nitrates from fertilizer runoff also pollute groundwater sources and often end up contaminating drinking water supplies, threatening communities and affecting human health.

Fertilizer overuse is also a major contributor to the climate crisis. Unused fertilizer is transformed by soil bacteria into nitrous oxide and released into the atmosphere, where it is 273 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in capturing heat. In the United States, fertilizer mismanagement on agricultural soils is the largest unmitigated source of nitrous oxide, responsible for about 75% of the total emissions.

PRECIOUS TSHABALALA: The cost of fertilizer overuse is not only environmental but economic too. Taxpayers are on the hook for pollution cleanup costs and public health expenditures. Additionally, the tourism industry loses approximately $1 billion in income due to water bodies being contaminated by nutrient pollution and algal blooms, and the total annual impact of nitrogen pollution on health care, water treatment, and recreational opportunities is estimated to be a staggering $157 billion. These costs are not sustainable in the long run, and action should be taken immediately.

Q: What is likely to change farmers’ behavior?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Farmers need robust policy instruments to ensure they have the right financial and technical incentives to adopt and implement practices that improve fertilizer application and management. Several conservation-focused practices, such as no-till, cover crops, buffer strips, wetlands restoration, and managed grazing have been shown to reduce fertilizer use, improve soil resilience, keep nutrients in place, and build long-term soil health.

Voluntary USDA conservation programs such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) provide farmers with financial and technical assistance to implement these practices. CSP and EQIP are backed by decades of scientific evidence and farmer experience, and they are pretty popular among farmers, but they are chronically underfunded and oversubscribed, so only about one-third of eligible applications are approved.

Q: You recommend that this funding be incorporated into the new food and farm bill, but we have been waiting almost three years for Congress to pass it. What is holding it up and how likely are we to see the situation change this year?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: The food and farm bill has been extended three times in the last few years, so essentially we are still operating under the framework of the 2018 bill. Party-line disagreements on critical provisions have prevented a new bill from being passed. Several versions of the bill have been introduced in prior years, but lack of bipartisan support did not allow full consideration of the bill in both chambers of Congress. A new draft of the bill was introduced by the House Agriculture Committee in February, and it passed out of committee last month.

Since 2022, UCS has been advocating for a transformational food and farm bill that creates a fair and equitable food and farming system for all. This would include an expansion of voluntary conservation programs that allows more farmers to adopt practices that retain farm productivity while preserving air and water quality and soil health.

We are yet to see whether these provisions can be negotiated into the current version of the bill, whether the bill can be signed into law with bipartisan support, or whether it will fall on its face and we’ll get another extension instead.

In a true sign of the times, when the thrusters stopped burning and the mission was a seeming success, I immediately opened my phone to check social media to see how people were reacting. While I saw dozens of my peers expressing the same joy I had, I also saw a steady drumbeat of people questioning the cost of this mission and why their tax dollars had gone to this. As someone who has spent time looking at the federal budget, I couldn’t help but chuckle. NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget was $24.4 billion—a minuscule portion of the federal government’s nearly $2 trillion budget.

On Friday, April 3, President Trump released his budget request for fiscal year 2027. It revealed just how ludicrous is the idea that NASA funding is a waste of tax dollars: the request includes a whopping $1.5 trillion for defense, up more than $400 billion from last year. Meanwhile, it slashes NASA’s budget by 23%, gutting $5.6 billion from the agency. Watching the Artemis launch, I felt hope for US science for the first time in a while. The president’s budget request brought me back down to Earth.

The costs of a much bigger military

In a previous piece, I discussed how a $1.5 trillion defense budget would not only achieve very little, but end up hurting the United States through its waste. With the president’s budget finally out, the $1.5 trillion in defense spending Trump called for on Truth Social in January came true. What I did not imagine was that the president would pair his exorbitant defense budget with cuts to vital environmental, healthcare, education, and science budgets. The administration plans to cut 10% of non-defense discretionary spending across the board—not enough to make up for the ridiculous increase in defense spending, but enough to devastate a host of important programs.

More clearly than ever, the current administration has demonstrated the trade-offs in our federal budget. The new budget would fund fantasies like “Golden Dome,” Trump’s infeasible anti-missile system, and “Golden Fleet,” his nonsensical shipbuilding program. Meanwhile, it would cut more than half of the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding, almost 20% of the Department of Agriculture’s funding, and 12.5% percent of the health department’s budget, among others. Most telling of all, the president’s budget request would more than halve funding for the National Science Foundation. This administration would rather fund its war against Iran than invest in our society’s basic needs.

The launch of Artemis II proves the United States can still do big things in science and technology, even while the federal government is starving our science agencies of the necessary funding. There are reasons why science is worthy of government funding: it saves lives, drives economic growth, and improves quality of life. The Apollo missions—the best analog to the Artemis missions—drove major advancements in flight control, food safety, and materials science that still benefit us all today.

