Bob Sheak, June 7, 2026
Introduction
It has long been established by experts and scientists that the carbon dioxide in the air and the resultant increase in global temperatures is produced overwhelmingly by fossil fuels. Even some of the major emitters of these climate pollutants have acknowledged as much, though most have not. The Harvard Gazette, among many others, confirmed this (Exxon scientists predicted global warming with ‘shocking skill and accuracy,’ Harvard researchers say — Harvard Gazette). Here’s are excerpts from the Gazette.
“Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to an analysis published…in Science by a team of Harvard-led researchers. Despite those forecasts, team leaders say, the multinational energy giant continued to sow doubt about the gathering crisis.”
“In ‘Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,’ researchers from Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research show for the first time the accuracy of previously unreported forecasts created by company scientists from 1977 through 2003. The Harvard team discovered that Exxon researchers created a series of remarkably reliable models and analyses projecting global warming from carbon dioxide emissions over the coming decades.”
Katie Surma at Inside Climate News also confirms the involvement of the fossil fuel corporations in their knowledge of the impact of their emissions in a May 14, 2025 report based on the internal company documents and other public records that “outline the fossil fuel industry’s decade-long campaign to mislead the public and avoid paying for their products’ harms (How the World’s Most Powerful Corporations Have Fought Accountability for Climate Change – Inside Climate News).
Such evidence does not sway the climate crisis deniers like Trump who ardently contend that there is no climate crisis and what we need to do is go ahead and maximize the production of coal, oil and gas, the principal sources of global warming.
Trump the denier
Trump not only has long disregarded any evidence but continues to claim that there is no climate crisis; it’s “fake,” as he said in a speech at the United Nation (Trump called climate change a ‘con job’ at the United Nations. Here are the facts and context | PBS News). This article is authored by Melina Walling and Seth Borenstein. Here is more of what they report.
Trump said. “‘This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.’”
Trump is totally wrong
Surma points out, “But the world U.S. President Donald Trump described in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday didn’t match the one many world leaders in the audience are contending with. Nor did it align with what scientists have long been observing.
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Unsurprisingly, Trump wants to fund the expansion of coal production
Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer report on Trump’s offer of Funds for the first new U.S. coal plants in 13 Years (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/climate/trump-coal-plants-funding.html).
They write that the president announced a total of $700 million in federal money to reinvigorate the domestic coal industry, which has been in decline for decades.
“Of the new funding, $425 million would be used to upgrade and extend the life of 12 coal plants that otherwise might have closed in the coming years. To unlock this money, Mr. Trump invoked a Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act, which gives the president sweeping powers to bolster domestic industries deemed essential to national security.
“The Energy Department separately announced that it would invest up to $350 million in coal projects, including funding for two companies to build the first new coal plants in the United States since 2013, one in Alaska and the other in West Virginia. Some money would also go to a power company that wants to restart a shuttered coal plant in Maryland.
“The money for the new coal plants would come from funds that Congress originally designated for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from polluting industries.”
Joselow and Plumer continue. “In recent months, the Energy Department has ordered units at five aging coal plants to stay open instead of shutting down as planned. And Mr. Trump has directed the Defense Department to buy more electricity from coal plants to power military installations nationwide.”
The president revealed his ignorance when on Thursday, June 4, “he said the move would help lower consumers’ energy bills, though experts say coal plants are more expensive to build and operate than gas plants and renewable energy.”
Unlike what the President and other deniers claim, there is no such thing as “clean coal.” “Experts say the phrase ‘clean coal’ is misleading, noting that coal plants produce more harmful air pollutants and planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions than do gas plants, solar panels and wind turbines. Burning coal emits mercury and other heavy metals linked to an array of health problems.”
“Despite the unfavorable economics of coal,” Joselow and Plumer write, “some proponents think the fuel could make a comeback if electricity demand from data centers continues to rise and the Environmental Protection Agency continues to relax pollution regulations that have significantly increased costs for operators.”
“Mr. Trump on Thursday also announced $75 million for a new coal export terminal in Oakland, Calif. City officials have tried for nearly a decade to block the terminal from being built, but courts have repeatedly sided with the developer, and the project is now set to move forward.”
