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Maybe you’re reading this in a downpour. Perhaps you’re reading it because you have questions about the upcoming hurricane season. Or maybe you’re reading it because you’re one of the 150 million Americans enduring record-breaking temperatures in this week’s heat dome.
Whatever the reason, you have a question: Is this climate change?
There’s an old maxim — that, like many things, is often dubiously attributed to Mark Twain — that goes something like, “Climate is what you expect and weather is what you get.” Weather refers to the event itself, while climate refers to the trends (averaged over 30 years or more, usually) that might make such an event more or less likely.
Climate change is almost always an exacerbating factor in the case of something like a heat wave or a heat dome. In other situations, the picture is far more complicated and uncertain. It can take years to understand if and how climate change made an extreme weather event more likely, and while organizations like World Weather Attribution work hard to provide quick and accurate estimations, getting the science wrong can fuel climate skepticism and bolster deniers’ arguments. While it might be tempting to pin all extreme weather on climate change, the truth is, not all of it is.
Still, we do know a lot about how climate change influences the weather — and we’re always learning more. While this guide is far from the be-all and end-all of attribution and should be referred to with caveats, here is what we know about how climate change is shaping the extreme weather we see today.
“When you’re looking at heat extremes, there is almost always a climate change signal,” Clair Barnes, a research associate with World Weather Attribution, told me. “I don’t think there’s ever not been a climate change signal since I’ve been doing it in the last couple of years.”
As the planet warms, local temperatures respond everywhere. There are not as many complicating variables in this relationship as there are with something like drought. “With heat waves, it’s the same answer every time: It got hotter because it’s got hotter,” Barnes said.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that the kind of heat waves that would have occurred once in a decade before the Industrial Revolution now occur almost three times more frequently and are 1.2 degrees Celsius (or 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer. The most extreme examples — like the 2021 heat dome over the Pacific Northwest — appear to have been possible only because of warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, about 37% of global heat-related deaths, which amount to tens of thousands of deaths per year, are attributable to climate change.
There have, of course, always been heat waves. But it is with high confidence that scientists say they are hotter and last longer now than they would otherwise because of climate change.
Did climate change do it? It is “virtually certain” that heat waves are more frequent and hotter than they otherwise would be because of climate change.
WWA doesn’t specifically study wildfires since they aren’t technically “weather” (though once they form, they can make their own). Instead, the organization studies the conditions that make a fire more likely. In the American West, this deadly combo usually involves high pressure, extremely dry air, and some wind.
Globally, burned areas decreased between 1998 and 2015, but that isn’t because fire-weather conditions are improving — rather, regional leaders have gotten better at things like land use and fire management. Fire weather, meanwhile, is increasing and lasting longer due to climate change. In particular, hotter temperatures — especially hotter overnight temperatures — make it more difficult to combat the fires that do ignite. (Most fires in the U.S. start due to human negligence or arson, rather than by natural causes such as lightning strikes.)
This is especially the case in California, where 10 of the state’s largest fires have occurred in the past two decades, with five in 2020 alone; a 2023 National Integrated Drought Information System-funded study further found a 320% increase in burned areas in the state between 1996 and 2021 due to contributions of human-caused climate change, with that number expected to grow in the coming decades.
On average, wildfire weather season lengthened by two weeks around the globe from 1979 to 2019. The IPCC has medium confidence in the claim that fire weather has become more probable in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and parts of Europe over the past century, and high confidence that fire weather will increase regionally due to global warming in the coming years.
Did climate change do it? Climate change has almost certainly exacerbated the heat, humidity, and drought conditions necessary for wildfires to start. The actual ignition of the fire is frequently human-caused, however, and complicating variables such as local vegetation, forest management, and land use can also muddle the picture.
Tropical cyclones are large and complicated storm systems. Ocean temperatures, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, wind shear, barometric pressure, atmospheric moisture, the shape of the continental shelf, emergency preparedness measures, and pure luck all affect how destructive a given storm might be — when or if it makes landfall. Climate change can put a thumb on the scale, but it is far from a lone actor.
Hurricanes — the strongest manifestation of a tropical cyclone — essentially work by transferring heat from the ocean into wind energy. Because the ocean absorbs excess heat from the warming atmosphere, scientists expect to see more “major” hurricanes of Category 3 or above in the coming years.
