Green Zine Notes and Links
hosted by the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, featuring special guest Don Morgan, current President of the Bank of North Dakota.
Over two days, farmers, legislators, economists, financial professionals, conservation leaders, and community members will come together to explore how public banking has supported agriculture, disaster recovery, housing, infrastructure, and local economic development—and what lessons Vermont might draw from North Dakota’s century of experience.
The Congress will include a farm resiliency tour, farmer dinner, keynote presentations, panel discussions, and collaborative working sessions at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
I hope you’ll join us for this unique opportunity to learn, exchange ideas, and be part of the conversation.
Registration and the draft agenda are available here:
+If you still think of it as “alternative energy,” high time to update your priors. The indefatigable Mark Gongloff chronicles the sheer size of the green economy
A recent report from the London Stock Exchange Group Plc (LSEG) found that “green economy” companies, or those that derive a significant portion of their revenue from stuff like clean energy, efficiency and water management, now have a total stock market value of $10 trillion. If this were a standalone sector, it would be bigger than healthcare and third in the world only to technology and industrials.
Since 2008, valuations for these companies have grown by 18% a year, compared with 12% for the broader market, the report found. Their stocks have outperformed global equities by 133%. A representative sample of these companies, the FTSE Environmental Opportunities All Share Index, topped the FTSE Global All-Cap Index by 12% last year.
In fact, this stealth sector just had one of its best years on record despite many of the world’s governments and the corporate sector abandoning their pre-Trump pledges to zero out carbon emissions to stave off the worst of global heating. Green revenues grew 5.3% last year, the fastest since 2022, the year of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Evidence keeps mounting that the green economy has entered a new phase, one where its rapidly improving economics give it lasting immunity from fickle political sentiments. Even as the dreams of the 2015 Paris Agreement, net zero, the IRA and more have crumbled, the technology with the power to make some of those dreams come true has only gained momentum.
“What the LSEG data shows us is that the green economy’s resilience is no longer dependent on politics,” Matthew Roling, founding executive director of the Abrams Climate Academy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Energy security, grid reliability and supply chain security are now the primary drivers. Those are arguments that resonate in boardrooms. That’s a materially more durable foundation than the Paris Agreement consensus ever was.”
Friday Evening in Rochester there is a free steak dinner (5PM) and a pasture walk, an opportunity to here from leaders in improving Vermont’s resilience through soil management and a chance to brainstorm together. Speakers are:
- Abe Collins, Land Care Cooperative and LandWEB
- John Rodgers, VT Lieutenant Governor and Farmer
- Linda Prokopy, UVM Dean of College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
From LocalMotion VT: Be a part of the conversation! Join us for an informal virtual discussion on e-motos, Tuesday, June 9th at 9:30 AM. |
The Big Picture
As electrotech adoption accelerates worldwide due to the manifold stupidities of the Iran War fossil fuel crisis, new data is underscoring how profound and far-reaching the global clean electrification shift has already become! Our World in Data has a great new visualization of Ember’s recent report that fossil fuel use for electricity declined worldwide in 2025, with clean energy meeting all new demand growth and then some!
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Note that this chart is annual additions, not cumulative, so all these bars are stacking on top of each other!
And Bloomberg NEF notes that energy storage (mostly batteries) has crossed the “100 GW annually” barrier, with 112 GW (112,000 MW) installed worldwide in 2025. (54% of those installations were in China). The solar-to-storage ratio of annual global additions in gigawatts fell from 56 in 2016 (56 times as much solar as storage being built) to just 6 in 2025, as solar kept growing rapidly and storage grew even more rapidly from a lower base. The “solar power during the day, battery-stored solar at night” model is fully mature and increasingly dominating global energy systems. Humanity’s electrification just keeps accelerating!
“It only took four years for energy storage to increase annual additions to more than 100 GW from 10 GW, whereas it took roughly eight and 15 years for solar and wind, respectively. This record underscores growing market momentum and increased industry maturity.”
— Isshu Kikuma, BloombergNEF.
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- Drawdown The Most Comprehensive Plan by Paul Hawken
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What If We Get It Right? By Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
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Last minute Guest: Johanna Miller of the Natural Resources Council, The power of working together, and a legislative update. Call your senator and ask for support of H740 which build the information for the state to know what needs to be done on the climate front.
Methane the low hanging fruit:
Make Some Noise!
