Trump Administration Pays Duke Energy $129 Million to Halt Offshore Wind Farm

It was the fourth such deal struck by the administration to get companies to forfeit their offshore wind leases.

By Maxine Joselow, The New York Times, June 29, 2026

The Trump administration on Monday said it would pay Duke Energy $129 million to abandon its plans to build an offshore wind farm off North Carolina.

It was the fourth such deal struck by the administration to throttle the development of offshore wind power, a source of renewable energy that President Trump has disparaged for decades.

Under the agreement, Duke Energy would surrender its lease in federal waters for a wind farm that was planned in the Carolina Long Bay area, roughly 15 to 22 miles off southeastern North Carolina. The project was in the early stages of development and construction had not yet begun.

The government plans to reimburse Duke Energy $129 million, slightly less than the amount that the utility paid for the lease under the Biden administration. Duke Energy would then reinvest that money in other sources of energy favored by the Trump administration, which could include new nuclear and natural gas projects, according to the utility.

Scientists and environmentalists say that offshore wind farms could play a crucial role in the fight against climate change. Unlike burning fossil fuels, wind turbines do not generate any of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the planet. And unlike large-scale solar farms, they do not take up vast amounts of valuable land.

The Trump administration, however, has criticized offshore wind projects as ugly and inefficient.

“President Trump’s vision of unleashing affordable, reliable American energy for our country’s communities and using common sense to put the American people first is being implemented,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement on Monday.

Mr. Burgum also repeated his earlier claims that offshore wind farms threaten national security. Last year, the Interior Department cited those concerns when ordering a halt to the construction of five other wind farms off the East Coast, saying their spinning turbines could interfere with military radar. But several federal judges struck down the stop-work orders, saying they were unpersuaded by the administration’s arguments.

After its losses in court, the administration pivoted to a new strategy: paying developers to walk away from offshore wind projects. It struck the first such deal in March with the French energy company TotalEnergies.

That deal saw the government pay TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon plans to build two wind farms, one off New York and the other in the same area off North Carolina. Seven Democratic-controlled states have sued the administration over that agreement, calling it an illegal use of taxpayer dollars.

The latest deal with Duke Energy means the government has so far committed to spend more than $2.5 billion to get companies to terminate their offshore wind leases.

Duke Energy, based in Charlotte, N.C., is one of the nation’s largest utilities. It provides electricity to roughly 8.7 million customers in six states and natural gas to roughly 1.6 million customers in four states.

“This settlement allows Duke Energy to refocus $129 million in ways that directly benefit our customers and communities in the Carolinas,” Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe, the executive vice president and chief executive of Duke Energy Carolinas, said in a statement.

Riley Cook, a spokesman for Duke Energy, said in an email that the $129 million would be reinvested in “reliable, diverse energy sources that can help meet growing demand” for electricity. He said the investments could flow to nuclear reactors and “grid infrastructure projects” in the Carolinas, though he did not provide specific details.

But Pasha Feinberg, an offshore wind strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said the scuttled wind project could have helped meet soaring power demand, too.

“We need more electricity, not less,” Ms. Feinberg said in a statement. “Canceling clean energy projects is self-defeating. Paying off companies so they will abandon them is just ludicrous.”

Gov. Josh Stein, Democrat of North Carolina, also sharply criticized the agreement.

“The Trump administration is strong-arming companies into abandoning clean energy, and the industry is folding like a beach chair,” Mr. Stein said in a statement, adding that his state needed the power and jobs that the wind project would have generated.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/climate/trump-offshore-wind-duke-energy.html

America’s Thirst for Gasoline May Not Recover After Iran War

People drove less and bought more-efficient cars when fuel prices surged, habits that could stick over the long term.

By Lydia DePillis, The New York Times, June 23, 2026

Judy Vassallo, an 89-year-old retired art teacher who lives on her own in a leafy neighborhood just north of Center City in Philadelphia, used to take her 2002 Honda CRV to the suburbs for a visit with friends, or downtown for doctor appointments and Pilates classes.

But since gasoline prices shot up after the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February, she couldn’t stomach paying nearly twice as much to fill her tank. Instead, Ms. Vassallo started taking the city bus, which is free for seniors. She found that she liked it — saving on gas and parking tickets.

“Once it becomes a habit, it’s not an onerous thing, it’s built into the pattern of my behavior,” Ms. Vassallo said. “You’re going into the city, you’re going to take the bus. And I’m finding that it’s so much easier.”