The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to sell voters the theory that its budget cuts are intended to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. But the president’s new budget request has put in starker relief than ever that cuts to our domestic institutions, including science, are actually done to spend more on weapons and war fighting—even if the cuts do not make up for the jaw-dropping military spending. Especially given the recent wars of choice undertaken by the Trump administration, the threats from a massively expanded military budget and handouts to defense contractors are clearer than ever.

A moment of hope in challenging times

The launch of Artemis was truly a moment of hope for many people my age. My generation was in elementary school when the Great Recession scrambled our home lives, finishing high school when the COVID pandemic forced schools to go online, and graduating college when DOGE ripped the federal workforce apart. This makes it easy to fall into a sense of dread, in an era where backsliding feels normal.

Artemis II should remind us all that the United States can still do great things in science when we put our mind—and money—to it. The president, sadly, has other plans.

We ended up in a rental house we couldn’t afford, as many Americans do. To keep a roof over our heads, we had to make hard decisions between keeping the lights or the water on or paying for groceries, and sometimes we had to go without. Public benefits and other programs that may have helped us scrape by existed, but they were hard to navigate when my family was busy working and trying to get through each day.  

It’s because of these formative experiences that I understand the necessity of housing justice. According to the Urban Institute, housing justice means: “Increasing access to safe, affordable housing and promoting wealth-building by confronting historical and ongoing harms and disparities caused by structural racism.”  

In March, I was excited to attend the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s (NLIHC) annual Housing Policy Forum in Washington, DC for the first time. UCS is a member organization of NLIHC because our climate resilience team knows that we must solve the climate crisis and the affordable housing crisis at the same time to ensure people are safe wherever they call home and advance a human right to housing as climate change transforms our communities through disasters and slower-moving climate impacts like sea level rise.  

Here’s what I learned at the forum and what I think all climate justice advocates should know as we work toward housing justice.

1. We are stronger together  

Working toward a more just, healthier world requires all movements to link arms and bring in our neighbors if we are to have a chance against an authoritarian government.  As Quiana Fisher, executive director of Texas Housers, said in a panel conversation on building local power, “our silos are falling.” Advocates for social and climate justice can no longer pretend to work in an insulated bubble (a silo)—our work is interconnected and all of it is under attack by the Trump administration. For example, Fisher said, “housing is health care,” meaning that inadequate, unsafe, or the lack of housing puts peoples’ health and well-being at risk. And we know that climate change also affects health.

A 2025 UCS study found that people living in affordable housing experienced several days to several weeks’ worth of heat alerts during the hottest summer on record in 2024, with households headed by people of color facing disproportionately high risks. 

If people don’t have access or can’t afford to cool themselves where they live, they’re at risk of heat-related illness and death. Our work on affordable, safe housing and climate change is not separate. To achieve climate resilience for all, we must advance solutions with partners in housing justice.  

2. There is value in lived experience 

Sometimes academics (and others) can fall into a trap of valuing theory over lived experience, Tracy Beard, Coalition Coordinator at Housing for All Tennessee said, talking about her work as a housing justice advocate and PhD candidate. Denying someone’s expertise unless they have an advanced degree or what Ms. Beard humorously called “certified brains,” shuts out important insights that could lead to valuable, practical solutions. 

We talk about centering equity and justice in our climate work, and we know that the people most impacted must guide the development of the solutions. After all, they know best what they need to move from surviving to thriving. Beard advised folks with “certified brains” to work intentionally with people with lived experience; know when to step back and let them lead; and—for those who work at well-resourced organizations—share resources, expertise, and power. Simply “amplifying the voices” of those most marginalized isn’t enough: building trusted partnerships and working in collaboration together is the way forward.

3. Housing is a human right 

The same week of the conference, President Trump allegedly said, “Nobody gives a ‘bleep’ about housing.” That’s simply not true, especially for the 300+ people who attended NLIHC’s lobby day at Capitol Hill on March 13 to tell our congresspeople how essential investment in housing is in the face of a “national shortage of 7.2 million homes affordable and available for extremely low-income renters,” according to NLIHC’s newest report. And to further refute President Trump’s claim, a few days after his out-of-touch comment, the Senate passed a major bipartisan housing bill. But wait there’s more…the White House then announced two housing-related executive orders that are problematic (read my colleague Zoe Middleton’s blog for more on this). 

Housing is a human right. The United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” 

But in the US, wages are not keeping up with costs of living: rent, utilities, groceries, and people are struggling through no fault of their own. My experience with housing insecurity inspired me, first to be an organizer and then a policy advocate, because everyone deserves access to the knowledge and resources to make the change they need to live their fullest lives.  