The storms aren’t just getting more powerful, though. Because of the interaction between ocean heat and energy in a hurricane, the storms also intensify more rapidly and are “more than twice as likely to strengthen from a weak Category 1 hurricane to a major Category 3 or stronger hurricane in a 24-hour period than they were between 1970 and 1990,” according to new research published last year.
WWA says it cannot attribute the intensification of any individual storm to climate change due to relatively limited modeling so far, so the organization instead looks at how climate change may have amplified associated rainfall and storm surges. Rainfall and flooding are, in fact, more deadly than high wind speeds in hurricanes, and both are understood to be increasing because of climate change. Put simply, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, which means worse deluges. Researchers linked extreme rainfall during Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, and Irma to climate change; Hurricane Harvey, which flooded up to 50% of the properties in Harris County, Texas, when it made landfall in 2017, had a rainfall total 15% to 38% greater than it would have been in a pre-industrial world, researchers found. Additionally, rising sea levels caused by climate change will worsen coastal flooding during such events.
However, “trends indicate no significant change in the frequency of tropical cyclones globally,” according to the IPCC. That is, there aren’t more hurricanes; the ones that form are just more likely to become major hurricanes. Scientists understand far less about what climate change means for the smaller Category 1 or 2 storms, or if it will impact the diameter of the storms that do form.
Did climate change do it? The greenhouse effect is making the atmosphere warmer, and in a warmer climate, we’d expect to see more major hurricanes of Category 3 and above. Evidence also points to hurricanes intensifying much more rapidly in today’s climate than in the past. Climate does not seem to play a role in the overall number of storms, though, and other critical factors like the path of a storm and the emergency preparedness of a given community have a significant impact on the potential loss of life but aren’t linked to a warmer atmosphere. Hurricanes are complicated events and there is still much more research to be done in understanding how exactly they’re impacted by climate change.
In the winter, your skin might feel dry, and your lips might chap; in the summer, many parts of the country feel sticky and swampy. This is simple, observable physics: Cold air holds less moisture, and warm air holds more. The “Clausius-Clapeyron” relation, as it is known, tells us that in 1 degree C warmer air, there is 7% more moisture. All that moisture has to go somewhere, so quite literally, when it rains, it pours. (That is, when and where it rains: WWA notes that “an attribution study in northern Europe found that human influence has so far had little effect on the atmospheric circulation that caused a severe rainfall event.”)
Like heat, the relationship between warm air and rainfall is well understood, which is why the IPCC is highly confident in the attributable influence of climate change on extreme rain. While it may seem confusing that both droughts and intense rainfall are symptoms of climate change, the warming atmosphere seems to increase precipitation variability, making events on the extreme margins more likely and more frequent.
Increased precipitation can have counterintuitive results, though. Rain occurring over fewer overall days due to bursts of extreme rainfall, for example, can actually worsen droughts. And while it might seem like more water in the atmosphere would mean snowier winters, that’s only true in certain places. Because it’s also warmer, snowfall is declining globally while winters are getting wetter — and as a result, probably more miserable.
But what does “more rain” really mean? Rain on its own isn’t necessarily bad, but when it overwhelms urban infrastructure or threatens roads and houses, it can quickly become deadly. Flooding, of course, is often the result of extreme rain, but “the signal in the rainfall is not necessarily correlated to the magnitude of the floods because there are other factors that turn rain into a flood,” Barnes, the research associate with WWA, told me, citing variables such as land use, water management, urban drainage, and other physical elements of a landscape.
Landslides, likewise, are caused by everything from volcanic eruptions to human construction, but rain is often a factor (climate-linked phenomena like wildfires and thawing permafrost also contribute to landslides). The IPCC writes with “high confidence” that landslides, along with floods and water availability, “have the potential to lead to severe consequences for people, infrastructure, and the economy in most mountain regions.”
Did climate change do it? More extreme rainfall is consistent with our understanding of climate change’s effects. Many other local, physical factorscancompound or mitigate disasters like floods and mudslides, however.
When I spoke with Barnes, of WWA, she told me, “It’s really easy to define a heat wave. You just go, ‘It was hot.’” Droughts, not so much. For one thing, you have to define the time span you’re looking at. There are also different kinds of drought: meteorological, when there hasn’t been enough rain; hydrological, when rivers are low possibly because something else is diverting water from the natural cycle; and agricultural, when there is not enough water specifically for crops. Like flooding, many different infrastructural and physical factors go into exacerbating or even creating various kinds of droughts.
