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Opinion
As Santa Marta Leads the World Into the Energy Future, the US Clings to the Past
A global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels has coincided with rising gas prices caused by Trump's Iran War, motivating many leaders to embrace renewables. Unfortunately, US policymakers aren't following their example.
May 02, 2026
Many of the people who’ve been working for years on climate issues assembled this week in Santa Marta, Colombia for a conference on how to get off fossil fuels. Sponsored by the Colombians and the Dutch, it was an outgrowth of December’s unhappy COP negotiations in Brazil: the 50 or so nations that actually wanted to move decisively past coal, gas, and oil scheduled a meeting of their own. By all accounts it was a kinder, gentler version of the regular climate talks, in part because fossil fuel lobbyists (who have become the largest “country” at the regular negotiations) were not welcome. The wonderful Irish diplomat Mary Robinson put it well: “COPs are more formal, negotiators have their lines and they will not cross them and it’s so different here,” she said, adding that participants “have felt more human together.”
By lucky accident, the gathering took on extra meaning because it coincided with President Donald Trump’s absurd misadventure in Iran. All of a sudden there was a new reason, past the destruction of the planet, for getting off fossil fuel: Gas is too damn expensive, assuming you can get it all. What we’ve done in the Strait of Hormuz is one of those accidents that changes history: As the head of the International Energy Agency, the venerable Fatih Birol, said last week:
The vase is broken, the damage is done—it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.
The pieces of that broken vase are scattered across the planet, especially in Asia and Africa, where fuel prices are soaring and fertilizer made with fossil fuel is suddenly either unavailable or ruinously expensive. As Reuters reported this week:
Agricultural bodies, including the International Grains Council, are already cutting their forecasts for the next harvests. And the United Nations, which is trying to negotiate shipping access for fertiliser through the Gulf, has sounded the alarm over food security in developing nations.
In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, high fertiliser costs contributed to exacerbated hunger in poor, import-dependent countries, and analysts say regions like East Africa are again vulnerable.
Australia may offer an early indication of the impact on production of global staples.
In the bread-basket state of Western Australia, one industry group now expects the wheat planting area to drop by 14% as growers shift away from the fertiliser-intensive, low-margin grain.
But the good news, of course, is that these countries are rapidly putting together a new and sturdier vase, this time based on energy from the sun and wind that doesn’t need importing. The Santa Marta conference focused on the financing needed to make this switch work—a very real problem, but in the face of the desperation caused by events in the Mideast those who can are going ahead. As Wing Kuang reported, “Chinese EV manufacturers reported an 82.6% rise in month-on-month sales in March.” As the business pages of the India Times reported yesterday:
Increasing penetration of EVs, especially two- and three-wheelers, and rapid deployment of Battery Electric Solar Systems across Southeast Asia and South Asia is now viewed as guaranteed by those in the industry.
The optimism was palpable at this week's Asia Battery Raw Materials & Recycling Conference in Hanoi, where much of the discussion among delegates was more how the region was going to source sufficient raw materials to make batteries, rather than how to increase demand from current levels.
That all this counts as irony is the one delicious lining to all the pain and suffering. Donald Trump, purchased underling of the fossil fuel industry, has managed through his own colossal incompetence and ego to nip the hand that feeds his bank account. Yes, at the moment the industry is soaring: BP reported the kind of grotesque returns Thursday that should have any rational government reaching for a windfall profits tax:
Maja Darlington, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said the war had been “an entirely predictable disaster for everyone except the oil industry. BP’s profits are booming, with Trump’s bombs bringing billions for them and bigger bills for us.”
But those billions are in the here and now; in the slightly longer term the opposite is happening. Big Oil’s only real growth strategy has been exporting liquefied natural gas to Asia. Bloomberg checked in the other day on how that’s going:
The near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the serious damage sustained by Qatar’s LNG export plant has sent prices higher and buyers scrambling for alternatives. Gas’ reputation as a reliable and affordable energy source has taken a serious hit, and plans for its speedy adoption in Asia’s developing nations have been derailed, with potentially long-lasting consequences.
“Every day this is extended, prices elevate, the market tightens, and demand destruction happens,” said Masanori Odaka, an analyst at Rystad Energy. “The longer this lasts, the more structural it becomes.”
Bloomberg News spoke to more than two dozen executives, traders, and analysts across Asia, who painted a picture of a region that had been thought of as the future of LNG, but is now rapidly losing faith in the super-chilled fuel. Most requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to media.