The climate crisis and the affordable housing crisis must be addressed at the same time to ensure people are safe where they live in a climate-changed world. Most of us in the US are susceptible to wildfires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, or extreme heat that can damage or destroy where we live and threaten our health and safety. With Danger Season starting next month, we urgently need stable federal funding for housing and the passage of major housing legislation.  

Whether people rent, buy, or seek shelter from the streets every night, all families deserve safe and affordable housing, and those homes must be able to literally weather the storms ahead.

Much like libraries, the post office, and our public roadways, public transit is a public good where the government has a crucial role. Time and time again, Congress has enshrined in federal law that fostering the development and revitalization of public transportation systems is in the economic interest of the US while also meeting national goals for air quality, energy conservation, international competitiveness, and enhanced mobility for elderly, disabled, and disadvantaged populations in both urban and rural areas.  

Yet, like clockwork, in the President’s Budget for FY27 released last Friday, the Trump administration has again proposed to cut the federal role in public transit. This is the latest in a long line of attacks from the administration: a leaked proposal from November 2025 to cut all federal transit funds, and freezes on transit grants to intimidate political rivals in Colorado, New York, Illinois, and many more places, just to name a few.

Even before Trump’s second term, key current US Department of Transportation appointees such as Deputy Secretary Steven Bradbury wrote Project 2025 proposals to decrease federal investment in transit and shift it to the private sector to fund and provide. In Trump’s first term, the administration requested similar cuts and slow-rolled the distribution of funds they did have control over. This affects millions of Americans who take transit every day and all of us who benefit from a robust system. Ultimately, cuts would leave us without a crucial, affordable option to get around.

Amid these attacks, legislators need to stand up for their constituents and instead increase federal transit investment in budgets and the next surface transportation reauthorization. The country deserves and needs to fill the gaps of decades of transportation policy that has favored an unsustainable, unaffordable, and choiceless transportation status quo.

Public transit has immense public benefits

In addition to helping folks get around, public transit investment comes with numerous public benefits. Decades of research have shown that transit increases productivity, helps anchor regional economies, and reduces poverty and unemployment. It is a key low-cost transportation option that makes places more affordable to live in and promotes upward mobility. Every billion dollars invested in transit generates five billion dollars in economic activity and over 40,000 jobs. This holds for rural and urban areas alike, yet transit service across the US lags behind its global peers.

It makes sense that the government should invest in transit to support affordability and the economy, but the benefits stretch even further than that.

Transit is also crucial for public health. In small cities and rural areas, transit can be a lifeline and prevent people from missing crucial healthcare appointments, especially for aging adults or people with disabilities. It reduces social isolation and provides food access, which are crucial for our health. Transit also promotes better air quality, increasing levels of physical activity, and decreasing injuries from motor vehicle crashes.

Investing in transit is also a crucial part of the government’s role in addressing climate change. In our report, Freedom to Move, we show that a system with improved transportation options and reduced driving could save up to $201 billion in energy infrastructure and $128 billion in public health costs through 2050, presenting a more effective climate solution than the current car-dependent model.

Public transit comes with public accountability

Of note, transit is a public service, so a transit agency’s goal is to serve all its customers, whether they’re rich or poor, whether it’s on the maximally profit-inducing route or not. Transit agencies come with accountability mechanisms such as boards, public engagement, and crucial regulations like Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that are already under attack by the Trump Administration. These public processes are a crucial place where communities across the country are able to provide important input on what they need.

In this era of destruction of science and democratic processes, transportation policy has been weaponized as a tool of retribution for Trump’s authoritarian agenda. It is increasingly crucial to preserve the public processes that allow for democratic participation in transportation policy processes. As my colleague Steven Higashide puts it, “[transportation policy] can be part of the antidote, demonstrating the ability of government to improve our lives and fueling the organizing we need to win a more democratic society.”

Engaging the private sector requires strong civil servants

Throughout the past century, it was public investment that kept people moving despite the tides of private sector financing. More recently, when the COVID-19 pandemic brought havoc to our transportation systems, it was federal investment that helped keep transit running–a successful, bipartisan effort that recognized how essential transit was for essential workers, and by proxy, all of us.

In this, finding the right role for the private sector in public transit is tough. There is a fundamental mismatch of goals between making profit and the mobility of all people that requires careful design to align. To bring these together, we need skilled government staff who are able to navigate technical nuances and stand up for the public interest. Proposals for the private sector’s role come in a variety of flavors:

Privatization, or the ownership and operation of transit services by the private sector, poses significant risks. Removing guardrails from the public sector and hoping for public benefits is wishful thinking. Privatization often foregoes greater oversight on things like safety and civil rights, mechanisms for public accountability, and ultimately is no panacea for the country’s large transit needs.