Drought as we mean it here, though, is a question of soil moisture, Barnes told me. “That’s really hard to get data on,” she said, “and we don’t necessarily understand the feedback mechanisms affecting that as well as we understand heat waves.” As recently as 2013, the IPCC had only low confidence that trends in drought could be attributed to climate change.
We have a better understanding of how drought and climate change interact now, including how higher temperatures drive evaporation and cut into snowpack, leading to less meltwater in rivers. The IPCC’s most recent report concluded that “even relatively small incremental increases in global warming (+0.5C) cause a worsening of droughts in some regions.” The IPCC also has high confidence that “more regions are affected by increases in agricultural and ecological droughts with increasing global warming.”
WWA’s attribution studies have, however, found examples of droughts that have no connection to climate change. The organization flags that it has the highest confidence in the climate affecting droughts in the Mediterranean, southern Africa, central and eastern Asia, southern Australia, and western North America and lower confidence in central and west Africa, western and central Europe, northeast South America, and New Zealand.
Did climate change do it? Maybe. Some droughts have a strong climate signal — California’s, for example. Still, researchers remain cautious about attribution for these complicated events due in part to their significant regional variability.
Tornadoes are extremely difficult to study. Compared to droughts, which can last years, tornadoes occupy a teeny tiny area and last for just a blip in time. They “wouldn’t even register” on the models WWA uses for its attribution studies, Barnes said. “It would probably look like a slightly raised average wind speed.” The IPCC, for its part, has only “low confidence” in a connection between climate change and “severe convective storms” like tornadoes, in part due to the “short length of high-quality data records.”
But we are learning more every day. This spring, researchers posited that Tornado Alley is moving east and “away from the warm season, especially the summer, and toward the cold season.” Though it’s not entirely clear why this is happening, one theory is that it relates to how climate change is affecting regional seasonality: winters and nights are becoming warmer in certain areas, and thus more conducive to tornado formation, while others are becoming too hot for storms to form during the normal season.
Did climate change do it? Researchers aren’t entirely sure but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between tornado formation and climate change. Still, warmer temperatures potentially make certain areas more or less prone to tornadoes than they were in the past.
We say “it was a dark and stormy night” because “it was a severe convective storm” doesn’t have the same ring. But an SCS — which forms when warm, moist air rises into colder air — is the most common and most damaging weather phenomenon in the United States. You probably just call it a thunderstorm.
Severe convective storms cause many localized events that we think of as “weather,” including heavy rainfall, high winds, tornadoes, hail, thunder, and lightning. Because heat and moisture are necessary ingredients for these kinds of storms, and because the atmosphere is getting both warmer and wetter, climate models “consistently” and confidently predict an “increase in the frequency of severe thunderstorms,” the IPCC notes — but, “there is low confidencein the details of the projected increase.” Trends remain poorly studied and highly regionally dependent; in the United States, for example, there is still no evidence of a “significant increase in convective storms, and hail and severe thunderstorms.” Still, other research suggests that for every 1.8 degree F of warming, the conditions favorable to severe convective storms will increase in frequency by up to 20%.
Hail forms during severe convective storms when the hot, moist air rises to a region of the atmosphere where it is cold enough to freeze. Like thunderstorms more generally, data is fairly limited on hail, making it difficult to study long-term trends (most climate models also do not look directly at hail, studying convective storms more broadly instead). However, it’s been hypothesized that climate change could create larger and more destructive hail in the future; if thunderstorm updrafts grow stronger, as projected, then they could hold hail at freezing high altitudes for longer, allowing individual hailstones to grow larger before falling back to Earth. One study even suggested that with continued warming, there could be a 145% increase in “significant severe hail” measuring at least 2 inches in diameter — that is, a little smaller than a tennis ball.
Did climate change do it? Everything we know about thunderstorms suggests that a warmer, wetter atmosphere will mean severe convection storms become both more frequent and more intense. But there is still very little available data to track the long-term trends, so attributing any one storm to climate change would be nearly impossible.
Just as virtually all heat waves worldwide are worsened by climate change, “nearly every instance of extreme cold across the world has decreased in likelihood,” according to the WWA. While the organization has run attribution studies on “a few” heavy snowfall events, it has either found no link to climate change or has been unable to state a conclusion confidently. On the other hand, the loss of snow cover, permafrost, Arctic sea ice, and glaciers has a high-confidence link to human-caused climate change in the IPCC report.
