This summer, I’ve attended three clean energy or environmental conferences. Two were eco-right nonprofit gatherings, which I’ll leave unnamed because I’m from the Midwest and we don’t do that. The third was RECESS 2026 in Detroit (Resilience and Equity in the Clean Energy Sector Summit), the clean energy summit Carla Walker-Miller built to put Black, Brown, and Indigenous leaders at the center of the energy transition.

At the first two conferences, the crowds were overwhelmingly white, and the words “climate change” were handled like weapons-grade plutonium. Speakers talked about energy independence, innovation, and stewardship – words carefully chosen to avoid upsetting anyone in attendance.

At RECESS, I heard climate change named from the stage four times in the first two hours. My rough tally for both eco-right conferences combined: zero.

During the opening day, Stacey Abrams took the stage as the day’s keynote. Her argument to the audience was that clean energy and democracy go hand in hand and serve as a bulwark against autocracy: who holds power over the grid and who holds power at the ballot box are the same question. I walked out ready to go to war for her.

So where did the idea that people of color don’t care about climate come from?

The Usual Suspects

In 2014, a pair of polls made headlines by claiming Black and Latino voters ranked climate change (as a national priority) dead last. Unsurprisingly, the American Coalition for Clean Coal and Electricity, together with the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The questions made respondents pick between keeping energy prices low and new climate regulations, as if a family couldn’t want both. The Grist took this argument apart at the time.

The coal lobby is paying for a poll that uses people of color as a vehicle to manufacture apathy. Shocking, I know.

More objective polling tells us a very different story. In a Pew survey, 71 percent of Hispanic adults said climate change is affecting their local community, compared with 54 percent of non-Hispanic adults. The EPA found Black Americans are 40 percent more likely to live where heat-related deaths are projected to rise the most, and Hispanic Americans 43 percent more likely to live where extreme heat will cut the most working hours.

Underrepresented communities were never apathetic to climate change; they have historically been the ones footing the bill for the damages.

Who is Keyser Söze?

This movie reference was intentionally crafted to appeal to middle-aged white men. Spoiler alert: guys, we’re the problem.

In 2011, Michigan State sociologist Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap studied a decade of Gallup data and found conservative white men were significantly more likely than other Americans to deny climate change. About 30 percent of them said the effects of global warming will never happen, versus roughly 7 percent of everyone else. And the gap got wider among the ones who said they understood global warming very well.

Before you “@ me”, I’m just trying to explain an exposure gap. For generations, guys who look like me have lived farther from the smokestack, the distribution center, and the floodplain. When you’re not the one paying for the damages, it’s easy to believe there isn’t a problem.

Veneer Problems

But the insulation is starting to wear thin. As of today, the Iran war has cost the average American household about $797 in extra fuel costs, more than $106 billion nationally, according to ITEP’s tracker. (Truckers complaining about the cost of diesel may be interested to learn that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill killed the $40,000 tax credit they could have used to switch to an electric truck.) That’s the price of running our economy on a fuel priced by the most volatile region on earth. This summer, Canadian wildfires created so much pollution in Chicago I had to buy N95 masks simply to breathe outside.

Master Your Craft

At RECESS I moderated a panel, and I asked Byron Osbern, an International Brotherhood of Electricians union leader, for the best advice he ever received. His answer was simple: master your craft. After the panel, the AV guy came up to me and said that hearing a union leader say that brought tears to his eyes.

That’s what I saw in Detroit. Electricians, entrepreneurs, students, and executives, most of them people of color, treating the energy transition as a craft to master and a business to build. Carla has spent decades in this industry and has said she never felt welcome in it until roughly the last five years. But she never waited for an invitation; she built a table.

If You Build It – They Will Come

Field of Dreams is the most Midwestern movie ever made – and one that inevitably brings tears to my eyes. It’s about Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) - a guy who builds something ridiculously audacious, on faith that people will show up. Carla built hers, and people showed up: last year, RECESS drew more than 600 attendees from 28 states. Fellas, what are you going to build?

A lot of us were raised to believe being a man means protecting your family and your home. I still believe that. I’d just point out that the threat to our homes isn’t hypothetical anymore. It’s in the gas tank. It’s in the air our kids breathe in July. Protecting what’s ours now looks less like standing guard with your Remington 870 12-gauge and more like having an uncomfortable conversation.

Man to man – here’s what I want you to do. Forward this to one man in your life who would rather talk about literally anything other than climate change. Don’t send it with a lecture. Send it with an invitation: come with me to RECESS 2027 (my treat). Sit in the back or off to the side, and listen to the people who have been paying the bill explain what they’re building.

The most useful thing we can do right now isn’t to take the wheel. It’s to get in the car.

With love,

Matt

Disclosure: I advise Carla Walker-Miller and Walker-Miller Energy Services, and I moderated a panel at RECESS 2026. Views are my own.

_{Swaggy swag}

On the Waterfront

At this point in my career, I’ve assembled a small army of reusable water bottles, one from nearly every conference I’ve attended (leave the lanyard, take the water bottle). It’s the default swag of every conference worth attending. We even hand them out to our own speakers and students at the Abrams Climate Academy. (If you’d like one, restack this post and I’ll send you one for free!) That army stands guard in my kitchen cabinet, and I fill every single one from the tap. Turns out that habit isn’t just free; it’s also the healthier and safer choice.

Knife in the Water

What Glacéau, Poland Spring, and Nestlé won’t be advertising anytime soon is that their product isn’t just more expensive than tap water; it’s also likely less safe.

Start with the economics. Municipal tap water runs about $0.004 per gallon nationally, a fraction of a cent. Single-serve bottled water, the 16.9-ounce bottles that make up most of what’s sold, runs closer to $7.50 per gallon (once you account for how it’s actually packaged and priced, not the bulk case rate). That’s nearly 2,000 times the cost for a product that’s regulated less rigorously than the one coming out of your faucet.

Underwater

But you probably already knew you, we, sometimes even me, waste money every time we buy bottled water. Let’s focus on the myth at hand. National surveys put the share of Americans who distrust their tap water somewhere between 40 and 55 percent, and one nationally representative study found more than a quarter of Americans believe bottled water is outright safer than tap. Look, I lived in Michigan for a long time. The Flint water crisis wasn’t that long ago. So I’m going to ask you to hold two truths in your head at once that may feel like they’re in tension.

· Truth Number One: Lead service lines, especially in homes built before 1986, are a serious problem, and it’s a bigger problem here in Chicago than anywhere else in the country. Chicago has more lead service lines than any other US city, roughly 412,000 confirmed or suspected. Lead in drinking water can do serious, irreparable harm to the brain, kidneys, and nervous system, and our lawmakers should be doing everything possible to get them out of the ground. Chicago has hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and city funding sitting largely unspent for this exact work, and as of last year’s reporting, had notified only about 7 percent of the roughly 900,000 households legally required to be warned that their water could be unsafe.

· Truth Number Two: Municipal water is regulated by the US EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act and must be tested for bacteria and pathogens hundreds of times per month. Municipal utilities must send annual water quality reports to their customers and publicly report contaminant violations. Bottled water is regulated by the US FDA as a food product. It’s tested far less frequently, and the FDA doesn’t require bottled water companies to make their test results public. Independent testing by Consumer Reports has found heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury), PFAS, and other contaminants, especially in carbonated water.

The Shape of Water

In addition to being more expensive and less regulated than tap water, bottled water has a third strike against it: the plastic bottle itself. Three reasons to avoid them:

1. Bisphenol A (BPA). A well-known endocrine disruptor, linked in research to hormonal disruption and elevated blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular effects. Not typically found in PET bottles, but likely present in more durable, older bottles. Remember that old Nalgene bottle? If you still have one, recycle it.

2. PFAS, forever chemicals, linked in research to cancer and developmental delays in children. This one is brand-dependent. A Johns Hopkins-led study found PFAS in 39 of more than 100 bottled waters tested, though it didn’t name specific brands. Separate testing by Consumer Reports did, and found Topo Chico carrying the highest PFAS levels of any brand tested. Interestingly, the EPA has moved to require PFAS limits in tap water, while the FDA has opted not to set any limit for bottled water at all.

3. Micro- and nanoplastics, shed by the bottle itself, especially when it’s heated or shaken. A bottle left in a hot car and then jostled around released 9.29 times more nanoplastic particles than one stored under normal conditions, according to recent testing. The human health impact of ingesting these particles is still an open question. What we do know: early animal studies have found links to chronic inflammation, cellular stress and DNA damage, and disruption of the gut microbiome.

The Life Aquatic

If you’re worried about the safety of your water at home, here are three suggestions to help you monitor and improve it:

1. Buy a Tap Score home water test. Tap Score is a mail-in kit that goes to an actual certified lab rather than a DIY color-match strip. The essential city water kit runs $189; the essential well water kit runs $209.

2. Install an under-sink reverse osmosis (RO) system. A pitcher filter (Brita, for example) removes chlorine taste but does essentially nothing for PFAS or lead. An iSpring RCC7 or comparable APEC RO system will run you a couple hundred bucks and remove most PFAS compounds. One thing worth checking before you buy: a general RO or NSF/ANSI 58 certification doesn’t automatically mean a specific unit has been independently tested for PFAS. If PFAS is your priority, look for an explicit PFAS or P473 certification on the listing, not just a general RO stamp.

3. If budget isn’t the constraint, look at a whole-home, professionally installed, point-of-entry RO system. These treat every tap and faucet in the house rather than just the one under your kitchen sink, which matters because PFAS exposure isn’t limited to drinking water; it also comes through showering and bathing. Systems like this typically run $2,000 to $5,000 fully installed. Worth a paid consultation and an actual water test in hand before committing at that price point.

So skip the bottled water. Use the stuff that costs nearly 2,000 times less. Use the stuff that’s more regulated and better tested. And put your own army of conference swag water bottles to work, the way I use mine: filled from the tap.

With love,

Matt

When I was ten years old, I had a poster up on my wall of a cherry red Porsche 911 “whale tail”—it was likely hanging right above my box of HO scale Athearn model trains. Having a Porsche poster or model trains in the 90s wasn’t unique, but the fact that I got to drive a Porsche 911 as a 20-year-old working at a car dealership probably was. (There’s nothing quite like the sound of a rear-mounted, naturally aspirated engine changing gears.)

In my teens and early 20s, my love of trains and cars went in opposite directions—that was until I began to slowly learn how problematic cars were for things I also loved: cities, community, our environment. A decline in interest that coincided with a trip to Japan, where I got to ride the Shinkansen for the first time—love at first sight. Since then, I’ve made up for lost ground and learned to appreciate that trains can be a luxury and performance product – if not yet here in the United States.

There is a very specific kind of joy in standing on a platform as 750 tons of aluminum and steel scream past you at 200 miles an hour without so much as spilling your coffee. Car people know this feeling. It’s the same experience you get standing next to a Bugatti at idle, or watching an F-16 during a flyover, except the train did it while carrying hundreds of people to a meeting, and it’ll do it again in 11 minutes, on schedule, forever.