• The rare closest example of this in the US is Brightline, a private company that owns and operates an intercity rail line between Miami and Orlando. Of note, Brightline has still received nearly half a billion dollars in public subsidy, relies on this and cross-subsidy from real estate investments to cover its net losses ($549 million in 2024), and is a sub-sub-subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi state-owned investment firm Mubadala Investment Company. Yet, despite financial and safety challenges, overwhelming demand for transit continues—Brightline still provided 3.1 million rides in 2025.
  
• Outside of the US, when places like the United Kingdom privatized most of their bus services, banning municipal companies outside of London, the result was an “expensive, fragmented, unreliable, and dysfunctional bus service” that the country has been trying to reverse for years.

Public-Private Partnerships (P3) describe a wide array of private sector participation where the devil is in the details. The strongest push for these comes from a desire to increase the involvement of private capital when public dollars aren’t enough. On the plus side, P3s can sometimes save costs and allow projects to be built that would otherwise not happen. On the negative side, P3s often fail to do so, resulting in excess complexity, cost overruns, and longer timelines or, as was the case in Denver, lower reliability and rider satisfaction. Ultimately, the risks are smaller than full privatization because of more public sector involvement, but the devil is in the details.

P3s are complex and come with tradeoffs that rely on initial negotiation of a long-term concession agreement. In lieu of project delivery capacity, P3s require a savvy government staff to negotiate successfully and ensure project implementation. In the case of the A, B, and G lines in Denver, $450M in private financing supplemented $1,750M in public funds, which ultimately got the project built. This was in exchange for locking the transit agency into less control over services and 29 years of high “availability payments” to the private sector.

“We have to live with those contracts, for now.” – Patrick O’Keefe, Denver Regional Transit Districts Director

Lastly, contracting out to the private sector for narrowly building new capital projects or operating a service is already a common model. This is often in the name of reducing costs, with mixed results. Some prevalent applications are in rural areas for dial-a-ride, vanpool, and commuter bus services.

However, whether contracting out is beneficial or not depends on numerous factors. Similar to P3s, research from the Transit Costs Project points to the lack of investment in strong government staff as a key factor in raising transit costs. In essence, when agency staff don’t have the experience or time to manage these contracts, we get higher costs, delays, and overruns.

In any of these forms, increased privatization as an excuse to absolve governmental responsibility for transit is a recipe for leaving us stuck, and the complexity of these arrangements highlights the importance of investing in a government workforce savvy enough to ensure public benefits. And whether it’s supplemented by private dollars or not, the fact is that the clearest way to improve transit across the country is for the public to invest in it.

We deserve better transit

We already have a very privatized transportation system—an expensive, privately-funded system of car ownership that is to blame for transportation being the US’s second-highest household expense, costing households over $13,000 per year. Public transit ensures we have another option—one that isn’t so “pay-to-play,” one that supports our communities big, small, rural, and urban, one that is rooted in democracy.

We call it public transit for a reason. Being able to get where we need to go is something we all should be able to do. Transit offers an affordable, accessible, and sustainable option for getting around, while simultaneously contributing to the economic vitality of our communities. As Congress prepares its next federal surface transportation reauthorization and debates annual budgets, now is the time to make sure they know to keep the ‘public’ in public transit.  

The expansive restructuring of the agency, which includes moving headquarters to Utah and spreading staff to the winds is irreversibly destructive to the federal scientific enterprise and leaves the nation to face growing climate threats with fewer experts predicting and managing wildfires. It also leaves us less equipped to protect forests that provide clean air and water and less able to support many rural livelihoods. More importantly, the reshuffling of Forest Service staff poses an imminent threat as hotter, drier conditions across much of the country are setting up dangerous wildfire risks in the coming months.

Nobody wants this

My own experience as a civil servant at USDA working directly with Forest Service R&D scientists tells me this relocation is bad for the American people, bad for American producers and foresters, and bad for rural communities. Not only is the agency’s headquarters moving to Salt Lake City, but the Forest Service will shutter 57 of 77 research facilities located in 31 states. Many R&D staff will likely be consolidated into a centralized office in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The Forest Service’s mission in administering over 193 million acres of land—including 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands—is to “sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.” Through its R&D arm, the Forest Service conducts independent science it makes available to the public that also provides the foundation for many forest management decisions. The agency has done all this on a budget that equates to roughly 0.6% of the president’s proposed $1.5 trillion budget for national defense spending. At about $9 billion, the entire Forest Service budget would pay for 18 days of fighting the war against Iran (assuming $500 million cost per day).

As National Coordinator for the USDA Climate Hubs program, I worked hand-in-hand with many Forest Service R&D scientists, the very same ones who are being uprooted from their research stations. I also fondly remember meeting Smokey Bear for the first time at the San Bernardino National Forest while learning about their wildfire control strategies and research. Seeing the news about the relocation and reorganization made me very sad for my Forest Service colleagues, knowing that the next few years will require many to leave the agency, move states, and/or switch careers completely. Truly devastating.