Just because climate change makes extreme cold and snowstorms less likely does not mean they won’t happen. Research published in Nature earlier this year suggests climate change could bring more snow to certain places, as extremely cold parts of the world warm to snow-friendly temperatures, and increased precipitation from a warmer atmosphere results in more flurries. Parts of Siberia and the northern Great Plains are even experiencing a deepening snowpack.
Did climate change do it? Probably not — though there are notable exceptions.
An earthquake is usually caused by the release of energy when two tectonic plates suddenly slip past each other (though they can also be caused by fossil fuel extraction). But before you dismiss earthquakes as having no connection to climate change, there is one place where there could be a link: water.
As Emily Pontecorvo wrote for Heatmap this spring, “Changes in surface water, whether because of heavy rain, snow, or drought, could either increase or relieve stress on geologic faults, causing them to shift.” Admittedly, even if there is a relationship between climate change, water, and earthquakes, it appears to be small — so small that humans probably can’t feel any resulting quakes.
Did climate change do it? It’s highly unlikely.
Earlier this year, extreme turbulence on a Singapore-bound flight from London killed one person and injured at least 20 others. While such events remain rare — the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board recorded just 101 serious injuries caused by turbulence on millions of flights between 2013 and 2022 — extreme turbulence appears to be increasing, potentially because of climate change.
According to one study, severe turbulence is up 55% between 1979 and 2020, seemingly due to an increase in wind shear at high altitudes caused by the temperature contrast between the equator and the North Pole. (This relationship is a little bit complicated, but essentially, at higher altitudes, the temperature over the pole has been declining due to rapid Arctic temperature changes even as it’s increased at the equator; lower in the troposphere, the opposite is happening). Other studies have similarly shown that doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could increase moderate-to-severe turbulence by as much as 127%.
Data, however, is limited and fairly subjective, leading to some skepticism in the scientific community and inaccurate dismissals by climate-change deniers. As with many complex weather phenomena, our understanding of how climate change interacts with turbulence will likely grow in the coming years as the field of research develops.
Did climate change do it? Potentially in some cases, but there is still much to learn about the connection between the two.
Desertification differs from drought in that it describes a decline in soil fertility, water, and plant life to the point of total “land degradation.” (In contrast, land can become productive again after a drought.) Like other compound disasters, desertification results from natural processes, climatic conditions, and land management practices such as grazing and deforestation.
According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, land degradation is “almost always” the result of these “multiple interacting causes,” and the warming climate certainly isn’t helping. Heat stress can kill off vegetation, making landscapes more prone to desertification, as well as drive aridification.
In the resulting drylands — which comprise about 46% of global land area — you can expect dust storms (also known as haboobs), and sand storms resulting from the wind kicking up loose soils. While there have always been sand storms, one study suggests that climate change is one of the critical drivers of global annual dust emissions increasing by 25% between the late 19th century and today.
However, “climate change impacts on dust and sand storm activity remain a critical gap,” writes the IPCC, and more research is desperately needed to address this. By the UN’s estimate, dust storms were associated with the deaths of 402,000 people in 2005. As many as 951 million people, mainly in South Asia, Central Asia, West Africa, and East Asia, could be vulnerable to the impacts of desertification if climate change continues.
Did climate change do it? It was potentially a factor, but we have lots more to learn.
Are locust swarms technically “weather”? Not really. But so long as we’re on the topic of weather events of Biblical proportions, locust swarms might as well be addressed, too.
And the answer may surprise you: Climate appears to be a driver of locust swarms, which threaten food security and exacerbate famines throughout Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Locusts prefer “arid areas punched by extreme rainfall,” according to one study that looked at the connection between swarms and climate change, and while much of that pattern is fixed in the natural El Niño–Southern Oscillation cycle, a warming climate will also “lead to widespread increases in locust outbreaks with emerging hotspots in west central Asia.” In particular, the research found that in a low-emissions scenario, locust habitat could increase by 5%, while in a high-emissions scenario, it could increase by 13% to 25% between 2065 and 2100.
Did climate change do it? It’d likely be tricky to attribute any one locust swarm to climate change, but as with many other natural phenomena, climate likely plays a compounding factor.
