News Feeds

In the first installment of a two-part series on the borderlands, Aaron and Lilly are joined by Laiken Jordahl, National Public Lands Advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, to discuss his work protecting public lands along the U.S.-Mexico border. Laiken shares a boots-on-the-ground perspective on what makes these places special and how border wall construction is actively impacting our public lands. Plus, Kate returns to the pod! She and Aaron cover updates for BLM and National Park Service nominees, the withdrawal of the public lands rule, and more. News

• Pearce on a list of candidates Senate hopes to confirm soon — E&E News
• Trump Just Withdrew Scott Socha to Lead the National Park Service — SFGate
• White House completes review of BLM public lands rule — E&E News
• Trump used Park Service to funnel millions to ballroom construction firm — New York Times
• President’s Budget Proposal Slashes National Park Service Funding Amid Ongoing Attacks on National Parks — National Parks Conservation Association
• Border wall map disappears from government website — Big Bend Sentinel

Resources

• Find Laiken Jordahl on X, Bluesky, Threads, TikTok, and Instagram
• Center for Biological Diversity
• No Big Bend Wall
• Mission Creep: How Trump is using the border to militarize our public lands — Westwise blog
• Watch this episode on YouTube 

Produced by Aaron Weiss, Kate Groetzinger, Lauren Bogard, and Lilly Bock-Brownstein
Feedback: podcast@westernpriorities.org
Music: Purple Planet
Featured image: San Rafael Valley border wall construction. Russ McSpadden, Center for Biological Diversity

The post Borderlands part 1: The threats to public lands at the border appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Here’s the way we’re used to thinking about bird breeding in North America: As our days get longer and temperatures rise, neotropical migrants arrive to produce and raise chicks alongside our...

Washington State Department of Transportation is engaged in updating the State Rail Plan, last revised in 2019. In its current form, the State Rail Plan does not adequately represent the state’s rail transportation needs.

A Washington State committee of Climate Rail Alliance submitted comments in response to a public input request.

WA State Rail Plan 2026 CRA.pdf

Also, Tom White submitted comments as a professional consultant and advisor to CRA, Rail Can’t Wait Coalition, and Solutionary Rail.

Comments – Washington 2026 State Rail Plan.pdf

The comments are extensive and represent what we feel should be the direction the state must take.

What is the State Rail Plan, What is the Purpose, What is Required?

Northwest Transmission Summit

Join us May 7-8 in Boise, Idaho to discuss how we can reinforce and expand our
transmission system to meet our region’s needs and build toward our prosperous
future.

Register

Montana Regional Connectivity Study

To encourage an informed discussion about transmission options in the Northwest, NWEC and our partner organizations commissioned Energy Strategies and Montara Mountain Energy to analyze potential pathways for delivering as much as 12,000 MW of new energy from Montana to the grid by 2035, while minimizing impacts on people and landscapes.

We are advocating for a new forward-looking, community first approach to transmission planning—one that seeks to engage with stakeholders and communities early in the planning process, to identify needs, concerns, opportunities and benefits right from the start. This study is a tool to begin important and necessary conversations to achieve the goal of a safe, reliable and efficient electricity grid that can provide access to the lowest cost energy resources while increasing grid reliability and economic development opportunities for Montana.

Read the Study

New NWEC Members

Welcome to our new members: Engineers for a Sustainable Future, Greenlight America, MeterHome, and The Nature Conservancy!

Federal and Regional Updates

Court Orders Emergency Protections for Columbia Basin Salmon after Federal Deal Collapses

At the end of February, a federal judge in Oregon granted critical emergency measures to protect endangered salmon and steelhead, which will provide a vital lifeline after the federal government unilaterally ended the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement last summer.

Read more from OPB, The Seattle Times, and Underscore News.

Washington

What happened in the 2026 legislative session?

The short 2026 Legislative Session ended on March 12. NWEC tracked over 80 bills and engaged on about 20 bills in Olympia and virtually. Thank you to everyone who engaged with us, followed along, and pushed affordable and reliable clean energy advocacy forward!