Forest Service R&D scientists were essential to bringing their perspectives on climate-related impacts and adaptation on forestlands, including their interplay with agriculture. For example, the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station collaborated with regional geneticists to build the Seedlot Selection Tool, which helps forest managers match planting materials based on current and future climates.

Another important resource that may no longer be updated, or may be lost, is the Fire Management Adaptation Menu, produced by the USDA Northern Forests Climate Hub and Forest Service Northern Research Station. Losing this critical information would take away tools that help land managers anticipate climate change impacts and identify steps they can take to adapt forests to changing fire regimes.

So what’s the big deal if researchers are moved around? The More than Just Parks Substack explains the impact well:

“You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”

I also share the sentiment expressed by Robert Bonnie, former USDA undersecretary during both the Obama and Biden Administrations, and who helped oversee the Forest Service during the Obama Administration: “Nobody is asking for this. None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody.”

Compromising US wildfire research

By its own account, Forest Service R&D is the “world’s leading wildland fire research organization.” This work includes how climate change alters fuel moisture and fire behavior through warmer and drier conditions. And the science is clear—the wildfires burning now aren’t the same fires that burned 30 years ago. They are burning at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, growing with greater speed, and under more extreme fire weather conditions. 

These longer, more intense wildfire seasons are destroying homes, livelihoods, and lives. In addition, costly wildfire seasons are driving up property insurance premiums and contributing to rising housing affordability challenges, according to UCS Senior Policy Director for Climate and Energy Rachel Cleetus. As my colleague succinctly put it, “Without robust science, staffing, expertise, and resources, as well as fair pay for wildland firefighters, the job of tackling worsening wildfire seasons will be much harder—and that could put people in greater danger.”

The scale of disruption across R&D sites will yield a significant brain drain and push scientific discovery back decades, especially on issues relevant to the Forest Service: wildfires, pests, post-fire restoration, and more.

Threat to forests as a land carbon sink

Among other concerns, the Trump Administration’s restructuring is a threat to forests’ role as a land carbon sink, and management choices under different climate futures affect long-term carbon outcomes. Globally, forests have historically absorbed roughly one-third of human heat-trapping emissions, but climate change is threatening that carbon sequestration capacity. Canada’s forests are already a source of carbon to the atmosphere following record-breaking wildfire seasons and devastating insect outbreaks.

In the US, the future of our land carbon sink remains murky, with climate change playing a key role in forests’ trajectories. Wildfires threaten to release huge amounts of carbon to the atmosphere and zero-out a forest’s capacity to absorb carbon for years, while drought can lead to tree mortality and facilitate insect outbreaks.

Critical research on these dynamics comes from Forest Service researchers and relies on the agency’s long-term monitoring programs that expand our understanding about how forests respond to climate change. Loss of that scientific and forest management capacity threaten not only our immediate ability to respond to climate-fueled wildfires, but also our ability to use forests to adapt to and mitigate climate change.   

Cutting science agencies benefits no one

It’s worth noting that similar moves by the Trump administration to relocate the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Headquarters yielded negative results and decimated those agencies.  Relocation of federal agencies outside of Washington, DC to be closer to stakeholders was a tactic by the first Trump Administration to diminish the use of science, data, and evidence in decision making. In 2019, the USDA’s ERS and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) were moved to Kansas City for oft-used reasons like “cost savings,” to “provide better customer service,” and “better attract and retain staff.”

Likewise, the BLM, a major federal land management agency and partner to the Forest Service, had its headquarters moved “out West” to Grand Junction. Already, 97% of BLM staff were located in the western United States.  According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), nearly half of the relocated staff declined reassignment, and the agency’s reorganization efforts did not yield effective reforms.

Having worked at BLM headquarters in 2024, I can share my personal observation that the agency was still hamstrung from the 2019 relocation with decreased staffing, missing expertise, and loss of institutional knowledge.

I see a parallel here with Forest Service headquarters being moved to Salt Lake City. It will disrupt key services and important research, accelerating the demise of its world-class research. After seeing what happened at BLM, ERS, and NIFA, the Forest Service will be crippled at coordinating issues across states and less visible in important policy conversations with other land management agencies.

The disastrous effects of President Trump’s recent push to deregulate industry have been most visible in the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) chaos.  The now largely defunct department’s haphazard cuts, combined with budget proposals to slash funding and staffing for dozens of federal agencies, make the sole purpose of these moves clear: the destruction of competency, experience, and effectiveness at federal agencies. The administration is not seeking efficiencies or savings, rather they are seeking a more expansive, more profitable path for special interests through the exploitation of public goods like our national forests. Industry only profits from horizontal trees, not vertical ones.