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On accelerating nuclear energy, power plant emissions, and BYD
Current conditions: Southern Spain will endure multiple days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week • Nearly 4 inches of rain could fall in parts of southwestern China on Tuesday • It will be almost 90 degrees in New Orleans again today after high temperatures triggered widespread brownouts in the region over the weekend.
President Trump signed four executive orders Friday designed to accelerate the build-out of nuclear power in the U.S. The orders specifically call on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to speed up its approval of new reactors; relax radiation exposure limits; explore using federal lands and military bases as potential reactor sites; and grow the nation’s nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 gigawatts in 2024 to 400 gigawatts by 2050. The orders also describe putting 10 new large reactors into construction no later than 2030 with the support of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office — including having at least one operational reactor at a domestic military base no later than September 2028. “Mark this day on your calendar,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at the signing on Friday, per The New York Times. “This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation.”
At the same time, the administration’s ambitious goals come against a backdrop of reduced “personnel and funding for the NRC and the Department of Energy, along with weakening the NRC’s independence and global credibility,” Jennifer T. Gordon, the director of the Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, writes — all of which will “make it challenging to realize the full potential of the U.S. nuclear energy industry.”
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to propose that greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuel-burning power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or climate change, The New York Times reported Saturday, based on a review of an internal draft of the document. The EPA’s rationale in the proposal is that the emissions from the sector are small enough that their elimination would have no impact on public health — although according to the agency’s own accounting in 2022, the power sector is the second biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, behind only transportation.
The move by the EPA, while in keeping with the Trump administration’s deregulatory ambitions, also serves to justify its pending proposal to “repeal all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants,” including coal-powered units. Previously, the agency had argued that Biden-era restrictions on coal- and gas-fired plants could prevent up to 1,200 deaths and 1,900 cases of asthma per year.
BYD
BYD announced steep discounts on 22 of its electric and plug-in hybrid models between now and the end of June, with some price cuts as big as 34%, Bloomberg reports. The company’s cheapest car, the Seagull hatchback, is down to just $7,780, while the Seal hybrid sedan saw the steepest discount of more than $7,000, to a mere $14,270. Shares of BYD closed down 8.6% after the announcement.
BYD’s cuts aim to boost customer demand, with Citi analysts anticipating the discounts could increase dealership foot traffic by 30% to 40% week on week. But the analysts also appeared skeptical that the move by BYD would be hugely beneficial to the company in its price war with rival EV automaker, noting “competition remains relatively mild.”
South Africa has proposed a liquified natural gas trade package with the United States, following a contentious meeting between President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Trump last week, Reuters reports. The deal would see South Africa import 75 to 100 petajoules of LNG annually from the U.S. over a 10-year period. Though South Africa currently does not have an LNG import terminal, the government plans to build one at the Port of Richards Bay, with the first phase going online by 2027, in order to lessen its reliance on the dwindling supply via pipeline from Mozambique. The U.S. will reportedly also help South Africa explore fracking opportunities within South Africa; the Karoo region of the country is believed to hold shale reserves, though drilling has been held off due to concerns about contaminating the water supply.
The trade package additionally includes an agreement for South Africa to avoid paying a duty on imports of cars, steel, and aluminum. According to Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, who shared details of the deal, it will amount to $900 million to $1.2 billion in trade per year.
President Trump on Friday urged the United Kingdom to “stop with the costly and unsightly windmills and incentivize modernized drilling in the North Sea, where large amounts of oil lay waiting to be taken,” the Associated Press reports. Trump specifically cited Aberdeen as a potential hub for the “century of drilling left” — the same Scottish city where his Trump International Golf Links golf course is located, and where he unsuccessfully opposed the building of 11 offshore turbines before he became president. Despite Trump’s frequent complaints that turbines are eyesores, the BBC reported this weekend that wind farms have become an “unusual” and “surprisingly popular” tourist attraction in the UK.
Four former Volkswagen executives were found guilty of fraud in Germany on Monday for their role in the 2015 “dieselgate” emissions test cheating scandal.
The founder of Galvanize Climate Solutions and a 2020 presidential candidate does some math on how smart climate policy could help the U.S. in a trade war.