Regional & State Policy Director, Zach Baker, led the state’s first big legislative push on data center regulation in two pairs of bills (HB 2515/SB 6171 and HB 2245/SB 5982). NWEC staff, members, and partners pushed many impactful bills through the finish line, including but not limited to:

• SB 5982, closing data center Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) loopholes
• HB 1903, creating a state bill assistance program
• HB 2367, regulating the Centralia coal plant
• HB 2338, expanding community-scale weatherization
• SB 6200, granting renters cooling access
• SB 6355, establishing a transmission authority
• HB 1960, changing the tax structure for large wind and solar projects

What’s Next?
CETA Education. As we see mounting challenges ahead of 2030 (e.g., transmission, resource adequacy, increasing energy bills) and recognize that fewer legislators have historical knowledge on CETA, it will be important to educate legislators and the public on the purpose of CETA in the interim.
Data Centers. NWEC will continue to lead stakeholder engagement and help look for additional bill sponsors in the interim.

We expect to see work continue on data centers, utility wildfire liability, affordability, and CETA in the 2027 long session. Read more from the Environmental Priorities Coalition. We will share more
information on the bills that passed and lessons we learned this session in an
upcoming blog—stay tuned!

Supporters of HB 1903 from Front and Centered, Washington State Community Action Partnership, NW Energy Coalition, and Franklin PUD with Rep. Sharlett Mena on the Capitol steps in Olympia. Led by NWEC partner Front and Centered and Rep. Mena, HB 1903 establishes a statewide monthly energy bill discount program that will supplement existing assistance programs and create a partnership between the State Department of Commerce and utilities to more equitably deliver energy assistance. The program will be funded by the Climate Commitment Act and is expected to gradually grow as additional funding becomes available. NWEC worked closely with our partners to offer policy expertise and advocate for this bill, and it is a significant step toward reducing household energy burden and keeping bills more affordable.

Montana

NWEC and allies challenge PSC’s decision to keep data center information secret

On March 12, NW Energy Coalition joined member groups and allies in filing a challenge to the protective order NorthWestern Energy received with regard to its dealings with proposed data centers. The groups had previously filed a complaint at the MT Public Service Commission, arguing that the utility needed
to comply with state law and seek Commission approval prior to supplying power to new large loads in Montana. But NorthWestern has denied that the statute is applicable, and it has refused to publicly disclose the details surrounding three prospective new data centers, for which it has signed letters
of intent to provide electric service. Combined, the new data would account for additional electric demand of 1,400 MW—twice the size of NorthWestern’s entire statewide average electric load. Needless to say, a increase in electric service of that magnitude raises serious questions about grid reliability, infrastructure costs and affordability for Montana’s residential and commercial electric customers. We hope the Commission will reverse course and rescind its prior order allowing the utility to redact and
withhold this important information from the public.

Read more in The Daily Montanan.

Idaho

As Idaho faces rapid load growth across all customer types, the issue of who pays for new infrastructure and power needs is increasingly important. A primary way to address this issue is through the part of the utility rate-making process known as “cost of service” which allocates costs to the customer groups that are causing the increases. As part of settling Idaho Power’s recent general rate case, NWEC worked with our allies at Clean Energy Opportunities for Idaho and the City of Boise to cause a special docket focused on revising the cost of service method. NWEC recently filed initial feedback to Idaho Power that recommended some key improvements regarding the costs for transmission lines and new power plants. If adopted, these improvements should shift costs away from residential and small business customers and back onto the very large users whose demand contributes to overall system needs. NWEC will then build upon these cost allocation methods to create electric rates that will encourage more flexible use by all customers. Our goal is to enable growth that fits within the existing system and mitigate the need for additional infrastructure.

Idaho Power also recently filed plans to build hundreds of megawatts of new gas plants to meet peak energy demands beginning in 2029. These rising demands are not just data centers, rather every part of Idaho continues to grow as people move in, businesses develop, and Micron builds more memory chips. NWEC is reviewing the filings to determine if these forecasted peak loads are realistic and identify opportunities to address needs though more flexible customers and more battery storage to avoid adding additional fossil fuel generation to the mix.

