EU Ramps Up Wind, Microsoft’s Water Problem, and MI Sues Big Oil

Welcome to The Climate Roundup newsletter. Your weekly edit of the climate and environmental stories shaping our planet and our culture and how the two are deeply connected. We live in a global ecosystem shaped by human decisions. Let’s make good ones.

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Notes On The Current Moment:

The more time I spend on this planet, the more I come to realize that the bravest thing one can do is to love. This was obvious to many of the widely-accepted Greats: Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Jesus, the genius Albert Einstein, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, and countless other human beings unrecognized for their devotion to living a life of love. It’s not easy. And in many ways it’s the harder path to take initially. Society wires our brains early on that love is weak. Our individualistic culture further separates and isolates us from love. In reality, love is the most powerful force of all. It takes a great deal of inner strength, grit, and willpower to rip out that old faulty wiring, and come back to our true nature.

As a company, our mission is to help everyone embrace their own innate environmentalism. At its core, environmentalism is about love (I wrote about this recently in an essay here), including love for humanity. I bring up this notion of love today to highlight what’s happening in this pivotal moment in our country. I feel it requires, at the very least, an acknowledgement from me, and therefore Gen E. Yes, we are in the business of systemic change and planetary issues, which are a hell of a lot on their own, but it’s important to show up in support of other critical fights. We are environmentalists for humanity.

What we are seeing from the current elected administration is a complete lack of love. That may not sound like a harsh enough criticism, but that’s only because of that old, manipulative wiring. A complete lack of love is the lowest form of living. I’m guessing most of us here have known of this administration’s glaring ‘lack of’ from day one. That’s day one the first time around (and well before that). And now this is the culmination of a year’s worth of countless acts of aggression, bullying, violence, spite, lies, derogatory narratives, and assaults on citizens and governmental agencies alike. The killing of innocent citizens by our own government was finally too much. We appear to have reached a boiling point. Has the collective had enough of this loveless state of America being forced upon us?

In a recent poll (by a Republican pollster no less), support for Trump’s approach to immigration has flipped from results in 2024, when 55% of Americans approved. Now, 55% disapprove. This past week, the conservative opinion writer, David Brooks, wrote his final column for The New York Times, in which he belabors the loss of faith in values across America – he argues that without a shared moral order, we have no common grounding, and we are lost. Yes, love has been lost. These references point to a shared exhaustion from this lack of love. They are rumblings that are getting louder. The majority of us now have had enough.

It may not be clear what to do in times like these. I say doing anything in the name of love is enough. Whatever the topic, if it stirs something within, perhaps simply acknowledging the wrong and sending love through words said aloud to oneself is enough. Using her gift of words, the poet Amanda Gorman wrote a beauty of a poem dedicated to the murder of Alex Pretti and the violence in Minneapolis. Please read. She says “Yet our greatest threat isn’t the outsiders among us, but those among us who never look within”. Amen, mic drop.

In another example of giving love, I was stopped in my tracks yesterday passing by a little local book/random object/food shop in Brooklyn that held a bake sale to raise money for protestors in Minnesota. Prior to yesterday, I’d never seen more than a few people in this shop at once. But yesterday, they had a line down the block. Hundreds of people came to stand outside in the freezing cold to physically and financially show their support for the protestors in Minnesota. I was so moved because while this may seem inconsequential, it is quite the opposite. These are people living far from Minnesota, who left their apartments, did something inconvenient that nobody in Minnesota will ever know specifically, yet their act of love will in fact touch someone elsewhere who needs it. That is the definition of love.

For those wanting to give financial support, Vox has rounded up many sources to send help to groups in Minnesota.

I share these thoughts and observations in the hope of spreading love and the courage to express it. So on behalf of myself and Gen E, clearly, we send our love and support to everyone fighting the lack of love at the hands of Trump and company. May love prevail.

And now…here’s what’s happening in the world of climate.

Environmental News:

🤝 10 European countries have signed a pact to build enough offshore wind capacity to power 150 million homes by 2050.