We don’t talk about trains like this enough. We talk about them like boring infrastructure. Ridership numbers. Farebox recovery ratios. Right-of-way acquisition. All true, all important, all deeply unsexy. But underneath it all, the fastest trains on Earth are impressive machines: distributed traction systems putting out more horsepower than a field of Formula 1 grids, aerodynamic noses shaped by the same wind-tunnel obsession that goes into a hypercar, national pride riding on every kilometer per hour. Japan, China, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and a dozen other countries have spent the last two decades in an arms race to build the fastest, smoothest, most impressive vehicles ever to run on a fixed guideway.

So, we’re doing this the way a car magazine would. Specs, comps, a little bravado, some honest reporting on which numbers are real and which ones are marketing.

What are the fastest passenger trains in the world?

A quick word on eligibility

First, we’re ranking trains that carry actual paying passengers, not tests or pilots. A test run happens on a stripped-down, reinforced, empty train chasing a top speed for a press release. Commercial service means reliability, energy efficiency, and getting grandma to Osaka on time, every day, for 30 years—safely. We will give a quick nod to the record chasers at the end; they deserve some limelight too.

Second, “fastest” gets tricky, because trains have three different speeds: a design speed (what the engineers built it to theoretically survive), a certified speed (what regulators have approved), and a day-to-day operating speed (what shows up on the ticket). We’re leading with the highest speed each train has genuinely run in revenue passenger service.

On to the comparo!

#5: Haramain High-Speed Railway — Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Haramain, launched in 2018, connects the holy cities of Mecca and Medina with Jeddah’s airport.

The Comps

• Top speed in service: 300 km/h (186 mph), with the fleet tested up to 310 km/h and infrastructure built for 330

• Trainset: Talgo 350 SRO

• Manufacturer: Talgo, Spain

• Power output: two power cars driving the train, part of a fleet built specifically to handle 50°C desert heat and windblown sand

• Service area: Mecca to Medina via Jeddah and King Abdullah Economic City, 453 km, roughly two hours

• Capacity: 417 passengers per set, in two classes

You’re probably just as surprised as I am that one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations made the “fastest trains” list. The Haramain line is the first high-speed railway in the Middle East, and it was built for pilgrims. During Hajj season, the line runs more than 100 services a day, moving nearly two million people between Mecca and Medina in a matter of weeks. Talgo engineered a “desert pack,” more than 30 extra technologies bolted onto a proven European platform just to keep a 300-km/h train running reliably through sandstorms and triple-digit heat. It’s less a bullet train and more a bullet train that also survived basic training in the Empty Quarter.

#4: Frecciarossa 1000 — Italy

The Frecciarossa 1000 is the latest addition to Bombardier’s ZEFIRO class of high-speed trains.

The Comps

• Top speed in service: 300 km/h (186 mph); rated commercial speed 360 km/h, design speed 400 km/h

• Trainset: ETR 1000

• Manufacturer: Hitachi Rail / Alstom (formerly Bombardier and AnsaldoBreda), interior by Pininfarina

• Power output: roughly 9,800 to 10,000 kW, about 13,300 horsepower, spread across 16 traction motors on all eight cars

• Service area: Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, and international runs into France and Spain

• Capacity: up to 485 passengers, four classes

The Frecciarossa is the car in this set with a gorgeous engine it isn’t legally allowed to use. Italy built this thing to run at 360 km/h and it has already proven it can hit 389 km/h on a test run, but current infrastructure caps it at 300 in daily service. That’s the automotive equivalent of a 220-mph supercar stuck behind a 65-mph speed limit governor its entire life: still gorgeous, still brutally fast off the line, just not living up to its own spec sheet yet.

#3: Shinkansen E5/H5 Series “Hayabusa” — Japan

The Comps

• Top speed in service: 320 km/h (199 mph)

• Trainset: E5 (JR East) and H5 (JR Hokkaido)

• Manufacturer: Hitachi and Kawasaki Heavy Industries

• Power output: 9,600 kW, about 12,900 horsepower, from 32 traction motors

• Service area: Tohoku and Hokkaido Shinkansen, Tokyo to Shin-Aomori and on to Hokkaido

• Capacity: 731 passengers, including an 18-seat Gran Class cabin

The Hayabusa, literally “peregrine falcon” (a name that may also be familiar to motorcycle enthusiasts), is the one that built the modern idea of what a bullet train should look like: that long, elongated nose exists purely to punch through tunnel air pressure at speed without producing a sonic boom out the other end. Japan tested a predecessor called Fastech 360 at up to 360 km/h and deliberately dialed the production train back to 320 for passenger comfort and noise regulations. Since Shinkansen service began in 1964, across tens of billions of passenger trips there has never been a single passenger fatality from a derailment or collision.

#2: CR400 “Fuxing” — China

Fuxing CR400BF “Golden Phoenix” high-speed train

The Comps

• Top speed in service: 350 km/h (217 mph), the fastest conventional wheel-on-steel-rail train running in regular commercial service anywhere

• Trainset: CR400AF “Red Dragon” and CR400BF “Golden Phoenix”

• Manufacturer: CRRC Qingdao Sifang and CRRC Changchun

• Power output: roughly 10,400 kW, close to 14,000 horsepower on the standard eight-car set, scaling up on the longer 16- and 17-car formations

• Service area: the Beijing to Shanghai high-speed corridor and most of China’s 40,000+ km high-speed network, more track than the rest of the world combined

• Capacity: 556 to 1,283 passengers depending on formation

If the Frecciarossa is the beautiful car that isn’t allowed to use its full engine, the Fuxing is the one that just floors it every single day. This is the actual fastest conventional train you can currently buy a ticket for, cruising at 350 km/h on the daily Beijing-Shanghai run, covering 1,318 km in about 4.5 hours. It’s hit 420 km/h in trials, and China has more than 1,100 of these sets in revenue service. And it’s not resting: the next-generation CR450 has already clocked 453 km/h in pre-production testing and is expected to enter commercial service at 400 km/h, which will bump this whole list the moment it happens. China has built an entire industrial base that churns out fast trains at a scale nobody else can match.

#1: Shanghai Maglev — China

China’s Shanghai Maglev Train – the fastest train in the world

The Comps

• Top speed in service: 431 km/h (268 mph), the fastest any train has ever run in regular passenger service

• Trainset: Transrapid SMT (TR08)

• Manufacturer: Transrapid International, a joint venture of Siemens and ThyssenKrupp, built in Kassel, Germany

• Power output: none, in the way you’re thinking. The propulsion is entirely in the guideway itself, a linear motor made of magnetic coils that both levitates the train about a centimeter off the track and pulls it forward.

• Service area: Shanghai Pudong International Airport to Longyang Road station, 30 km

• Capacity: 574 passengers, three classes

From 2004 to 2021, the Shanghai Maglev ran at a sustained 431 km/h in daily commercial service, making the 30-km airport run in 7 minutes and 20 seconds, a trip that takes close to an hour by taxi. Since May 2021, Shanghai has throttled the line back to a more sedate 300 km/h, largely for cost and wear reasons on a route that was never meant to turn a profit. It’s the trainset equivalent of a factory detuning a hypercar’s engine to make the warranty feasible. But it’s still rated and fully capable of 431 km/h; it hit an unofficial 501 km/h on a 2003 test run, and for seventeen straight years it held the outright record for the fastest thing you could buy a ticket for.

Honorable Mention: L0 Series SCMaglev — Japan (not yet in service)

The first segment of the Tokyo – Nagoya SC Maglev has been the testbed for perfecting the technology. Photo: Rick Harnish

Top speed on record: 603 km/h (375 mph), the fastest any train has ever moved

Need we say more? No passenger has ever ridden this thing on a real route, and none will for a while. The L0 is the prototype for Japan’s Chuo Shinkansen, a floating superconducting maglev line meant to eventually connect Tokyo and Osaka in about an hour, running at a planned commercial speed of around 500 km/h. It set the world rail speed record of 603 km/h back in 2015 on a test track in Yamanashi, faster than a Boeing 747’s takeoff speed, and it does it without touching the ground. The line was originally supposed to open in 2027. Geology, groundwater disputes with Shizuoka Prefecture, and some of the most tunnel-heavy construction ever attempted (upwards of 90% of the route runs underground) have pushed that date out to somewhere in the 2030s. It’s the concept car of this list.

Bringing these speed beasts home

Every train on the list exists because a country decided, at some point, that moving people at 200-plus miles an hour on the ground was worth the investment, the engineering risk, and the decades of patient buildout. We, the people of the United States, have not yet made that decision. We have the busiest air corridors and the worst traffic corridors of any developed country on Earth, as well as (ironically) the most miles of train track on Earth.

That’s what the High Speed Rail Alliance is trying to change.

Join the over 1,000 members who help make sure HSRA stays on track to bring amazing trains like this to North America.

We traded quality skiing, temperate weather, and the ability to leave our homes between December and April for the opportunity to live next to 20% of the world’s fresh water, solid, if not spectacular, urban infrastructure, and relative safety from hurricanes, wildfires, and coastal flooding. Which is why we should all take a little pride in learning that last week the New York Times designated Chicago as the No. 1 most climate-resilient major city in the world…

Link to the rest of my OpEd in Crains Chicago business.

Telia Finland’s Pitäjänmäki data center, which captures and shares waste heat to power nearby buildings (my god, even their data centers are cooler than ours)

Country Grammar

We’ve spent this series talking about data centers the way most people do: freshwater impacts, electricity usage, abstract facts and figures, blah, blah, blah.

But until now, we have neglected the realities faced by the people and communities that live next to these massive, hulking boxes we’ve entrusted with curing cancer and creating celebrity-animal hybrids. Data center neighbors experience a loud hum, temperature increases they can’t explain, and a building next door that’s throwing away enough free heat to warm the neighborhood (but isn’t?).

So, let’s close out our “Cleaning the Cloud” series with a conversation about the real-world impacts data center communities are actually dealing with.

Get Loud Now!

Data centers aren’t crazy, super loud per se. It’s more like a relentless, tonal, 24/7 hum that might make me forget my tinnitus. They have cooling fans, chillers, backup diesel generators, thousands of servers humming in unison – the combined effects of which can hit 96 decibels at the source (equivalent to standing next to a gas lawnmower). Residents near facilities across the nation describe it as an “internal organ vibration.”

This is noise pollution – full stop – the effects of which can lead to headaches, sleep disruption, and even hypertension from years of chronic exposure. But there’s a serious problem with how data center noise is monitored. Facilities have measured as low as 40 to 59 dBA on residential property (the same noise level as a typical human vocal conversation), technically within legal limits, but people are still losing sleep. This is because the noise standards measure industrial sound, not the low-frequency whine data centers produce.

If only there were an easy way to dampen this sound that also has plenty of other environmental co-benefits. Ah, yes, trees and land! A Michigan operator facing lawsuits and a new city noise ordinance responded by buying the adjacent land to use as a natural acoustic buffer. It’s not fancy or novel, but it works. It works even better than a $5 million engineered barrier in North Dakota that is apparently useless. Data center developers simply need to buy the buffer before they build – and do so before the lawsuits start coming.

More Heat than the Shaq Attack

A single data center can throw off heat at 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter. The upper end of a data center’s heat is like having two stove burners blasting on high every single square meter of the building.