NWEC in the News

Big tech took down new data center regulations, WA lawmaker says (Seattle Times)

NW environmental groups ask court to overturn Centralia order (Clearing Up)

Washington’s State’s data center regulation bill fails following pushback from tech industry (GeekWire)

Energy watchdogs: Data center protective order is unconstitutional (Missoula Current)

Judge orders spill at Northwest dams to aid salmon, despite energy concern (RTO Insider)

Next generation geothermal needs more than a technology revolution (Canary Media)

The post April 2026 Newsletter first appeared on NW Energy Coalition.

EWG testimony before the Health Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Healthier America: Legislative Proposals on the Regulation and Oversight of Food Iris Myers April 28, 2026

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. 

My name is Scott Faber, and I am the senior vice president for government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, a national nonprofit environmental health organization. I am also an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, where I teach food and farm law. Prior to joining EWG, I was the vice president for federal affairs for the Consumer Brands Association, formerly known as the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

Thank you for holding today’s hearing on legislative proposals to address food policy. Food that is safe, affordable and healthy, and that is produced in ways that reflect America’s shared values, is not a partisan issue. All Americans, regardless of party, want our food to be safe, affordable and healthy.

Many of our food and farm laws have not been updated in decades, or are not being implemented in ways that reflect our shared commitment to safe, affordable, healthy food.

Many Americans simply lack access to healthier foods. 

Diet-related disease is now our leading cause of death, surpassing smoking, as consumers struggle to distinguish between ultra-processed food, and healthier processed foods. 

And every year, thousands of us are sickened by pathogens, and hundreds die. Too many of us eat food that is contaminated with toxic metals or contaminants like PFAS. Too many of us eat food that contains food additives and substances that have been linked to serious health harms, including cancer.

In particular, nearly 99% of new food chemicals have, since 2000, been approved for safety by food chemical companies, not the Food and Drug Administration. And the FDA rarely reconsiders the safety of the thousands of chemicals we’re already eating. Many of these new chemicals were added to our food without the FDA’s knowledge. 

In the absence of federal action, our states have played an important complementary role, by phasing out the most troubling food chemicals, especially from school foods. Arizona, California, Delaware, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia are protecting our children from chemicals of concern in school foods.

Many of the bills that are the subject of today’s hearing would help make our food safer and healthier by:

• updating food labels
• banning chemicals of concern
• alerting consumers to hidden threats
• ending deceptive practices
• reducing heavy metal contamination, especially in baby and toddler food
• modernizing how we review food chemicals. 

To ensure the safety of our food, Congress should require that all new food chemicals be approved for safety by the FDA, not food chemical companies, and should direct the FDA to reconsider the safety of the chemicals we’re already eating, starting with food chemicals linked to cancer and other serious health harms. Chemicals that pose serious risks, like cancer, should not be in food, let alone considered “generally recognized as safe,” and should be quickly removed from our food. 

Food chemical assessments should be based on publicly available, scientific studies, and consumers should have the chance to share their views and receive a response from the FDA.

Congress should ensure that the FDA has the culture and clear deadlines needed to restore consumer confidence in the safety of food chemicals. Congress should also ensure that baby and toddler food is safe. Recent food safety failures and investigations have underscored the need to increase tests for more pathogens and immediately report the results, and to set and enforce tough standards for neurotoxic heavy metals like lead. 

To meet these responsibilities, Congress should allow the FDA to assess fees on chemical and food companies to ensure the FDA has the resources to be a full partner with our states.

Congress should not, as proposed by a bill under consideration at this hearing, make our broken food chemical safety system even worse by allowing food chemical companies to bypass FDA review altogether and instead allowing industry-funded panels of industry insiders to approve new food chemicals that can be immediately added to food.

Congress should not, as proposed, reduce the amount of information about new chemicals that must be submitted to the FDA. Nor should it allow a new chemical to be added to food without a thorough review and presume it to be safe just because the FDA has missed an artificial deadline. 

