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Weather across the U.S. this year has pingponged from waves of intense cold and snow in the East Coast and Midwest, followed by sudden warming, to heavy rain and a record heatwave on the West Coast–which melted winter snow in the Sierras too fast and too early, ensuring less water flows to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, one of the trends that has been consistent is rising ocean temperatures.

Over the past few weeks, labs such as the European Union Copernicus Climate Change Service determined that the average surface temperature of global seas in March was 69.75 degrees Fahrenheit (20.97 Celsius), the second-highest level ever recorded. And in California, researchers at Scripps recently found that the typically chilly Pacific is also hotter, clocking in at 68.5 degrees, 7.7 degrees above the average for mid-April.

What those findings mean is that conditions are again ideal for El Niño: a climate pattern that drives up global surface temperatures. That makes it likely that 2026 will continue a streak of global heat records that’s persisted for over a decade, with each subsequent year being hotter than the one that preceded it. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said this month that March 2026 was the hottest on record in the contiguous United States, capping a 12-month period that was also the hottest ever.

The consistency of the data confirms that climate change is a fact of life. Along with general discomfort for humans, more heat means more stress on global agriculture and water systems, and costs to upgrade infrastructure to adapt to more intense weather.

As this unfolds, climate denialism is also on the rise in the U.S. as the Trump administration lobbies entities such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to set aside climate-oriented policies and increase support for carbon-based energy projects. At recent meetings of those institutions, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued that their focus should be on economic growth, trade and development. And when it comes to climate, “we cannot have these elite beliefs get in the way,” he said, according to the New York Times.

Setting aside that many would consider Bessent–a Yale graduate who’s worked in global finance for decades and has a net worth Forbes estimates to be $600 million–to be quite elite, it’s hard to understand how that term relates to efforts to curb planet-warming carbon pollution.

“The only reason for the observed warming are human activities, and the biggest of those activities are the emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told the Times.

Wanting to do something to slow or change rising ocean and land temperatures so that humans, animals and plant life can continue to thrive is many things, but it’s not “elite.” It’s conservative in the most literal sense.

The Big Read

Urbanists Hate Cars. Should They Love Electric Robotaxis?

Modern promoters of urban living, sometimes called new urbanists, have a reputation for blaming the automobile for many of the ills of the modern city. Walking, cycling and mass transit are prized solutions, along with urban design patterns that favor them. While not universal, automisia, the fear and dislike of the private automobile and its effects, is a common theme.

As a result, the reaction of many urbanists to self-driving cars has been, “self-driving cars are still cars,” and as such they repeat the negatives of cars. They are also concerned about the threat robocars and other new transport forms pose to transit ridership, and thus the success and survival of transit.

This makes it interesting to consider the underlying reasons urbanists dislike cars, and how the arrival of the new technologies, in particular the electric robotaxi (along with the electric robovan, delivery robots and a few other tools) affect these issues.

It turns out the electric robotaxi removes many of these objections, though not all of them. This is particularly true when you have a fleet of vehicles of different types, including small 1-2 person urban “pods,” regular-sized cars, multi-person shared vans, and robots that can deliver goods and bicycles where they are wanted.

Read more here

Hot Topic

Anders Lindberg, president of Finland’s Wärtsilä Energy, on how the Middle East war may impact the renewable energy transition

The war with Iran has brought a dramatic spike in oil and natural gas prices. Could it speed the shift to renewables as countries try to limit their exposure to fossil fuel price volatility?

The transition is already happening, and more and more solar and wind are installed every year. We have seen it increasing year by year. It's a little bit too early, maybe, to say what are the consequences of this war in the Middle East. But I think that if we draw conclusions from what happened in the last major disruption, which was not so long ago in Europe, namely when Russia invaded Ukraine, gas prices went up a lot. We can see that it had a positive effect on the acceleration of implementing energy security, which is renewables. If you did renewables, you’re not as dependent on gas imports from Russia. I think that we expect to see the same thing now. It will take a little time, but I think that we will see in the coming years an acceleration of renewables being implemented.

Short term, I think we will also see some coal increases because countries in Asia that have access to coal will replace the fossil fuels they don't get with coal, but that's a short-term effect. The more mid and long-term effect, I'm sure, will be an increase in renewables, speeding up the energy transition that we have already seen increasing year by year.

There’s been a big shift in U.S. federal policy toward renewables and a big push for fossil fuel energy production. How do you see that impacting the transition?

In the U.S., we see quite a lot of activity. Even in Texas, a very fossil fuel-oriented state, we see they have more wind–I think it also surpassed California this year in solar. But there is a lot of wind and solar in Texas. Then, of course, there’s the wind belt north of Texas, where we see a lot of wind being installed. Obviously, in California, we see a lot of solar as well as wind. I think we definitely see the U.S. transition continuing despite the political agenda. It is also a big market for us because we sell flexibility in the system, and that is needed when you install renewables. … Flexible engine power and turbines.

Definitely, we can see that in countries where you have installed a higher level of renewables, we also see the need for flexibility in the system, and that is flexibility with storage, which provides short-term flexibility, but also with engine power plants or gas turbine plants that provide longer flexibility that you need. This flexibility is, from our point of view, very important. You can say that there is no question about renewables coming along because of its being the cheapest form of energy. But what is very important here is: are the system and other sources of generation prepared for that? That's our point, that you need to provide flexibility in the system for the renewables to thrive and have good business cases and little curtailment, and also little volatility of prices that you have if you provide the flexibility. You also avoid blackouts in worst-case scenarios.

In some markets, such as Australia and Southern California, where sunlight is unusually abundant, do you need new gas plants or could you just rely on renewables and battery storage?

Theoretically, you can. We have done a study, which we call “Crossroads To Net Zero,” published in 2024. You take the whole globe, and you look at all the power generation, and you want to achieve net zero in 2050. The first way we did this was exactly as you say. We only used solar, wind and battery storage. In the second alternative, we looked at, you do the same, but you add flexible engine power plants to it. What we saw when we did that was that we had a $65 trillion higher cost in alternative one when you only used renewables or battery storage. That’s because you need to overpopulate it so much to handle when it's cloudy or when it's not windy. For example, in Germany, there are periods where you have very little sun in the winter, and at the same time, no wind. So on a global scale, it's a $65 trillion difference. What is interesting is that it's not only the money that you overspend if you only do it with battery storage and renewables, you also have 21% less emissions in alternative two.

And the reason for that is that you can implement it much faster because you need to overbuild as much of the renewables and the storage. And you will also have 88% less curtailment or wasted energy if you do alternative two than alternative one. The reason is, again, if you overbuild it for handling this situation when you have too little wind or too little sun, then when you have sun and wind, you will actually overproduce more than you can use. It's an 88% difference in that. That's a huge difference. So you can do what you said, use only renewables, but it's not the best and optimal solution.

What Else We’re Reading

China weighs curbs on exports of solar manufacturing equipment to U.S. (Reuters)

U.S. Senate votes to end ban on mining near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters (Star Tribune)

Carbon-capture hub gets a surprise lifeline from the Trump administration (Wall Street Journal)

Delta quietly waters down its plan to hit net-zero carbon emissions to an ‘aspiration’ (Bloomberg)

Methane, a gas that causes climate change, is bubbling out of California reservoirs (Los Angeles Times)

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