The great solar-coal flip

For the first time on record, solar generated more electricity than coal across the entire U.S. - despite active federal policy pushing the other direction.

☀️ Good news: The UK shut off its last coal plant in 2024. China now installs more wind and solar annually than the rest of the world combined. And last month, the U.S. crossed a milestone that seemed impossible five years ago: solar beat out coal on the national grid, for the first time in history.

🌡️ Not-so-good news: A super El Niño is set to supercharge heatwaves, droughts, and floods in the coming year. These in turn impact everything from coral bleaching risks to food price spikes worldwide.

🌈 What you can do: Find the warming stripes for your city at Show Your Stripes, share them, and use them to start one conversation. Those conversations matter more than you think!

Check out David Swain's blog post here and his Q&A here.

Find your warming stripes here.

Thank you to Anne Cloud with ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Voice Over for the Planet⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for narrating this edition of Talking Climate. 

Music by Bradley Myer.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.talkingclimate.ca

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Talking Climate with Katherine Hayho. Each episode, we explore how climate change is affecting the people, places, and things we love, and what we can do to make a difference. From science to solutions and stories that inspire, you're in the right place for real talk about real change. This week we're talking about solar passing coal, a looming Super El Nino, and showing your stripes. Let's dive in. Good news. Coal built the Industrial Revolution. And now wind and solar are beating it. The UK, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, turned off its last coal-fired power plant in 2024, and now gets nearly half of its power from sun and wind. China, long seen as the poster child for coal, now installs more wind and solar power annually than the rest of the world combined, and is hitting its renewable energy targets well ahead of schedule. Now, the U.S. is starting to catch up in the solar race. There's already more solar than coal on the Texas grid. And for the first time on record last month, solar generated more electricity than coal across the whole U.S., 12.8% versus 12.2%. This is a huge flip from just five years ago, when coal-generated power outweighed solar by a factor of three. The forces driving this transition aren't political. In fact, the U.S. government has been actively trying to hold back renewables. That's what makes this trend so remarkable. It's happening despite active federal policy opposition, including paying a French company a billion dollars to give up its offshore wind leases. Solar is now the cheapest source of electricity in history, and the market knows it. In 2025, a new solar project was installed every 59 seconds in the US alone. At this point, trying to hold back the clean energy revolution seems as futile as doubling down on horses and buggies when cars are not only available, but cheaper. Not so good news. A super El Nino is brewing this year. What is it and why does it matter? El Nino is named for the Christ child, as it's often characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures off the coast of Peru that begin around Christmas time. By spring, a long tongue of warm sea surface temperature stretches all the way across the Pacific to Australia. Anytime the ocean temperatures in this region hit 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than average, it's in El Nino. But this year, they're already at 1 degree Celsius and climbing fast. On June 11th, NOAA confirmed that El Nino conditions have developed, putting the overall chance of it reaching very strong or super intensity at 63%. The peak is expected at the end of this calendar year. El Nino impacts temperature and rainfall patterns around the world. It typically brings unusually dry conditions to Australia and much of India, wet conditions to the southern U.S., and warmer than usual winter over northwestern and central North America. This in turn exacerbates climate extremes, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, and more. Past El Nino events have been associated with massive wildfires in Australia, floods in East Africa, record-breaking coral bleaching events across the Pacific, and hefty price spikes in food around the world as so many agricultural regions are hit simultaneously. The steep economic losses due to the knock-on effects for everything from marine fisheries to the global supply chains have in turn been shown to affect civil conflict, with one study estimating that even a regular El Nino doubles the probability of new civil conflicts arising throughout the tropics. A super El Nino has only happened three times since 1980, in 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16. The 1982 El Nino was dubbed perhaps the worst in recorded history, causing up to 2,000 deaths and triggering droughts and wildfires in Africa, Australia, and Indonesia, while dumping record rainfall on Peru. A 2023 study put the global economic toll from that El Nino event at $4.1 trillion. Then there's the fact that this event is occurring over a background of a rapidly changing climate, which makes everything that much worse. Dartmouth geography professor Justin Mankins says the current forecast implies this could be the costliest El Nino on record. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres minced no words, warning that El Nino conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world. Impacts will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with a devastating speed. For a deeper dive, I recommend climate scientist Daniel Swain's blog post and recent livestream QA linked in the show notes. What stripes, you ask? Your warming stripes, of course. Created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading, the warming stripes show how a place's temperature has changed over time. Each stripe represents a year. A cooler-than-average year is blue, an average year is white, a warmer-than-average year is pink, and you can guess what red means. Last year, the warming stripes were on display at MoMA as part of the exhibition Pirouette: Turning Points in Design, alongside the first Mac computer and Shigata Karita's original emoji designs. Ed even appeared on a MoMA podcast, talking about creating the visualization. This year, the UK's National Trust is projecting them onto St. Michael's Tower on Glastonbury Tour with the message: start a conversation about our warming world. Want to find the warming stripes for the place where you live? Visit Ed's website, showyourstripes.info, to see how any place in the world has warmed. Then once you've found your stripes, share them on social media. Or you can even wear them. I have a dress and a woolly scarf and a cotton scarf in the warming stripes. And you can get them in everything from flip-flops to bathing suits. And there is even an Australian organization named Common Grace that has a Knit for Climate Change program. However, you choose to show your stripes, use them to start a conversation today about how the world has changed since we were born and how our future is in our hands.ca. Until next time, keep talking climate.