Congress should not, as proposed, weaken longstanding legal standards, allow hundreds of food additives and substances to escape FDA review through legal redefinitions, simply declare that all the substances now allowed in food are “safe,” or allow the chemical industry to decide whether new uses of chemicals are not “substantial” enough to require FDA review. Congress should not further delay standards for heavy metals in baby food.

Most importantly, Congress should not, as proposed, block states from providing important protections, especially when the FDA fails to protect us. State and local governments are partners critical to the FDA, inspecting food manufacturing facilities, ensuring our restaurants are safe, protecting us from toxic chemicals and contaminants in our food, enforcing food safety laws, and responding quickly when pathogens threaten our health. 

Our states are part of the solution, not the problem. 

Safer food starts with tougher standards and safeguards implemented by trusted, unbiased experts, not by industry-funded panels and secret studies. To help consumers identify healthier foods, we must make our labels clearer and expand access to healthier options. Processed foods can be part of a healthy diet, and many processed foods are healthier foods: low in added sugar, saturated fat and sodium – and free from dodgy additives. 

Congress should make it easier for busy consumers to find these healthier foods at glance.

Reforms that make our food safer and healthier will not increase the price of food. The same foods are being made in other nations without chemicals of concern or misleading labels and cost the same amount. Many factors impact the price of food – including the cost of labor, energy, transportation and marketing – but replacing a toxic chemical with a safe alternative or changing a label to help busy shoppers is not one of them.

Food manufacturers have thousands of additives and substances at their disposal, so banning a handful linked to cancer or other health harms will not increase the cost of food. By contrast, the cost of inaction – rising health care costs caused by poor diets and lost productivity due to foodborne illness – is significant and growing. 

In the absence of federal action, our states are working together to reduce the presence of ultra-processed food in our schools and to identify and address chemicals of concern that are banned elsewhere and excluded from identical products offered by the same food companies at the same cost.

I work with state and local legislators every day. Many of you were state and local legislators. We know state and local legislators are thoughtful, dedicated public servants who want what we all want: safe, healthy and affordable food. Until the FDA is doing its part, state and local legislators simply want the ability to keep us safe.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I am grateful this committee has chosen to hold this hearing at a moment when food policy is on the minds of so many consumers.

Areas of Focus Food & Water Food Ultra-Processed Foods Toxic Chemicals Food Chemicals California Press Contact Iris Myers iris@ewg.org (202) 939-9126 April 29, 2026

Registered nurses at UCSF Mission Bay in San Francisco, Calif., will hold a rally on Friday, May 1, to highlight patient safety concerns in the UCSF Birth Center. Nurses say they are deeply concerned about patient safety due to a revolving door of management, coupled with chronic and severe understaffing.

For many Western Snowy Plovers, the tiny, adorable puffballs you may be lucky to see skittering back and forth along the Pacific Coast, this time of year marks their first steps into parenthood. I...

Mitchell Lake Audubon Center serves more than 3,000 K-12 students each year with a small team of educators led by Erin Magerl, Senior Education Coordinator. This summer, she is joined by two Seasonal...

Are you ready to learn more about how beaver coexistence can build capacity for land managers and owners in California? Join the California Beaver Coexistence Training and Support Program on June 10, 2026 from 9-11:30am for an informative webinar featuring coexistence experts and practitioners.

By the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center
– visit their website to register for the webinar on June 10, 2026.

During their 2nd annual webinar, participants will hear from Grey Hayes, Beaver Coexistence Program Manager at Occidental Arts & Ecology Center. Grey will share about the California Beaver Help Desk. This new landowner support tool provides technical and financial support for those ready to expedite beaver solutions—from neighborhoods experiencing flooding, wetland managers with clogged culverts, and ranchers looking to preserve shade-producing trees.

The webinar will also feature presentations and discussions with two of the state’s leading beaver coexistence professionals: Cathy Mueller with Connected Ecology and David Krawitz-Greenspan of Wet Meadows Institute. They will share case studies showing how their work makes living alongside beaver easy and affordable for communities. The Beaver Institute’s Aaron Hall will describe the national context of California’s beaver coexistence efforts. Additionally, Molly Alves from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Beaver Restoration Program will offer updates about that program, and Vicky Monroe of CDFW’s Human Wildlife Conflict division will discuss how her team works to resolve human-beaver conflicts. 