A 30-megawatt facility (small by data center standards) rejects as much waste heat as a neighborhood of 25,000 to 35,000 homes, concentrated onto a lot the size of about 20 of those homes combined, something like 1,000 to 1,750 times the heat density of ordinary residential blocks. Field measurements in Phoenix found neighborhoods downwind of operating data centers running 0.7 to 0.9 degrees Celsius warmer on average, with spikes over 2 degrees, detectable up to 500 meters away. Phoenix is already one of America’s hottest cities. This ambient heat exacerbates issues for any residents who do not possess AC.

The fix for ambient data center heat is one we’ve already discussed: liquid cooling. Air-cooled data centers just move most of the facility’s heat straight into the atmosphere. Liquid cooling captures that heat far more efficiently at the source, which is now pulling double duty: it cuts the thermal plume hitting your street, and it makes the heat usable instead of wasted. Which is the perfect segue to the last problem local communities face, because liquid cooling isn’t three separate fixes; it’s one fix that solves all three: fewer fans means less noise, captured heat means no plume, and a captured heat stream is the only kind you can actually pipe somewhere else to use.

Which brings us to problem three: waste heat.

So, Re-use All Your Heat!

A single megawatt of IT load throws off roughly 8,760 megawatt-hours of thermal energy a year. Right now, most of that just evaporates into cooling towers or bleeds into the neighborhood, as problem two.

No one is reusing data center heat better than… drumroll please – Helsinki, Finland. (No wonder they are the happiest country on the planet!) Microsoft partnered with the Finnish utility Fortum to build what both companies call the world’s largest data center waste heat recovery project, up to 350 megawatts of thermal power, expected to supply roughly 40 percent of district heating demand across three municipalities, heating homes for a quarter million people. One data center there can heat up to 20,000 apartments.

New York is getting in the game, at a much smaller scale. Con Edison has proposed converting buildings around Rockefeller Center off the old district steam system and onto heat pumps that draw warmth from data centers, sewers, and neighboring buildings’ cooling systems. It’s not as grand an ambition as Helsinki’s, but it’s proof the same model can be adopted here in the good old USA.

The gap in ambition between Helsinki and where most US data centers are today is the reason I wrote this series. The technology to fix ambient noise and waste heat isn’t exotic. Trees. Liquid cooling instead of air cooling. A pipe to the building next door instead of a vent to the sky.

No need for Manhattan Project-style technology breakthroughs. We just need developers who plan for neighbors before they start complaining, and it requires the rest of us to start asking for it.

Here’s the elephant in the room: the federal government has essentially no siting authority over data centers. Nobody in Washington decides where a rack of servers and a wall of fans can go. That decision sits entirely with whichever state, county, or township the developer picks.

Which means Minnesota can require liquid cooling all it wants. It doesn’t matter if Indiana, or Georgia, or Loudoun County, Virginia will take the same project with no such requirement, plus a tax break. There is always a jurisdiction willing to loosen the rule or write a bigger check, and developers know exactly how to shop for one.

Fifty governments competing for the same investment, and the loosest bidder usually wins. It is hard to see a state ordinance fixing this; it takes a federal floor, one minimum standard for noise and heat that no state can undercut to land a ribbon-cutting.

If any of you reading this have the ability to ratify a constitutional amendment, let me know. I’ve got a few other ideas to contribute.

When I Move, You Move

If a data center is proposed anywhere near you, or if one’s already operating in your city, ask these two questions instead to make sure your local communities are protected:

1. What’s your noise mitigation plan?

2. Where is the waste heat going?

The developers’ answers to these questions will tell you exactly how much they’ve thought about keeping your community safe and livable.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my series “Cleaning the Cloud”. Please consider re-stacking this article to help support this work.

With love,

Matt

This quote terrifies me because it is inarguably true.

And, arguably, I already experienced it this summer as I scurried to buy N95 masks (COVID PTSD flashbacks!) from Walgreens this July to protect myself from the extreme air pollution here in Chicago caused by the wildfires in Canada. But the future is still ours to create together, and we can still work together to avoid appearing in someone else’s disaster video.

On August 26, Nepal and China were hit by a disaster that scientists had been warning us about for years. A massive chunk of glacier (inarguably loosened and lubricated by climate change) broke off, plummeted into a valley. The collapse caused massive floods that thundered down two rivers, devastating the villages and communities in their path.

“A lower part of a glacier has really come off,” said Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria who is currently based in Bangladesh. “If you look at the imagery, it’s like someone cut with a huge knife through the whole lower part and it fell off.”

As of the most recent count, almost 600 people are confirmed to have died, and almost 2,000 are missing.

I watched reels on Instagram this morning that showed CCTV video of villages in Nepal that were struck by the flooding in the moments before and after the flooding. It was horrifying. In one screen, you see a thriving area – people going about their day – and in a flash, everything is gone.

It looked like someone dumped a massive bucket of slush on a tiny diorama of a city.

We may not have mountains here in the Midwest, but we do have droughts, and tornadoes, and flooding, and air pollution. It’s only a matter of time before you are the one filming the disaster.

The average per capita carbon footprint of Nepal is about 0.6 metric tons per person, or 4% of the average American’s 16 metric tons of annual pollution. In spite of their microscopic footprint, the tiny country has been aggressively pursuing goals to electrify their transportation, expand hydro power, and reforest barren lands to help reduce their environmental impacts.

They didn’t ask for this tragedy. They’re not responsible for it, and they were doing their part to help the rest of the world become a greener and cleaner place.

This Thursday night, some friends and I watched the lunar eclipse from a chic rooftop bar in Chicago that had phenomenal views of the Second City’s skyline. My friend Chris remarked to me, “Chicago has a gorgeous skyline, but I’ve never looked at a skyline and wept. I’ve been in awe, and sure, I’ve been impressed, but I’ve never wept. I’ve only wept when I saw nature.”

I couldn’t agree more. Nature provokes such strong, positive emotional responses inside of us, because nature is us and we are nature. We can shape it – as no other species can – but we are no less a part of it. Which is why the stewardship of our natural world is so critical.

If this summer’s weather news has you feeling under it (the weather) – please go touch grass and consider providing some support to organizations like Blacks Outside that help people who don’t have access to nature access the great outdoors.

Or join me in giving directly here to help communities affected by the tragedy in Nepal.

And please remember these three things:

1. You are not alone. An estimated 89% of the world’s citizens want their governments to do more to solve climate change.

2. We are not trying to save “the” environment or “the planet.” We are trying to save “our” environment and “our” only home.

3. And most importantly, talk about climate change with your friends, with your children, with your family and neighbors. The physics of the atmosphere doesn’t care about politics. This is not a partisan issue. We do not need technological breakthroughs to solve climate change. We need cultural and political breakthroughs.

If all of us work together to do these things, we can all go back to using our phone cameras to make videos of our children’s first steps, what cute things our dogs or cats are up to, fit checks, and all the other wonderful, silly, carefree things we human animals do when we are not worried about whether or not the weather is trying to kill us.

With love,

Matt X.

Authors note: Both of my parents were boomers. This article was written with love, hope, and reverence and my tongue firmly in my cheek.

For Whom the “Buck Stops”

In the six years since I threw myself into the world of climate change and climate solutions, there’s a version of a conversation I’ve had more times than I care to count.

I will be chatting with a baby boomer. They will sympathetically express alignment with solving climate change, voice concern about its impacts, and pessimism with our political environment – and then, almost like clockwork towards the end of the conversation, they’ll say something like this:

“Well, it’s good that the youth (Gen Z, Gen Alpha) seem to care about this problem. I have an (insert descendent – daughter / son, grandchild, etc.) that really seems to care about this. I think in the future, it’ll change and they’ll be better than we were.”

Family Ties

My brothers and sisters in Christ – You have not departed this world yet. You are speaking about the futures and lives of YOUR children and YOUR grandchildren. Your parents left you with an insane bounty. You have “accumulated” over $85 trillion dollars in wealth. You make-up over 40% of Congress and 60% of the Senate (and hold the Presidency as well, for what that’s currently worth). You aided and abetted the creation of an existential crisis. You have all the power. And, broadly speaking, you are systematically kicking the ladder out from underneath the feet of your descendants while at the same time lighting a match and tossing it into the only home we’ll ever know as you sip your 7 and 7 in comfort, and blissfully coast into the great beyond.

Houston – We Have a Problem

Meanwhile this summer’s weather is screaming at us with ten toes down that the physics of the atmosphere do not care one iota about our intergenerational tensions.

Shall I count the ways?

· A chance to wear masks outdoors to protect ourselves as wildfires give the Midwest the worst air quality on planet earth

· Companies and communities bracing themselves for the “Strongest El Nino in living memory”

· Historic flooding in Indiana, Texas, and West Virginia, etc., etc., etc.

· July officially became the single hottest month in the entire history of US record keeping

· All of us getting the chance to learn what an extreme “heat dome” is

And we’re barely into tropical storm season. Need I go on?

The Future is Now Old Man

If you are a member of Gen Z or Gen Alpha, and you understand climate change, and consider what we experienced this summer – knowing that this will be the coldest summer of your lifetime – how in the name of all that’s holly can you look to the future with optimism?

Channeling the original boomer scion, Ronald Regan, I have only one question for you: “Are you leaving the world a better place for your descendants than the one your parents left for you?”

Florida Can Wait

My message to you – all of you aged 62 to 80: please get off the golf course and get in the game. And I’m not just talking about voting. Here’s my five point check-list to help you help your descendants.

1. Use your voice - Stop NIMBYISM – Join your local zoning or planning commission. At the bare minimum, show-up for these meetings (as well as city council meetings) so you can actively be a part of them and vote “yes” next time there is an opportunity to advance transit / rail, wind turbines, mixed use development or other projects that encourage sustainability, clean energy, or density in your community.

2. Use your money (after you’re gone) – Put your money where your mouth is – Consider using donor advised funds to direct your money targeting local resilience infrastructure, muni bonds to harden the grid, PACE financing for home electrification, or, of course, advocacy for other climate solutions – like high-speed rail. Directing even a fraction of the estate planning you’re “in the process” of transferring towards climate solutions outweighs almost anything else you could do.

3. Charity begins at home – Boomers disproportionately own the oldest, leakiest housing stock in the country and disproportionately resist heat pump and insulation retrofits due to inertia and cost. This is the most concrete, personal, non-symbolic action on this list – and it’s the one you are most likely to do out of your own self-interest because it’ll save you a lot of money.

4. Throw your hat in the little ring – Run for office in a low turnout race (school board, planning board, or utility commission). These are the bodies that approve or kill interconnection queues and rate cases, and boomer turnout in these races is disproportionately high relative to younger cohorts.

5. Remove your hat from the big ring - Boomers hold corporate and high-level NGO board seats, powerful political positions, utility relationships, and regulatory access that younger climate minded people don’t have yet. Opening doors, sponsoring, making introductions, is a real transfer of power. Work to redistribute your leverage to the next generation.

So boomers, here’s the deal. I’m not asking you to trade in the golf cart for a protest sign or start composting your own tears of generational guilt. Just show up to the zoning meeting once in a while, maybe skip the back nine for a school board race, and stop assuming Gen Z is going to fix this problem with vibes and the TikTok alone. You built the biggest pile of wealth, power, and institutional access this country has ever seen, and it turns out that’s actually a pretty good toolkit for fixing things, not just a nice retirement plan. Your grandkids don’t need an apology. They need you to use the clout you already have while you’ve still got it. So get off the seventeenth green, and get in the game. Florida will still be there. Assuming we get the sea level rise thing sorted.