Americans are powerfully attached to their cars, and their spending at gasoline stations jumped 21 percent from February to May. But that ability to spend has limits. According to Dow Jones Energy, consumption was 6.1 percent lower in May from a year earlier. Some of that is a long-running trend owing to the increasing efficiency of passenger vehicles, said Denton Cinquegrana, the company’s chief oil analyst, and about half is probably a consumer response to higher prices.

Much of that response comes from people forgoing discretionary driving, like road trips and grandchildren’s traveling sports games, particularly those with lower incomes. But in recent years, Americans have also gained greater ability to adapt, as more employers have allowed for telecommuting and more electric vehicles have arrived on the market.

“There’s more flexibility within working situations,” Mr. Cinquegrana said.

Despite the car-dependent nature of most American cities, sticker shock does make a difference: After the 1970s oil embargo, oil consumption per person in the United States fell, and didn’t return to the same level for another 20 years.

Some of those changes can last. The energy crisis gave rise to federal fuel-economy standards that spurred gas-saving innovations in vehicle design, keeping consumption lower than it might have otherwise been even as driving recovered.

Over the past decade, studies have shown that gasoline prices affect consumption both when they are going up and when they are going down. According to one 2021 paper, drivers have become more responsive to high prices over time, potentially because of energy price shocks that have prompted them to try different forms of transportation.

One option that has become more available lately is battery power. Some popular models, like Toyota’s RAV4 and Camry, are now available only with hybrid engines.

According to Cox Automotive, hybrids have been flying off dealer lots since the war started. And even though Congress truncated Biden-era incentives for fully electric vehicles, enough of them are coming off subsidized leases to supply a healthy used market.

“We’ve seen a change in consideration,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox. “People who need to buy a car, they’re looking online at these options that are more fuel efficient.”

One of those motivated buyers was Karin Ranta-Curran, a university administrator in Denver, who had decided to buy a third car because her youngest son started needing to drive himself around more. The family had considered getting an electric vehicle, but held off because of the expense of installing a home charger.

The war in the Middle East changed that.

“We woke up that morning and Israel started bombing Iran, and we thought, ‘OK, this might be the time,’” said Ms. Ranta Curran, who found a good deal on a used electric Lexus and now drives it to work.

She’s happy with the car and not having to pay for gas, even if geopolitical circumstances made it necessary. “We’re certainly not early adopters, so this was a bit of a forced decision in some ways.”

That is not an option for most people. Vehicle prices have climbed steeply since the pandemic, interest rates remain high, and low-income workers are under pressure as wage growth slows. That’s leading consumers to hold off on big-ticket purchases, counteracting what might otherwise be a faster replacement cycle toward cleaner cars.

Even bicycle sales have declined substantially from last year, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association. It attributes the slowdown to an unsteady economy and tariffs that drove prices higher, although e-bike sales continue to grow.

Baylii Adams-Yates is among those who feel stuck. She attends college in Morgantown, W.Va., and works as a dental assistant. She owns a 2016 Jeep that gets about 13 miles to the gallon, and doesn’t think she could sell it for enough to buy a more efficient car. But having a car that’s so expensive to drive also means she can’t take jobs that are a little farther out of town, or make extra income by doing deliveries.

“I tried doing DoorDash for the week, and I drained my gas tank within a day, every day,” said Ms. Adams-Yates, 25. “I would love to be able to do that, but it’s not realistic.”

Other countries, particularly in Europe and Asia, are more affected by petroleum shortages than the United States has been. They also have access to affordable electric vehicles imported from China, and have taken more policy measures to reduce energy demand. The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecast last week that global oil consumption would decrease this year, rather than increase, as it originally had expected.

For many U.S. consumers, there’s no way to cut back on gas, and they just have to reduce spending in other ways.

Take Kjersten Oudman, who runs a farm with her husband outside Sioux Falls, S.D. They have no choice but to fill their tractors with diesel to plant in the spring, and no choice but to deliver boxes of vegetables to 130 farm share members once they’ve started harvesting, filling the pickup truck with gas about three times a week. Unlike big logistics companies, they can’t tack on a fuel surcharge; the subscriptions are paid at a fixed price.

“We’re going to have to eat it for the foreseeable future,” Ms. Oudman said. Shelling out an extra few hundred dollars a month means tightly budgeting on groceries, which she tries to keep to $80 a week for her family of five, and postponing investments in the business. They were hoping to insulate their wash-and-pack building to store vegetables for longer, but the extra fuel costs pushed the project off.