We’re now four months into a worldwide trade war, and the economic data confirms it’s Americans who are paying the price. A growing body of surveys and forecasts indicate that inflation will be a persistent, wallet-draining reality for U.S. households. Voters now expect inflation to hit 7.3% next year, and as of March, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development projects that tariffs and trade tensions could help drive U.S. inflation up by 0.3 percentage points in 2025.
But there are solutions for whipping inflation. One is unleashing an abundance of clean energy.
Clean energy can have a powerful deflationary ripple effect, lowering prices across the economy. Solar has for years been the cheapest form of new energy around the world, and recent research from Goldman Sachs shows that prices of clean technologies like large-scale solar power and battery storage are falling. These lower costs are helping to keep electricity prices more stable, even as demand rises due to the growing number of data centers, the return of U.S. manufacturing, and the electrification of transport and heating.
As a thought experiment, my team gathered data on the U.S. energy market to estimate the potential deflationary effect that accelerating clean energy development could have on the American economy. At the end of our analysis, we found that accelerating renewable energy development nationwide could reduce inflation by 0.58 percentage points — meaning that if inflation were running at 4%, widespread clean energy would bring it down to 3.42%. This would save the average American family approximately $441 each year, or nearly three months’ worth of electricity bills.
While our model doesn’t completely capture all of America’s regional complexities regarding energy policy or resource availability, it shows what’s possible. Call it the “Clean Energy Dividend” — a measurable financial return Americans receive when renewable deployment expands.
These numbers are based on something that’s already happening in Texas, where building new clean energy projects is relatively easy. Since 2019, Texas has expanded its solar capacity by 729% and wind power by 49%, faster than any other state in the nation. These developments have added approximately 39,000 gigawatt-hours of solar, 41,000 gigawatt-hours of wind to the Texas grid. In that same time, Texas has also added 9,300 megawatts of battery capacity — a 8,941% increase.
To match Texas’ success, the rest of America would need to significantly ramp up its clean energy production. According to our analysis, the other 49 states combined would need to produce nearly 73% more renewable electricity than currently planned for 2025. That means that instead of adding 66,300 gigawatt-hours of clean power to the grid this year as projected, they’d need to add 114,700 gigawatt-hours. It’s an ambitious target, but one that would help keep costs down for consumers and businesses.
The deflationary impact would hit in two ways: from direct reductions in electricity bills and from lower costs for goods and services.
First, on direct reductions: The Electric Reliability Council of Texas market, otherwise known as ERCOT, is projected to experience a 12% decrease in wholesale electricity prices from 2024 to 2025; the rest of the United States, meanwhile, is expected to see a 3% increase in retail electricity prices during the same period. This creates a 15% gap between Texas and the national average.
The average American household uses about 10,791 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, which currently costs approximately $1,779 per year. With a projected 3% national increase, this would rise to $1,828 in 2025. If prices fell by 12% as in Texas, however, the cost would decrease to $1,571, resulting in a direct savings of about $258 per household.
Second, beyond direct savings: Our analysis found that electricity costs constitute about 2.4% of all business expenses in the economy. When businesses pay less for electricity, they typically pass about 70% of those savings to consumers through lower prices. This translates to an additional $183 in annual savings per household on everyday goods and services.
Combining these figures, the total benefit per household would be $441 annually. In terms of inflation, the direct effect on electricity bills contributes 0.34%, and the indirect effect through price decreases on other goods contributes 0.24%. Together, they account for a 0.58% reduction in inflation.
Far more than the U.S. would like to admit, its economy remains highly susceptible to oil shocks. Nearly every economic recession in the U.S. since the 1940s has been preceded by a large increase in the price of fossil fuels. Similarly, all but three oil shocks have been followed by a recession. And while the price of oil is low now, this doesn’t guarantee it will be in the future. When energy costs rise sharply — whether from conflicts, production cuts, or supply chain disruptions — the effects cascade through every sector of our economy.
Renewable energy serves as a powerful buffer against these inflationary pressures. That said, expanding renewable energy faces challenges. Some communities oppose projects such as wind and solar farms due to concerns about land use, aesthetics, and environmental impacts, leading to delays or cancellations. At the national level, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to hinder investment and slow the growth of renewable energy infrastructure. These obstacles can impede progress toward a more stable and affordable energy future — even in Texas.
