With Raw Farm, the largest raw-milk dairy in the country, Mark McAfee has capitalized on a once-fringe product that’s been thrust into the mainstream in recent years and backed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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Trump administration officials earlier this year killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and a close ally of the president’s.
The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.
The criminal probe was a significant escalation in the yearslong effort to police serial pollution offenses by Virginia-based Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated mining operations controlled by the family. In the past decade, Southern Coal and other Justice corporations have racked up tens of thousands of allegedviolations of the Clean Water Act and have been sued repeatedly by state and federal prosecutors over their failure to properly follow environmental laws at their mining sites.
On the day 5-year-old Lens Joseph was killed by a Boston Public Schools bus last year, the driver had already struck a postal truck, ignored a stop sign and missed several stops, prosecutors said. When he got to Lens’ house, he dropped him off on the wrong side of the street and then ran over the kindergartner as he crossed in front of the bus.
Transdev, a multinational company that has been the city’s sole bus contractor since 2013, hired and trained the driver of the bus that killed Lens. Yet a federal safety database shows no sign that the company was involved in the April 2025 crash. WBUR and ProPublica found at least 60 fatal Transdev crashes in the last decade, but the federal database shows only 18 under the company’s name. That means 42 fatal crashes are not identified as Transdev’s.
This missing information is important because the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which oversees commercial motor vehicles, relies on it to pinpoint unsafe companies.
But the process the agency uses to collect information is faulty: It identifies only a fraction of a company’s fatal crashes.
"SNAP participation is already declining at alarming rates, with over 3.5 million people leaving" the program since the passage of the GOP budget law, the Democratic senators said.
Several US senators who formerly served as their states’ governors on Tuesday warned that the cuts to food aid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are a “ticking time bomb” for millions of Americans.
In a joint statement, Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Angus King (I-Maine) drew on their experiences as governors to outline how the changes made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the GOP’s 2025 budget law would soon handcuff state governments’ ability to deliver essential assistance.
“Starting October 2027, most states will be required to pay 5% to 15% of SNAP benefit costs for the first time,” the senators said. “The Congressional Budget Office projects this will shift more than $35 billion from the federal government to states between 2028 and 2034, with states expected to respond by cutting another $7 billion in food assistance.”
The senators said that the GOP’s SNAP cuts mean states “will be forced to raise taxes, cut education, healthcare, or transportation, or restrict access to SNAP itself,” with some being “forced to drop the program entirely.”
They then pointed to numbers showing that “SNAP participation is already declining at alarming rates, with over 3.5 million people leaving” the program since the passage of the GOP budget law.
The senators’ warnings about the impact of the SNAP cuts came shortly after a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showing food insecurity in the US reaching its highest levels since the Covid-19pandemic.
The New York Fed researchers said their study found “a remarkable increase in food insecurity, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income households and households with young children,” as well as “a contemporaneous increase in pessimism among the same groups, along with a sharp decline in job-finding expectations.”
Despite this, Trump-appointed US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins last month described millions of people losing their access to SNAP as a positive sign that “America is back in business.”
When confronted by Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) about this during a House Agriculture Committee hearing last week, Rollins baselessly claimed that all of the people who had been removed from SNAP had been added to the program fraudulently, including “200,000 dead people.”
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"This has nothing to do with Joe Biden," one senator said, "but Trump and DOGE definitely screwed our cattle industry."
TheTrump administrationhas emphasized in recent days that the New World screwworm infectionfoundin a calf inTexasdid not pose a threat to theUnited States’ larger cattle herd, which is at its lowest point in 75 years due largely todroughtconditions—but the US Department ofAgricultureis nowacknowledgingthat cases of the parasite have been found outside the Texas containment zone and as far away as in New Mexico, as Republican officials attempt to blame theBiden administrationfor the outbreak.