Before Friday May 1st we all should join with REV and tell the Vermont Public Utility Commission (PUC) to REJECT the State DPS plan to postpone the biennial rate update for solar panel owners. In the face of increasing electric rates, this unprecedented move would mean a loss of hundreds or thousands of dollars for every solar household and a big profit boost for utilities.
Let your voice be heard – send your comments to the PUC by Friday, May 1st either online (PUC Case Number 26-0291-INV) or via email to puc.clerk@vermont.gov!
It reads in part: Every once in a while I have to snap out of the hypnotic grip of the bizarre news cycle and remind myself—and you—that there’s something even more important underway than the obvious mental and moral decline of the president: the relentless rise in the temperature of the planet. So here’s my latest occasional update from the physical world, and I fear the news is not good.
Let’s begin with the immediate past, and stay close to home, because the U.S. has been the center of some of the most extreme meteorological action on planet earth recently. Consider our winter: though it was chilly in the Northeast, if you averaged the temperature across the lower 48 it was the second-hottest winter on record. Thats because nine states had their hottest winter ever and five their second-hottest. As Andrea Thompson pointed out in Scientific American, “nowhere in the U.S. had a record cold winter this year. Nowhere even came close.”
That winter, by the way, was December, January, and February—what we call “meteorological winter” because it coincides with the coldest quarter of the year. It was outrageously hot and very dry, with severely shrunken snowpacks across the mountains of the West, which made Westerners nervous about the chances for wildfire as the summer wore on.
And then came March.
March was the single craziest month in U.S. weather history. Here’s how Seth Borenstein put it in the lede of his account for the Associated Press
March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data.
The federal government is still collecting weather data (though far less than it used to) and so we know the following remarkable fact according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4 F (6.3 C) above the 20th century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April.
As Bob Henson points out in the Yale-based blog Eye of the Storm,
In 35 of the 48 contiguous states, the statewide average reading was among the top-ten warmest for any March. Not a single contiguous state was cooler than average.
Henson also points out that a lack of rainfall meant it’s so far been the driest year in American history
The nationally averaged precipitation total for 2026 to date is an ominous one: a mere 4.79 inches. That’s the lowest value on record for any January-to-March interval, including such notoriously dry periods as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The previous record low was 5.27 inches, set in Jan.-Mar. 1910.
As Henson’s colleague Jeff Masters succinctly told the AP:
Climate change is kicking our butts
And I fear it’s barely begun the beating. Because over the last two weeks, even as the world has fixed its gaze on the Middle East, meteorologists have been staring in some awe and terror at what appears to be a rapidly building El Niño. I’ve been telling you this is on the way for some months, but it’s coming into ever-clearer focus. NOAA again, in its April forecast, put the odds of a El Niño beginning this summer at better than sixty percent. More to the point, the wide array of computer models around the planet are beginning to predict a so-called “super El Niño,” when temperatures in the critical region of the Pacific shoot up far far far higher than in the past. Henson and Masters again:
For October, roughly half of the ECMWF ensemble is calling for sea surface temperatures in the main El Niño region (Niño3.4) to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average. Such values would correspond to what’s loosely referred to as a “super El Niño.” Though there’s no official definition for a “super” event, the term is often attached to El Niño when its peak anomalies reach at least +2.0°C. Since 1950, the only El Niño events that have hit this threshold for at least one three-month interval were in 1972–73, 1982–83, 1997–98, 2015–16, and 2023–24. Only one of those events, in 2015–16, pushed all the way past +2.5°C.
Here’s a useful graph of the various estimates from the computer modelling, courtesy of Zeke Hausfather
Basically it reads: a world we haven’t seen before. Because remember, El Niño comes on top of the steadily rising temperature of the earth. If these forecasts bear out, then possibly 2026 and certainly 2027 will be the hottest years ever recorded on this earth. As the atmospheric scientist Paul Roundy put it, there’s a “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years.” We don’t know, of course, exactly how this will manifest, but as Gabrielle Cannon wrote yesterday in the Guardian
A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.
The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.
I think it’s safe to say that we can expect more weather chaos than we’ve ever seen before (the good folks at Covering Climate Now put together a useful briefing for reporters last week). Here’s my prediction, since my job is to figure out how the physical and political worlds intersect:
The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels. Our brief vacation from thinking about climate change as a crucial fact of life on this planet will be over; the conjoined fears of the next months will combine to put us in a very new place politically.
My main fear is that this useful moment is coming very late in the game.