For more than 40 years, Woodwell has dedicated itself to objective scientific analysis for the benefit and safety of people and nature. The science we conduct seeks to mitigate and adapt to the amplified threats of extreme weather events, wildfire, food insecurity, and others due to our changing climate. These threats pose immense economic consequences. Thus, not only do we have traditional STEM scientists, but also economic experts who ensure accessible and applied research. We understand the direct economic and societal impacts that our research has on the American people, and we understand that these benefits extend not only from the subject matter of our organization but from all scientific exploration and innovation in the fields of health, technology, and engineering, amongst others.
Woodwell strongly opposes OMB’s proposed rule of Federal Finance Assistance as a whole, and most specifically the provisions outlined below (§200.202; §200.204; §200.205; §200.340; §200.432; §200.454; §200.461; and §200.220). The stated objective of these revisions to “improve transparency, accountability, and oversight for Federal awards across the Federal government” directly contradicts the content of the provisions that color this proposal. “Oversight” is the only objective that this proposal truly strives for, yet the distinction of political oversight rather than scientific oversight is conveniently absent. The space of federally funded scientific research is already heavily regulated, and this proposed rule threatens to suffocate it beyond recovery. This increase in faulty, politically motivated science would negatively impact American livelihoods, the economy, and national security.
§200.202 – Programs Must Align with Administration Priorities
By requiring every grant program to be designed so its goals “align with administration policies and priorities,” the Administration seeks to align research with its own interest areas, manipulating scientific investment for partisan priorities. Tying federal financial assistance to the shifting priorities of any given political administration inherently threatens the continuity of essential, objective research and risks defunding critical studies based on partisan agendas. Subordinating independent, data-driven scientific inquiry to political mandates undermines scientific integrity, jeopardizes vital longitudinal datasets, and ultimately deprives policymakers and the public of the unbiased evidence necessary to effectively combat the very real escalating, evolving, and emerging concerns related to climate, public health, biomedical research, technology, and others that may be inconvenient for an administration’s agenda.
§200.204 – Grant Competitions Exempted from Public Notice
Transparency is an underpinning of scientific integrity. By allowing for exceptions to not post grant opportunities on Grants.gov under the condition that the head of an agency subjectively deems the opportunity as serving the “national interest,” this provision sows distrust within the scientific community and the general public. In order to best serve the national interest, the selection process should be open to competition. Candidates hand-picked by the agency will create grantees who are subject to the political whim of the Administration, rather than to the true “national interest” of the American people. Moreover, this provision fundamentally contradicts the “aim to ensure that basic American principles of equality and equal opportunity are upheld throughout all stages of the award making process” that is advertised in this proposed rule, as all applicants are not equitably provided the opportunity to apply for these specific grants.
§200.205 – Political Appointee Review of Grants
The foundation of credible, high-impact climate science relies entirely on the objective, merit-based peer review of research proposals by qualified scientific experts. Granting political appointees the authority to review and potentially cancel federal grants introduces dangerous partisan bias into the scientific process, threatening to derail critical, long-term research that may be politically inconvenient but is vital for national and global security. This provision fundamentally undermines scientific independence, degrades the integrity of federal financial assistance, and jeopardizes our nation’s ability to respond to evolving and emerging threats, like the climate crisis, with unbiased, data-driven solutions.
§200.340 – Grant Termination
This provision allows an agency to cancel a grant mid-project if it determines that the award no longer aligns with agency priorities or the “national interest.” Complex scientific inquiry inherently requires multi-year planning, continuous data collection, and significant, sustained resource investment. Broadening federal agencies’ and political appointees’ authority to unilaterally terminate grants for reasons unrelated to grantee performance or compliance, such as shifting administrative priorities, introduces uncertainty into the research ecosystem. Similar attempts to freeze grants for subjects and institutions disliked by the President throughout 2025 resulted not only in tremendous economic losses and waste of previously approved investments, but also a critical loss of scientific knowledge.