Importers in India and Bangladesh are already rethinking whether to keep the fuel as a center piece in future strategies. Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines that were expected to become large growth markets, are looking alternatives. A planned gas power project in Vietnam is looking to switch to wind and solar plus batteries. In Thailand policymakers are pushing for more renewables.
This is an appropriate reaction. Cheap renewable energy had already begun to fuel the remarkable energy transition I’ve been chronicling over the last four years in these pages. Now it’s been supercharged by events, and responsible leaders around the world are drawing the obvious conclusions. As Selwin Hart, the UN’s envoy to the Santa Marta talks, put it in his address to the gathering:
Renewables offer something fossil fuels never did: stability and sovereignty. There are no embargoes, price shocks, or tariffs.
But that’s not been the reaction, of course, in this country, where energy policy just keeps getting stupider. Read, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterful takedown of Environmental Protection Agency commissioner Lee Zeldin:
In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the EPA from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters…The EPA has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, as pro-coal.
But here’s what’s astonishing. The person that Zeldin very nearly beat for governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has been embarked on an environmental demolition project of her own. At the precise moment that gas prices are soaring, and as a new and supercharged El Niño brings climate concerns back to the center of public consciousness, Hochul is doing her very best to sink New York’s landmark climate law and stick the Empire State with more expensive gas. She’s not showing the policymaking chops of her peers in far poorer places like Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Donald Trump, purchased underling of the fossil fuel industry, has managed through his own colossal incompetence and ego to nip the hand that feeds his bank account.
The background here is long, and like all things in New York politics, opaque. Suffice it to say that New Yorkers passed a reasonably ambitious climate law, and that the governor has not done much to enact it. If you want some background, the redoubtable David Roberts interviewed the equally redoubtable Pete Sikora, who explains:
The governor just took everything that the Climate Action Council came up with—her own appointees—and ignored it. That’s the capsule summary. They didn’t do the policies, they didn’t do the regulations, they didn’t do the things that would have implemented the law. They did a few things here and there, but by and large, nothing that would have implemented the law correctly was done. Little bits and pieces. For example, the state passed ending oil and gas in all new construction. That’s fantastic. That’s really good.
As you pointed out, distributed solar is a real bright spot. The numbers are moving there. It’s good. The CHPE project is about to connect. That’s a big transmission project from Canadian hydropower to New York City. Very cool too. There’s good things happening. But by and large, the long list of things in the climate plan was not done—90% of it not done. The centerpiece was Cap and Invest. The governor pulled that back at the last second the same way she did on congestion pricing. It’s in this weird limbo where it’s paused now.
If you want a comprehensive list of the opportunities she’s missed, try here. Most political pros I’ve talked to—and I talked to some more this week because I was in New York this week to lobby on the state’s solar laws—seem baffled by what Hochul’s up to. She’s not in a tough election fight—after Trump pushed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) out of the GOP primary she faces only a Zeldin-lite Long Island pol, and in a year when an onion bialy could win in blue New York. My guess is that she’s about a year behind on her talking points; in the wake of Kamala Harris’ loss, a certain kind of moderate Dem decided that “affordability” was the new watchword and brought the idea that talking about climate was a mistake. (Not everyone went along—Gov. JB Pritzker in Illinois, for instance, has kept up the state’s clean energy momentum).
In New York’s case this may have been magnified by the sudden rise of Zohran Mamdani, who talked about affordability—but with a particular set of policies attached to it that made it more than rhetorical. For Hochul, an all-out push for wind and solar and batteries would have been wise since they are in fact affordable, but it was easier to go with the fracked gas lobby. So she’s fast-tracking new pipelines—in essence building the very infrastructure that New Yorkers rejected when they shut down fracking in the state. It’s all a tragic muddle, benefiting only Big Oil. Indeed, as Colin Kinniburgh reported last month:
A national industry group, led by some of the country’s largest pipeline builders and a slew of other gas interests, has recently entered the fray, tapping former state politicians to help advance Gov. Kathy Hochul’s “all of the above” energy strategy. Top of their agenda: pressing pause on the state’s climate targets.
New Yorkers can do a couple of things. One is press their state legislators to resist Hochul’s gutting of the climate law. The other is to lobby those same legislators to pass the ASAP and SUNNY laws, which would at least speed up solar permitting and allow balcony solar in the state.
And all of us can do a better job of demanding real action from our blue state leaders. Because this drift is not confined to New York—in Hawaii, for instance, Democratic Gov. Josh Green has called for a huge new liquefied natural gas project to supply the state’s electricity, ignoring the fact that the Aloha State is bathed in sunlight and washed by the steady trade winds that make it so delightful. Again, this is exactly the opposite tack that leaders across the rest of the world are taking, and in both states it will saddle residents with gas projects for decades to come.