While Democratic lawmakers are among those connecting the arrival of screwworm—a flesh-eating bug that feeds off the living tissue of warm-blooded animals and had been eradicated in the US in 1966—to cuts by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that specifically targeted screwworm monitoring programs, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins doubled down on claims that an “open border policy” under the Biden administration was to blame.
“This does trace back to the last administration and the open border policy, and the movement of millions of people and their animals up from South America through Central America,” said Rollins with certainty on Monday.
As David Dayen explained at The American Prospect Tuesday, former President Joe Biden placed a ban on bison, horse, and cattle imports from Mexico in 2024, which Trump lifted in February 2025. At the same time, DOGE, under the leadership of Trump megadonor and tech billionaire Elon Musk, cut screwworm monitoring efforts and animal disease control and prevention efforts, slashing 1,300 employees from USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
Rollins did reinstate the live import ban last May as screwworm cases were rising in Mexico and began funding prevention programs in Texas. But a $600 million facility for breeding sterile screwworm flies—a key component of successful eradication efforts—is not scheduled to be completed until late next year, and sterile flies that have been dispersed from a facility that opened in February at Moore Air Force Base in South Texas only amount to “about one one-hundredth of what it would take each week to eradicate the pest,” Dayen wrote.
He also noted that Rollins has attempted to blame Biden—who has not been in office since January 2025—despite the fact that the total average lifespan of a screwworm fly is 21 days.
“The more likely explanation is that an administration with an antipathy to government ignored government’s purpose until it was too late,” wrote Dayen.
The USDA established a 12-mile quarantine area around the affected area last week when the case was detected in South Texas, but on Monday the agency said another case had been found in Gillespie County, over 100 miles from where the initial case was reported.
A dog was also found to be infested in Lea County, New Mexico, more than 400 miles away.
The parasite is not expected to affect food safety, as it feeds on living tissue, but the outbreak raises concerns about rising beef prices, which are already high due to the low volume of cattle in the US. The high prices of fertilizer and fuel due to the war in Iran, and of equipment and repairs due to Trump’s tariff policy, have also put a strain on the cattle industry.
“The cattle producer in the US has already been under extreme financial stress,” Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action Fund and a farmer in Missouri, told The American Prospect. “This is serious, the screwworm outbreak. But it’s even more serious because of the financial position they were already under.”
In response to Rollins’ claims, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Tuesday: “Let’s be clear about what happened: DOGE cut the programs and staff that tracked dangerous outbreaks like screwworm.”
“So this has nothing to do with Joe Biden,” she said, “but Trump and DOGE definitely screwed our cattle industry.”
“MAGA Mike Johnson won’t show the American people his secret plan to eliminate Social Security because he knows Republican policies are wildly unpopular."
Social Security’s trustees said in theirannual reportreleased Tuesday that the New Deal program will be unable to pay out full benefits by the end of 2032—a quarter earlier than projected last year—in the absence of congressional action, a finding that advocates said underscores the destructive impact of President Donald Trump’s policy agenda and the need to make the rich finally pay their fair share into the system.
“This is the first Social Security trustees report that begins to take Donald Trump’s second term policies into account: A tax bill that largely benefited the wealthy, economy-wrecking tariffs, a needless war with Iran, and hostility to immigrants,” said Nancy Altman, the president of Social Security Works. “All of these have reduced the amount of money going into Social Security, weakening the system’s finances.”
The trustees report was released a day after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declared in a radio show appearance that “entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security” need to be “adjusted and fixed,” which critics say is euphemistic language for benefit cuts, given past GOP proposals such as raising the retirement age.
Johnson said the GOP intends to release a new Social Security plan “next year,” without providing any details.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), House Democrats’ campaign arm, immediately pressed Johnson, suggesting he’s delaying Republican plans for Social Security and Medicare until after the 2026 midterms to avoid consequences at the ballot box.
“MAGA Mike Johnson won’t show the American people his secret plan to eliminate Social Security because he knows Republican policies are wildly unpopular and will be resoundingly rejected by the American people in November,” said Justin Chermol, a DCCC spokesperson.