By subjecting researchers to the whim of the Administration, scientists will hesitate to publish findings important to the American people that challenge the status quo and may inform necessary scientific revisions to long-term policies. By suffocating any hint of scientific dissension, the Administration will promote faulty science that will put America’s scientific reputation, as well as American lives, in harm’s way. To preserve the continuity, stability, and global competitiveness of American scientific innovation, we urge the removal of these expanded termination powers to ensure that merit-based research is protected from abrupt and unwarranted cancellations.
§200.432; §200.454; §200.461 – Indirect Costs
These provisions significantly limit, or openly ban, the use of federal grant funding to cover the vitally important indirect costs of conference attendance, journal subscriptions, and publications, among others. Woodwell strongly opposes the outlined preference towards institutions with lower indirect cost rates in this proposed rule. These costs support the competitive nature of a project through the maintenance of necessary equipment and facilities, as well as public-facing collaboration and debate.
Without the opportunity to share research with other experts, and the general public, researchers lose out on vital knowledge and feedback that leads to improved and more legitimate scientific conclusions. Without the financial ability to publish findings, a scientific experiment may never be reproduced and thus not be seen as a legitimate basis on which to conduct additional research on complicated topics. The myriad of indirect costs necessary for a successful project present extraordinary financial barriers that will make the American federally funded research landscape inherently inequitable, shutting out scientists and institutions who would not otherwise be able to afford these assets.
§200.220 – Prohibition of International Collaboration
This provision, which prohibits the spending of federal funds in relation to foreign collaboration, including on travel or indirect costs, would severely inhibit the ability of the United States to scientifically compete on a global scale and to work with international counterparts who often have specific skills or resources that facilitate and amplify scientific outcomes and innovation. The most pressing scientific challenges of our time, from tracking global climate patterns and biodiversity loss to mitigating public health crises, are global and rely on the exchange of data, resources, and expertise across nations.
Prohibiting federally funded researchers from partnering with international colleagues would isolate the American scientific community, deny experts access to vital global datasets and specialized facilities, and severely stifle innovation. Such a restrictive mandate threatens to dismantle decades of cooperative progress and will inevitably force the United States to cede its position as a global leader in scientific discovery.
The range of countries that fall under this provision of banned collaboration is exceptionally wide and highly variable over time: the qualifying characteristics are those countries considered foreign adversaries or those subject to sanctions or restrictions related to national security, defense, or intelligence activities. Under these rules, even the 17 European Union countries subjected to semiconductor export restrictions at the end of the Biden Administration would be banned from scientific collaboration. The limited outlined exceptions, as dictated by a political appointee, are not sufficient to protect international collaboration.
This provision would override the existing processes to prevent undue influence or security threats, as well as the processes for granting exceptions. Specifically, the restrictions would disqualify federally funded research from the fundamental research exclusion. This exclusion has long exempted basic or applied research from export control regulations to allow for the free exchange and publication of research results. Instead, researchers would need to apply for licenses at the State Department and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. The proposed changes would significantly increase the costs, timelines, and workloads of international collaboration for these researchers as well as these federal agencies.
Impacts on Climate Resilience and Risk Mitigation
In the field of climate science and risk mitigation, this proposed rule would have exceptionally deep impacts. Although activities such as extreme weather tracking and preparedness, sustainable agriculture, and wildfire are all vital to the lives of everyday Americans, this Administration has a documented history of repressing these efforts in favor of harmful industry activities, including increased logging in previously protected areas.