I wrote about “climate-hushing” last week, and decisions like this are the inevitable result—on purely political grounds alone they surrender the high ground on what will be the most important issue of our century. And they surrender the gift that cheap renewables provide to both planet and consumer. They are exactly the opposite of what scientists told the Santa Marta conference was required—an end to new fossil fuel expansion. The next time a climate disaster strikes these states their governors will mouth the usual pieties, but they won’t mean much.
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No More Kings: Time to End Sovereign Immunity
If we’re serious about addressing protections for misconduct and abuses of power, ending these special rights—originally justified as a divine right—should be our top priority.
May 02, 2026
On three major occasions in President Trump’s second term, his opponents, including many elected officials, have taken to the streets under the banner of “No Kings.” And yet just this week, King Charles III spoke before our joint houses of Congress, where his comments about governmental checks and balances drew a standing ovation from everyone there.
A contradiction lies here, between our history and our perception of it. The truth is, the law that made kings untouchable—that “the king can do no wrong”—has never gone away in the United States. Instead, it multiplied. Today we call it “sovereign immunity.”
The Declaration of Independence blamed the King for its grievances, claiming his actions showed an “absolute Despotism” and “absolute Tyranny over these States.” But the taxes it complained about came from Parliament, which in 1688 had subordinated the King’s political role to itself and its Prime Minister. True, the monarch retained a total legislative veto (among other powers), but it last invoked that power in 1708. Colonial complaints about the King not recognizing colonial legislatures suggest the opposite of the grievance—a monarchical commitment against tyranny, by declining to override and usurp Parliament’s powers via royal whim.
Describing the 1789 Constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote that, except for a few important “particulars, the power of the President will resemble equally that of the king of Great Britain.” Some changes shed the aristocracy; others infused more checks and balances, like making the veto power conditional. As for the right of kings, Hamilton argued that the impeachment power of Congress addressed it, because an impeached president would be subject to prosecution “in the ordinary course of law.” Unfortunately for us, history did not walk that line.
The 1789 Constitution also split sovereign power between federal and state governments. These twin powers then pulled a trick: they successfully argued that the special right of kings had transferred to them. Courts applied this special right to political subdivisions, like counties and municipalities, and to those who act on their behalf, like legislators, judges, clerks, bureaucrats, and police. Tocqueville thought these subdivisions “mitigat[ed] tyranny,” viewing “townships, municipal bodies, and counties” as “concealed break-waters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement.” But by permitting them sovereign immunity, the opposite happened: our myriad government bodies (sometimes four or five to a person) now each hold the right of kings. Instead of ridding ourselves of kingly power, we multiplied it.
Courts continue to expand these special powers. In 2024, the right-wing majority of the US Supreme Court confirmed that presidential immunity insulates the officeholder from criminal responsibility, so long as the alleged acts happened while carrying out official duties. Last March, the Court expanded the immunity available to law enforcement. Now, police officers have immunity from suit for any constitutional violation not explicitly addressed by an appellate or high court. And a federal appeals court recently held that governments have no general duty to compensate a bystander when law enforcement destroys their property in the course of their duties. If police break down your door, in error or not, you must pay for the fix.
We don't need courts to tell us these things. We see government officials acting above the law every day, even in incidents as small as police ignoring parking rules or blaring through stoplights into oncoming traffic, just to then turn their lights off. Rules for thee, but not for me. While we still have the right of kings, we don't have to keep it.
If we’re serious about addressing protections for misconduct and abuses of power, ending these special rights—originally justified as a divine right—should be our top priority. We have the tools to do it. Governments may waive and disclaim their special rights through legislation, and many have done that in limited doses. We should move forward to end the special right altogether, which we can accomplish through legislation at local, state, and federal levels. For a sound first step, Congress could reintroduce and pass the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, which would strip these special rights from law enforcement in civil-rights cases.
And most fundamentally, we should recognize that we have not ended the rule of kings just yet. Abuses of power and protection against accountability under the rule of law aren’t of a bygone era, and the monarchy didn't take its special rights with it when it left. Sadly, the powers of kings and queens were left behind, written into our laws under a different name.
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Why I'm Answering the May Day Call to Action By Running for Congress
The workers of Uptown and The Bronx have been making the demand for a better life for over a century but Washington has ignored their demands for too long. I'm running to make sure it finally has an answer.