The new trustees report projects that Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance will be able to pay out full benefits “until the fourth quarter of 2032, one quarter earlier than projected last year.”
“At that time, the fund’s reserves will become depleted and continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 78% of total scheduled benefits,” the trustees said.
Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (NCPSSM), stressed that the new projection “does not mean that Social Security is going ‘bankrupt’ or ‘broke.’”
“Nor does the trustees report mean that benefits must be cutto maintain the program’s fiscal health,” said Richtman. “It would be grossly unfair to ask beneficiaries on fixed incomes to bear the cost of strengthening Social Security. While conservatives favor benefit cuts (such as raising the retirement age, means testing, or reduced COLAs), we advocate for revenue-side solutions where the wealthy pay their fair share.”
Specifically, NCPSSM and other progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers have called for raising the Social Security’s payroll tax cap, which currently exempts annual income above $184,500 from the program’s dedicated payroll levy.
Richtman said that lifting the payroll tax cap and “subjecting some of high earners’ investment income to Social Security taxes” would keep the program solvent “well beyond the 2030s.” He noted that Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation to shore up Social Security’s finances by taxing the rich, but the bills have gone nowhere in the Republican-controlled Congress.
In a joint statement issued in response to the trustees report, Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.), Richard Neal (D-Mass.), and Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) said that “instead of joining Democrats to protect and enhance” Medicare and Social Security, “Donald Trump and Republicans are busy sabotaging them.”
“After DOGE took a wrecking ball to the Social Security Administration under false pretenses, all Americans got were slashed customer service and their most personal data put at risk—without a penny saved,” the Democrats said. “Combined with their sole legislative achievement pricing millions out of coverage and putting Medicare on the chopping block, there is no greater threat to Americans’ wellbeing than Republican governance.”
"We... worry deeply that US retaliatory strikes will trigger another destabilizing military exchange that has no winners," said the National Iranian American Committee.
President Donald Trump said the US military would “respond” after Iran reportedly took down an Army Apache helicopter on Tuesday, raising fears of yet more escalation amid collapsing ceasefire talks.
“I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.”
The Iranian state-owned outlet PressTV acknowledged that the aircraft had gone down, describing it as coming amid “Iran’s decisive retaliation against Washington’s incessant violations of a ceasefire with the Islamic Republic,” though it did not clarify whether it had been shot down or had gone down for a different reason.
US Central Command said on Tuesday morning that “the cause of the incident is under investigation.”
It is the first known instance in which an Apache, one of the most powerful aircraft in the US arsenal, was downed since the US and Israel attacked Iran in late February. Two US officials told CNN that it was brought down by an Iranian drone.
The US has deployed Apache and other aircraft as part of its effort to escort vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has blocked most maritime traffic in retaliation for the US launching the war, dramatically spiking global oil and gas prices. The US has also enacted its own naval blockade of Iranian ports.
The downing of the aircraft comes amid Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon, which Iran has described as a red line for ceasefire negotiations.
After trading fire over the weekend, Israel and Iran agreed to pause their attacks against one another after Trump begged them to “stop shooting.” But Iran warned that if Israel continues its devastating attacks on Lebanon, in violation of a recent ceasefire, it would continue firing.
On Tuesday, Israel issued yet another forced evacuation order for all the residents of Tyre, Lebanon’s fourth largest city before pummeling it with strikes, killing at least eight people and injuring another 32, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Israel claimed last week that militants from the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah were hiding out there, but according to Reuters, it did so “without providing evidence.”
Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which was forced to suspend its operations in the city and nearby areas due to the attacks, denounced Israel’s “forced displacement practices,” which have left more than 1 million residents of Lebanon displaced from their homes.
The National Iranian American Council warned of further escalation on Tuesday after the downing of the American helicopter, saying it jeopardized the prospects for peace.