Participants are encouraged to watch our previous webinar, which this year’s will build upon with timely new information and insights about coexistence in California. We anticipate ample time to answer participant questions during the webinar.

For more information, visit the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center:

• Beaver Coexistence In California Webinar
• Bring Back the Beaver

SilvaBio, the corporation seeking to mass clone and sell genetically engineered American chestnut trees, released a press release on 25 April claiming “four independent studies” validate the blight tolerance of their Darling 54 (D54) trees. SilvaBio repackages limited, short-term and previously available studies to create the appearance of momentum for a deeply flawed tree.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler

I am finalizing a textbook on climate risk and am posting chapters as I finish them. I’d previously posted chapters about embedded energy and physical climate risk; this post is a chapter on transition risk, the economic and social risks of the transition to a clean-energy economy.

Introduction

In the context of climate risk, transition risk encompasses the economic and social risks associated with a shift towards a low-carbon economy. Such an effort would fundamentally reshape our world and create critical financial uncertainty for assets and industries tied to the old, carbon-intensive system.

Net zero

Reaching “net zero” is the ultimate goal of most climate policy. This means reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, with any remaining emissions that are too difficult or costly to eliminate are canceled out by an equivalent amount of “negative emissions” — processes that actively pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These negative emissions are the “net” part of net zero and it acknowledges the practical reality that some sectors, like long-distance air travel or ocean shipping, may be incredibly difficult to decarbonize in the near future.

What are these negative emissions technologies? The two primary methods discussed are Direct Air Capture (DAC), which uses machines to filter carbon dioxide directly from the air, and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS), which involves growing crops, burning them for energy, and capturing and burying the resulting carbon dioxide. However, both technologies face significant hurdles, including high costs, large energy requirements, and, in the case of BECCS, immense land use needs that could compete with food production and biodiversity.

Once we reach net zero, global temperatures will stabilize — although they won’t recover to pre-industrial levels for tens of thousands of years. Getting the climate to actually cool on time scales we care about (decades to centuries) would would require pulling even more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, or deploying some type of climate engineering approach like injecting aerosols into the stratosphere.

The scale of the net zero transformation means that reaching net zero will fundamentally overhaul vast parts of the global economy. Many big sectors of our economy — energy, transportation, industry, agriculture — must be reshaped, and that reshaping will create enormous opportunities as well as painful dislocations. The transition to a low-carbon economy is not simply a matter of swapping one energy source for another; it requires rebuilding infrastructure, retraining workers, and redirecting trillions of dollars in investment.

Some industries are poised to prosper. Renewable energy is the most obvious example: in 2025, the world added over 700 GW of new capacity, and sustaining that pace for decades will require ongoing investment in manufacturing, installation, and maintenance of wind turbines and solar panels. The profits for those well positioned will be enormous.

The electric vehicle industry and its supply chains — from battery manufacturers to mining operations for lithium and cobalt — also stand to grow dramatically. Companies that build and manage electrical grid infrastructure, including new transmission lines and energy storage systems, will see surging demand. So too will firms specializing in energy efficiency, building retrofits, and emerging technologies like green hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuels. Even agriculture could see new revenue streams as farmers are paid to adopt practices that sequester carbon in soil.

Other industries, however, face serious decline. Fossil fuel producers (coal, oil, and natural gas) confront the prospect of their core product becoming obsolete, stranding assets worth trillions of dollars. Workers in these industries, from coal miners to oil rig operators, risk losing their livelihoods.

The effects extend well beyond extraction: refineries, pipelines, and petrochemical plants all face an uncertain future. The automotive sector will also see significant disruption, as the shift to electric vehicles renders the internal combustion engine and its complex supply chain of transmissions, exhaust systems, and fuel injection components irrelevant. Communities built around these industries may face economic devastation if the transition is not carefully managed.