May 01, 2026
Uptown wakes up before the rest of New York even opens its eyes. Walk Broadway from 125th to 168th, up through Dyckman, as I have, and you'll see it: The bodega coffee grabbed on the run, the crosstown bus packed before dawn, people clocking into work while downtown is still asleep. These are the people who built our city. Not the CEOs, real estate developers, or the politicians who show up every two to four years with fliers and false promises. The movement fighting for their dignity has always lived here—on these buses and these street corners.
Every May 1, we honor them. May Day, or International Workers' Day, was created from needless state violence. In 1884, American workers went on strike to win an eight-hour workday. As the deadline approached, a protest in Chicago turned deadly, with police firing into the crowd and arresting seven workers who, after a sham trial, were executed. The bosses thought that would be the end of it. They were wrong. Workers fought for and won the right to an eight-hour workday.
Here in Harlem, Washington Heights, and Kingsbridge, May Day isn’t an abstract history lesson, it’s a mirror. This is a day to honor the transit workers, nurses, teachers, laborers, and caregivers who have always refused to accept less than they deserve and risked everything to fight for a better future for the next generation. They show us what's possible when working people come together, across generations, race, gender, and culture, and demand a dignified life.
May Day reminds us of something simple and profound: Uptown is a union town. It always has been.
I want to build power for the people on that crosstown bus before dawn who never get thanked for keeping our city running and are told to be grateful for what little they have.
New York, and Uptown especially, has become a stronghold of union power. It was in Harlem, during the Harlem Renaissance, that A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—the first Black-led labor union in American history. It was in Washington Heights and Spanish Harlem where Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrant women transformed the garment industry, becoming so essential to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union that by the 1950s, the union published its paper, Justicia, entirely in Spanish. And it was in the Bronx that Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke exposed the Bronx Slave Market, where domestic workers, most of them Black women, were paid as little as 15 cents an hour and subjected to workplace harassment and abuse. Their conditions were so appalling that it sparked city-wide organizing to protect domestic workers. This is my community’s inheritance.
That tradition is still alive in our streets today. In January 2026, 70 years after 1199 Service Employees International Union's historic 46-day strike at Uptown hospitals, hundreds of unionized NY State Nurses Association (NYSNA) nurses walked off the job at NewYork-Presbyterian on 168th Street and at hospitals across our community. They stood on their picket lines from dawn to dusk, through a brutally cold January, fighting starvation wages and conditions so unsafe that patients were being put at risk. After 41 days of striking and organizing, they won. That's the Uptown way.
From the factory floor to the hospital room to the living room, Uptown is still at the center of the labor movement. I think about this legacy when people ask me why I'm running for Congress. The honest answer is: I'm not sure I had a choice.
When you grow up as the daughter of Dominican immigrants and watch your parents work multiple jobs and come home exhausted, see your neighbors get pushed out, watch politicians blame the vulnerable instead of the corporations robbing them blind, all while sending their tax dollars to drop bombs on babies, you organize and fight back. And eventually, the question stops being why run and starts being how could I not?
Congress was not built for us. It was built to manage us. It was built to keep our labor, our rent checks, and our votes flowing to people who have never had to choose between rent and groceries, all while allowing the people who are the foundation of our city to fall through the cracks. But here's what the establishment never understood about Uptown and The Bronx: We don't wait for permission.
That's the legacy I am fighting to protect in Congress. I am a proud card-carrying United Auto Workers member. I've picketed alongside NYSNA nurses on 168th Street and Mount Sinai Morningside. I've fought with Student Workers of Columbia to protect their peers from harassment by the university and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In Congress, I will fight to pass the PRO Act so every worker can organize without fear. I will push to fund public housing, cancel medical debt, and end the forever wars that drain our communities to pad the pockets of defense contractors. I want to build power for the people on that crosstown bus before dawn who never get thanked for keeping our city running and are told to be grateful for what little they have. They built New York and deserve everything it has to offer.
May Day is a call to action. The workers of Uptown and The Bronx have been making the demand for a better life for over a century but Washington has ignored their demands for too long. I'm running to make sure it finally has an answer.
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Dismantling the Voting Rights Act Sets American Democracy Back Decades
While the Supreme Court is right to acknowledge that the situation today is different from past decades, it errs drastically in concluding that the proper path forward is to gut one of the key pieces of legislation that made that progress possible.
May 01, 2026
On April 29, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 along ideological lines to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race, color, or membership in a “language minority group.” Under this provision, states were allowed to consider race in drawing district maps for the purposes of protecting the voting power of people of color. That is, until now.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that created a second majority-Black district as “an unconstitutional gerrymander.” The map was created after the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals found that an earlier redistricting attempt with only one such district violated Section 2. The circuit court argued that the state unjustly divided Black communities in a way that “deprive[d] them of the opportunity to form effective voting blocs.” In response, Louisiana created a second majority-minority district, which Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.) won in 2024.