🚙 The EU is on a roll. Following last week’s EU news of clean energy beating out the dirty kind for the first time, EV car sales just beat out gas-guzzlers for the first time in December. Hybrids are the EU’s most popular car, claiming 44% of newly registered vehicles, but straight up electro-cars are racing to the top.

🔋 Our country’s fast-charging network for electric vehicles is growing! Fast-chargers increased 30% last year, and now combined with mid-speed chargers (the kind you’d use while getting groceries), there are 77K public charging stations across the country, which is half the number of gas stations for context. I’d say that’s making progress. And more are coming after the release of the $7.5B in government funding, which Trump held hostage illegally, starts to materialize and grow towards the goal of having fast chargers every 50 miles on highways.

👨‍⚖️ A coalition of 20 democratic states have asked a federal judge to block 6 specific actions that Trump has taken to block development of renewable energy projects, claiming he’s unlawfully targeting them. Yes, finally! It’s energy discrimination.

🫸 Cautiously good news on the endangerment finding front: The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration has delayed their repeal of the EPA rule that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions because they don’t feel confident their repeal would be upheld in court. And you bet they’ll be taken to court. Looks like the recent demise of their devious master plan, notably the scientifically-debunked and court-deemed-unlawful production of their climate report wasn’t so masterful after all.

👀 I’m excited to watch this antitrust case play out, where the state of Michigan is suing five Big Oil companies, accusing “the companies of creating a ‘cartel’ and raising costs for people in the state by colluding to stifle renewables, such as wind and solar power, and to suppress information about the dangers of global warming.” This is a new argument for a climate case, so let’s hope this strategy is the winning one. We must make these polluters pay.

🚰 The Times has a great piece on Microsoft’s about-face regarding its water usage for data centers. Back in 2020, Microsoft publicly pledged allegiance to the undisputable fact that “water is essential to life” by outlining a plan to drastically cut its water usage and become “water positive”, meaning it would restore more water than it drained (not a thing). Now? Their response amounts to what’s said by all of Big Tech, including the hoards of redundant A.I. startups following their VC masters: “A.I., though”. Microsoft’s participation in the man-made race to win the most money has them dropping any environmental concern standing in the way. Times reporters gained access to internal Microsoft projections that showed the company’s water use for their data centers would triple over the next five years. When asked about it, Microsoft came back with updated, lower projections, still showing enormous growth, and neglecting to include billions in new deals made last year for data center buildouts. The article points out that data center water use is comparatively small (.04% not including water for the required power generation) when compared to our country’s total agricultural water use (37%), and power plant water use (41%). By the way, we should talk about that dirty energy water use way more, because damn! Yet another reason wind and solar are infinitely better – no water hoarding. Still, the idea of using our planet’s very limited fresh water (only 3% of water on our planet is fresh) to literally water metal boxes that are being used to make our lives worse, is disgustingly wasteful. And what makes the whole operation worse is that many of these data centers are built near communities that are already strained in water access (like we talked about last week). So the business decision to plop a resource-hungry mass of machinery specifically in drought-prone, water stressed locations is aggressively cruel. Tech companies are essentially willing to risk humans and other lifeforms losing access to essential fresh water for the sake of the artificial.

🤥 Many communities are organizing to resist data centers coming to their towns for fear of air pollution, siphoning their drinking water, and higher electricity bills. To combat this, just like Big Oil and Big Tobacco before them, tech companies and data center industry groups have been spending millions on ads to reclaim their narrative, and paint a rosy picture of all the jobs and clean energy they will bring. That is not always true.

LOL:

For a potential laugh, I’ll share this video from producer Adam McKay’s climate entertainment studio. They make satires and skits about the absolute absurdity of the climate situation we’re in, particularly calling out the evil bad guys from Big Oil. This is a new series called “Do You Even Care?”, where the host traps his friends in an increasingly hot sauna until they care about climate change. Clever. The title alone and the way Esteban frames it up it made me laugh. Laughter truly is some of the best medicine.