“Military escalation amid the ceasefire became normalized via Israel’s military operations in Lebanon and the US imposition of a blockade,” the group said in a statement posted to social media on Tuesday. “Now, the tempo of stresses to the ceasefire is increasing at an alarming rate.”
“We are thankful that the helicopter pilots survived last night’s military exchange that unfolded in the Strait of Hormuz, yet worry deeply that US retaliatory strikes will trigger another destabilizing military exchange that has no winners,” the group continued. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. We must choose peace or be condemned to more disastrous war.”
"Do I have great confidence that Trump will do that right thing? No, I don't."
With PresidentDonald Trumpseeminglyopento the idea of having the federal government take a stake in majorartificial intelligencefirms, Sen.Bernie Sandersemphasized on Monday that he and the president have two very different visions when it comes to regulating AI.
During an interview at the National Press Club, CBS News’ Robert Costa asked Sanders (I-Vt.) to comment on Trump last week showing interest in the government partially owning Big Tech firms whose AI models could potentially disrupt American society in the coming years.
Sanders credited Trump with having sharp political instincts on the matter, theorizing that he understands the deep unease and anxiety that people feel about AI, particularly the fear that it could put millions of Americans out of work while benefiting Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
“So as a politician, I think that’s where he’s coming from,” Sanders said. “Do I have great confidence that Trump will do the right thing? No.”
Trump so far has only hinted at plans for a public stake in AI firms and hasn’t released any concrete plans.
In contrast, Sanders earlier this month wrote an editorial for The New York Times in which he proposed creating an AI-based sovereign wealth fund that would impose a one-time, 50% tax on OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI behemoths, paid in the form of stock.
Sanders argued that the wealth fund was necessary to “give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology” and “guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us—not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”
Noting that AI companies’ large language models (LLMs) were only made possible with the inputs of centuries’ worth of human knowledge and writing, Sanders said that it’s only reasonable that the public have a strong degree of control over how such technology is used.
“When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth,” Sanders wrote. “The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley. It must not be dictated by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit.”
Progressive economist Dean Baker on Tuesday pushed back on Sanders’ idea for an AI sovereign wealth fund, in particular arguing that it may be unwise for the government to create a wealth fund based on what might be a wildly overvalued asset.
“Most likely the AI sector is in a massive bubble,” cautioned Baker. “An AI sovereign wealth fund is likely to end up being a mechanism to shovel yet more money to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of the right-wing billionaire gang. We have already given this crew enough money.”
Instead, Baker proposed handling the potential negative consequences of AI disruption through a mix of higher corporate income taxes, stricter antitrust enforcement, and shorter average work weeks.
“We have all the tools needed deal with an AI productivity boom; we just lack the political will to use them,” Baker concluded. “The sovereign wealth fund idea is a massive leap in the wrong direction.”
"As globally important food-producing regions face growing risks of climate-driven disruption, the effects can ripple through livelihoods, supply chains, food assistance systems, and geopolitical relationships."
The climate emergency is sharply increasing the risk of crop failure in regions that produce an outsized share of the world’s staple food grains, according to a report published Tuesday that warns of “serious threats to Europe, the NATO alliance, and global stability” if cooperative resilience initiatives and other mitigation strategies aren’t pursued.
The report, “Global Breadbaskets: Food System Resilience as a Strategic Imperative,” was published by the Center for Climate and Security—part of the Council on Strategic Risks, a Washington, DC-based security policy think tank—and the Woodwell Climate Research Center, an independent nonprofit located in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
“Geopolitical fragmentation, conflict, extreme weather, and global aid cuts already strain food security. Meanwhile, climate change is increasing the likelihood of crop failures in the American, European, and Asian breadbaskets, which produce most of the staple crops underpinning global food security,” the report states.
The publication follows an April report from a pair of United Nations agencies on how extreme heat is impacting food production and food security around the planet. The new report includes a storymap that explores climate change-driven threats to wheat, rice, and maize (corn) crops in France, Germany, and India—three of the world’s “global breadbaskets.”
