Dan McCarthy

@danmccarthy.bsky.social

2519 Followers 934 Following

Senior editor at Canary Media

Screenshot of an article with the below text: Things are getting messy. President Donald Trump has gutted the only significant decarbonization law the U.S. ever managed to pass. Blue-state governors are backsliding on clean energy goals and easing up on fossil fuels under the cover of affordability. Oil and gas companies have dropped the pretense of caring about climate. ESG is dead. The ​“climate hawk” is dead. The words ​“pragmatism” and ​“realism” have become as inescapable in climate policy discourse as reminders of planetary warming are in the weather reports. Yes, the climate conversation has changed dramatically over the last year, at least in the Western world. But the techno-economic trends that are driving decarbonization forward have not. Clean energy — mostly solar — is still being built at a blistering pace. EVs are beginning to run gas cars off the road. China’s emissions could be starting to decline. The world is on track for far less warming than it was when the Paris Agreement was signed a decade ago, and we’re still in the early innings of clean energy deployment. In 2026, I’ll be watching this dissonance between decarbonization vibes and reality. Will politicians, companies, and others grow increasingly quiet on climate, all while the clean energy revolution speaks louder and louder?