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Unprecedented run of very hot weather
Bob Berwyn reports on a recent climate report that shows an “unprecedented run of global heat, Jan 13, 2026 (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13012026/multiple-reports-show-2025-extreme-global-heat”) …. Here’s some of what he writes.
“Several annual international climate reports released Tuesday indicate that relentless human-caused warming continued in 2025, especially in the oceans and at the poles.
“For the third year in a row, Earth’s average temperature ran close to 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the climate that sustained human civilizations as the 20th century began, before fossil-fuel pollution started damaging the atmosphere.
“The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service report released Tuesday ranked 2025 as the third-warmest year on record, just a hair cooler than 2023 and within striking distance of 2024, the hottest year on record. Together, the past three years have averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, the first time any three-year stretch has crossed that threshold.”
‘Exceeding a three-year average of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is a milestone none of us wished to reach,” said Mauro Facchini, head of earth observation at the European Commission’s directorate general for defense industry and space.”
“At today’s pace of emissions, Copernicus scientists said, the world is on track to hit the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree Celsius limit permanently by the end of this decade, sooner than expected when the deal was signed.”
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NBC News reports on March 27, 2026, that the most recent evidence documents that Arctic sea ice hits its lowest winter level as unprecedented heat smashes records all over Earth
“The sea ice is crucial to Earth’s climate because without it reflecting sunlight, more heat energy goes into the oceans.
“Vital Arctic sea ice shrank to tie its lowest measured level for the winter, the season when ice grows, as a warming Earth shattered records across the continents.
“Arctic sea ice levels, especially in the summer, are crucial to Earth’s climate because without the ice reflecting sunlight, more heat energy goes into the oceans. Ice of all kinds around the poles acts as Earth’s refrigerator. Wildlife, such as polar bears and seals, also depend on sea ice. Lack of sea ice in the Arctic creates new shipping routes and in doing so causes geopolitical disruptions, making once-ignored places such as Greenland, more desirable.
“The shrinking Arctic sea ice was announced Thursday as temperatures broke March heat records across the United States, all over Mexico, in Australia, across Northern Africa and through parts of Northern Europe. Climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures, called the extreme March temperatures ‘by far the most extreme heat event in world climatic history” and said on social media that the next few days would be “much worse.’
Sixteen states broke March temperature records in the past week or so, said weather historian Christ Burt. Twenty-seven locations had temperatures in the past week high enough to tie or surpass the hottest April day on record, including St. Louis, meteorologists said. Mexico has had thousands of records shattered, some of them warmer than the hottest May temperatures, but that’s nothing compared with what’s happening in Asia, where “dozens of thousands of monthly records” were smashed by 30 to 35 degrees (17 to 19 degrees Celsius) margins, Herrera said.”
Steady decline of sea ice
Each year Arctic sea ice grows over the cold winter and shrinks in the heat of the summer. This year the growth was so small that its peak, before starting to shrink, measured 5.52 million square miles (14.29 million square kilometers). That’s slightly smaller than last year’s 5.53 million square miles (14.31 million square kilometers), but the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which does the measuring, considers those two figures so close that it’s a tie.
This year’s sea ice area was about 525,000 square miles (1.36 million square kilometers) lower than the 1981 to 2010 winter average peak. That’s about twice the size of Texas.
“‘As temperatures have warmed and are continuing to warm, especially in the polar region, there is less opportunity to grow ice and it’s gonna tend to, on average, be less,’ said data center senior scientist Walt Meier. ‘It’s not like we are seeing a regime shift or anything. It’s more of a steady decline in the winter and at the maximum. And it also gives us a head start on the summer melt season. We’re starting from a lower number.”
Why it’s important
“The summer melt season — which precedes a September measurement known as the Arctic sea ice minimum — is ‘really the critical time,’ Meier said. One reason is that when there’s less white ice reflecting the strong summer sun, the oceans can absorb more heat. And when that happens, the Arctic warms closer to temperatures further south and atmospheric pressure changes. A leading theory — that is still controversial — says those Arctic changes then alter the movement and shape of the jet stream, which moves weather west to east and contributes to extreme weather bursts, he said.”
“On the other end of the planet, Antarctic sea ice is heavily affected by local weather and ocean factors. In February, Antarctica hit its annual low point and while it was smaller than the 30-year average, it was nowhere near the record low levels of the past three years, Meier said.”