Brand-Spanking-New Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, ND

Rough Rider

Last week I went to the American Conservation Coalition’s (Eco Right) annual meet-up in North Dakota. Did you know that North Dakota is America’s largest producer of sunflowers?

The ACC event was held in Medora, North Dakota at the brand-spanking-new, can still smell the paint drying Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. The library was built right into the Badlands themselves, with rammed earth walls, a living roof, and a custom concrete mix that was specially made for the project. The engineer cut the concrete content by over one third and still ended up with concrete that gets stronger over time. The building is pursuing what leadership calls the Four Zeros: zero energy, zero carbon, zero water, and zero waste.

The leadership team at the library made a series of very conscious decisions, in the name of TR’s legacy of conservation, to build a building to honor him that is at the bleeding edge of sustainability.

That’s the entire story of low-carbon building materials in one shiny new earth-toned box.

Somebody has to go first.

A Dirty Business

Concrete and steel are two of the dirtiest products humans make. Concrete production is responsible for roughly 8 percent of global greenhouse gas pollution. Steel is right behind it at 7 to 8 percent. Combined, that’s about one sixth of global greenhouse gas pollution!

Making concrete traditionally requires baking limestone until it releases carbon dioxide as a byproduct of the reaction. Making steel means running a blast furnace fed by coal.

The good news is that technological fixes for both products are real and ever so slowly gaining traction. Low-carbon concrete using “upcycled” materials usually carries a premium of 15-ish % (and falling). Green steel, made with hydrogen instead of coal, is more expensive today (25 to 40 percent over conventional steel), but that gap is projected to narrow significantly by 2030 (as hydrogen costs fall and carbon prices kick in). Recycled steel run through electric arc furnaces is already getting close to cost parity with virgin steel. These solutions work; what’s missing are customers big enough and patient enough to help underwrite the first plants at scale.

Which brings me to the actual subject of this piece: data centers!

We Need Big Tech to Enter the Arena

The AI buildout is now the largest driver of new commercial construction in the United States. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta are on pace to spend around $725 billion combined on capital expenditures in 2026. Concrete alone can represent up to 80 percent of a data center’s embodied carbon. U.S. data centers are projected to consume roughly 860,000 metric tons of concrete over the next three years. Big Tech companies are becoming the largest buyers of building materials in the country.

I want to help you change how you think about the hard costs in a construction budget. In isolation, when you hear that a product like green steel or green concrete has a “green premium” (a term popularized by Bill Gates, so I think it’s time for us to throw it out), people hear numbers like 25 to 40 percent premiums and assume it’s a dealbreaker.

It isn’t.

Concrete and steel are such a small fraction of the final cost of most structures that even a 75 percent premium on concrete raises total building cost by about 1 percent. For a hyperscaler writing billion-dollar checks for a single campus, the green premium on the concrete and rebar is a rounding error.

“Big Stick” Diplomacy

Sweden has shown us what happens when you link demand with an emerging green technology. Stegra, formerly H2 Green Steel, raised $7 billion to build a hydrogen-fed steel plant in Boden, backed by a long-term supply deal with Volvo. SSAB’s HYBRIT project delivered the world’s first fossil-free steel to Volvo back in 2021. Here in the U.S., AWS built 36 data centers with lower-carbon concrete in 2023, and AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are testing green concrete mixes through the Open Compute Project.

Government has a role to play here too: use the long lever of government procurements to help build markets. Buy Clean programs at the state and federal level, which set carbon limits on materials used in public projects, have already proven this model can work.

What does a country get if it builds this industry domestically instead of watching China do it?

China already produces more than half the world’s steel and about half its concrete. Countries that build domestic low-carbon materials industries now will get supply chain security, an export market as Europe’s carbon border tax expands, less air pollution, and industrial jobs that are hard to outsource.

Daring Greatly

I have two asks of two different readers.

If you work at a hyperscaler or advise one, push your construction teams to integrate green concrete and green steel into your standard construction specs (the way LEED certification became standard a decade ago), and treat the premium for what it actually is: immaterial.

If you’re a policymaker, stop treating Buy Clean as a niche environmental program and start treating it as what it is: industrial strategy that uses the government’s own purchasing power to build a market the private sector is already excited about.

Somebody has to go first.

In deep red North Dakota, it was a library. This decade, it should be the hyperscalers.

This may be the most important piece of my young Substack career. Share this with someone you know who’s anxious about AI’s impact on our planet.

Break My Soul

The roughly 5,500 data centers currently operating in the United States require about 176 terawatt-hours of electricity a year, which is about the same amount of power used by 16.7 million households (for comparison, California has about 13.8 million households). As cloud computing has soared, electricity prices across the US have (predictably) increased by 25-30% in just the last five years.

This places our elected leaders in a very difficult position. Say yes to the data center – and watch energy prices for your constituents explode, or say no and lose out on an important investment opportunity.

But what if there was a third option – an elegant solution that solved a lot of different problems for both people, our planet, and the hyperscalers that needs serious consideration?

Renaissance (Resilience)

Instead of building one new giant power plant to feed a data center (15 years for a nuclear power plant or up to five years for a natural gas plant), a company called Resilience is doing something much faster and much more interesting.

They’re putting solar panels, batteries, and energy efficiency investments into ordinary American homes and businesses, thousands of them, then bundling all of that electrical capacity together into one giant “virtual power plant“ that can sell all that power back to the grid on demand. Because these homes are already wired into the grid, this power doesn’t have to wait in line behind the multi-year interconnection backlog that’s currently blocking $98 billion in stalled data center projects. It can come online in 3 to 9 months. The legal instrument the data center operator signs with Resilience is a long-term energy procurement contract called a power purchase agreement.

“No one complains about solar panels or batteries when Facebook is giving them to you for free.” -Me

Resilience estimates there’s 1,000 gigawatts of untapped rooftop solar potential sitting on top of American homes right now, more than ten times what AI is projected to need by 2029. Only 5 percent of eligible homes have solar installed today.

But this is what makes this model so transformative. In the old model, a data center moves in, electricity prices near it jump, and the community absorbs the cost while someone else (Meta, Google, Amazon, et al.) keeps the profits.

Resilience flips that.

The homes with the “distributed energy resources” get extremely low energy bills – maybe even $0 per year. Local roofers, electricians, and developers get more work and new jobs. The power stays clean and is fast to build, and for once the people bearing the cost of America’s AI buildout are the same people enjoying the benefits of it.

Beyoncé Laws

There’s an adjacent policy mechanism moving through statehouses right now, and yes, everyone in the industry actually calls it BYONCE, short for Bring Your Own New Clean Energy. If a data center wants to plug into the grid, it has to bring new clean energy generation sufficient enough to cover its own new demand. Washington state has bills moving. Pennsylvania’s governor built it into his GRID standards. Illinois environmental groups are pushing it. And this is exactly where the VPP plus PPA model I just described shines.

A traditional utility-scale plant takes years to satisfy a BYONCE requirement. A distributed network of home solar and storage, the kind Resilience is building, can come online in months because it skips the interconnection queue. BYONCE sets the rule. The VPP plus PPA structure is how the data center developer complies with it.

Formation

It’s time for Big Tech to get in formation and get with the VPP plus PPA program. For years, natural gas was just cheaper than solar and batteries, full stop. That’s no longer true.

Solar plus battery storage now prices at roughly $74 per megawatt-hour; new natural gas runs about $70. Meanwhile, the cost of a gas turbine has tripled in three years, now $2.2 to $2.5 million per megawatt, and the backlog to get one built runs 3 to 6 years. Solar and storage can be up and running in 12 to 18 months. For a hyperscaler, every year a data center sits waiting on power is a year of AI revenue not captured, easily worth hundreds of millions on a large campus. Add in the political cover that comes standard with this model, showing up with lower bills and local jobs already built in instead of another gas plant proposal, and the case stops being about saving pennies on the megawatt hour. It’s about who gets to flip the switch first.

Hold Up (Save the H₂0)

The 97 terawatt-hours of fossil-fueled data center energy require vast amounts of water to heat up into steam (from burning gas or coal) to turn turbines and generate electricity. Much of this water is returned to lakes and rivers (albeit at a much higher temperature that isn’t good for native species). But a lot of this fresh water evaporates and can never be used again. Displace that fossil generation with solar and storage instead, and you avoid roughly 31.7 billion gallons of water consumption a year. That’s something like 48,000 Olympic swimming pools, gone from fresh water demand, every single year, just by changing how the electrons get made.

Freedom (Reducing Everyone’s Carbon Footprint)

Run the same math on greenhouse gas pollution, and the numbers are staggering. Converting that fossil-fueled share of data center power to solar plus storage avoids roughly 54.8 million metric tons of CO2 a year. That’s about 12 to 13 million gasoline-powered cars taken off the road, every year, indefinitely, just from how one industry chooses to power itself. It also happens to solve one of the hardest decarbonization problems in the book, residential and commercial buildings, which most climate plans struggle to address.

Ring the Alarm

I always like to end my articles with a call to action. Something manageable and specific to help all of us be better, more informed, more involved. This week, I just want you to share this article with someone you know.

When I learned what Resilience was doing, I was gob smacked – it was so elegant, so obvious, and so impactful. The economics work. The speed-to-power advantage for Big Tech is real. The water and carbon numbers are enormous. None of that matters if it stays in my Substack.

If you’re a civic leader, this is your leverage the next time a data center asks for a permit. If you work at a hyperscaler, this is the business case that gets you online faster than your competitor waiting in the gas turbine queue.

If you’re neither of those things, you probably know someone who is. Forward this to them. The bottleneck on this idea is its novelty and lack of awareness - not enough people know it exists yet. Help me fix that part.

A Good Walk Spoiled

They say that golf is a good walk spoiled. And for men with romantic partners, golf could be spoiling even more important things.

But perhaps more importantly, golf is also pretty harsh on nature. The roughly 16,000 courses in the United States take up more land than Delaware (~3,500 square miles) and consume over 531 billion gallons of fresh water a year (or enough to meet the household needs of over 20 million average Americans).

Which is…

A hell of a lot more land and fresh water consumed than all ~5,500 data centers in our country – by a wide margin.

Unlike golf courses, data centers have the luxury of an existing technology that can help dramatically reduce water consumption.

Chill Out

Data centers can use liquid cooling to reduce direct water consumption. Evaporative cooling tower technology (“fresh water”) systems typically use about 2-5 million gallons of water per megawatt per year. Liquid cooling systems reduce that amount by 95%.

It’s important to note that most of the data center’s water usage is actually experienced downstream of the facility when the coal or gas is burned to create steam to turn the turbines to make the energy that powers the plant (more on this topic later!).

Liquid cooled systems have the added benefit of reducing data center energy consumption; however, these systems generally require higher up-front costs.

States across the country from South Carolina to Kansas (with Arizona in particular driving adoption) are beginning to explore legislation and policies aimed at requiring data centers to pursue liquid cooling to address water stress – and avoid the usage of potable water to serve the needs of the cloud.

The great news is that even if an existing data center hasn’t been designed for liquid cooling, it can often be retrofitted for liquid cooling; however, for data centers with higher energy density server racks (50kW/rack+) – it’s much more challenging to retrofit if liquid cooling wasn’t selected in the design phase.