This new map was later challenged by a group of self-described “non-African Americans” who contended that it violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The Supreme Court concurred. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito remarked, the new map “would violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.”
Notably, the Supreme Court did not rule that Section 2 itself was unconstitutional. Rather, they determined that the framework used to determine whether a map violates the provision must be updated “so it aligns with the statutory text and reflects important developments” in the decades following the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). These “great strides” include abolishing voting tests, erasing disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race, as well as greater shares of people of color elected to political office. For the Supreme Court, these developments warrant a higher bar for Section 2 violations.
The Supreme Court misunderstands the present. It pretends that we live in a nation largely free of the very kinds of racial prejudices and issues that gerrymandered maps like Louisiana’s allow Congress to overlook.
This is a reckless conclusion. While recent decades have seen sizable progress in addressing racial discrimination, the court ignores two key points: Fiirst, progress does not mean that the problem is gone. Anti-voter bills designed to undermine the political power of people of color continue to be introduced and passed across the country. This is especially true in red states. As the Brennan Center of Justice notes, “Racially diverse states controlled by Republicans are far more likely to introduce and pass restrictive provisions than very white states with Republican control; in other words, it’s states like Texas and Arizona, not Wyoming or Utah, that are passing the most restrictive legislation.” In fact, on April 27, the Supreme Court issued a shadow docket ruling that allows Texas to implement a gerrymandered map that a Trump-appointed judge had previously found to be “racially discriminatory.”
Second, and as this very ruling indicates, progress can always be undone. Prior to this ruling, the Supreme Court had already undermined core aspects of the VRA. This includes eliminating “preclearance” requirements which mandated that states with histories of racist voting practices must have new election laws or procedures reviewed by a federal court or the Department of Justice. Since then, multiple states previously covered by those requirements, including Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, have seen their congressional maps challenged in federal court over concerns of racial discrimination.
Becoming complacent, as the Supreme Court would have us, puts the hard-fought victories that people of color have achieved at risk. Their emphasis on racial progress overlooks that even seemingly colorblind policies can set us back decades. Consider for instance the nominally race neutral SAVE America Act. It requires proof of citizenship, such as a US passport or birth certificate, to vote. This is effectively a poll tax that will disproportionately harm poor people and people of color. According to a 2023 YouGov poll, only about a third of Black Americans have a current passport. Moreover, some Black people may face more novel challenges. The Center on Budget and Policies Priorities reports that elderly Black people who were born under Jim Crow may never have been issued a birth certificate at all. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) put it, the SAVE America Act is “Jim Crow 2.0. […] What they're trying to do here is the same thing that was done in the South for decades to prevent people of color from voting.” In short, the past is not simply history; if we are not vigilant, it can become our future.
The multigenerational, centuries-long issues of race will require more than 60 years to solve. While the Supreme Court is right to acknowledge that the situation today is different from past decades, it errs drastically in concluding that the proper path forward is to gut one of the key pieces of legislation that made that progress possible. More fundamentally, the Supreme Court misunderstands the present. It pretends that we live in a nation largely free of the very kinds of racial prejudices and issues that gerrymandered maps like Louisiana’s allow Congress to overlook. Importantly, by diluting the voting power of people of color and by extension their congressional representation, it undermines their efforts to combat racism, colorism, and xenophobia.
Nevertheless, under this court’s decision, future plaintiffs will have to show that “the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” Simply demonstrating that a congressional map dilutes a minority group’s voting power will not be sufficient. As Justice Elena Kagan writes in her dissenting opinion, requiring “vote-dilution plaintiffs” to prove a “race-based motive” will “make success in their suits nearly impossible.”
Intentionality is an incredibly difficult legal standard to meet. Proving intent is among the core reasons why hate crimes are so difficult to convict in court. As such, it is no surprise that Kagan believes this ruling effectively renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring majority opinion, wrote that the Supreme Court should never have interpreted Section 2 “to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.’” In his view, Section 2 “does not regulate districting at all.” Thomas’ opinion is not only inconsistent with the legislative and judicial history of the VRA, but it is inherently contrary to the ideals of a democracy. Proportional representation is not a mere “entitlement”—it is a constitutionally mandated guarantee that ensures that communities have their unique concerns addressed and their interests protected.
The Supreme Court’s decision, in conjunction with the Trump administration’s unrelenting assault on the Constitution, have set American democracy back decades. Yet, this is no time to despair. Now more than ever, we must organize, build broad multi-state coalitions, protest, and demand that our rights be recognized.
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