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Trump wants to gag scientists
Bill McKibben writes on Trump’s efforts to “gag American Scientists When We Need The Most,” Common Dreams, June 1, 2026
(https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-silences-science). He coins the term “scilencing” to capture this situation. Here’s some of what he writes.
In late May, “the White House announced plans for a major tightening of political control over research grants. Instead of relying on the advice of expert panels as to which research should be funded, the new policy relies on political appointees. McKibben writes, “One or more senior political appointees designated by their agency head must conduct ‘a pre-issuance review’ of all discretionary grants, making sure they follow several principles, including to ‘demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.’
McKibben refers to Jeff Mervis at Science, who interviewed several observers of this Trump policy. Here are examples.
“‘What OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is proposing is not a reform of grants management,’ Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), writes in a Substack post. ‘It is a vehicle for complete political control of science… over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.’ Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a leading critic of the Trump administration’s research policies, calls the proposal ‘a dystopian move that woulddestroy what remains of merit-based review.’”
McKibben points out, “The science the Trump administration really hates is climate science, because it threatens the ‘energy dominance’ that the White House has made its basic foreign and economic policy, not to mention the profits of the fossil fuel industry that has been such an attentive donor.”
He refers to the view of John Timmer, who wrote at Ars Technica:
“‘The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the ‘national interest.’ The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.”
Some good news
McKibben sees some good news. Renewables in the form of solar panels and wind energy continue to grow. There is also progress in batteries that store energy when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. He refers to sources that document that “2025…was the first year the world installed more than a hundred gigawatts of battery storage, up 48% from the year before, and expected to grow another 46% this year.”
He continues. “And the possibilities are everywhere. Canary Media’s Julian Spector wrote last week, a new global report shows that these so-called ‘firm renewables’ (wind and sun coupled with batteries).”
“IRENA [International Renewable Energy Agency] looked at 252 solar projects that went online there in 2024 and found that many of them could be augmented with extra solar capacity and batteries to deliver power cheaper than the $100-per-megawatt-hour benchmark for new gas-fired plants. Almost all the modeled solar-battery plants could beat that cost for firm clean power 90% of the time; even at the higher reliability threshold of 99%, nearly half the projects remained competitive, and the lowest cost was $46 per megawatt-hour.”
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Is there time to save the planet?
C.J. Polychroniou argues that “a just transition is still within reach, June 1,2026
(https://truthout.org/articles/despite-climate-policy-setbacks-a-just-transition-is-still-within-reach). C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Here are excerpts from his article.
The present situation is dire
The evidence for rapid human-caused climate change keeps piling up, yet the world continues to flood the atmosphere with greenhouse gases amid a political backlash against the struggle for a future free of fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow, which means humans are continuing to make the climate crisis worse. Global average temperatures are expected to stay at record levels for the 2026-2030 period, exceeding preindustrial averages by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. As global warming speeds up, events like wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and floods will become more intense, and there will be a substantial increase in premature deaths, with the overwhelming majority occurring in low-and middle-income countries. The climate crisis presents a grave threat to life on Earth, although scientists have now scrapped the worst-case climate scenario on account of the expansion of renewable energy — which means there is still hope.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned economist Robert Pollin talks about the forces resisting green transition and highlights the results of a major study he and some of his co-workers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) produced for advancing a green transition in Michigan. According to Pollin, there are simply no technical or economic considerations preventing Michigan and other U.S. states from achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Pollin is distinguished professor of economics and co-director of PERI at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.”
The example of Michigan
Pollin is the lead author of a new and massive study on how the state of Michigan may become carbon neutral by 2050.
“In a 2022 report from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) called the MI Healthy Climate Plan, the state established, as its central climate target, for Michigan to achieve carbon neutrality — i.e., net zero emissions — by 2050. Reaching zero emissions in Michigan by 2050 is a realistic target as long as the state maintains its commitment to achieve it. As a starting point, it is a major statement in itself that the state government set this emissions reduction target and is actually still taking it seriously. This isn’t easy under Trump 2.0.
“At present, about 85 percent of all energy consumed in Michigan’s economy comes from burning oil, coal and natural gas. The challenge is obvious: how to go from 85 percent dependence on fossil fuel energy sources as of now to zero, or near zero, fossil fuel consumption in 24 years.