Everyone in the Pool

The hyperscalers have taken note of public outcry directed at their water-hogging facilities, and many have begun voluntarily adopting liquid cooling technology to get ahead of pending regulations and civic displeasure:

· Microsoft has become best in class at water conservation. Starting August 2024, Microsoft began deploying closed-loop, zero-water-evaporation cooling for new AI data centers, chip-level liquid cooling paired with dry-cooler heat rejection instead of evaporative towers. Pilot sites in Phoenix and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin (the Fairwater AI campus). This is a notable reversal for a company operating in one of the most water-stressed metro areas in the country.

· Amazon is pursuing a parallel but different path: recycled/reclaimed water rather than zero-water, targeting over 120 data centers using recycled water by 2030, an estimated 530 million gallons of freshwater saved annually once complete.

· Oracle has published on closed-loop cooling specifically for its AI data center buildout, explicitly framing it against Uptime Institute’s benchmark that conventional evaporative systems can use millions of gallons per MW annually.

· Google and Meta have both made water-positive-by-2030 commitments, though their approach leans more on offsetting and recycled water partnerships than eliminating evaporative cooling outright.

Follow the Water

As hyperscalers continue to lean into water conservation, there are a number of companies that (may) benefit from this shift. Vertiv (VRT) is the obvious first stop. It holds the largest share of the liquid cooling market, and its equipment is already bolted into the hyperscale AI clusters going up right now. nVent (NVT) is the sleepier play. It builds the coolant manifolds NVIDIA specified for its own Blackwell generation chips, which means demand for nVent’s hardware grows every time NVIDIA sells a GPU. Ecolab (ECL) is the one most people will ignore. On the surface, it is a giant, unglamorous industrial water company. Underneath, it owns CoolIT Systems, one of only two component makers wired directly into NVIDIA’s own hardware roadmap. Please remember, I cannot help myself to share these ideas, and you shouldn’t construe this as investment advice. It is just a reminder that water conservation is becoming mandatory infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have, and mandatory infrastructure tends to be where the money goes.

To the Statehouse

Data centers don’t have to be adversaries of the towns that host them. The technology to fix the water problem already exists, and companies are already selling it at scale.

South Carolina and Kansas are trying to write that requirement into law right now. Arizona is doing it the harder way, town by town, ordinance by ordinance, because the legislature has not. Civic leaders in every state courting a data center deal already hold the same leverage those places found. Zoning approval, tax incentives, and utility interconnection agreements are all points of leverage where a simple condition, closed-loop cooling before you get the permit, could turn a fight over water into a partnership over infrastructure. The industry has already proven it can build this way when it chooses to. The only question left is whether local leaders ask for it before the concrete gets poured or after the wells run dry.

Significant research contributions were provided to this essay by our summer intern, Cara Obua

Many experts have concluded that the $32 trillion United States economy has become one giant bet on artificial intelligence – which feels deeply alarming considering that only 17 percent of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on the United States over the next decade.

On one hand, we have the Trump Administration wrapping AI in a national security and economic competitiveness argument while betting the (our?) farm on its future.

On the other hand, we have 7 in 10 Americans (count me as one of the seven) who have no desire to live near a data center – with the only group of Americans that have a consistently favorable impression of AI being those that make over $200k.

How will this tension resolve itself?

The Phantom Menace

I love my Claude Pro subscription. I would be very sad if it disappeared tomorrow; in fact, it feels like the same leap forward life took for me in the mid-’90s, when I first discovered the joys of rummaging on eBay, shopping for books on Amazon.com, and sending IMs on AIM.

The exuberance and hype of the era saw tech P/E ratios reach an exorbitant 60x (implying you pay $60 for a stock that gives you one dollar in earnings), and over two years beginning in March 2000, over $8 trillion in wealth was destroyed along with pets.com, Webvan, and boo.com.

But the destruction of wealth was a speed bump in the path of a digital juggernaut that ultimately wound up destroying analog industries left and right, from phone books to encyclopedias, to Blockbuster video.

Attack of the Clones

The next big bubble to burst in my lifetime was the ‘08/’09 real estate crash – where market valuations weren’t quite as high (Nasdaq PE hit around 27x), but the economic devastation was arguably greater. Initially, there was a huge backlash to a proposed government bailout of the banks, which pushed the market down further – until it became impossible for the feds not to step in.

When I reflect upon the ‘08/’09 real estate bubble crash, there is a part of me that recognizes the utility and importance of a robust and reliable banking system – and the necessity for our government to step in to preserve it (Thanks Obama!).

I’m not so sure that the American public would feel the same way if the Federal Government decided to bail out Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg when the AI bubble crashes.

In past government bailouts, the Federal government has usually provided funding to companies that represent roughly six times the losses the companies faced – which in the case of AI companies, could be in the trillions of dollars – a specter made all the more plausible by China’s progress in AI and its approach to dealing with foreign competition.

The Empire Strikes Back

Let’s assume for a moment that the AI bubble doesn’t crash. The models continue to rapidly evolve, and the AI “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Tesla) continue to steadily grow into their valuations.

Currently, these seven companies have an average PE ratio of 75x; they’re collectively worth $22.7 trillion, and they account for 33% of the total valuation of the S&P 500.

Let’s also assume that five years from now, they’ve gently grown into sleepy (magnificent) giants trading at 20x earnings – that would imply additional earnings of about one trillion dollars a year at the same valuation. I will conservatively estimate that half of those earnings are related to software purchased to replace human employees and that the average total cost of a worker replaced is $80,000. That would conclude that AI displaced as many as seven million jobs in the next five years – and my estimate is on the low end of the spectrum.

There you have it. Either the Feds spend trillions bailing out an industry no one likes, or we stand by and watch the Death Star gobble up millions of jobs. What is a 250-year-old fledgling democracy to do?

The Last Jedi

In June of this year, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) laid out a plan to partially nationalize AI.

The three key pillars of it are:

· The bill imposes a one-time 50% tax, paid in stock, on companies with more than $200 million in annual AI-related receipts

· The shares go into a Treasury trust fund managed by a new Independent Commission for Democratic AI, whose seven members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, which is oversight of the fund

· The creation of a Norway-style Sovereign Wealth fund valued at approximately $7 trillion that would issue direct payments to every American of as much as $1,000

Bernie Sanders’ plan is leveraging the bro-ligarchy’s own words – if AI is indeed a public resource – most certainly one “built” on the collective wisdom of all of us – we should own it.

A New Hope

The good news is that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman already seems very keen to swap his own hard-earned equity for taxpayer money. The guy running the company at the center of this is telling you the private sector cannot carry the downside risk on its own.

We had this exact conversation in the 1970s, when American oil dominance could have funded a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund and instead funded nothing. We are being offered a second run at the same trade, this time with AI instead of oil.

You don’t have to believe Bernie Sanders’ bill is the right structure. The tax trigger, the commission, the payout mechanics are all negotiable.

What isn’t negotiable is the question it calls: if seven to 25 million jobs get displaced and the Magnificent Seven get bailed out anyway, who owns the upside?

Ask your representative or any elected official directly. Not “please nationalize AI.” Ask them what happens to the bailout math if the bet goes wrong, and who’s on the hook for the check?

My global take on government bailouts: If you are too big to fail, you should not be left to the private sector to manage in the first place.

Payday

Twice a month, my fintech app pushes a notification reminding me that my employer has once again made payroll. My checking account is replenished, I close the notification, and I move on with my day. Most of us do. But here’s what almost none of us stop to consider: that $10,000 sitting in your account isn’t sitting anywhere. Your bank has already turned it into roughly $100,000 of lending capacity, and it is making decisions about where to deploy that money right now, without you, on your behalf, and in your name.

For most Americans who drive an EV, carry a reusable bag, and feel a low-grade guilt every time they board a plane, that $100,000 is almost certainly financing something they would never choose to finance themselves.

The Mechanism

The principle at work here is called fractional reserve banking, and it is one of the most consequential and least discussed features of the modern financial system. When you deposit money, your bank is required to hold only a small fraction of it in reserve. The rest becomes the raw material for loans: mortgages, commercial real estate, corporate credit lines, infrastructure financing, and yes, fossil fuel project development. The ratio varies by institution and by country, but the multiplier effect is real, and it is large. Your $10,000 deposit does not sit. It circulates through the economy.

And those loans have a carbon footprint.

Every dollar lent to a coal mine, a liquefied natural gas terminal, or an oil pipeline carries an emissions consequence that never shows up in your personal carbon accounting. It is invisible by design, buried several layers down in a financial supply chain that was never built with transparency in mind. Researchers and climate finance practitioners call this your “financed emissions,” and for most individuals, financed emissions dwarf every other category of personal environmental impact combined.

The Spectrum

Which bank or credit union you choose to do business with really matters. Changing where you bank could make a bigger annual impact for the planet than adopting a fully vegan diet. There are four categories of financial institutions, and each carries a vastly different estimated emissions footprint.

• Large, Global Banks (BofA, Citi, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo) – These are the institutions most likely to use your cash to fund fossil fuel projects. According to Project Drawdown, the financed emissions attributable to $10,000 deposited at these institutions are roughly 2.9 metric tons (MTs) of greenhouse gas pollution per year.

• Regional Banks (Capital One, Citizens, Fifth Third, PNC) – Regional banks are somewhat less likely to be directly involved in fossil fuel lending, but still carry a meaningful carbon footprint: approximately 2.4 metric tons per year for $10,000 in deposits.

• Fossil-Free and Green Banks (Amalgamated, Beneficial State, Clearwater CU, Sunrise Bank) – Climate-responsible banks, institutions that avoid lending to fossil fuel projects and steer capital toward clean energy, carry an average estimated footprint of around 0.6 metric tons per year. That is an 80% reduction compared to a big four bank.

Local Credit Unions. If you are like me, and you have had your college mascot on your debit card since signing up for the university credit union as a freshman, here is the imperfect answer: there is no verified published dataset that quantifies financed emissions for the typical credit union. This gap is a transparency failure of the industry, not a knock on credit unions. What we do know is that credit unions are structurally different from global banks. Their mission is to recycle capital into local communities, and their lending is heavily concentrated in consumer finance: auto loans, mortgages, and personal loans. That portfolio composition implies a carbon footprint much closer to green banks than to JP Morgan. The data will catch up eventually. In the meantime, your local credit union is almost certainly a better choice than your current big global bank.

Benchmark First

Before you switch, know where you stand. For U.S. consumers, Topo Finance has built a calculator specifically designed to help individuals benchmark their current bank’s carbon intensity against alternatives. Run your own numbers at topofinance.org before you make any decisions.

Two Hours

Switching banks is free, but it is not instant. Opening the new account takes minutes. Have your ID, Social Security number, and an initial deposit ready, and you can be set up online in under ten minutes. The heavier lift is redirecting your financial life: pull three months of statements from your current bank, list every automatic payment and recurring charge, and update them one by one. Let your HR team know you have new direct deposit information. Leave a cash cushion in your old account for 60 days to catch anything you missed. Budget two hours of active effort, then a couple of months of light monitoring, and you are done.