Fire is a natural and integrally important process in the life cycle of our forest ecosystems. Woodwell scientists study and promote traditional methods of fire management of local and indigenous peoples who recognize the environmental benefits of fire via prescribed burns to reduce the buildup of natural fuels. Conversely, this Administration emphasizes fire tactics that have led to oversuppression, contributing to the buildup of dry fuel on the forest floor. Combined with the ever-warming temperatures destabilizing atmospheric conditions and extreme drought, increasingly frequent lightning strikes ignite these more flammable forests. Without regular fires to periodically clear out this fuel, the land has become more vulnerable to intense and widespread fires that present extreme threats to human health. Over 15,000 deaths have been attributed to wildfire particulate matter over the last 15 years. Without federally funded scientific research to bolster natural wildfire solutions, Americans are increasingly at risk.
Like most climate sciences, wildfires are not constrained by political boundaries. This means that international collaboration is critical to our work at Woodwell. This is especially true of our Arctic partnerships with communities across Alaska, Canada, Mongolia, and more as we study traditional wildfire mitigation tactics in the boreal forest region. Woodwell research has found that from 2006 to 2020, the economic burden linked to climate change-induced wildfire particulate matter alone accumulated to $160 billion. This potential economic payoff of exploring alternative solutions is only one example of the startling economic benefits of wide-reaching scientific research.
The Critical Role of Federal Financial Assistance to Economic and Global Competitiveness
Between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the grants so far frozen or terminated since 2025 have resulted in economic loss across the United States estimated at $2.8 billion.10 The total job loss is estimated at more than 13,000. Texas faces the greatest economic loss of $366.1 million and around 2,000 jobs lost.11 Massachusetts faces an estimated $126.9 million in economic losses and 555 jobs lost. These losses are not exclusive to states on either side of the aisle: they are all-encompassing.
No institution is safe from these financial threats: two-thirds of land-grant universities and nearly half of all Historically Black Colleges and Universities have been affected. Even community colleges have had funding targeted for termination. Public universities and colleges suffered the steepest losses, with financial losses from grant disruptions totalling an estimated $2.1 billion. According to NSF data, the cancelled grants disproportionately affected early career researchers, women, people of color, and those with disabilities.
Private funders cannot step in to fill this funding gap. Basic research generates knowledge that diffuses beyond its original source and the current time, ultimately benefiting competitors. This “knowledge spillover” is great for the broader economy and thus broader population, but bad for companies trying to capture a return on their investment, leading the private sector to underinvest.
Government investments in scientific research and development are, and have historically been, an integral part of our nation’s economy, with returns estimated between 150% and 300% since World War II. In 2024, the knowledge and technology industries in the United States produced $3.3 trillion in added value, accounting for 11% of the U.S. GDP. From 2017 to 2024, the field’s financial contributions to the economy grew faster than the domestic U.S. nonfarm economy as a whole.
Federally funded research not only yields financial returns, but also provides for increases in our standard of living via biomedical advancements, a more favorable startup environment with increased job opportunities, and enhanced national security through the creation of advanced defense technologies. Economy-wide, long-term returns are calculated at $5 for every $1 invested in research and development. Further, $1 of public investment in research and development has been found to yield an additional $3 in follow-on private research and development investment. Economic researchers have concluded that the United States should invest much more in science and innovation than it does currently, especially given findings that federally funded research and development yields substantially higher returns than other forms of federal investment, including even physical infrastructure.
In cutting federal funding for scientific innovation, the United States puts its status of technological dominance in jeopardy. China’s annual research and development growth rate has rapidly outpaced that of the United States by more than 200% for over two decades. In 2024, the United States and China were neck and neck as the top producers of knowledge and technological industry, with $3.3 trillion and $2.9 trillion, respectively. However, that same year, China topped the US as the largest knowledge and technological manufacturing producer with 10% more of the global share.25 Under current projections, Chinese scientists will overcome US dominance in the fields of AI, semiconductors, materials, and high-performance computing in only 5 years. When considering the implications of this Federal Financial Assistance proposed rule, with its many problematic and restrictive positions, it can only be assumed that China’s dominance would be more inevitable and even faster-approaching than ever before.