“We got about halfway done and were like, ‘Well, I guess we’ll have to wait now,’” Ms. Oudman said.

It’s not just gasoline. Oil heating is still common in some parts of the United States, and the cost has jumped far more than natural gas or electricity since the war started.

Jennifer Kewley moved in 2020 into the house her great-grandfather built in Milwaukee, and replaced the roof and the siding. But it still has an oil heater, and filling it up costs about double what it did before the war.

In March and April, she set the heat at 55 degrees and bundled up while working from home doing medical billing for a hospital system. She filled up the tank only halfway, for $600, and is hoping the price will drop by the time she needs the heat again in October. Over the long term, she’s thinking about how she might cobble together the money to replace the old boiler.

“I think that this is a situation that could happen again,” Ms. Kewley said. “I don’t think this is a one-off, where I could just go another 20 years like this.”

Whether oil and gas demand recovers also depends on the price of everything else, since consumers have to balance rising costs for food, utilities, insurance and other necessities.

Judith Awkerman already made one compromise, giving up the dream of moving into a nicer house once her children were through college because home prices have jumped around where she lives near Newport, R.I. She has also given up frequent visits to her two sisters, who live in other parts of the state. She’s not sure she’ll return to those longer drives, even if gas prices recede.

“I don’t think it’ll be like, ‘Yay, we can do whatever we want,’ because it’s cumulative with everything,” she said. “Car repairs, medical expenses, medications — it would take a whole system downgrade, where inflation is way down, which of course we won’t have for a while, I don’t think.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/business/economy/gasoline-demand-destruction.html

The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America

Op-ed by Robinson Meyer, The New York Times, June 14, 2026

Meyer is a contributing Opinion writer and the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on climate change.

It’s not so easy to harvest the sunshine if you live in America. Homeowners can hire someone to install solar on their rooftops, but it can take many years for it to pay for itself. You might be able to buy a share in a nearby solar farm, but only if you’re lucky enough to live in a place where community solar is available. If you live in an apartment or condo, forget it — in many states, you have no options at all.

But that might be changing soon in more than half the country. A technology — known as plug-in, balcony or garden solar — is already enormously popular in Germany, in part because you can buy a kit for less than $600 at IKEA. It’s a small solar panel system, often producing up to 1,200 watts of electricity, or generally more than a refrigerator consumes, that you can affix to a wall, hang on a railing or prop up in a garden — and then plug directly into a wall socket. With the help of a small device called a micro inverter, it pumps electricity into your household circuits to offset your power demand.

At least 30 states have passed legislation to legalize these plug-in solar kits or are considering similar bills. The idea has wide appeal: Last year, Republican-led Utah became the first state in the country to allow plug-in solar sales.

Although these kits are modest in scale, they have the potential to change how Americans understand and consume energy. More states should get on board with them as part of a broader campaign to transform how our country harnesses renewable and zero-carbon power.

There are a few good reasons America should embrace balcony solar. For one, it will expand access to a clean power source that’s playing an increasingly important role in the global energy system. After a decade of staggering cost declines, solar has become a powerhouse: Last month, the United States — despite the Trump administration’s meddling with renewable energy projects — generated more electricity from solar than from coal power for the first time ever.

A balcony or backyard solar kit could also recruit a much larger group of people to cut their greenhouse gas pollution — in particular, renters. Climate advocates often coach homeowners to replace the big machines in their homes with cleaner alternatives: Buy a heat pump, not a furnace; an induction stove, not a gas range; an electric vehicle, not an internal-combustion car. But renters like me can rarely make permanent changes to the buildings where we live, and we may not own a car. In most cases, that’s fine, of course: Taking public transit, walking instead of driving and living in an apartment or condo give us a low-carbon lifestyle, gratis. Balcony solar is a small way that apartment- and condo-dwelling Americans can take ownership of their energy choices and cut down their pollution on the margins.

At the same time, most Americans live in single-family homes, and one of the biggest reasons only about 9 percent of them have solar panels is the price tag. The United States has eye-watering rooftop solar costs compared with those in the rest of the world. A standard 7-kilowatt rooftop solar system that costs $28,000 to install in the United States would cost roughly $4,000 in Australia or $10,000 in Germany, according to the research and advocacy group Permit Power. What experts call our “soft costs” — marketing and sales, as well as our mishmash of local permitting rules and practices — can add thousands of dollars to the cost of a project.