This uneven distribution of winners and losers will create difficult economic and political challenges, particularly during the transition period. The enormous capital investment required — in renewable generation, grid modernization, EV charging infrastructure, industrial retooling, and carbon removal — must be mobilized quickly, creating the risk of supply chain bottlenecks, inflation in key materials, and financial instability. Managing this transition in a way that is both fast enough to meet climate targets and equitable enough to maintain broad public support is one of the defining policy challenges of our time.

Stranded assets

A core concept in transition risk is the “stranded asset”. A stranded asset is defined as an asset that loses significant value well before the end of its expected economic life. This loss is often sudden and unexpected, driven by changes in market conditions, technology, or policy. While this can happen for many reasons, it is a particularly potent risk in the context of climate change, arising from both direct physical impacts and the economic shifts of the energy transition.

For example, here is a house that literally fell into the ocean in North Carolina in Sept. 2025:

link

From Zillow.com, this was a pricey house:

link

 

This house could have stood for another few decades, but it collapsed into the ocean due to coastal erosion that was certainly made worse by sea level rise. When that happened, its value instantly dropped to zero, a stark, nonlinear impact that produced a stranded asset.

While physical risks can strand assets, the concept first gained prominence in discussions about transition risk and the fossil fuel industry. Oil and gas companies are valued in the trillions of dollars, with much of that valuation based on their proven reserves—oil and gas that is in the ground and ready to be produced. The transition to a net-zero economy, however, requires that a significant portion of these reserves be “left in the ground” and never burned. Once the market fully accepts that these assets cannot be produced due to climate policies, their value could drop to zero rapidly.

The danger of these fossil fuel assets becoming stranded extends far beyond the energy companies themselves. It poses a systemic risk to the broader economy because large swaths of the general public have financial exposure to these companies through their investments, including 401k programs, pensions, and mutual funds. The sudden devaluation of these energy assets could negatively affect many people’s investment and retirement funds, which in turn could have a widespread and devastating impact on the financial security of the general public.

This same principle applies to the real estate sector. Consider a commercial office building with a low energy efficiency rating located in a city that passes a new ordinance mandating high-performance standards for all buildings. The owner is suddenly faced with a difficult choice: either undertake a costly, large-scale retrofit to meet the new legal requirements or risk being unable to legally rent the space. If the retrofit is too expensive, the building’s value is stranded, as its primary function — generating rental income — has been eliminated by a policy change aimed at reducing emissions.

Another often-overlooked category of risk lies in intangible assets. For companies in the S&P 500, these assets — such as brand value, reputation, and intellectual property (IP) — can represent up to 90% of their total market value. Their non-physical nature makes them vulnerable to rapid devaluation. For example, imagine a company that holds a highly valuable portfolio of patents for a new, efficient diesel engine technology. If a major country or region, aiming to meet climate targets, decides to ban the sale of all new diesel cars, the market for that technology disappears. The intellectual property, once a significant asset, has its value evaporate almost overnight. This is a direct parallel to the risk facing fossil fuel companies, whose reserves — a tangible asset on paper — could become worthless if they cannot be produced.

A final critical category that is often overlooked is human capital. Human capital represents the skills, knowledge, and expertise that workers have developed over their careers — assets that can suddenly lose their value in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Consider a mechanic who has spent 30 years perfecting the art of repairing internal combustion engines. This individual has accumulated expertise in diagnosing problems, understanding the mechanical systems, and maintaining gasoline-powered vehicles. As the world shifts to electric vehicles — which require fundamentally different maintenance skills — this expertise becomes obsolete. The mechanic’s human capital, built over decades, is stranded.

The scale of this challenge is enormous. Huge numbers of workers have built their careers in fossil fuel industries. Coal miners possess specialized knowledge about underground operations, safety protocols, and extraction techniques. Oil field workers understand drilling technologies, reservoir management, and petroleum systems. Pipeline operators and refinery technicians have invested years developing skills specific to a carbon-intensive economy. As these industries contract or disappear entirely, these workers face the prospect of their expertise becoming rapidly becoming worthless.

This creates both an economic and social crisis. Unlike a stranded power plant that can be written off a company’s books, stranded human capital represents real people with families, mortgages, and communities that depend on their income. A 50-year-old coal miner cannot simply retrain as a software developer overnight. The geographical concentration of these industries compounds the problem — entire regions have been built around fossil fuel extraction, creating communities where the primary source of skilled employment may disappear.