Conclusion
The proposed revisions of the OMB Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance abandon scientific integrity. Woodwell urges the Office of Management and Budget to rescind the proposed revisions of the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance so that science remains independent and free of any partisan agenda. The politicization of science is completely contrary to scientific value, and will irreparably damage America’s international reputation in this field. Most importantly, the stifling of scientific innovation will endanger American citizens through detrimental impacts on livelihoods, the economy, and national security.
HOWLAND, Maine — Scientist Kathleen Savage leaned out from the basket of a boom lift, a red safety helmet perched on her head.
She sealed a few needle-covered stalks from an Eastern Hemlock tree inside a clear plastic cylinder and pulled out her phone. On the screen, a meter rose and fell as the level of gases inside the cylinder fluctuated. The question she was asking: What were the microscopic bugs on the stalks and leaves doing in there?
But looked at another way, it could also buy the planet critical time as the world races to address the climate crisis.
“These small, microscopic organisms are everywhere,” she said. “When you translate that to an entire forest, they add up and pack a big punch.”
Savage, a senior research scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, is part of a team of experts trying to better understand which of these microscopic bugs — or, as they’re technically called, microbes — consume potent methane gas, and whether they could eventually be marshaled as a tool to combat climate change. Methane is among the world’s most potent greenhouse gases, accounting for roughly 30 percent of global warming. Once emitted, it only lasts in the atmosphere for a little over a decade, but in that time, it is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Read more on Boston Globe.
A recent study provides new evidence of increasing life-threatening heat waves, focusing on the accumulation of dangerous heat that is known to cause severe health impacts. Researchers have developed a new metric – the accumulated dangerous heat index (ADHI) – that includes the combined effects of temperature and humidity to identify summer hours that surpass a dangerous threshold. Hourly exceedances are summed over each day, month, and season across the Northern Hemisphere.
Trends in ADHI are attributed to temperature, humidity, or a combination to better understand the cause of increased life-threatening heat conditions regionally. The researchers found areas historically prone to excessive heat have experienced longer-lasting, more intense, and expanded dangerous conditions, with some regions becoming uninhabitable. They found temperature to be the dominant factor driving increased ADHI during the daytime in most regions, while increasing humidity plays a more important role at night.
“We know that extreme heat causes by far the most fatalities of any type of hazardous weather, and it is crucial that we are able to fully assess and understand its risks,” said the lead author, Dr. Jennifer Francis, Senior Scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Brutal heat waves have already wreaked havoc across the Northern Hemisphere in 2026, even though summer has barely begun. Record-smashing temperatures are blamed for thousands of deaths in Europe, while dangerous heat invaded major eastern cities of the U.S. during celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence.”
“Escalating extreme heat is putting communities, ecosystems, and livelihoods at risk across many areas of the globe,” added co-author Dr. Natasa Skific. “The Accumulated Dangerous Heat Index gives scientists a new and straightforward tool to warn leaders and help them prepare for life-threatening heat events.”
Co-author and MIT Research Scientist Dr. Judah Cohen noted, “As we found in our companion study that focused on severe winter conditions, the warming Arctic also appears to be contributing to the longevity of dangerous heat waves in many areas at lower latitudes.”
The findings in this new study provide further motivation to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases, and the regional trends will assist decision-makers and planners in preparing for a future with a better understanding of the threats from deadly heat.
Find the full paper here.
In 2023, Canada experienced its worst wildfire season to date. Fires raged across all 13 provinces and territories, breaking national records for burned area and carbon emissions.
Fires have a complex impact on both the global and regional climate. While fires contribute to warming through the release of stored carbon from trees and soil, they also create an unexpected cooling effect. Postfire changes to vegetation composition and coverage have an impact on albedo—the amount of sunlight reflected by a surface. The absence of the tree canopy no longer conceals snow, thus reflecting more incoming solar radiation which can cool the local environment.