Many of the countries that have brought down the cost of rooftop solar to low levels rewrote local rules. Here in the United States, the truly transformative reforms for cutting rooftop solar costs would have to happen in the states. Going forward, balcony solar should be able to avoid some of rooftop solar’s creeping costs: It will be bought off-the-shelf like a consumer product, not sold by a team, like a swimming pool; it can be installed by just about anyone, with no special training; and it requires minimal approval.

There are still some technical questions to resolve about how balcony solar will work in the United States, in part because our electricity networks work differently than Europe’s. A plug-and-play balcony solar system has yet to be certified in the United States; testing began only recently. Utah’s law legalizing plug-in solar requires any system to be certified as safe by outside authorities; other states should follow its lead.

There is one concern I have about balcony solar, which is that users could exaggerate its contribution in the future. The little panels have a certain romance to them, suggesting we all might generate our own homespun electricity, the way our frontier forebears baked their own bread or sewed their own clothes. But they are too small to ever replace the power grid. On the year’s coldest mornings and hottest evenings, and on many more days besides, the vast and powerful electricity generation and distribution system will still be needed. And that is OK: We won’t be able to take on climate change, or achieve our greatest economic ambitions, until we work together to build a new power grid.

But if I can dream for a second, I hope balcony solar’s charisma and low cost help us imagine the energy-abundant future we are so close to achieving. Americans and our government have a tendency to treat the current energy system, and the current set of technologies that enliven it, as finished and fixed. In reality, they are always changing. The electricity system of the 2000s relied far more on coal than ours does now. We will not always pump a carcinogenic cocktail of fossil fuels into our vehicles just to run errands or go to work, just as we no longer illuminate our homes with kerosene.

Plug-in solar demonstrates one version of the coming changes: With its small size, it makes balcony and backyard power production possible. But it’s only one messenger of many from that new world. As batteries continue to develop, larger and larger amounts of energy will be stored at ever-smaller sizes and scales, and that will enable innovations and technologies we cannot yet imagine — technologies that will change our world as much as the sextant, the bicycle or the jet engine. Some new zero-carbon energy technologies are already at the cusp of widespread deployment or at least technological feasibility: enhanced geothermal, space-based solar, mined hydrogen, new forms of nuclear fission and even nuclear fusion.

Balcony solar will play one small role in that drama. It is cheap and modular and an affable addition to the energy system. And it may yet teach Americans the importance of adding new energy generation, recruiting ever more Americans to the head-spinning potential of the new technologies that stretches out before us — should we only wish to change.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/opinion/solar-panels-balcony-backyard-plugin.html?searchResultPosition=1

Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges

The clean energy sector is showing resilience despite challenges thrown at it by a hostile White House, a recent report found. A string of legal victories has further dampened the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.

By Aman Azhar, Inside Climate News, June 15, 2026

The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.

On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed the appeal after the Justice Department filed a motion for its voluntary dismissal on June 10. 

The case against Trump’s executive order was filed in May, 2025 by a coalition of attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, D.C., led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Monday’s decision affirms the Dec. 8 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris, which concluded that Trump’s January 2025 executive order was unlawful, finding the sweeping ban on wind projects was “arbitrary and capricious” and exceeded the president’s authority. 

Environmental and wildlife advocacy groups applauded the move. Nancy Pyne, a senior advisor to the Sierra Club, said renewable energy continues to prevail and grow in spite of Trump’s relentless attacks.

“While everyday Americans face soaring bills and unstable prices,” she said, “renewable energy offers an affordable, common sense solution to lower costs and protect our health and our environment.”

This latest victory in a string of legal setbacks for the administration comes at a time when clean energy production continues to surge despite a slew of policy, permitting and procedural hurdles imposed by the White House. 

According to a recent report from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and Atlas Public Policy, a record 79.7 GW of clean power are projected to come online in the U.S. in 2026, even as roughly 8 GW of clean energy projects were canceled in the first quarter of the year.

The project pipeline remains strong, the report found, with 222 GW of clean energy capacity planned or under construction nationwide as part of 693 GW of power announced through the first quarter. Developers have announced plans to invest an estimated $377 billion in new projects through 2031, the report said in its key findings. 