The human dimension of stranded assets also creates political risk for the climate transition itself. Workers facing the loss of their livelihoods can become powerful opponents of climate action, slowing the transition for everyone. The fear and anger generated by the transition can translate into political movements that resist or reverse climate policies, as workers vote to protect their immediate economic interests over longer-term economic reality.

The TCFD Framework: Four Key Drivers of Transition Risk

To better understand and manage transition risks, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) developed a framework that organizes these risks into four distinct categories. This framework has become the global standard for how companies and investors think about and report climate-related financial risks.

1. Policy and Legal Risks

Policy and legal risks emerge when governments and courts take action to address climate change. These interventions can fundamentally alter the economic landscape, often with little warning.

Carbon pricing represents one of the most direct policy tools. When governments implement a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, they make it more expensive to emit CO2. For instance, a carbon price of $50 per ton of carbon dioxide would add around $20 to the cost of a barrel of oil, fundamentally changing the economics of oil production and consumption. Companies that built their business models around cheap fossil fuels suddenly face dramatically higher operating costs.

Efficiency standards create another layer of policy risk. The UK’s Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES) provides a clear example: it prohibits landlords from renting properties with poor energy efficiency ratings. A landlord who owns an older, inefficient building faces a stark choice — invest heavily in retrofits or watch the property become unrentable, thereby creating a stranded asset.

The legal dimension adds another layer of risk through climate litigation. There are many lawsuits winding through the courts where people are taking fossil fuel companies to court because they have been or expect to be harmed by climate-change-driven extreme weather. This potential climate liability could expose fossil fuel companies to enormous financial risk, much like tobacco companies faced when the health impacts of their products became legally actionable.

2. Technology Risks

Technology risk represents the classic story of disruption — when a new, cheaper, or better technology makes existing technologies obsolete. In the climate context, this risk is accelerating as clean technologies have reached critical tipping points.

The most dramatic example is the drop in renewable energy costs. Solar power costs have fallen nearly 90% over the past 15 years. In most parts of the world, building a new solar or wind farm is now cheaper and faster than building a new coal or gas plant — even without subsidies. This is rapidly reordering energy economics and energy markets. Coal plants that were expected to operate profitably for 40 years are being shut down early not because of regulation, but because they simply can’t compete economically with cheaper energy sources. Natural gas plants will be next.

Electric vehicles present another technological disruption. As battery costs decline and performance improves, EVs are becoming not just environmentally preferable but superior products — they accelerate faster, require less maintenance, and increasingly cost less to own and operate than internal combustion engines. This technological shift threatens not just automakers who are slow to adapt, but entire ecosystems built around gasoline vehicles: gas stations, oil change shops, parts suppliers, and even dealerships whose business models depend heavily on service revenue from complex internal combustion engines.

3. Market Risks

Market risks encompass the shifts in supply, demand, and investor sentiment that can rapidly revalue assets and companies.

As an example, demand for transition minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper is soaring as the world builds batteries and renewable energy infrastructure. Companies that secured supply chains for these materials early have gained significant competitive advantages, while those arriving late face production bottlenecks and inflated costs. Conversely, demand for thermal coal is collapsing in many regions, leaving coal mining companies with reserves that may never be extracted.

Perhaps more significant is the shift in investor perceptions. For decades, oil companies were valued based on their proven reserves — the oil and gas they had rights to extract. Now, many investors view these same reserves as worthless, unburnable carbon that will never generate revenue. This shift in perception led BP to write down its assets by $17.5 billion in 2020, with Shell following with a $22 billion write down. These companies acknowledged that much of their oil would likely remain in the ground forever.

The power of changing investor sentiment was dramatically demonstrated in 2021 when Engine No. 1, a tiny activist hedge fund, successfully won three board seats at ExxonMobil. Their argument wasn’t environmental but purely financial: Exxon’s failure to plan for the energy transition was destroying long-term shareholder value. This showed that transition risk has moved from the margins to the center of corporate governance.