“If you have a more reflective surface, like ice or snow in particular, it’s going to reflect more of that sunlight back to space, and so it’s going to have a cooling effect compared to if it wasn’t there,” says Rogers. “Because if it wasn’t there, then the darker land or the ocean would have absorbed more of it and heated.”
These changes in albedo have historically partially offset the warming caused by fire-induced emissions; however, climate change is disrupting this balancing effect.
In a newly published paper, co-authored by Woodwell Climate Senior Scientist Dr. Brendan Rogers, researchers found a 29% decrease of the regional climate-cooling impact of boreal wildfires since the 1960s. This represents one aspect of a critical shift in past ecosystem dynamics—not only is climate change responsible for rising global temperatures, but it is also weakening the natural mechanisms that once regulated this rise.
“The consequences of retreating snow cover become especially clear at the scale of individual fires,” says Max van Gerrevink, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University and Research. “Historically, nearly half of all Canadian wildfires reached a natural climatic break-even point, where snow-driven surface cooling fully offset the warming caused by fire-related emissions. Today, that proportion has fallen dramatically, to only about one in four or five fires.”
The study used remote sensing to map the predicted changes in surface albedo over a 70-year postfire period assuming carbon dioxide emissions maintain current levels until 2050, then decrease, eventually reaching net zero by 2100. For Canada’s boreal forests, this means earlier snow disappearance rates, later snow onset and warming temperatures—all of which impact albedo.
When considered alongside a previous study co-authored by Rogers, the decreasing power of the cooling effect is projected to continue even further.
“Compared to pre-climate change, we’re talking about, over the next several decades… a 50% to 60% reduction due to earlier snowmelt,” says Rogers. “It’s important to be aware of this when you’re thinking about ‘What does this mean for the earth system,’ and ‘How might you manage these fires.’”
The implications of this finding are of growing concern, as warmer and drier weather conditions associated with continued climate change are subjecting Canada’s boreal forests to more severe and longer fire seasons. During the 2023 Canadian fire season, an estimated 647 teragrams of carbon were released—a number comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of the largest-emitting nations and only exceeded by India, China and the United States.
With more carbon being released annually from worsening fire seasons and a diminishing climate-cooling effect, Canada’s boreal ecosystems are facing an amplified threat from exacerbated warming. As the study found, the subsequent weakening of the climate-cooling impact implies that contemporary boreal fires are, on average, twice as likely to result in a net climate-warming influence.
“Fires both warm through greenhouse gas emissions and cool through changes to land surface albedo,” says Rogers. “The cooling impact is declining, but the carbon impact is not, and it might even be growing because we’re seeing more permafrost emissions after wildfires.”
Rogers stressed the importance of considering albedo and carbon as two parts of a larger equation rather than two factors that act in opposition. This is due to the fact that albedo’s impact is limited to the geographic area where these fluctuations occur and therefore is not as widespread. Furthermore, he emphasized the need for measures that directly target carbon emissions in order to comprehensively address climate change.
“The reality is the spatial footprint from the albedo changes in Canada have very little impact on us down here in the lower 48 or other parts of the globe,” says Rogers. “And I think that’s important, because the carbon impacts are global and do impact us and everyone else on the planet.”
Grazing lands are everywhere. These lands, used to raise domesticated animals like cows and sheep, span over 12 billion acres, comprising nearly 40% of ice-free land on Earth, and represent the largest category of human land use.
Grazing lands are not just working lands, they are also critical grassland, shrubland, and woodland ecosystems that provide important ecological benefits like carbon storage. Poor management practices like overgrazing have resulted in the degradation of these ecosystems. In the United States, over half of rangelands are considered degraded, resulting in the loss of 50 billion tons of carbon that would otherwise be stored in soils. Grassland species are in decline, and the productivity of these lands has dropped, with economic consequences for ranchers.
What is regenerative grazing?