The cumulative math is enormous. The average American keeps the same checking account for nearly 19 years. Moving $10,000 from a big four bank to a green bank or fossil-free credit union avoids roughly 2.3 metric tons of financed emissions per year. Over 19 years, that compounds to somewhere in the range of 40 metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution avoided. That is the equivalent of roughly 9,500 hamburgers, never eaten, simply by changing where your paycheck lands.

Closing Time

This week, look up your bank at bankingonclimatechaos.org. If it appears in the top ten fossil fuel financiers, you already know what you must do. Put two hours on the calendar.

If you want to go further: ask your wealth manager or self-directed brokerage for a personal impact report. Most will not have one ready, which is the point of asking. The question is a form of pressure. Do the same with your employer. Your 401(k) or pension plan is financing something right now. Ask your HR or benefits team what it is funding and whether an environmentally aligned option exists. Your employer chose that plan. They can choose a different one.

You have more financial leverage over the clean energy transition than you have probably been told. Your deposit account, your brokerage, your retirement plan, the questions you ask your employer - these are not symbolic gestures. They are capital allocation decisions, and capital allocation is how energy systems get built. You have been making these decisions by default for years. You can start making them on purpose today.

I’ve been deep in the build for a keynote presentation I’m developing on the actual economics of the US-China energy competition, the kind of argument you’re used to getting from me, just built for a stage instead of a page. It’s been a great exercise; making an argument strong enough to survive a live audience is a different discipline than writing it down.

Back to the regular schedule next week. Hope you all are staying cool and having wonderful summers.

Matt

Happy belated Fourth of July!

I’m writing this from the Midwest, where we celebrate Independence Day with the same energy we bring to everything else: more than enough holiday liquid cheer, in a parking lot, with a cooler. If you grew up here, you know the specific chaos of a suburban cul-de-sac at 9 p.m. on July 4^th – sparklers in one hand, a lukewarm beer in the other, someone’s uncle explaining, confidently and incorrectly, how fireworks work.

Some of you are reading this on a plane. Or you just got off one. Maybe you drove eight hours to a lake house. Maybe you flew to see family you only see twice a year and felt that familiar low-grade guilt somewhere around 30,000 feet – the climate-conscious traveler’s tax. You’ve read the articles. You feel bad for approximately 30 seconds and then ask the steward for a Diet Coke.

I want to talk about that guilt. Not to make it worse. To give you an idea for action to alleviate your anxiety.

America turns 250 this year. Two and a half centuries. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary run – a country that went from thirteen coastal colonies to the dominant economic and cultural force on the planet inside of a human lifetime, then just kept going.

There is also a number that tends to get lost in the birthday coverage.

When most people talk about which country is most responsible for climate change, many claim it is China. And in terms of current annual emissions, that’s correct. China emits more greenhouse gas pollution per year than any other country on earth. But that framing misses something important about how the atmosphere works. Carbon dioxide accumulates, and it stays up there for hundreds of years. What matters for the climate isn’t who is polluting the most today; it’s who has put the most in the tank over time.

On that ledger, the blame game culprit isn’t even close.

The United States is the single largest contributor to cumulative historical greenhouse gas pollution in the history of civilization. We have been the biggest industrial economy on earth for longer than any other country, and we burned an extraordinary amount of fossil fuel building that economy. That legacy is baked into the atmosphere whether anyone in a cul-de-sac in Ohio thinks about it during the fireworks.

If you care about this problem, and you want to do something about it beyond feeling bad at altitude, the question is where to aim your actions.

Carbon offsets are not the answer.

I know they feel like the answer. You book a flight, the checkout screen offers you the chance to plant some trees for $6.50, and there’s a brief sensation of moral equilibrium. The research on voluntary offsets is not encouraging. Permanence is hard to verify. Additionality (whether the trees would have been planted anyway) is difficult to establish. Fraud is common. The market is largely unregulated. Buying an offset is not the same as avoiding an emission.

Here is something that truly works, at least at the margin, and has the added feature of potentially making you money: buy KRBN.

KRBN is an ETF – a publicly traded fund – that holds carbon credit allowances, the actual permits that heavily polluting industrial facilities in regulated markets that tax carbon are legally required to purchase to emit CO₂ pollution. The biggest markets it tracks are the European Union Emissions Trading System and the California cap-and-trade program.

Here is the mechanism, and it’s important that you understand it:

These markets work by setting a hard cap on total allowable emissions, then issuing a fixed number of permits. Companies that need to pollute must buy permits. When you buy KRBN, you are purchasing those permits on the secondary market. You are taking them out of circulation. That tightens supply. Tighter supply pushes the price of polluting higher. Higher prices make clean energy comparatively cheaper and make it harder for polluters to operate profitably without cutting emissions.

You are not planting a tree and hoping.

You are directly increasing the cost of pollution for industrial emitters, using the same market mechanism that governments built to price carbon in the first place. And if governments, under regulatory and legal pressure, tighten the cap further over time, the value of those permits goes up.

You own them. You may make money.

A round-trip flight from Chicago to New York generates roughly half a metric ton of CO₂ per passenger. One share of KRBN approximately covers that. The stock currently trades for around $33 per share. Compare that to the $6.50 tree you weren’t sure about. One of these purchases tightens the global carbon market. The other one made an airline feel better about selling you a ticket. You can buy KRBN on Robinhood, Fidelity, Schwab, or most other standard trading platforms. It trades like a stock.

Two hundred and fifty years is a long time to be burning things. The next fifty don’t have to look the same.

Hope the cul-de-sac survived. Hope you kept all ten fingers. And if you’re nursing a mild case of sparkler regret this morning, open Robinhood before you open the Advil.

Disclosure: I own KRBN. This is not investment advice. It’s a holiday essay with a ticker in it. Please tend to your own business accordingly.

By Matthew Roling and Ben Mark

America is in the middle of a once‑in‑a‑generation surge in electricity demand. AI data centers, electric vehicles, and a manufacturing revival are pushing the electricity grid to grow at its fastest pace since the early 2000s (EIA, 2026). Battery storage is scaling just as quickly. Costs are plunging, capacity is set to more than double by 2027, and California now operates an energy storage arsenal larger than the entire Los Angeles power system (EIA, 2025; California Energy Commission, 2025). Batteries are rapidly becoming the backbone of how Americans consume power. But the boom rests on a supply chain still dominated by China, leaving the U.S. in the uneasy position of powering its economic expansion with technology sourced from a geopolitical rival.

Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act spurred battery demand before a domestic industry existed to supply it

The core challenge with the Inflation Reduction Act wasn’t intent, but execution. Congress set out to reshore battery manufacturing, but the law made its tax incentives available years before a domestic supply chain existed to capture them. As a result, the majority of early IRA credits for energy storage and electric vehicles flowed straight through a battery ecosystem overwhelmingly dominated by China. By 2024, Chinese firms controlled 85% of global cell manufacturing capacity, with Chinese juggernaut CATL alone holding 39.2% of the market (IEA, 2025; SNE Research, 2026).

Domestic investment did ramp up. U.S. gigafactory capacity pipeline through 2030 jumped from roughly 700 gigawatt‑hours before the IRA to more than 1.2 terawatt‑hours by mid‑2023 (Columbia University SIPA, 2023). But the midstream remained almost entirely Chinese: mineral processing, cell manufacturing, and distribution were still concentrated abroad. And because the IRA’s foreign entity of concern (FEOC) restrictions kicked in starting in 2024 — barring Chinese‑sourced components from qualifying for credits — the policy effectively tightened the rules before the U.S. had built the capacity needed to comply. The result was predictable: a reshoring effort that boosted demand faster than it built supply.

New FEOC restrictions are only exacerbating the problem

Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law in July 2025, retained federal investment tax credits (ITC) for grid‑scale battery storage through the 2030s, a result that pleasantly surprised much of the clean energy industry. But the law also tightened the conditions for claiming those credits. Stricter FEOC provisions further limit procurement of Chinese‑sourced battery components, capping FEOC‑derived content at 55% in 2026 and increasing to 75% by 2030 (Baker Tilly, 2025).

The policy logic is clear, but the execution risk is enormous. With more than 70% of global battery pack assembly still sourced from Chinese manufacturers, there is not enough non‑Chinese production capacity to meet U.S. demand through at least 2028 (Council on Strategic Risks, 2025; Benchmark Minerals, 2026). Projects scheduled to break ground from 2026 onward must either source more expensive non-Chinese cells, forfeit the ITCs entirely, or wait. Some companies have suspended or canceled their projects due to cost considerations as a result of FEOC restrictions (e.g., Freyr Battery, Kore Power, Ford) (Beroe Inc, 2026). Greenline Insights estimates that more than $47 billion in planned U.S. battery storage is now at risk from FEOC restrictions — threatening grid stability just as power‑hungry data centers and manufacturers depend on batteries for reliability, and giving competitors a window to get ahead in the AI infrastructure race (Greenline Insights, 2025).

How China’s battery dominance impacts our economy, our environment, and our households

China is further consolidating its global battery lead. Global installations jumped 51% in 2025, surpassing 315 gigawatt‑hours, with China accounting for more than half of the annual build (ESS News, 2026). China installed more battery capacity in December 2025 alone than the United States deployed all year (ESS News, 2026). Chinese manufacturers are now aggressively entering export markets across Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America, and locking in supply agreements and shaping infrastructure standards. As China demonstrated with EVs and solar, manufacturing dominance quickly becomes market control. If the U.S. remains tethered to a supply chain it has deemed a security threat while China races ahead, it risks ceding not just market share but technological leadership in one of the most consequential infrastructure buildouts of the next two decades.

U.S. grid emissions at risk

Battery storage is the fulcrum that determines how much clean energy the grid can absorb. Without sufficient storage, solar and wind output must be curtailed when it exceeds what transmission lines can carry — meaning clean electrons are wasted, and fossil fuel generation stays online. The IEA projects grid-scale battery capacity must expand 35-fold to nearly 970 GW by 2030, facilitating a power sector that the Net Zero Emissions (NZE) Scenario projects must slash emissions by approximately 13 Gt CO₂ from 2022 levels — a reduction larger than the entire current annual output of global heavy industry (IEA, 2024; IEA, 2025; IEA, 2022). A storage buildout slowed by supply chain constraints is a direct setback for reducing America’s grid emissions.

Reduced reliability and higher electricity costs

Fewer utility‑scale batteries means less capacity to displace the gas peaker plants that routinely drive the worst bill spikes. Those plants can cost utilities up to 30 times more per megawatt‑hour during extreme heat and cold than normal grid power, and those costs flow straight to ratepayers. Every battery that doesn’t get built because of FEOC compliance issues is, in effect, a peaker that stays online longer — and low‑ and middle‑income households, who already spend a disproportionate share of income on energy, absorb the brunt of that premium (Department of Energy, 2019). A grid that’s more insulated from China but more expensive and less reliable for Americans is not a policy success.

What lawmakers should do next

Allied coordination matters as much as domestic policy. South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the European Union are navigating the same China dependency. A coordinated approach to mineral processing, manufacturing standards, and reciprocal market access would create a market opportunity for countries prepared to meet it. Countries that coordinate early will not just reduce their exposure to China. They will define what the next era of industrial leadership looks like.