If the Trump Administration were to move forward with this restructuring as planned, Forest Service R&D would join research efforts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as casualties of this administration’s deliberate, dangerous subterfuge.

The dismantling of the Forest Service is another example in a long list of the Trump Administration’s assault on science. The Administration has already begun dismantling our world-class earth system science research and modeling center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a public good that, if broken up, would have serious economic, national security, and public safety harms, including wildfire research and—consequently—preparedness and response to wildfires. And like last year, the Trump administration has asked Congress to essentially defund NOAA’s research arm.

As Smokey Bear has taught millions, only YOU can prevent forest fires. In this case, only YOU really can prevent literal forest fires by fighting the Trump Administration’s plan to dismantle the Forest Service and ensuring that critical science on wildfires, climate, and carbon continues.

Even with the media attention around this disruptive and corrupt move, one should ask themself—not if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound—but if the Trump Administration breaks apart the Forest Service and no one is around to stop it, does it survive?

Everyone’s interested in the price of gasoline this spring. Well, everyone with a gasoline-powered car is. Rising gasoline prices means Californians are now spending about $6 billion per month on gasoline. Currently, that’s due to the conflict in the Middle East, but this is just the latest shock to prices, with both international issues (like the invasion of Ukraine and the COVID pandemic) and more local disruptions like refinery fires causing past spikes in the price at the pump in California. But gasoline spending would have been much higher if drivers in the state had not been already cutting gasoline use.

EVs, efficiency and alternatives to driving are saving Californians money

These price shocks will certainly cause drivers to look at ways to cut gasoline use, but even before this crisis, California’s gasoline consumption has been falling. While the state’s population has increased slightly, gasoline sales in California have dropped 2.4 billion gallons per year since the peak in 2017. That’s over 60 gallons per person in annual consumption.

Californians are spending more on gasoline with the dramatic price increases, but we are spending less than we would have in the past. Since February 1, GasBuddy.com reports the average price for unleaded gasoline in the state has increased $1.36 per gallon to $5.86 per gallon as of March 30, 2026. Improvements to gasoline vehicle efficiency, the replacement of gasoline cars with EVs, and lower driving with remote and hybrid work arrangements means that drivers in the state are saving $1.2 billion per month compared to if they were driving and using gasoline at the same volume as they were in 2017. And this lower gasoline consumption is despite having more people in the state and having a GDP that grew by $1.7 trillion and at a faster rate than the US as a whole since 2017. Climate policies are a big reason Californians are spending a lot less on gasoline than they otherwise would be. From 2005 to 2025—a period when federal fuel economy standards and both federal and California greenhouse gas standards compelled automakers to produce cleaner cars—the average new vehicle fuel efficiency grew from 19.9 miles per gallon to 27.2 miles per gallon (25.6 miles per gallon when excluding plug-in vehicles). Over that same time, California’s air quality regulator continued to push automakers to develop and deploy electric vehicles and offer financial incentives to encourage drivers to make the switch. 

There are now over 1.5 million fully electric vehicles on the state’s roads. If these EVs replace the average gasoline vehicle, they would eliminate over 700 million gallons of gasoline consumption in California every year. These facts may be cold comfort when going to fill up your gasoline vehicle during this current price spike and the bill tops $100. “Well, it could be worse” doesn’t really offer much relief. But it really could be worse —billions of dollars worse—without the climate and clean vehicle policies enacted over the past two decades. Unfortunately, just as we are seeing the benefits of such policies, federal rollbacks of fuel economy and emissions standards and attacks on California’s authority to set its own standards mean further progress is stalled.

Switching from gasoline to electricity lowers costs and emissions

But even when (if?) gasoline prices come down, car buyers should remember these periods of price shocks and choose vehicles that are both cleaner for the environment and cheaper to refuel. If you can switch from gasoline to electricity, that’s your best bet. But whether you are looking at an electric vehicle or gasoline car, choosing a more efficient model will save money for refueling and lower total emissions.

Lowering costs without buying a new car

Used EVs are increasingly available, including late-model vehicles coming off leases. This will give more affordable options for people that want to make the switch from gasoline to electricity but can’t afford to buy a new car. And data from auto industry experts show that used EVs are retaining their battery capacity, even when they have significant mileage.

However, replacing a car with walking, biking, and/or public transportation altogether is even cheaper than getting an EV. Not only does that save money on fuel, but also maintenance, insurance, parking, and registration costs. That’s why we should support both policies that make it easier to switch to EVs AND advocate for better pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and public transportation funding.

Looking ahead, April shows continued above normal risks in the Southeast and the Southwestern United States.