There, Republican lawmakers have introduced a wave of legislation aimed at imposing new fees and regulatory hurdles on renewable energy projects, restricting further development, and mandating costly backup power requirements. These measures could raise wholesale electricity prices by 14%, according to an analysis by Aurora Energy Research. Just as the rest of America should be emulating Texas’ success, Texas is busy unraveling it to resemble the rest of America.
Still, there are several factors that can speed renewable deployment nationwide: streamlining permitting processes, developing competitive electricity markets, ensuring sufficient transmission infrastructure, and passing supportive regulatory frameworks. While geography will always affect which resources are viable, every region has significant untapped potential — from geothermal in the West to solar in the South.
No matter where you stand on decarbonization and the fight against climate change, we should pay attention to any idea that can fight inflation, put money back in Americans pockets, create jobs, make our energy more secure, and help the environment all at once. The Clean Energy Dividend may not solve everything—but it’s about as close to a win-win-win as we’re going to find.
Empire Wind has been spared — but it may be one of the last of its kind in the U.S.
It’s been a week of whiplash for offshore wind.
On Monday, President Trump lifted his stop work order on Empire Wind, an 810-megawatt wind farm under construction south of Long Island that will deliver renewable power into New York’s grid. But by Thursday morning, Republicans in the House of Representatives had passed a budget bill that would scrap the subsidies that make projects like this possible.
The economics of building offshore wind in the U.S., at least during this nascent stage, are “entirely dependent” on tax credits, Marguerite Wells, the executive director of Alliance for Clean Energy New York, told me.
That being said, if the bill gets through the Senate and becomes law, Empire Wind may still be safe. The legislation would significantly narrow the window for projects to qualify for tax credits, requiring them to start construction by the end of this year and be operational by the end of 2028. Equinor, the company behind Empire Wind, maintains that it aims to reach commercial operations as soon as 2027. The four other offshore wind projects that are under construction in the U.S. — Sunrise Wind, also serving New York; Vineyard Wind, serving Massachusetts; Revolution Wind, serving Rhode Island and Connecticut; and Dominion Energy’s project in Virginia — are also expected to be completed before the cutoff.
Together, the five wind farms are expected to generate enough power for roughly 2.5 million homes and avoid more than 9 million tons of carbon emissions each year — similar to shutting down 23 natural gas-fired power plants.
Still, this would represent just a small fraction of the carbon-free energy eastern states are counting on offshore wind to provide. New York, for example, has a statutory goal of getting at least 9 gigawatts of power from the industry. Once Empire and Sunrise are completed, it will have just 1.7 gigawatts.
If the proposed changes to the tax credits are enacted, these five projects may be the last built in the U.S.
That’s not the case for solar farms or onshore wind, Oliver Metcalfe, head of wind research at BloombergNEF told me. They can still compete with fossil fuel generation — especially in the windiest and sunniest areas — without tax credits. That’s especially true in today’s environment of rising demand for power, since these projects have the additional benefit of being quick to build. The downside of losing the tax credits is, of course, that the power will cost marginally more than it otherwise would have.
For offshore wind farms to pencil out, however, states would have to pay a much higher price for the energy they produce. The tax credits knock off about a quarter of the price, Metcalfe said; without them, buyers will be back on the hook. “It’s likely that some either wouldn’t be willing to do that, or would dramatically decrease their ambition around the technology given the potential impacts it could have on ratepayers.”
Part of the reason offshore wind is so expensive is that the industry is still new in the U.S. We lack the supply chains, infrastructure, and experienced workforce built up over time in countries like China and the U.K. that have been able to bring costs down. That’s likely not going to change by the time these five projects are built, as they are all relying on European supply chains.
The Inflation Reduction Act spurred domestic manufacturers to begin developing supply chains to serve the next wave of projects, Wells told me. It gave renewable energy projects a 10-year runway to start construction to be eligible for the tax credits. “It was a long enough time window for companies to really invest, not just in the individual generation projects, but also manufacturing, supply chain, and labor chain,” she said.
Due to Trump’s attacks on the industry, the next wave of projects may not materialize, and those budding supply chains could go bust.
Trump put a freeze on offshore wind permitting and leasing on his first day in office, a move that 17 states are now challenging in court. A handful of projects are already fully permitted, but due to uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs — and now, around whether they’ll have access to the tax credits — they’re at a standstill.
“No one’s willing to back a new offshore wind project in today’s environment because there’s so much uncertainty around the future business case, the future subsidies, the future cost of equipment,” Metcalfe said.