FEOC restrictions should also be paired with aggressive investment in domestic cell manufacturing and alternative battery chemistries. Sodium‑ion, iron‑air, and flow battery formats are just a few promising technologies that rely on abundant domestic materials and bypass the mineral chokepoints China dominates. These are commercially viable solutions that, with focused policy support, could bring cost premiums down and help close the supply gap before FEOC restrictions become fully binding.

The U.S. battery boom is real. Demand is surging, costs are falling, and the grid needs storage at a scale that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. But the boom was built on a supply chain Washington has now deemed a national security concern, and the fix has sent producers racing to catch up. The question is no longer whether America will build the batteries it needs, but whether it can build them fast enough, and on its own terms, to secure its energy future.

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency published its updated Comprehensive Climate Action Plan on June 1, 2026, and the leaders in Springfield must think the average Illinoisan is a 55-year-old suburban dad making over $150,000 a year. Because they rolled out the red carpet for electric vehicle incentives and offered essentially nothing for mode shift, transit, or, most glaringly, passenger rail.

Before going further, let us acknowledge what Illinois has accomplished. The state has done serious work decarbonizing its electricity grid. In 2005, power generation accounted for 95.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution, about 32% of total state emissions. By 2023 that number had dropped to 38.3 million metric tons, a nearly 60% reduction. That is a genuine achievement and it deserves recognition.

But transportation is a different story. In 2005, transportation emissions were 75.2 million metric tons, about 25% of the state’s total. By 2023 they had dropped to 57.2 million metric tons, a reduction of less than 24% over 18 years, and transportation’s share of total emissions grew to 28% as the grid got cleaner. Illinois has been making real progress where progress is easy. It has barely moved on the hard part.

The Land of Lincoln, Railroads, and Irony

This state invented the American railroad. Chicago became the greatest city in the Midwest because every rail line in the country ran through it. Illinois has more miles of railroad track than almost any state in the nation. The Santa Fe, the Burlington Route, the Illinois Central, the Chicago & North Western, these lines were built here, by us, connecting a continent. Abraham Lincoln was a railroad lawyer before he was a president.

And yet the state’s 83-page climate plan mentions the word “train” exactly zero times.

The plan does gesture toward reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT), projecting a 9% VMT reduction with no explanation of how we are going to achieve it. It nods to land use density with vague language about concentrating new construction in high-density regions. It mandates that municipalities and government agencies purchase electric buses, a requirement so toothless that it includes no funding mechanism and no enforcement timeline.

The implicit theory of the plan is that Illinois will solve its transportation emissions problem by convincing 575,000 new car buyers per year to buy electric vehicles instead of gas-powered ones. At up to $4,000 rebate per vehicle, replacing every new car sold in Illinois with an EV could cost as much as $2.3 billion annually. That is more than the entire operating budget of the Chicago Transit Authority, one of the largest public transit systems in America.

There is a cheaper, faster, and more equitable answer hiding in plain sight.

The Average Illinoisan Does Not Make $150,000

The EV strategy has a fundamental problem. The average new car in America now costs $50,326. The median Illinois household income is approximately $80,000. New car buyers with household incomes above $150,000 now represent 43% of all new vehicle sales nationally, up from 33% just six years ago. EV rebates are, in practice, subsidies for people who were already going to buy an expensive car.

Mode shift is different. A train ticket from Springfield to Chicago does not require a household income of $150,000. It does not require a $722 monthly payment. It does not require seven years of debt. It just requires a train.

The Commission That Needs a Signature

Illinois has already built the institutional infrastructure to do this right. And the High Speed Rail Alliance (HSRA) has been doing the quiet, unglamorous work of making sure it survives.

The Illinois High-Speed Railway Commission has spent years researching potential routings between Chicago and St. Louis, conducting initial ridership projections, and holding monthly public meetings where ordinary Illinoisans can weigh in on how their statewide rail system should be shaped. Metra, whose CEO chairs the Commission, is one of the best publicly-owned commuter railroads in the country. The Commission is staffed by people who know railroads, and its public meeting structure means citizens have more say in how their statewide rail system is shaped than in almost any comparable planning body in the country.

This spring, thanks in no small part to advocacy by the HSRA, the Illinois legislature voted to extend the Commission’s sunset from January 1, 2027 to January 1, 2030. This extension matters because serious rail planning takes time, and killing the Commission in 2027 would have meant discarding years of routing research and ridership analysis before it could be acted on. HSRA successfully fought to prevent that from happening. The extension bill is now on Governor Pritzker’s desk waiting for his signature.

The legislature also voted, again with HSRA’s advocacy behind it, to endorse the American High Speed Rail Act, introduced by Representative Seth Moulton and co-sponsored by 47 representatives, which would authorize $41 billion for high-speed and higher-speed rail nationally. Illinois going on record in support of that bill sends a signal to Washington that the Midwest is ready to be part of a national passenger rail network, not just a flyover corridor between coasts.

HSRA won those two legislative victories in a session that had no shortage of competing priorities. That is exactly the kind of patient, persistent advocacy that moves infrastructure policy in a state where the highway lobby has had decades of runway.

What You Can Do

Giving HSRA $10 a month is an investment in the only organization in Illinois that showed up to fight for trains when the climate plan forgot they existed. Become a sustaining member. Then send this piece to one person who cares about getting this right.

The spiritual home of the American railroad has everything it needs to lead on this. Governor Pritzker has the pen. It is time to use it.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration finalized what it called the single largest deregulatory action in American history: the rescission of the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding. This legal foundation gave the federal government authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Gone with it were federal emissions standards for cars, trucks, and heavy-duty vehicles. The administration’s argument was not primarily scientific. After an attempt to use a Department of Energy report written by a handful of fringe scientists collapsed under withering criticism from the scientific community and a federal court ruling that the process was unlawful, the final rule rested on something simpler: Washington should not be in this business. Let the states sort it out.

There is a reasonable version of this argument. Conservatives have grounded their opposition to federal environmental regulation in the Tenth Amendment for decades, dating to Barry Goldwater and codified under Reagan: powers not delegated to Washington are reserved to the states. Environmental policy, under this view, is exactly the kind of local matter that state legislatures and state courts are best positioned to handle. And there is evidence that the system can work that way. Richard Nixon created the EPA. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed California’s first greenhouse gas regulatory scheme. Twenty-four states, representing 60 percent of U.S. GDP, have already set their own climate targets, independent of whatever Washington chooses to do. The administration’s own final rule acknowledged the question: would states step in? If the federal government exits the field and states pick up the ball, that is federalism doing exactly what its architects intended.

Enter, therefore, the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act.

Introduced in April by Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Harriet Hageman, the bill does not simply hold the federal line on climate regulation. It goes further, voiding state climate superfund laws, dismissing pending litigation, blocking future lawsuits brought under any theory, including fraud and failure to warn, and declaring the entire field exclusively federal, in a bill whose sponsors just told Washington to stay out of it. Vermont and New York had passed superfund laws requiring polluters to contribute to climate adaptation costs. Hawaii and Maui have cases moving toward trial. The bill would kill all of this.

The legislation declares that climate regulation is, and continues to be, governed exclusively by federal law. Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, called this “stunningly broad,” noting it would break with more than fifty years of Clean Air Act precedent giving states authority to regulate emissions more stringently than Washington.

The federal government has just vacated the field. The bill plants a flag in it anyway.

The architects of this bill did not invent the strategy. Two decades ago, gun manufacturers secured sweeping federal immunity from liability through the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, largely stripping shooting victims of their day in court. Cruz and Hageman have said the quiet part out loud: their own press materials cite the gun immunity law as the model. The one other industry to receive this kind of congressional protection was the one whose products kill 44,000 Americans a year. Oil and gas is now asking for the same treatment.

Here is what congressional immunity tells you about the merits of a case. Frivolous lawsuits do not require acts of Congress. Companies beat frivolous cases in court or settle them cheaply. What requires a federal shield is a lawsuit you are genuinely afraid to take to discovery, because discovery turns internal documents into public record.

Exxon’s own scientists predicted catastrophic warming in the 1970s. The company understood the risk decades before most Americans had heard the word greenhouse gas, and it spent the intervening years funding doubt. Cases in Hawaii, Maui, and Boulder are now moving toward trial. That means depositions. That means document production. That means the gap between what the industry knew and what it said becomes, potentially, sworn testimony.

Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School, put it simply: if there is no basis for the claims, why is immunity necessary? The urgency of this bill is its own answer.

The timing and urgency of the bill are easier to understand with a few additional facts. The legislation’s sponsors have received more than $9.5 million from oil and gas interests over their careers. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s primary lobbying arm, listed blocking climate liability as a top policy priority for 2026. It does explain why a bill built on the premise that climate lawsuits are meritless is moving with the urgency of a bill whose sponsors know exactly what is at stake.

You can hold two positions simultaneously and remain intellectually honest. You can believe the federal government overreached on climate regulation for decades. You can believe states and localities are better positioned to make these calls than Washington bureaucrats. Both are legitimate conservative arguments with long constitutional pedigrees.

What you cannot do, with a straight face, is hold both of those positions and also support a bill that strips states of exactly that authority, written by legislators whose careers were financed by the industry the bill protects, at the precise moment those same companies face the prospect of explaining in open court what they knew and when they knew it.

Whatever you think about climate change, that is not federalism. That is not conservatism. That is a protection racket.

EES Coke Battery on Zug Island, seen from the Rouge River, May 17, 2026. Photo by Dustin Blitchok/Planet Detroit.

Thirty times smaller than the width of a human hair. That’s the width of a PM2.5 particle — the microscopic pollution pouring from DTE Energy’s EES Coke Battery on Zug Island near Southwest Detroit, where residents suffer asthma hospitalization rates three times the statewide average.

Respiratory damage is only part of the story. Airborne particulate matter gets into children’s developing brains, robbing them of IQ points, disrupting neurodevelopment, and quietly dimming cognitive potential before a kid ever sets foot in a classroom.

Dark matter

EES Coke Battery is not a household name. It should be.

The company heats coal in oxygen-free ovens to produce metallurgical coke, the fuel that blast furnaces at steel mills cannot run without.

The sulfur dioxide and particulate matter released in that process do not travel with the coke to the steel mill. They stay in Southwest Detroit, and in the lungs of the people who live there.

The product from EES Coke Battery feeds blast furnaces that produce the steel in your car, your refrigerator, and the building you work in.

The buyers of that steel do not pay the health cost of making the coke that made it possible. That cost is paid in hospitalizations, cardiovascular disease, and premature deaths. It is an externality, which is an economist’s way of saying someone else is paying your bill.

DTE Energy – Michigan’s dominant electric utility, the one that just filed for a $474-million rate increase — is the owner of EES Coke Battery.

For decades, the EPA valued a statistical life at approximately $11.7 million, a figure used to weigh the human cost of pollution against the cost of cleaning it up.

Applied to the estimated 29 to 57 annual premature deaths caused by EES Coke, that math produces somewhere between $348 million and $667 million in annual uncompensated health costs, against a one-time $100-million fine for decades of violations.

In January 2026, the Trump administration eliminated the calculation entirely. The official value of a human life in Southwest Detroit, according to the EPA, is now zero dollars.

The hydrogen unlock

An alternative to coke-fed blast furnaces already exists, and it runs on the most abundant element in the universe. Sweden’s Stegra is building a commercial steel mill powered by clean hydrogen.