Regenerative grazing is the practice of moving livestock between pastures to allow more time for vegetation to rest and re-grow, and it is often touted as an antidote to degradation. The technique is intended to emulate the movements of wild grazers like bison and elk and can maximize grass growth and help incorporate more plant biomass into the soil, two factors that are key to increasing soil carbon. Regenerative practices can also improve the quality and diversity of food for grazing animals.
Because of its potential, regenerative grazing practices have generated much buzz, particularly in the world of carbon credits. Current proposed grassland management projects on the Verra Registry —the world’s largest public database on carbon credits — estimate that in total they will remove as much as 40 million tons of CO2 per year. Despite these claims, there have been few conclusive scientific studies to verify. Accurate soil carbon estimates are crucial to right-size expectations for producers, policymakers, and financial markets supporting regenerative grazing practices as a potential climate solution, yet this lack of conclusive evidence leads to the need for more rigorous analysis.
Why is it so hard to study rangeland carbon?
An ideal study of the carbon storage potential of regenerative practices requires before and after measurements on comparable fields using both conventional and regenerative techniques. This is hard to do for a couple of reasons.
First, rangelands are complex systems with many different factors, including soil type, vegetation and land use history, playing into how much carbon gets locked away in soils. Second, the grazing practice changes are individually tailored to work with each ranchers’ operation, adding complexity. Third, expected changes in soil carbon are small relative to the large and variable background carbon stocks in rangelands, often leaving scientists looking for a needle in a haystack.
A review assessing the quality of existing evidence, led by Woodwell Climate researchers, found 70 papers that attempted to answer this question. Of those 70 papers, only 10 were found to make scientifically robust comparisons of soil carbon between conventionally and regeneratively managed sites. These 10 studies showed an average result of no change in carbon. Most of these 10 studies used small experimental plots that allow researchers to control for confounding effects, but can simplify the system past the point of recognition for a rancher. Two studies even used lawn mowers instead of grazing animals, raising questions about the applicability of these findings to real, working ranches.
A large subset of the 70 studies compared soil carbon levels at ranches already under regenerative management with nearby conventionally grazed ranches. These studies suggest that on average regenerative grazing can sequester 0.7 tons of CO2 per acre per year more than conventional grazing. However, this approach makes the assumption that the present-day soil carbon level on a conventionally grazed site is equivalent to the baseline level of the regenerative site prior to change. This assumption requires careful pairing of vegetation, soil type, climate and land-use history that was not documented in most of the studies.
The variable quality of existing studies leaves us no closer to understanding the benefits of regenerative grazing, and scientific study is still needed.
Woodwell’s rangeland carbon projects are working to fill the data gap
The flurry of attention on regenerative management practices means funding and executing long-term studies that can generate high-quality data is an urgent priority. Projects on the Verra Registry are claiming to sequester more than twice as much carbon as the Woodwell analysis was able to estimate based on existing data. Left unverified, this could result in greenwashing ranching operations and carbon credit programs.
Woodwell researchers are actively exploring ways to fill this knowledge gap. Soil spectroscopy, a method that measures the interaction between light beams and soil particles to determine their chemical composition, offers a lower cost option for analyzing a large amount of soil samples to determine carbon content. Easier and cheaper soil analysis options will facilitate future research into the benefits of various land management practices, with applications for farms, ranches and other landscapes.
Woodwell scientists have also developed RangeSTAR, a system for tracking changes in plant productivity and soil carbon at a land management scale with a high level of detail. RangeSTAR combines computer simulations with remote-sensing data and field measurements of rangeland-health indicators. As the project progresses, researchers hope to get a clearer picture of the role rangelands can play in combating the climate crisis.
A message from President & CEO Dr. Max Holmes
My house was built in 1870. It has been heated by wood, coal, oil, natural gas, and now electricity drawn from the sun. In one sense, that is a mundane property record. In another, it is the entire history of human energy, compressed into a single address.