Climate-change driven heat, drought drive risk

Across much of the country, March brought above-normal temperatures—including an alarming, record-breaking early heatwave in the western US (and other parts of the country)—virtually impossible without climate change. Drought has also spread, with a third of the country now in severe or extreme drought. As of the end of March, 60 percent of the country was in some stage of drought. And precipitation was also below normal in many parts of the country, including “snow drought” conditions in the West. In addition, the March heatwave triggered a much earlier melt-off of snowpack—in some cases as much as 4 to 6 weeks earlier than the previously recorded earliest melt-off dates, according to the latest wildland fire outlook. Reductions in snowpack have been linked to more severe wildfire, while earlier snowmelt increases the timeframe for large wildfire activity by allowing vegetation to dry out for longer periods.

Together, these hotter, drier conditions bear the classic fingerprints of climate change, and they’re setting up dangerous risks for wildfires later this year, moving westward as the season progresses. These background conditions mean that, should a fire break out due to lightning or human ignition sources, the chances of it growing in intensity and size are much greater.

Multi-year risk factors are also critical to monitor. For example, the latest Fuels and Fire Behavior Advisory for the Central and Southern Great Plains shows that above-normal rainfall in 2025 led to vegetation growth that has now turned exceptionally dry with the rainfall deficit and drought in the first part of 2026. These exceptional grass loads are volatile tinder for this year’s wildfire season. According to the report, “Oklahoma Forestry Services reported extreme fire behavior and high resistance to control as a grassland fire spread to junipers on the Cedar Canyon Fire in late March, and similar conditions have been reported elsewhere in the region.” Similarly, the report for the Northern and Central Great Plains notes that: “Historically dry fuels are leading to extreme rates of fire spread and fire behavior not typically seen in March.“

By July, much of the western US—including northern California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado Idaho, and Utah—will experience high fire risk, along with the south-central US, barring major rainfall events that can help blunt risks.

Climate change is one major part of the picture. Other factors—such as the proximity of wildfires to communities, homes and critical infrastructure—can raise the risks and harms to people’s safety, health, livelihoods, local economies and critical ecosystems.

A wildfire-driven insurance crisis

Worsening wildfire seasons are also contributing to a growing challenge in the property insurance market, especially in California. Many residents in wildfire-prone areas—and even in areas with lower risk—can no longer find affordable insurance on the open market. Insurance companies have been raising rates, dropping policies, and even retreating from risk-prone areas.

An increasing number of homeowners have been forced to purchase “last resort” policies from California’s state FAIR plan, one indicator of the problem. These bare-bones policies provide limited, expensive coverage—and the premiums vary widely by zip code. Data show that the number of policies in force under the California FAIR plan has risen 146% between 2022 and the end of 2025. The FAIR plan, which is under financial strain, is now seeking to raise its rates and is asking for a 35.8% average rate hike this spring.

The insurance market is in a precarious state and, were California to experience another costly fire season, things could get even more dire for homeowners. Despite all of this, insurance companies are continuing to insure fossil fuel projects and infrastructure—which are the underlying cause of the climate crisis! As UCS research shows, major fossil fuel producers bear a huge responsibility for the emissions that are fueling worsening western wildfire seasons—and it’s only fair that they should pay for their share of the impacts and costs.

Policy responses (or lack thereof)

Even as the nation faces another potentially dangerous fire season, the US Forest Service (USFS)—which plays a major role in managing wildland fires—is undergoing a chaotic and disruptive reorganization by the Trump administration. Separately, last year, President Trump issued an executive order directing a consolidation of federal firefighting resources across the Department of the Interior and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA, within which USFS sits) and other changes to limit and respond to wildfires. The DOI has published a plan to establish a joint US Wildland Fire Service.

While consolidation could have benefits, there are good reasons to be skeptical about the Trump administration’s approach and actual intentions. For example, a recent report from the USDA Office of the Inspector General shows that the USFS lost 16% of its staff (5,860 employees) since the end of 2024—which is largely due to Trump administration actions. And among the moves announced last week is a closure of research stations that study wildfire risk. Without robust science, staffing, expertise, and resources, as well as fair pay for wildland firefighters, the job of tackling worsening wildfire seasons will be much harder—and that could put people in greater danger.

All these changes are happening against a backdrop of a broadside assault by the Trump administration against federal agencies. Staff and budget cuts, dismantling of programs that serve the public, and politicization of disaster aid have been an ongoing challenge with this administration. All while spreading disinformation about climate science. Moreover, the administration is gutting climate and clean energy policies that could help curtail the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change and help communities build resilience to climate-fueled disasters.

Congress must ensure that crucial public priorities—including support for the science, staffing and resources needed to understand and address the growing threats and impacts of wildfires—are robustly funded in the next appropriations cycle. Investments in community resilience and risk mitigation measures to protect against wildfires, as well as for the management and protection of healthy forest ecosystems, are also vital.

