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The Rich World’s Climate Distraction

  The past 75 years have brought the greatest improvement of human welfare in history. But over the past decade, much of that progress has stalled. This happened at the same time that the rich world shifted its attention to climate change. This isn’t a coincidence, and it has to change. Consider extreme poverty, long defined as living on less than $1 a day, adjusted for inflation and purchasing power. In 1950, more than half of humanity was that poor (using the 1985 dollar as the benchmark). Today the share is 7.6%, the lowest ever recorded. Average schooling has almost tripled, from 3.2 years to nearly nine. Electricity access has soared. Problems remain, but the gains have been spectacular. Yet that development has lately slowed to a crawl. After almost two centuries of declining poverty, the number of poor people in the world hasn’t budged since 2016. Global progress is at its slowest pace since 1950, according to the World Bank. There are many causes, but one stands out. In ...
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Judge strikes down New York’s climate superfund law

  The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York struck down the state’s Climate Change Superfund Act on Monday, ruling that the 2024 law is invalid under the federal Clean Air Act. The law set up a cost recovery scheme whereby fossil fuel companies would pay into a fund used to finance climate change adaptation-related infrastructure projects. The state’s argument rested in part on the Trump administration’s decision earlier this year to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, which gave the agency authority to regulate climate pollution. Judge Brenda K. Sannes dismissed that argument in her decision, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in American Electric Power v. Connecticut from 2011, which, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo put it , “established companies’ protection from federal public nuisance claims over greenhouse gas emissions. That decision sprang from the Court’s earlier 2007 decision that the Clean ...
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Climate Change is Making Us Stupid

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  I take the title of today’s post from the closing line of a fantastic 2014 article by Dan Sarewitz in Slate . Sarewitz wrote: “Climate change, added on top of all the other causes of these problems, will often make things worse. But for the most part there will be no way to tell which ones are worse than they would have been anyway, or how much worse they have become. So it’s not that apocalyptic fears about climate change are utterly fantastic—climate change may well exacerbate a range of serious and potentially even disastrous problems—it’s that the monomaniacal, apocalyptic version of climate change gives us a picture of the world that is so incomplete that it’s much worse than simply wrong. Worse because, just like religious and political orthodoxy, it cannot be falsified. On the contrary, everything that goes wrong simply reinforces the conviction that there is just one explanation for all our problems—climate change—and that there is only one thing we can do to keep the ...
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Arizona’s solar industry facing mounting backlash

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  Arizona’s solar industry facing mounting backlash Reagan Priest , Arizona Capitol Times   August 20, 2026  Key Points: Republican lawmakers introduced multiple bills targeting utility-scale solar The Corporation Commission is increasing fees and decreasing reimbursements for rooftop solar customers Solar and battery projects continue to be built, but natural gas capacity is expanding faster It has been a rough year for solar advocates in the nation’s sunniest state.  Republican lawmakers, state regulators and some utility companies have historically been unfriendly to renewable energy resources. But this year they’ve attempted to block the construction of utility-scale solar on state land, repeal tax incentives for rooftop solar systems and impose higher fees on ratepayers who choose to adopt solar.  While these attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, there’s no indication that opposition to Arizona’s solar industry is abating anytime soon. This comes amid what...
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Residents skeptical of prospective wind power project

  JEFFERSON – A standing-room-only crowd of county residents peppered elected leaders and project representatives with questions about a potential utility scale wind power development during a public information session held Tuesday, Aug. 4, at Henderson Memorial Public Library. Apex Clean Energy, based in Charlottesville, Va., is in what it characterizes as the early stages of developing Station Wind, a planned 300-megawatt wind power project using 50 to 70 turbines erected across much of the eastern portion of Ashtabula County. Apex has been leasing land toward a goal of 30,000 acres within a footprint of approximately 300,000 acres. The clean energy company is looking to lease property from private owners in Williamsfield, Wayne, Colebrook, New Lyme, Cherry Valley, Andover, Richmond, Dorset, Lenox, Morgan, Pierpont, Monroe and Sheffield townships. Turbine locations have not been selected, but they will be spread out over the entire target area. Approximately 12,000 acres have al...
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Thousands of Wind & Solar Projects Lost Tax Credits

  Why It Matters Thousands of wind and solar projects lost access to federal tax credits when they missed a July 4, 2026 construction deadline. The deadline was set by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21), which President Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, fundamentally reshaping how the federal government incentivizes renewable energy. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) details the mechanics of the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal per-kilowatt-hour tax credit for electricity generated from qualified renewable energy sources. For wind and solar projects, the law imposed a hard deadline: begin construction by July 4, 2026, and reach commercial operation by December 31, 2027, or lose eligibility for the successor Clean Electricity Production Tax Credit (CEPTC). That deadline passed 46 days ago . Industry analysts have warned the accelerated phaseout forced developers to dramatically compress project timelines, abandon projects entirely, or shift investment t...
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