Earth Day, 2026.

Climate change continues. The economic bigwigs should be chasing the goal to decarbonize, but instead they wanted tax cuts and healthcare cuts, they wanted growth hacking and peptides, they wanted media controls and age verifications and for people to gamble on what color the sky will be once earth hits 2.5 degrees Celsius.

Solar grows cheaper, we can build it out, we can build out wind, but the pace hasn’t hastened. We’ll get there later than we’d like and worse for the wear, but there’s not a damn thing the oil companies and their Trumpified EPA can do to stop humanity’s march. All they can do is slow it a bit, but that stalling will only last until the right price points and demand points are reached.

In many ways, they’re fighting against themselves. The trade blunders under this administration have opened Canada to Chinese-made electric vehicles, and some of those will rub off on our northern border. Slowly but surely, first Canadians and later Americans will seek out cheaper cars and trucks as a result. The grid will continue to expand and to add capacity, and most of the new capacity will be some form of clean energy for the fact that it’s the least labor-intensive and best capital investment. As older gas generators eventually get replaced, it won’t be with new generators. It will be more wind and solar.

But the lag will be painful. How many summer camps, how many hurricanes, how many wildfires? The rising seas will eat coastal lands, requiring costly migrations of people and industries. That will shift demographics. People forced to move by climate change aren’t going to vote for people who deny it exists.

The earth is a nice place to live, and with the right effort it could be nicer, sooner. The economics will eventually make that happen, but for now we are stuck with the right-wing politics of make-believe. They overestimate the costs of reasonable regulations, while underestimating the costs of pollution. They are the pro-lifers that choke the unborn in the womb through air pollution. They are the free-market cronies who block wind farms and force coal plants to remain operating.

Even in places run by relatively-sane people, all it takes is a spike in oil prices to cause them to worry and cancel taxes or think about reworking decarbonization plans. The same happened to tech companies, worried about becoming irrelevant if machine learning suddenly takes over, they abandoned their climate pledges.

Those who stay the course would be better for it. The opportunity cost is not what it seems. The real opportunity, from clean power, is long-term risk-avoidance, not temporary price spikes. You would be better to borrow to build, for by the time you replace today’s new solar panels, they will be cheaper still. Any temporary savings from backsliding will be higher costs as carbon prices are artificially managed while the sunshine remains free. The wind remains free.

Happy earth day. Go register to vote and vote for those who believe in the future. It’s out there, and it’s coming. The sooner we adopt policies for it, the better off we’ll be.