The country already has 471 GW of clean power online, with a record 51.6 GW newly added in 2025, “the equivalent of about 25 Hoover Dams,” the report notes. Solar and battery storage now account for 85 percent of the planned pipeline.

The Monday court ruling arrives roughly a week after a different federal court restored a key tax-credit pathway for wind and solar developers. 

On June 6, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia tossed an August 2025 treasury rule that made it difficult for wind and solar projects to qualify for federal tax credits. The change eliminated the longstanding practice whereby developers locked in tax credits by showing that 5 percent or more of a project’s total cost had been spent. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the administration had not given a sound reason for the change, and sent the rule back to the IRS to reconsider.

“We see a strong correlation between the high rate of cancellation and the anti-renewable policies from the Trump Administration—from aggressive executive orders through attempts to repeal pollution protections,” said David Villagrana, lead counsel for clean energy tax solutions at EDF. In an emailed response, Villagrana said the Trump administration has significantly delayed projects through administrative measures. “Development within any industry likes consistency; for clean energy, the Trump administration has ensured a lack thereof.”  

He cautiously welcomed the court’s overturning of the revised 5 percent rule, saying the administration could decide to appeal the district court’s decision but “it would have to overcome the district court’s careful and thorough analysis of the many legal deficiencies in the IRS’ notice.”

The EDF report also tracked a sharp uptick in gas projects. “[T]otal planned and under construction natural gas capacity rose from 44.8 GW in Q4 2025 to 65.5 GW by the end of Q1 2026, an increase of 20.7 GW,” its authors wrote, more than four times the combined growth of solar, storage and onshore wind over the same period. Fossil fuels’ share of planned capacity has climbed from 9 percent at the end of 2022 to 27 percent, “a threefold increase that points to an uptick in fossil fuel generation investment,” according to the report.

In an interview with Inside Climate News, Jon Gordon, senior policy director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy advocacy group, said the gas buildout was “very concerning… particularly from an environmental standpoint,” warning that new plants are “likely going to be in service for 30 years plus, once they’re constructed.” 

He said “the big reason we’re seeing this surge of natural gas is this administration that’s been throwing roadblocks in the way of renewables and providing incentives for fossil fuel.” 

For a clean-energy state like Maryland, he said, the challenge was real because “a lot of our problems are very short term. We need new supply right away,” and yet gas plants “are the longest to build.” Gordon argued that economics increasingly favors the clean energy pathway because the cost of building gas plants “has almost doubled in just a couple of years,” while solar and battery costs keep falling.

The EDF-Atlas report also found that 80 percent of the nation’s existing, planned and under-construction clean power capacity is located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. Of the 30 districts with the most clean power capacity, just five are Democratic. Texas leads every state with 164 GW, nearly double California, in second place with 83 GW.

Abe Silverman, an assistant research scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, cautioned against reading the map in partisan terms. Talking to Inside Climate News, he said the first thing he looks to is “where is land cheap.”

“Is it really the red and blueness of the state, or is it the underlying cost of land and the density,” he asked. Much of the growth is in areas with low-cost land, he said, and it is further shaped by interconnection policies.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15062026/trump-administration-abandons-fight-against-wind-energy/

Arctic Refuge Oil Draws Few Bids, Despite Trump’s Push for ‘Liquid Gold’

An auction to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended with just 10 percent of the available land claimed for oil development.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, June 5, 2026

An auction of oil leases in Alaska’s remote Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended on Friday with just nine bids covering only about 10 percent of the available land, undercutting President Trump’s claims that drilling in the pristine wilderness area would set off an economic boom.

The sale brought in about $3.7 million, nearly half of which came from the state of Alaska’s publicly owned economic development corporation. Most of the 58 tracts available drew no bids at all. No major international oil companies entered bids.

Mr. Trump had campaigned in 2024 on turning oil development loose in the Arctic refuge, an isolated habitat for species including polar bear, caribou and millions of migratory birds, promising that extracting what he called “liquid gold” there would lower the price of gasoline and groceries. Republicans who pushed for opening the region said the refuge would generate a multibillion-dollar windfall as soon as drillers were allowed inside.

Previous sales mandated by Congress during Mr. Trump’s first term also drew little interest. The handful of leases that had been sold were suspended, and then later canceled, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But with the war in Iran sending oil prices spiking and the federal government actively encouraging companies to drill, analysts said they had expected a more robust auction this time.