Wood came first. It always does. Since our ancestors learned to control fire, biomass has been the default answer to cold and darkness. The house would have had a cast-iron stove, fed by wood cut from nearby forests. This is how virtually every human being on earth stayed warm for tens of thousands of years, and many still do. It worked, but it was labor-intensive, land-hungry, and contributed to deforestation.
Coal replaced wood in the industrializing Northeast not because it was loved but because it was dense, cheap, and abundant. A ton of coal contained far more energy than the equivalent volume of wood and could supply cities that had long since stripped their surrounding forests. Then came oil – heating oil delivered by truck, burned in a furnace that could be thermostatically controlled. Oil heat was modern. It was convenient. It was what the house was running on when my wife and I bought it in 2000. The following year, we switched to natural gas, piped directly to the boiler—cleaner than oil, cheaper at the time, and widely regarded as a “transition fuel.” Last year, we made what I believe will be the final transition: heat pumps, powered by electricity, with solar panels on the roof and a contract for renewable energy for anything we draw from the grid.
The sequence—biomass, coal, oil, gas, electricity—is not just our home’s story. It is the arc of modern civilization. And the direction of travel has always been the same: toward fuels that are denser, cleaner, and more controllable, and away from those that are dirtier, heavier, and harder to move. Electricity, especially when generated from wind and sun, is the logical end of that arc. The sun and wind are limitless natural resources and our ability to harness them into electricity will only continue to be more efficient. The energy transition the world is now debating is not some radical rupture; it is the next step in a journey that has been underway since the first furnace replaced the first wood-fired stove.
The only real question is speed. And here, the conflict now consuming the Persian Gulf offers an unexpected answer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the outbreak of military conflict with Iran has removed close to one-fifth of global oil supplies from the market. Prices have reached $100 per barrel or higher. Nations that import the majority of their fuel from the Persian Gulf are facing genuine shortages. The head of the International Energy Agency has called it the greatest global energy security challenge in history.
The conventional assumption might be that an oil shock slows the energy transition – that higher prices make everything more expensive and governments retreat to fossil fuels out of desperation. History suggests the opposite. The 1973 Arab oil embargo helped to launch solar research, energy efficiency standards, and nuclear expansion. Countries around the world are again confronting the danger of energy dependence. That recognition tends to produce investment in alternatives, not capitulation to the status quo.
There are headwinds, of course. The current U.S. administration has been openly hostile to renewable energy, rolling back incentives and attempting to prop up coal and oil production. But administrations are temporary. Solar panels and heat pumps are not. The economics of clean energy have already crossed the threshold at which policy resistance can reverse them; what governments can do now is slow the transition at the margin, not stop it. And a geopolitical crisis that makes the cost of fossil-fuel dependence unmistakable—not in future climate projections but in today’s energy prices—has a way of clarifying minds.
My house has been through this before. It didn’t choose its fuels for ideological reasons; it followed the logic of cost, availability, and technology. The world’s energy system will do the same.
At a time when climate victories are scarce, an acceleration of the energy transition is reason for hope. Those with the financial means—and perhaps the broader good fortune to live in a time and place where the choice is available—can lean into this transition, doing what they can to speed the inevitable shift away from fossil fuels and toward what I believe will be humanity’s ultimate energy source: clean electricity generated from renewable sources.
The energy transition alone will not solve the climate crisis, but it is an essential step in that direction.
Onward.
How climate change is influencing Europe’s record-breaking heat wave
NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center, about the impact of Europe’s heat wave and its links to climate change.
Tropical Forests Forever Facility: Pathways to Impact
Tropical forests are often discussed as environmental assets. In reality, they are critical infrastructure stabilizing the climate across scales, protecting biodiversity, regulating rainfall, sustaining food systems, and underpinning economic and political stability across regions.
This event demonstrated how innovative financing mechanisms and multi-stakeholder partnerships can drive sustainable impact while paving the way for a paradigm shift in forest finance.