The analysis’ authors note that compared with 2010 threat levels, by 2040, “the risk of a given year’s crop failing is projected to grow roughly twofold for Indian wheat and German maize, roughly threefold for French wheat, roughly fourfold for French maize, and roughly sixfold for Indian rice, with sharp increases in critical producing regions.”
Climate-driven extreme heat “not only threatens crops, but also the laborers and infrastructure that translate them into food security,” the report continues. “Extreme heat is projected to reduce the suitability of 15-40% of India’s rain-fed rice-growing regions by 2050, and to reduce physical work capacity during the average growing season to as little as 40% of 2000-era levels by 2100.”
“By 2040, southwestern France will average up to 16 additional days per year above 35°C (95°F), exceeding thresholds that reduce yields, impact grain quality, and cause heat stroke,” the paper warns. “Extreme heat also threatens to damage or disable road and rail networks critical to food transportation, agricultural machinery, civil defense, and military mobilization.”
The publication also states that global breadbasket failures in Europe “could open rifts for Russian meddling, fuel instability in key partners, and elevate food production as a geopolitical lever.”
The Council on Strategic Risks operates within the transatlantic security policy community, whose work often overlaps with NATO’s interests.
“We have plenty of examples of how crop failures can contribute to political instability, from the French Revolution to the Arab Spring,” Center for Climate and Security deputy director and report lead author Tom Ellison said Tuesday in a statement. “In today’s environment, global breadbasket failures could strain NATO priorities, prompt unrest in key countries, and upend trade relationships.”
Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist and report co-author Alexandra Naegele warned that “climate change doesn’t just threaten crop yields and grain quality—it destabilizes entire food systems, from labor and livestock to food storage and transport.”
“Quantifying these climate-driven risks is an essential step toward building resilient food systems and safeguarding global food security,” she added.
The report recommends steps countries—specifically members of the European Union and NATO—can take to mitigate risks to food security, including strengthening cooperative resilience, anticipating instability and hybrid warfare, supporting strategic and vulnerable partners, coordinating trade responses, and investing in agricultural research and development.
“Amid climate change, geopolitical uncertainty, food shocks from the war in Iran, and Russian hybrid warfare, investing in a resilient food system isn’t in competition with security—it’s a key part of it,” Ellison stressed.
Monica Caparas, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center and report co-author, said, “Understanding and preparing for breadbasket failures is both a national security priority and a humanitarian imperative—one that can help protect lives, reduce instability, and strengthen food resilience before a regional shock becomes a wider crisis.”
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A new report argues for a “sufficiency” world, in which all have enough and where the share of wealth owned by the richest 1% drops dramatically.
By Bill Mckibben
One of the (many) curses of the Trump era is that he keeps us fixated, hour by hour, on his latest stupidity or fraud, a constant swirling game of three-card monte that ends only when he robs some more of our attention and money. So I will try valiantly for a moment to escape his asteroid belt of provocation (it’s not easy—did you know that America decided this week to sink a few billion into promoting… coal?) and try to think a little more broadly.
This step back is occasioned by Thomas Piketty and his team at the World Inequality Lab in Paris, who last week released the Global Justice Report, subtitled A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. Piketty, you will recall, is the London-born economist who in 2013 released his book Capital, in many ways launching the ongoing critique of global inequality and the generalized scorn for the billionaire class. (At one point, remember, America and the world generally admired these people).
Now he and his team has enlarged their analysis to include the 21st century’s novel dilemma—that we are steadily and rapidly overheating the planet—and the result is this report, which I read in certain ways as the data-rich companion to Naomi Klein’s 2014 classic This Changes Everything, an investigation of whether it is possible to imagine prosperity without ruinous growth. Much has changed in the years since those volumes—most importantly, the plummeting price of solar and wind energy and of batteries to store that power has opened up a much larger escape hatch. And it’s from that premise that Piketty’s new work really proceeds.