At the same time, policymakers and regulators at the state and federal level must seriously grapple with the spiraling insurance crisis which is also contributing to the housing affordability crisis affecting millions of people. Data transparency and better oversight and regulation of the insurance market are urgently needed to better understand where, why and by how much insurers are raising rates (and if they are using discriminatory metrics like people’s credit scores to do so). Consumers need regulators and policymakers to help ensure they are treated fairly, especially in their worst moments after disaster strikes.

Catastrophic wildfires are now a reality for all too many communities. As a nation, we have to do much more to help people prepare, withstand and recover from these fires, while also sharply cutting the heat-trapping emissions that are burning up our world.

On the contrary, California is more resilient to global price shocks due to strong programs like Cap and Invest and the prudent spending of the revenues it generates.  California has made strides in reducing fossil fuel demand over the past few decades as our grid, homes and cars are increasingly powered by domestic, clean electricity.

Continuing ambitious climate and clean energy policies, like Cap and Invest, is critical to protecting the lives—and pocketbooks—of Californians.

Global events, local impact

The Iran war is occurring far from California, but it is undoubtedly a primary cause of the recent gas price spikes that are hitting drivers close to home.

Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that the largest component of gasoline prices and the main source of price volatility is the price of crude oil, which made up 55% of the cost of a gallon of gas over the last decade.

California gets about a quarter of its crude oil from the Middle East, which is obviously being impacted by multiple wars. And while the US is a net exporter of petroleum, because crude oil prices are set on a global market, prices for oil and petroleum products are spiking dramatically everywhere, regardless of where they come from.

The extreme volatility of crude oil globally is why gas prices are, well, extremely volatile.  

What else determines the price of gasoline?

If the price of crude is responsible for more than half of the cost of a gallon of gasoline, what makes up the other half? The answer is straightforward…to a point.

In January, when gasoline in the state was $4.01 per gallon, the price of crude oil accounted for $1.60, refining and distribution margins were $1.09, state and federal taxes and fees were $0.90 and environmental programs were $0.42. The math is simple, but there is a mystery hiding in the refining and distribution margins.

Since 2015, California consumers have also been saddled with what Berkeley Professor Severin Borenstein has described as the Mystery Gas Surcharge (MGS).

The MGS is the difference between California and rest of US retail price after removing taxes and other cost differences.  Professor Borenstein’s recent post notes the MGS was “about $0.57 in Feb, before attack on Iran. Based on AAA info, today it’s just over $1.”

Oil companies love to complain about the 42-cent environmental programs, but the MGS is a bigger, non-transparent part of the cost of California gasoline that you don’t hear the oil companies talk about.

California’s rules protect air breathers and consumers

Decades ago, toxic air pollution—largely from cars and trucks—was causing smog and driving a public health crisis in California. Concerns about this pollution led Governor Ronald Reagan to successfully advocate that President Richard Nixon allow California to regulate vehicles more stringently than the federal government.

This authority was the basis of countless life-saving regulations that made cars and trucks in California cleaner, more fuel-efficient, and, ultimately, zero-emission. These safeguards reduced toxic air pollution and heat-trapping emissions and also had the significant co-benefit of decreasing the state’s reliance on gasoline.

California’s protections have resulted in California’s gasoline demand dropping about 15 percent since its peak in 2005. In addition to the clear pollution and public health benefit of reduced reliance on gasoline, this reduced demand protects consumers from the likely price volatility caused by global events like war and extreme weather events.

The state has gone from a maximum of 15.6 billion gallons used in 2017 to 13.2 billion gallons in 2025. That’s over 2 billion gallons in reduced gasoline use and $14 billion per year in avoided spending at the current price of $5.82 per gallon. On average, that breaks down to about 60 fewer gallons of gasoline per Californian and more than $350 extra in each of their wallets.

And while the state reduced its gasoline consumption by 2 billion gallons, California’s economy grew substantially, becoming the world’s fourth largest economy last year.

Keep capping and investing

You wouldn’t know it from the billboards the oil industry is plastering around Sacramento, but in stark contrast to the major, volatile, and mysterious costs associated with crude oil and industry profits, California’s Cap and Invest program accounts for only 25 cents to the overall price of gas. And unlike crude oil prices and refiner margins, it remains a small, stable and predictable cost that improves the lives of Californians.

Like setting up an automatic 401k contribution, Cap and Invest is a reasonable investment that funds cleaner vehicles and related infrastructure, reduces electricity prices, and advances climate solutions. All these investments work together to make California and its residents more resilient in the face of local, state, national and global events.

Conversely, skyrocketing crude prices and refiner margins line the oil industry’s pockets and help fund misinformation campaigns against the state’s critical climate programs.

Updates to the Cap and Invest program are in the midst of being finalized by the California Air Resources Board. This process must move forward without delay to provide the state the resilience it needs to weather the storm of global supply constraints, hostile federal administrations, and disingenuous polluters.