“We’re in the middle of a massive supply shortfall, and if there was ever a time to look past political and reputational risks, it would be now,” said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm.

Mr. Trump has called the refuge “the biggest find anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia,” and he has directed the government to expedite development in Alaska. The administration declared the day a success.

“The interest was solid,” Kevin J. Pendergast, the director of the Alaska office at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, said as he announced the results. The B.L.M. director, Steve Pearce, hailed what he called “strong industry interest.”

When the auction ended, two companies had bid on five tracts of land totaling about 70,000 acres. About 689,000 acres were offered for leasing.

One was the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state-owned economic development corporation that is currently the only oil and gas leaseholder in the refuge. The authority had three of the winning bids, totaling about $1.5 million. The other winning bids went to Hex L.L.C., an Alaska-based oil and gas production company.

Mr. Book said he believed that many of the largest oil and gas companies had stayed away because of the logistical challenges of drilling in such remote territory, as well as concern that a future administration could again cancel leases.

The top Democrats on environmental committees in Congress, Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Jared Huffman, Democrat of California, called the results “an embarrassment for the Trump administration.”

In a joint statement, they called the auction “an insult to our entire country, by sacrificing and selling off America’s public lands for pennies on the dollar.”

Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans of Alaska, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge spans roughly 19 million acres along the North Slope of Alaska. One of the last truly wild places in the United States, it is home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife.

It also includes land considered sacred by the Gwich’in, an Alaska Native group.

But the refuge is estimated to contain as much as 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, though many experts believe that estimate is based on old data. The Alaska corporation currently holds leases in the refuge, but there is no active drilling.

Environmental activists said the tepid sale results and the absence of major oil and gas companies was evidence that the market has little interest in the Arctic refuge.

“The government spent public money to hold an auction no major company showed up for, and that tells you everything you need to know about the economics here,” said Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group.

Alaska Native communities were divided over the auction. Members of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, who have been fighting oil and gas development in the region for decades, argue that drilling threatens an areas they call the Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, “the sacred place where life begins,” and the Porcupine caribou herds that Indigenous communities have relied on for thousands of years.

“We will continue to fight the Trump administration’s leasing program, and work with our friends and allies to protect this sacred and irreplaceable landscape from development of any kind,” Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, said in a statement.

Other Alaska Native communities have argued that oil and gas development is critical to economic development.

“It’s a step forward, as far as we’re concerned,” said Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, which represents Inupiat leadership organizations on the North Slope and supports oil and gas projects. “We look forward to continuing to advocate for it and for the overall self-determination of the folks on the North Slope.”

The controversy over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has spanned almost 50 years. Alaska officials and many Republican lawmakers have long sought to allow drilling there, citing the jobs and revenue it would create. But the refuge was protected for decades, largely by Democrats in Congress.

That changed in 2017 when Republicans, in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, pushed through a tax bill allowing sales of leases of up to 1.5 million acres in the refuge.

Two weeks before Mr. Trump left office in 2021, the Interior Department held the first auction. It was a dud. So was the second auction in 2025, ending without a single bidder.

There will be three more sales in the Arctic Refuge between now and 2035, all mandated in Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill that passed last year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/climate/anwr-lease-sale-alaska.html

Twenty Years After His Film, Al Gore Tweaks the Climate Script

Mr. Gore is still giving the slide show that “An Inconvenient Truth” was built around, but with changes that reflect a shift in the discussion of climate change.

By Chico Harlan, The New York Times, May 25, 2026

It was the world’s most famous movie built around a slide show: Al Gore, in a darkened auditorium, clicking through images that warned of a heating planet. Within the film’s first minutes, Mr. Gore described a “moral imperative to make big changes,” a call he echoed several times onstage.

Twenty years after the release of “An Inconvenient Truth,” his Oscar-winning documentary, it is remembered mostly for its cultural resonance — for bringing awareness of global warming into the mainstream. Mr. Gore and his intense focus on climate change energized both supporters on the left and critics on the right. In a self-effacing bit on “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Gore warned viewers about glaciers on the attack. A year later, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

As the years passed, Mr. Gore has kept going with his slide show, giving presentations in hundreds of cities worldwide, most recently in Nashville earlier this month.

And with time, the slide show has changed in ways that reflect how the conversation about climate change has shifted over the course of a generation.

Onstage in Nashville, Mr. Gore made a central argument that would have been inconceivable two decades ago. Rather than directly invoking morality, he led with economics.

