The Climate Crisis and Its Solutions, by the Numbers |
Last time I marked the fifth anniversary of this newsletter with a remarkably heavy burst of analysis—a "where do we stand" summary that let me speak at the highest possible level about our past, present, and future. So of course I’m worn out, and perhaps you as well. We’re going to proceed less systematically this time—I’m going to show you some numbers that have arrived in the last few days, and try to make sense of each of them, with only slight regard for how exactly they fit together.
And it’s all a useful reminder that though the climate and energy crises have everything to do with psychology and sociology and economics and political science and theology and love and art and winter, they are rooted in quantifiable physical fact, which cannot be wished away and which must be faced resolutely.
That was the average temperature for the lower 48 states in July, according to just-released federal stats, making it the hottest month in American history, 3.3°F hotter than the 20th-century average. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Wyoming was the furthest above average for the month. Among other things, this development robs climate deniers of a cherished talking point. July 1936 had been the co-record holder. We understood why—in the words of climatologist Andrew Dessler:
During the early 20th century, aggressive plowing and the replacement of native grasses left Great Plains soils exposed. When drought conditions developed, those degraded soils dried out quickly, reducing evaporation and soil moisture and reinforcing the heat.
But try telling that to Fox News. Dessler, by the way, has had a fascinating three-part series on those century-old Midwestern extremes. But now it’s mostly academic; we’re living in a hotter country than any American has ever seen. And indeed a hotter world. As Jeff Masters reports, July 2026 tied for the warmest month in the planet’s history, with July 2024.
That’s how much temperatures have risen on average in Europe since the 1960s, according to the new State of the Climate 2025 report, which veteran analyst Bob Berwyn broke down this week. Just think about that for a moment, because it helps you to understand the scale of what we’ve done. When you walk outside your home, in Europe or America, it’s 3°F hotter than it would have been a just few decades ago. Think of that amount of extra heat (and remember that ninety percent more is stored away in the oceans, waiting to be released).
Writing from Berlin, Jim Tankersley and Tatiana Firsova offer a vivid account of what that feels like in every day European life:
It’s changing the way children see summer.“Some days it’s too hot, and the heat is just so oppressive. I’m more of a winter person,” said Sophia Nachtsheim, 15, who visited Krumme Lanke on Thursday with her mother and three younger siblings.
That’s the windfall profit so far for the oil industry thanks to the Iran War, according to a new analysis from the folks at Oil Change International.
The five major international oil companies (IOCs) recorded massive jumps in profits in Q2 2026 compared to the same quarter of 2025. Their total adjusted net income amounted to $51 billion for the 3 months—that’s nearly $400,000 per minute. Meanwhile, people around the world are paying around 30% more for gasoline and diesel, with some countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, seeing increases of 80% or more.
It would of course make great sense to tax these windfall profits, earned entirely on the back of dead Iranians and Americans, and everyone who’s paying $4.50 a gallon at the pump. Portugal actually is, at a 33% rate. Exxon’s Darren Woods has responded to wider EU efforts with threats:
We canceled investments that we had planned for Europe based on the last time they passed a windfall profits tax. In fact, we’re suing the EU because we don’t think that’s a legal taking for the industry.
#4.8% of Global Energy-Related Carbon Emissions
So far the energy debate around AI has focused on how much electricity it takes to run data centers. But the number above comes from a different heretofore uncounted part of the problem: It’s what a new study says artificial intelligence could add to the atmosphere simply by making it easier for the fossil fuel industry to find and exploit oil and gas wells. Emily Atkin has a top-notch account of the new study, which makes it clear that a data center might as well have an oil derrick sitting on top. She includes these additional numbers:
Specifically, they found that Big Oil’s use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI’s data centers.On the low end, these tools could enable additional yearly carbon emissions equal to Mexico’s, according to the research. On the high end, they could enable yearly climate pollution equal to Russia’s—the world’s fourth-largest emitting country.
Meanwhile, I mentioned this parenthetically last week, but it deserves more attention: Climate researcher Zeke Hausfather took the time to calculate how much energy is used when you really use AI “agents” for carrying out tasks. And the answer is: a lot. Asking Claude a question is not so energy-intensive, but as he explained to Robinson Meyer this week:
Increasingly AI is being used in an agentic form. And that more means that you give AI a set of instructions or a goal to achieve. And then AI goes off and does many, many, many, things to try to achieve that goal. AI agents are, at least in the corporate world and the software engineering and scientific world, the vast majority of AI use today. And those agents make both much more complicated calls than the prompts would suggest and many, many more calls. And so when you look at the actual energy use of these AI agents, it’s something on the order of 600 times larger per prompt than the traditional, like, type something in a chat box and got to get an immediate response. And so that does end up adding up. I actually looked at two months of my own AI use because I had local logs of all of the numbers there… I found that on average I was using about three kilowatt hours a day for my agentic energy use which is the equivalent of running two refrigerators.
That’s been the average growth in US battery installations over the last three years, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it’s continuing to accelerate. Here’s the chart:
Notice that it’s continuing to rise this year. And as long as we’re doing charts, here it is broken down by state, with batteries in lavender. You’ll note that only four or five states are really participating in the battery revolution so far, which leaves enormous room for rapid growth elsewhere. Batteries are the transformative........