1. The Land of Lincoln Gearing Up Its Grid to Go Green
How Illinois is laying the gridwork to meet its energy and climate ambitions
Looking to build on a ten-year record of climate and energy affordability law, Illinois legislators are now considering the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act (CRGA) to grow and modernize the state’s energy grid and add virtual power plants to get cheap renewable energy online faster.
They have broad support from stakeholders like labor, industry, and consumer advocates, who don't want to see the state's clean energy momentum stall because of infrastructure limitations.
The bill’s momentum is a testament to the staying power of green energy and an acknowledgment that Illinois (and the country) must build new grid infrastructure to support 100% renewable energy by 2050 and projected load growth from electrification and data centers.
An added benefit of CRGA: it would also mandate a public study of the state’s grid to determine where it is underutilized and how the latest technology could increase efficiency without building new wires.
James Gignac, Midwest policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program: “Transmission is crucial to a reliable and affordable grid because it allows us to move clean energy from place to place and be more resilient in cases of extreme weather.”
2. Major UK Pension Drops State Street Over Climate Failure
The £28 billion People’s Pension wants responsible, sustainable management.
The People’s Pension, a UK retirement fund, pulled its investments from State Street, citing the firm’s failures to responsibly manage climate risk. The fund is moving on to other firms whose managers have a demonstrated commitment to sustainability and climate risk management.
This move illustrates rising tensions between investors and asset managers, the latter of whom are targets of partisan political pressure in the U.S. to ignore climate risk.
While the anti-ESG backlash is driving asset managers’ current retreat from climate considerations, it is good to remember that most asset managers haven't meaningfully integrated climate risk into investment decisions and still invest heavily in fossil fuel projects, despite the risks.
3. Trump Guts NOAA and the National Weather Service, Putting People and Businesses at Risk
These cuts will put lives at risk as tornado, fire, and hurricane forecasting, preparedness, and response all depend on the now-weakened early warning systems.
Donald Trump and his politicized team are already a third of the way through their Project 2025 handbook. The latest target? The meteorologists, hydrologists, scientists, and technicians whose weather models form the backbone of global weather forecasting and early warning systems for hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, and other extreme weather that keep people safe. NWS was already understaffed, and despite its staggering 73:1 ROI, Elon Musk’s DOGE were indiscriminate in their mass firings of probationary and newly promoted long-time staffers.
No private forecaster is equipped to gather even a fraction of the data that NOAA publishes daily; every single forecaster relies on data from NOAA and the NWS, and there isn’t infrastructure in place — satellites, detection stations, analysis, data sharing infrastructure, etc. – to replicate their services.
People and businesses count on this data and analysis every day to stay safe, deliver goods and services reliably, and evaluate investment and resourcing decisions. With climate change driving increased extreme weather, these capabilities are all the more important and dangerous to lose.
4. Big Tech Flexes Its Political Muscle in Virginia
Big Tech is buying influence to block regulations on data centers.
In Virginia, the Data Center Coalition (DCC) — which represents the biggest players in the world’s largest data center market — is flexing its muscle in the political arena. Before the 2025 legislative session started, DCC spent $165,000 to lobby Virginia lawmakers and defeat tougher data center regulations.
It worked. Ambitious bills to rein in data centers failed — the only measure to pass requires some local approval for new data center projects. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has been remarkably friendly to Big Tech, is expected to sign it.
All this comes as Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) sounded the alarm: meeting data center electricity demand will be “very difficult,” even if the state abandons its climate targets. The JLARC study also warned that Virginia ratepayers will see higher electricity bills as the grid is expanded to serve data center growth.
Virginia’s politics are already dominated by special interests — namely Dominion Energy, which routinely donates upwards of seven figures each election cycle to candidates. Now, the Data Center Coalition is adding yet another source of money stifling consumer interests.
5. Subrogation: The Buzzword Opening the Door To Climate Accountability in 2025
California and Hawaii are both seeking to make polluters pay for climate damage.
In the fight to hold fossil fuel companies financially accountable for climate disasters, a new word keeps coming up: “subrogation.” California’s AB 222 — the Affordable Insurance and Climate Recovery Act — illustrates the concept: it allows insurers to sue fossil fuel companies to recover the costs of climate-driven disaster claims. The logic is simple: people shouldn’t pay for climate disasters caused by fossil fuel pollution — the polluters should.
Hawaii is pursuing subrogation, too. This week, a subrogation bill (SB 1166) sponsored by Senator Chris Lee passed out of the Hawaiian state senate. If enacted, Hawaii insurers would also be able to sue polluters to recoup climate disaster losses, such as those that occurred in the wake of the devastating Maui fires.
These bills rightfully acknowledge that past carbon pollution is driving current financial losses. As Big Oil has known for years, burning fossil fuels is driving climate change, climate change is driving more extreme weather, and extreme weather is leading to direct economic harm.
6. Who Really Controls Energy Costs – and Your Monthly Bill?
Commentator and novelist Cory Doctorow lays out how regulators are setting energy rates in secret, and considers what we can do.
Energy prices are rising nationwide, but there’s little transparency in how rates are set, and that’s by design. As Doctorow writes, typically, a tiny, obscure consulting group called the Society of Utility and Regulatory Financial Analysts (SURFA) helps giant investor-owned utilities push rate increases through state public utility commissions (PUCs). In these commissions, the regulators who set policy are increasingly captured by the utilities through aggressive lobbying, political ties, and revolving door relationships.
Example: For decades, Dominion Energy bankrolled Virginia legislators and regulators with campaign contributions to lock in high rates and block competition.
These captured regulator challenges are not new. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt found similar dynamics in the Gilded Age of New York politics.
“The regulating commission, my friends, must be a Tribune of the people, putting its engineering, its accounting and its legal resources into the breach for the purpose of getting the facts and doing justice to both the consumers and investors in public utilities,” said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a 1932 Oregon speech. “This means, when that duty is properly exercised, positive and active protection of the people against private greed!”