There’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground.
The Global Justice Project says that rapid decarbonization is a must, and that it needs to be paid for by the rich, and that that payment should come in the form of a global wealth tax and a global income tax, which funnel fairly large sums of money from the north to the south. They aim for a “sufficiency” world, in which all have enough and where the share of wealth owned by the richest 1% drops dramatically—a kind of globalized Sweden, I’d say, in which people work half the hours we do at present, and consume more education and healthcare and less stuff. They view it as an alternative to “degrowth” scenarios, and also to our current unrestrained growth model, and say that it leaves the world with lower temperatures than either of those schemes.:
To avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency is required: a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems is also necessary, as is the sharp compression of income and wealth inequality. This compression is both a social justice objective and a condition for financing necessary climate investment and human capital expenditure and for sustaining political support from bottom- and middle-income classes in both the North and the South.
Here’s a little diagram they provide of the basic outline.
I have a certain sympathy for the argument—expressed most pithily by David Roberts on Bluesky—that this kind of sky-castle architecture doesn’t amount to much; I too am more fascinated by the daily drumbeat of technological innovation. And I think that the accumulation of that innovation may undermine part of Piketty’s argument; I have a feeling that the investment required for decarbonization is going to be easier to come by, as the price for good stuff just keeps falling, and the economic logic of paying for fossil fuel becomes ever smaller.
But I also think that the climate crisis is not the only ecological threat we face, nor indeed the only threat period. I think it’s pretty clear that democracy can’t survive inequality; there’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground. One possibility is that the mega rich will succeed in their current project of deliberalizing the planet, and we’ll all get to live in our own nasty little sovereignties; another is that the Bernie Sanderses resident in most parts of the world will figure out how to combine their efforts and that over time we’ll get something that looks a bit like what Piketty (or for that matter Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future) imagines. One tell for me that this team is not entirely politically detached came in this paragraph about what would happen if America (or China) predictably refused to join in such a scheme:
If necessary, the Global Justice Platform can be implemented with an incomplete coalition of countries, including the absence of the US and/or China. According to our projections, the climate damages imposed by the US on other countries would be about 3% of world GDP per year, on average, over the 2026-2100 period if the US does not participate in the GJP. Under simplifying assumptions, other countries should impose a corrective tax of approximately 80% on all US exports to collect tax revenues approximately equivalent to the damage. Given the projected decline of the US share in world GDP—from 30% in 1945 to 15% in 2025 and 5-10% by 2100—it is likely that such tariffs would induce the US to join the GJP. The same conclusion applies to the case of China, but with a higher tariff (180% or more).
The report concludes that
A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible. What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.
I think that’s a worthy goal to keep in the back of our minds as we proceed with the daily work of building the infrastructure for this new world; every election is a chance to get us a little closer, by electing the kind of people who understand the need for this kind of compression of wealth.
But the infrastructure is the part we can do something about right now, and on that score there’s some equal mix of encouraging maddening news, all of it again on a large scale.
On the one hand, our farcical war in the Gulf continues to serve as the recruiting sergeant for the renewable revolution. As a Bloomberg team reports in a long and important essay, the Gulf War has been “Asia’s Ukraine”:
About two hours from Manila there’s a solar power plant capable of powering 60,000 homes. Surrounded by fields growing okra and eggplant, it had been sitting idle since August, waiting for a connection to the grid—stuck in a queue just like many other renewable energy facilities around the world as power networks struggle to catch up with rising electricity demand.
Then the Iran war cut off the Philippines’ supply of imported liquefied natural gas. Immediately, the government cut fuel taxes and offered free bus rides to the public. Then a few weeks later, as the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked, officials began deploying policies toward a deeper, more structural plan to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
One strategy was to fast track more than 30 renewable plants by the end of April. One of those was that 125-megawatt solar plant, built by Citicore Renewable Energy Corp, which is now supplying clean energy to the grid. It is “good timing,” said Joselito Ernst Cañete, operations manager at Citicore, just as electricity demand increases to power air conditioners during the peak summer months.
