David Fenton

The Fenton Forecast — what future will we choose in AI, climate, democracy, health? Now on all podcast platforms. The dissidents Ezra Klein won’t interview. Because the future is up to us.

This just has to make you think that people still pushing fossil fuels for energy are in a state of delusion and denial.

American ingenuity is unmatched. The future belongs to clean energy. We have the tools, the talent, and the drive to build it. Trump should get out of the way of progress and let American innovation do what it does best.

Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods. In turn, it widens the gap between the included and the excluded, between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those who remain on the margins. #MagnificaHumanitas

You're measuring adaptation, not hazard. Climate deaths fell because we built early warning systems, evacuation networks, and emergency medicine, not because storms got weaker. CRED, whose data you use, has explicitly warned against this framing. Polar bears recovered from the 1973 international hunting ban, not from a friendly Arctic. The 1960s baseline you cite wasn't a census; it was a guess. IUCN still lists them Vulnerable, and ice-dependent subpopulations are declining. Global burned area fell because African savannas were converted to cropland. Forest burned area, the climate-relevant metric, has risen sharply. Canada 2023 set the all-time record. Each of those numbers is a story about human capacity to cope with a worsening climate. Not evidence the climate isn't worsening. Complacency is a worse policy adviser than panic.

Israel has turned its prisons into a network of torture camps for Palestinians. Prisoners are subjected to severe violence, deliberate humiliation, starvation, sleep deprivation, denial of medical care and abuse in everyfacility they are held in. Some have also been severely sexually assaulted. Since October 2023, at least 84 Palestinians have died in these torture camps. The policymakers, and primarily Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, brag in TV puff pieces and on social media about what is happening in these torture camps. Today, we published “Living Hell”, a report on the situation of Palestinians in Israeli custody. It is based on the testimonies of Palestinians released in recent months, along with research, reports, news updates and Israel Prison Service figures, and continues our previous report on the issue, “Welcome to Hell”, from August 2024. Systematic, deliberate abuse continues to define Israel’s policy toward Palestinian prisoners in its custody, and is another feature of the Israeli regime’s coordinated onslaught on the Palestinian people. Link to the full report > btselem.org/publications/2…

@Handre This is misleading as you leave out payroll and state and local taxes. When you add those, the bottom 50% pay much much more. Meanwhile taxes on the wealthy are HALF what they were in the early 1960s. When there was plenty of “success.”

Progressive taxation punishes success and rewards failure. In the US, the top 10% already pay 70% of income taxes while the bottom 50% pay 3%. Yet politicians demand the "rich" pay their "fair share." They want to claim an even larger share of high earners' productivity.

The dawn of 24/7 solar power. Cost of battery storage is dropping at an astonishing speed. Costs of storing solar or wind energy have fallen more than 50% since 2022, 27% only last year alone. This is an absolute game changer. It turns around the economics of power. It makes solar and wind competitive not only to coal, but to gas. In April 2026 for the first time the world produced more electricity from solar and wind than from gas. Solar and wind are economically competitive to gas 95% of the time in giants as China, India and Brazil Financial Times have more: lnkd.in/eyvx2bw5

If 9 Jewish paramedics were killed ANYWHERE in the world it would be called terrorism. And we’d never hear the end of it. Israel slaughtered 9 paramedics in 72 hours, most of which we’ve seen on film, and we only hear their names on Twitter.

The left did not “turn on” Jews. The most popular leftist in America is Bernie Sanders. Jon Ossoff won his primary unopposed a week ago. The next Democratic Senate leader is likely Brian Schatz. Don’t confuse a right wing Middle Eastern state with American Jews.

We have entered the incredible new era of 24/7 firm renewable power, an industrial and sovereign inevitability. The economics are brutal for anyone holding fossil assets. Here's the raw data from the latest 2026 IRENA, IEA, and Ember reports: THREAD

🎥 David Hogg on the Democratic National Committee: “The establishment is effectively dead… This is an incumbent protection racket. It is focused not on winning elections for Democrats. In DC, it is focused on keeping the same people in power, even if it keeps us in the minority.” Host Jen Welch said the Democratic Party cannot succeed as a “party of prostitutes” with the same “pimps”—corporate and special interest donors— as the Republican Party. 🔗 Source: IHIP (YouTube). Full episode linked w/ @davidhogg111 linked below.