The cost of renewable energy had plunged. He talked about “market forces” and about the “spectacular, unprecedented” technology revolution — including low-cost solar panels and wind turbines — that now make aiding the planet an affordable choice.

“We’re in a different world now,” Mr. Gore said in Nashville. “The options are terrific.”

The moral aspect of climate advocacy has had a long legacy, burnished not only by Mr. Gore but also by Pope Francis, who portrayed a link between environmental degradation and societal rot. In the late 2010s, a wave of youth protesters argued that political leaders and corporations had a duty to safeguard the planet for future generations.

But as that movement waned, some felt the moralizing had at times brought a political backlash. After the documentary’s release, Mr. Gore was criticized in some right-wing circles for hypocrisy given that he traveled widely and lived a lifestyle reliant on fossil fuels for energy. Later, to attend climate events, the activist Greta Thunberg twice crossed the Atlantic by sailboat in a conspicuous effort to avoid polluting air travel, a move that some critics called a publicity stunt out of reach for noncelebrities.

Environmentalists, meantime, made a new case: that wind and solar energy were becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. Bill McKibben, a founder of the campaign group 350.org, said climate advocates no longer had to “fight against the force of economic gravity.”

“This is the place where we have the most leverage,” he said. “Instead of having the economic wind forever blowing at us, now it’s in our sails. We do finally have a tool to work with.”

Johan Rockström, the scientist who leads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, went so far as to say that the “winning argument” in pushing for cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions “is not the ethical and moral one, it is the economic one,” in part because of the political blowback the moral argument can attract.

In an interview, Mr. Gore spoke at length about his evolving slide show, which he estimated he had given thousands of times. Did he move away from the moral message?

“It remains the central argument,” Mr. Gore said, pointing out that he was still making this case in speeches and at meetings. But he also noted that “experience says there are a lot of people who will be more easily be persuaded by the impact on their pocketbooks.”

He described his target audience as people “whose minds are changeable,” and that’s where he thinks an economic argument, as well as one about health implications, has grown more effective. He also reasoned that the moral case, as strong as he felt it was, had perhaps reached its persuasive limits.

President Trump has forcefully rejected the idea that renewable energy has an economic advantage, last year calling green energy a “scam” and describing climate change as the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” During his first term, Mr. Trump criticized “prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse,” with Ms. Thunberg, the climate campaigner, in the audience.

The consequences of climate change, of course, still raise moral questions. Wealthy countries are responsible for the bulk of emissions, while poorer nations disproportionately face the damage. Deadly heat waves singe countries where most can’t afford air conditioning, while hurricanes barrel into small islands and slice their G.D.P.s. Last year, the top United Nations court ruled that nations had a duty to prevent environmental harm and that any breach constituted a “wrongful act.”

“The idea that there is one way to talk about climate, it never was true and isn’t true now,” said Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Mr. Gore still begins his slide show as he did in the “An Inconvenient Truth” days, with an image of Earth taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. After that, the differences in content are immediately apparent. Back then, though he cited examples of how climate change was driving extreme events, he said the phenomenon was just “beginning” to show itself. Now, he devotes a full hour to current events such as fast-intensifying hurricanes, wildfires and shrinking glaciers that are reducing water supply.

In the 2006 documentary, he noted that the 10 hottest years on record had come over the previous 14 years, since the 1990s.

Compare that with his current slide show, in which he notes that the 10 hottest years have all happened since 2015.

“It’s still getting worse much faster than the solutions are being deployed,” Mr. Gore said in the interview.

Mr. Gore said he had been presenting some version of the slide show since the 1980s and had performed it more than 1,000 times even before the documentary’s release, using a Kodak Carousel projector in the early days. He said that “one of the most important presentations” was on the deck of a houseboat in Center Hill Lake in his home state, Tennessee. He was with longtime friends, with beer flowing. They weren’t the most obvious audience for a climate talk. But, he said, they were interested.

“It emboldened me to start taking it on the road in a much more forceful way,” Mr. Gore said.

A scene in the documentary showed him at a desk, laptop open, jotting notes on paper. “I guess the thing I’ve spent more time on than anything else is trying to identify all those things in people’s minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this,” Mr. Gore said at the time.

Asked why he continued with the slide show 20 years later, he described it as a “challenge of a particular kind.” But this time he was talking about himself, not the planet. “It’s one of those, when you pick it up, you can’t put it down,” he said.

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