“Our study works out a plan to accomplish this. The central feature of our plan is to build a clean energy infrastructure to supplant the existing fossil fuel–dominant infrastructure. Solar and wind power will be the state’s primary new energy sources, operating at a greatly upgraded level of energy efficiency. Geothermal and low-emissions bioenergy will be supplemental renewable sources. Michigan will also need to create large-scale battery storage capacity to account for the fact that solar and wind are intermittent energy sources — i.e., the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow all day everywhere.
“We estimate that the costs of these clean energy investments — including all renewables, efficiency upgrades, and battery storage — at about 2 percent of Michigan’s overall spending (GDP) per year every year between now and 2050. For 2027, this total spending would amount to about $15 billion. That’s obviously real money. But it is still only 2 percent of total spending in Michigan. That means that 98 percent of spending in the state can still go to everything else besides its green transition project.
“It is also critical to emphasize that, according to our estimates, these clean energy investments will generate an average of between 85,0000-100,000 jobs per year between 2027-2050 within Michigan, equal to about 2 percent of Michigan’s current workforce. These will include jobs across all occupations in the state, including, for example, roofers, machinists, accountants, office managers and assistants, truck drivers, and wind turbine engineers. This level of job creation will continue as long as the state continues to invest 2 percent of its GDP on clean energy projects.
A major component of the study revolves around a just transition for fossil fuel workers,, which “has to be a first-order priority of the overall green transition project, as the late, great labor and environmental leader Tony Mazzocchi first emphasized decades ago. This is a matter of simple economic justice. But without a generous just transition program fully embedded in the green transition project, it is also fair to expect that a large share of the workers and communities staring at major losses in their living standards will become green transition opponents. They then become fertile targets for exactly the type of brazen political opportunism practiced by Trump and company. Trump, for example, recently anointed himself the champion of the miners in ‘America’s beautiful clean coal industry.’”
“In Michigan, there are now about 21,000 people employed in the full range of fossil fuel-based industries, amounting to only 0.5 percent of the state’s current workforce. Virtually all of these jobs will be phased out between now and 2050 under the statewide green transition. If we assume that the phase-out proceeds in more or less steady increments between 2026 and 2050, and we also take account of workers voluntarily retiring over the next 25 years, we end up with only about 350 workers getting laid off every year. This compares with our lower-end estimate that about 85,000 jobs will be created in Michigan as long as the state invests 2 percent of GDP per year on clean energy projects.
“Still, each of the 350 workers who will be displaced every year needs to receive generous transitional support. This should include pension guarantees, guaranteed re-employment at their previous pay levels, as well as job retraining and relocation support as needed. We estimate that a generous transitional support package for all these workers would cost about $45 million per year. That is less than 0.01 percent of overall 2025 statewide spending in Michigan.”
“For Michigan, an additional major concern is the impact on employment of automobile manufacturing transitioning from building internal combustion engine powered autos to battery electric vehicles (EVs). As of 2025, total auto manufacturing employment in Michigan was about 49,000 jobs, i.e., more than double the employment level for all fossil fuel sector jobs in the state. It is possible that this transition to EV manufacturing could expand employment levels and improve conditions for auto workers within Michigan. But whether this happens will depend on the effectiveness of industrial policies to locate EV manufacturing operations, battery production in particular, within Michigan. More broadly, these trends demonstrate the imperative of a commitment to full employment policies, along with rising wages and expanded benefits, as a centerpiece of a U.S. economy-wide Green New Deal.”
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Concluding thoughts
Trump’s policies are exacerbating the climate crisis. He is committed to expanding fossil fuels, including coal, the dirtiest of them. Most Republicans in Congress support him. He continues to have the support of much of the MAGA movement, though his overall poll ratings are very low. The ratings have little to do with the climate crisis and a lot to do with high prices due to Trump’s foolhardy Iran War and his tariffs. There is a lot of commentary in the news about his tendency to fall asleep at cabinet meetings and other events. He spends a lot of time bragging about his “ballroom” and other vanity projects. This only reveals his rampant narcissism. Meanwhile, the planet gets hotter.
Vital issues - challenging pol and econ power 