Meanwhile, the cheerful solar guru Danny Kennedy chimed in from a conference in Singapore where he found the Western politicians and analysts way behind the Asian curve. I will quote from his account at some length because it’s important:
Philippines. After declaring a national energy emergency in March, the government activated a whole-of-government mandate for energy security. Regulatory bottlenecks for renewables are being dismantled. Rooftop solar inquiries are up 500% since the crisis began. This is not a green ambition. This is a survival response.
Vietnam. The country has revised its power development plan, targeting a minimum of 47% renewable electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam is already the region’s largest EV market, and its government has expanded EV tax incentives in direct response to the Iran War’s impact on fuel prices. HSBC recently extended $4 billion in clean-tech financing to Chinese firms, much of it flowing into EV and solar exports to Vietnam and ASEAN.
Indonesia. Beyond the factory I visited in Batam, the government is engineering a broad fiscal shift—expanding EV incentives with a target of 2 million electric cars and 12 million electric two-wheelers on the road by 2030. With the world’s largest nickel reserves, Indonesia is positioning itself to replace diesel imports with a domestic battery ecosystem. The logic is national sovereignty as much as climate policy. We’ve also talked about their 100GW solar archipelago plans.
Thailand. Advanced its net zero target by 15 full years, to 2050. Solar generation surged 72% in 2025. The country is adding 50 GW of renewables and 14 GW of energy storage by 2037. A major 1 GW module supply deal between China’s GCL-SI and Thailand’s Getz Energy was just signed to support that buildout. Singapore itself. Already scaled solar to 1.7 GW and is executing multi-gigawatt cross-border subsea clean electricity cables from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam—with a requirement that developers bundle storage at origin for 24/7 firm power delivery. Singapore, to its credit, is acting. The conference, perhaps, just needed a bigger window.
We already know China and India—the two largest energy consumers in Asia—reached a historic tipping point together in 2025. For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%. These are not small numbers. These are inflection points.
And yet even as this good news is happening, the Chinese are also beginning to shutter many of the solar panel factories that are at the heart of this revolution, because they’re not making enough money. This is, on the hand, understandable, and on the other entirely maddening—these factories are the single most important industrial asset on Earth—they are factories for lowering the temperature of the Earth. As readers are doubtless painfully aware, I’ve been beating this drum for a good long while, but I’m glad to see others joining in. Adam Tooze, the interesting bricoleur in charge of the Chartbook newsletter, wrote in the FT this week, it would be understandable if we were talking about some mundane commodity like cement:
But solar panels? Since when were solar panels just another commodity? They are a technological miracle. They make us into farmers of the sun. For the past half century, research labs around the world, starting in the 1970s with NASA spin-offs and the big US energy research push under Jimmy Carter, have been straining to reach this point. Together with batteries, which are also rapidly approaching the point of excess supply, they are the key to a sustainable future.
As Tooze points out, it cost China very little in subsidies ($18 billion) to build this behemoth (though one should probably add in the subsidies that, say, Germany provided to its citizens to buy the early models, underwriting the startup of China’s engineering miracle).
I’ve long argued that on a rational world, trying everything it could to head off the worst of global warming, we would “globalize” these factories, running them 24/7 and then piling up the panels on every railroad siding and wharf on the planet so that people could come take them away. This would be, I think, a backdoor way of achieving a fair amount of what Piketty has in mind, far messier than his global scheme but somewhat more plausible. By some calculations, 10 years production from those plants would produce enough panels to provide all the power the world currently uses.
If my sense that the coming El Niño will revive the world’s focus on the climate crisis—well, this is the easiest possible route forward. And it comes not just with more power, but with different power. Elon Musk may be rushing his IPO for data centers in space or whatever the heck he’s currently selling, but some of us will hole up here on Earth, quite sufficient with the solar panels in our yards.