Twenty years ago today, An Inconvenient Truth made its debut in movie theaters across the U.S. I’ll be honest: I was skeptical that my slideshow about the climate crisis could become a successful movie. But thanks to our immensely talented director, Davis Guggenheim, Jeff Skoll, who made the ultimate decision to make the movie, and the incredible team behind the film — Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, Scott Z. Burns, Lesley Chilcott, Ricky Strauss, Diane Weyermann, and so many others, the film was a huge success, and opened the eyes of millions around the world to the threat posed by the climate crisis. While I wasn’t sure that there’d be widespread public interest in a science-based slideshow, I have never doubted humanity’s ability to solve this crisis. We know we must act, and Mother Nature is making that clearer and clearer every day. We’re already feeling the rapidly worsening impacts of a warming planet. Those impacts are evidence that our cause is even more urgent than it was 20 years ago. And as a result, the global movement for climate action has grown into the largest morally-based movement in the history of the world. We also know now that we can act. Indeed, in the past 20 years, we’ve made tremendous progress: The world came together in 2015 to forge the historic Paris Agreement, which despite the recent U.S. withdrawal, continues to drive global action and ambition. Incredibly, last year, renewables made up 86% of all the new electric power installed around the world. In the U.S., renewables were 92% of all new power capacity! Electric vehicles are now 25% of all new car sales worldwide and the sales of gasoline-powered vehicles have been declining since they peaked in 2017. Unfortunately, however, the crisis is still getting worse faster than we are deploying the solutions — solutions that are now way cheaper than the dirty and dangerous fossil fuels still spewing heat-trapping pollution into the sky as if it is an open sewer. So, while this is a natural occasion to reflect on the 20 years since the movie came out, I’m focused much more intensely on what we need to do now in order to shape what our world will look like in the next 20 years. I’m still presenting my updated slideshow all over the world, training grassroots climate leaders and working with partners in 194 countries and territories who are creating change in their communities, in their workplaces and schools, and in their nation’s policies. From what I’m seeing and hearing, I have no doubt that we will win this struggle. But it is still not clear that we will win it in time to avoid catastrophic damage and the dangerous negative tipping points that the climate scientists have long been warning us we must prevent. Will we muster the moral courage and political will to solve this crisis? Well, if you ever doubt our ability to do so, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource. It’s up to all of us to renew it. Photos: Still from An Inconvenient Truth, 2006. Climate Reality Project training in Nashville, TN, 2026.

Democrats’ explicit focus on climate change has led back to Donald Trump and reversed what marginal climate progress Joe Biden achieved, argues Matt Huber. A more promising approach: pursue pro-worker policies that benefit the climate without centering it. jacobin.com/2026/05/climat…

@jacobin You’re certainly right about NGOism. They don’t reach the public with all that $. THIS IS WHY people don’t think cchange will affect them. Nobody tells them. Not telling them even more won’t help. You can’t transform the economy without people knowing WHY. They won’t support it.

@jacobin Plus if we don’t have an informed and organized working class we won’t’ get the massive transformation of the economy — and legislation — needed to save us. IRA wins by 1 vote are not wins. Even with power, you need the people.

@Matthuber78 @jacobin Except Joe Biden never focused on climate change. He never even gave a speech about it. I would argue the opposite - Democrats’ failure to educate the public about how cc affects them is the problem.

My response to more NYT discourse in @jacobin.

@Joecitizen18 @ChairHochschild @CalEnergy It’s working in California. In Spain, Portugal and Scotland. Meanwhile remember they are competing with heavily subsidized fossil fuels.

@dfenton @ChairHochschild @CalEnergy Solar and wind is not the answer, not with the current technology available. Maybe one day but not now. Without subsidizing it the math vs output doesn’t work. Germany is a good example of bad decisions

Solar is cheap energy. And fast. In 2004 it took a year to deploy 1 GW of solar. In 2026 half a day. And the sun shines all night in batteries and other storage. @ChairHochschild of @CalEnergy on fentonforecast.com linktr.ee/fentonforecast #solar #climatechange

The Sahel is at record temperatures. India is baking at 45°C. 90 dead in Uttar Pradesh from flooding. This is not a forecast. This is not a warning. This is now. Every week, another record. Every week, more bodies.

Solar to overtake coal on Texas grid for the first time ever this year @CanaryMediaInc canarymedia.com/articles/solar… "For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal in the power market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are adding more solar there than anywhere else in the country. As a result of those diverging trajectories, the federal government expects ERCOT will receive 78 billion kilowatt-hours from solar in 2026, and just 60 from coal."

@jacobin If you don’t help the working class understand — which you can — that climate threatens them, we will never get the legislation needed to remake the economy in time to save us. Why do you think the working class is stupid?