Their process, green hydrogen plus direct reduced iron, eliminates coke entirely. No coke means no sulfur dioxide, no PM2.5. The only byproduct is water vapor.

The barrier is not technology. It is the cost of hydrogen and the political will to force the transition. Michigan may have an answer to both.

Geography is destiny

Beneath the state lies the Midcontinent Rift, a geological formation created when the North American continent began splitting apart more than 1 billion years ago and then stopped.

In January 2025, the U.S. Geological Survey identified it as one of the highest-potential regions in the country for naturally occurring geologic hydrogen, sometimes called white hydrogen, which forms continuously as water interacts with ancient volcanic rock deep underground.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive directive in January establishing the Michigan Geologic Hydrogen Exploration and Preparedness Initiative to begin unlocking it.

The state that is home to one of the worst industrial air pollution crises in the Midwest may also be sitting on the clean fuel that makes the source of that pollution obsolete.

Geologic hydrogen piped to Great Lakes blast furnaces could eliminate the need for metallurgical coke entirely, ending the cycle that begins in coal mines and ends in the lungs of Southwest Detroit children.

The applications extend beyond steel. The same hydrogen could displace the fossil fuels used to produce ammonia for fertilizers, power heavy trucks and shipping, and decarbonize industrial processes that electricity alone cannot easily reach.

Michigan moonshot

The resource and the problem are in the same state. That does not happen often, and Michigan cannot afford to squander it.

The federal and state governments should jointly fund an accelerated geologic hydrogen exploration and extraction program, treating it with the urgency of a defense procurement rather than a routine research grant. Whitmer’s executive directive is a start. It is not enough.

Steel producers should be brought to the table to form a Great Lakes Green Steel Consortium with a binding timeline to transition Great Lakes blast furnaces to hydrogen-based direct reduced iron furnaces. And DTE’s EES Coke Battery operating permits should be tied explicitly to that timeline. When hydrogen is available, the coke ovens close. Not as a penalty. As a plan.

The children in zip codes 48217 and 48209 cannot wait 30 years for the market to sort this out. They are already paying the price of steel they will never be able to afford. The least Michigan can do is use the resource sitting beneath their feet to stop charging them for it.

Oak Ridge was in Tennessee. Los Alamos was in New Mexico. This one belongs in Detroit.

Link to story originally published June 2, 2026, in Planet Detroit.

There’s a woman in Illinois named Catharine Schutzius who just wants to plug in a solar panel.

She and her husband sold their home, downsized into a smaller apartment, and found themselves with an east-facing balcony – and, as any of us would – Catharine wanted to reduce her new home’s energy bill. The solution was a technological breakthrough that’s taking the country by storm (or in this case, sunshine!). A plug-in solar panel, sometimes called balcony solar, costs about $300. You mount it on a railing, plug it into an outlet, and it starts generating power. No contractor. No permit. No electrician. It’s an appliance, the same category as a window air conditioner or a dishwasher.

Schutzius testified in Springfield this spring in support of a bill that would have made plug-in solar legal in Illinois. The bill passed out of committee. It had momentum. Then the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) weighed in, and the bill died.

The IBEW’s stance is worth exploring because their stated reason for opposing the bill – and their actual reason – are not the same.

First, what exactly is balcony solar? A typical plug-in system generates 300 to 400 watts and can offset 10 to 15 percent of an apartment’s electricity consumption. At current Illinois rates, that’s roughly $200 to $400 in annual savings on a bill most renters are already straining to pay. The hardware costs $200 to $600. Utah legalized it in 2025. Maine, Colorado, Maryland, and Virginia followed. More than half of U.S. states are actively considering it. By any honest definition, this is an appliance that generates electricity rather than consuming it.

Illinois, one of America’s most ambitious clean energy states, voted to keep it illegal.

What exactly was the IBEW trying to protect?

Illinois has approximately 1.7 million renter households. Assume modest adoption, say 5 percent over five years. That’s 85,000 systems, each averaging around $400, a roughly $34 million market. Electrician labor accounts for zero dollars of that, because these systems require no licensed electrical work. All you have to do is plug them in.

The IBEW’s actual financial exposure from balcony solar is therefore close to nothing.

So what were they protecting?

The boundary. Illinois rooftop solar is an estimated $800 million annual market. Licensed electricians handle the hardwired AC connections, the panel upgrades, and the interconnection work. That labor share is real money, and it depends on a clear jurisdictional line between work that requires an electrician and work that doesn’t. Balcony solar doesn’t threaten rooftop solar. Advocates said as much during the debate, calling it “small potatoes” and “a completely different market.” What balcony solar threatens is the category. If a plug-in solar panel is an appliance, what else might be an appliance someday? The IBEW isn’t protecting today’s market. They were protecting their turf.

Here’s how they revealed their honest motivations: during the legislative debate, IBEW representatives never raised concerns about job losses. Not once, on record. They raised safety. And safety is a legitimate question worth asking honestly. The honest answer is that Utah, Maine, and Colorado legalized plug-in solar power, and nobody has been electrocuted. The safety argument is available. It just isn’t load-bearing.

There’s a genuine irony worth sitting with. The IBEW helped write Illinois’ 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, one of the most ambitious state clean energy laws in the country. They were at the table in 2016 and again in 2025. They are, on paper, a pro-clean-energy union whose members install solar panels for a living. They have done real work to build the policy infrastructure that made rooftop solar viable in this state.

And then they blocked the one solar product designed specifically for the people who will never own a roof. The renter. The downsizer. The person in the apartment on the east-facing balcony who did everything right and still can’t access the clean energy economy that the union helped build.

That tension doesn’t resolve easily. The IBEW has legitimate interests. Jurisdictional erosion is a real threat to organized labor. These things can be true, and the outcome can still be wrong.

This is a pattern worth naming. Detroit’s automakers had legitimate interests, too, when they managed their EV transition to protect internal combustion margins. The result was ceding the 21st century to companies that didn’t carry the legacy costs. The IBEW is running the same play on a smaller stage. Protect the jurisdictional boundary, slow the transition, and trust that the technology will wait.

It won’t.

Illinois advocates say they’ll be back next session. The IBEW bought a year, maybe two. Meanwhile, Catharine Schutzius is still paying full freight on her electricity bill, her east-facing balcony doing nothing, waiting for the state of Illinois to decide that plugging in an appliance is something a person is allowed to do without a licensed electrician’s blessing.

The union protected its turf. Hundreds of thousands of renters are paying for it.

The Write-Down uses forensic financial analysis to examine the gap between what powerful institutions say and what they actually do. Subscribe at substack.com/@matthewxroling.

The University Club

In the spring of 2024, a mutual friend introduced me to Dr. Shirley Meng over breakfast at the University Club in Chicago. We were building a panel together on progress decarbonizing the US economy, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t fully appreciate who I was sitting across from. Shirley was warm, unhurried, and completely unpretentious about the fact that she was one of the most decorated battery scientists in the world.

At some point, I asked her about the differences between working in China versus the United States. She didn’t hesitate. “Regardless of how one feels about the United States,” she said, “you can count on the rule of law here to get things done.”

I’ve thought about that line a lot lately.

This spring, Shirley Meng announced she is leaving the University of Chicago for a senior post at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She cited the Trump administration’s retreat from climate action and clean energy and its immigration crackdowns as the reasons. The scientist who told me America was worth betting on because of its institutions has decided those institutions are no longer a safe bet.

When someone like Shirley Meng leaves, it is tempting to frame it as a personal story, a talented person making a life choice. It is not. It is a balance sheet entry – and the United States is on the wrong side of the ledger.

The Engineer’s Daughter

Shirley grew up in Hangzhou, China, the daughter of a civil engineer who spent his career building hydroelectric dams. She joked that her family has a pretty good track record on renewables.

Her father was also deeply disillusioned with Chinese politics, and when Shirley showed early interest in law, he steered her toward engineering instead. His reasoning was simple: engineers must tell the truth. You cannot fake a dam.

That ethic took her far. She left China for Singapore, earned her PhD through the Singapore-MIT Alliance, and eventually made her way to the United States, where she built one of the most decorated careers in battery science worldwide.

She chose America, deliberately and for reasons that mattered to her.

What Happens When the Dam Breaks?

And what a legacy she built here. During her time in the United States, Shirley co-founded three battery companies: South 8 Technologies, UNIGRID, and ExPost Technology, which have collectively attracted roughly $60 million in capital and employ around 60 people. She served as Chief Scientist of the Argonne National Laboratory Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. She holds numerous patents, has trained hundreds of researchers, and her lab’s foundational work underpins technologies that China is now scaling into global market dominance. China now manufactures roughly 80 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. The foundational science that makes those batteries work was developed in American labs, on American research funding, by scientists like Shirley Meng.

Here is the part that should bother every American who cares about economic competitiveness. The research that made all of this possible was largely funded by American taxpayers through federal grants, national laboratories, and public universities.

A career like Shirley Meng’s typically represents tens of millions in cumulative federal research investment. We paid for that foundation. Then we made it rational for the person who built on that foundation to take her expertise, her network, her next set of ideas, and her next generation of students somewhere else.

We do not just lose Shirley Meng. We will lose everything she would have built next, and all the young minds she would have trained.

What She Was Betting On

She grew up in a country where her own father steered her away from law because he did not trust the system. She knew the difference between functional institutions and broken ones. And she chose America, in part, because she believed it was the former.

That may no longer be the case.

The policy unpredictability, the attacks on research institutions, the immigration crackdowns, and the retreat from clean energy and climate action – all of these represent a deterioration of the institutional reliability that talented people from around the world once factored into their decision to build their careers here. Shirley is not leaving because Singapore is better than Chicago. She is leaving because the things she valued about America are being dismantled in real time.

We Are Making It Easy

Shirley is not alone. She joins a growing list of U.S.-based scientists with Asian roots who have moved, or signaled plans to move, to universities in Singapore, China, Japan, and South Korea. These institutions are aggressively recruiting them, but we are making the recruitment process easy.

The immigration crackdown does not distinguish between a fentanyl smuggler and a battery scientist with 300 peer-reviewed papers and three American startups to her name. The broader culture of hostility toward immigrants does not see that distinction either. It just creates noise, and talented people with options respond by leaving.

We signal that people with foreign origins are not fully welcome, and the countries that want to win this century’s energy race send the opposite signal. Singapore is acting strategically. We are funding that strategy with our own talent, trained at our own universities, on our own taxpayer money, and then showing them the door.

The people making these decisions will not feel the consequences. Someone else will.

The Cost of a Toxic Culture

Culture war politics feel free to the people prosecuting them. They are not free. They have a price, denominated in jobs, intellectual property, and the clean energy industries that will define economic competitiveness for the next century. Shirley Meng’s father built dams that are still standing in Hangzhou. The things she would have built here, we will never get to count.

Some people in Michigan decided not to wait for Washington to fix this. Global Detroit, led by Steve Tobocman, a former Michigan state representative who founded the organization specifically to keep international talent in the region, runs programs designed to attract and retain the scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs that federal policy is driving away. At a moment when Washington is showing talent the door, Global Detroit is holding it open.

If you believe that America’s strength has always come from being the place the world’s best people chose to build their futures, that is worth supporting. Shirley Meng chose America once. The least we can do is make sure the next Shirley has a reason to stay.