4. Reputational Risks

Reputational risk reflects the changing expectations of consumers, employees, and society at large. As public concern about climate change grows, companies associated with high emissions face damage to their brands and their social license to operate.

The financial sector illustrates how reputational concerns translate into business decisions. In 2019, Goldman Sachs announced it would no longer finance new thermal coal mines or Arctic oil exploration. While framed partly in risk management terms, the bank explicitly cited reputational considerations and changing client expectations as key drivers. They recognized that being associated with these projects was becoming bad for business, potentially costing them clients and talented employees who increasingly consider environmental factors in their career choices.

Consumer pressure is also reshaping entire industries. The rapid growth of plant-based milk alternatives like Oatly directly responds to, among other things, consumer concerns about dairy’s environmental impact. Traditional dairy companies, seeing their market share erode, are scrambling to launch their own non-dairy alternatives. This shift isn’t driven by regulation or technology costs but by changing consumer preferences that make high-emission products less desirable, regardless of price or quality.

5. Putting it together

These four categories of risk — policy and legal, technology, market, and reputation — don’t operate in isolation. They interact and amplify each other, creating feedback loops that can accelerate the transition and magnify risks for unprepared economies.

Consider how technological advances in renewable energy trigger cascading effects across all risk categories. As solar and wind become cheaper than fossil fuels (technology risk), governments gain political cover to implement stricter emissions standards and carbon pricing (policy risk), knowing these policies won’t dramatically increase energy costs for voters. These policies, in turn, shift investor capital away from fossil fuels and toward renewables (market risk), further driving down clean energy costs through economies of scale. Companies slow to adapt find themselves not just technologically obsolete but facing reputational damage for clinging to outdated, polluting technologies (reputational risk), which makes it even harder to attract capital, customers, and talent.

The automotive industry provides another vivid example of these interconnected risks. As electric vehicles improve and battery costs fall (technology risk), governments implement EV mandates and phase out internal combustion engines — Norway by 2025, the UK by 2030 (policy risk). These policies signal to investors that traditional automakers without credible EV strategies are poor long-term investments, triggering capital flight (market risk). Meanwhile, young consumers increasingly view gas-powered vehicles as environmentally irresponsible, especially luxury gas vehicles (reputational risk). Each risk reinforces the others: technological improvements justify stricter policies, which shift market dynamics, which shape public perception, which in turn creates pressure for even more aggressive policies and faster technological development.

Understanding these interconnections is essential for understanding transition risk. A company cannot address one type of transition risk while ignoring the others — they must recognize that these risks compound and prepare for the systemic changes that result from their interaction.

The “Just Transition”

The recognition that the shift to a low-carbon economy will create winners and losers, particularly among workers and communities reliant on fossil fuel industries, has given rise to the concept of a just transition. A just transition is an effort to ensure that the benefits of a green economy are shared broadly and that the costs do not fall unfairly on those who can least afford them.

The core idea is to provide support, retraining, and new economic opportunities for workers and communities whose livelihoods are threatened by the phase-out of carbon-intensive industries. This is not merely an ethical consideration; it is a pragmatic one. The threat of widespread job losses can create powerful political opposition to climate action, potentially slowing down or even derailing the transition for everyone. Therefore, managing the human side of the transition is critical to its success.

In a just transition, we would repurpose skills: For example, the skills required to build an offshore oil rig are similar to those needed for constructing an offshore wind platform. A just transition would facilitate this shift through targeted programs.

The private market is unlikely to manage this process efficiently or equitably. Government action is therefore needed to fund retraining programs and help workers seamlessly switch to new jobs in the growing green economy.

Germany’s approach to phasing out coal mining in its Lausitz region serves as a prominent example. The German government is investing €40 billion to manage the process by funding new infrastructure, research institutes, and extensive retraining programs. The goal is not just to compensate for lost jobs but to actively build a new, sustainable economic future for the region.

Conclusion

Transition risk represents a fundamental restructuring of the global financial and social order. As this chapter has detailed, the journey toward a net-zero economy is far more than a simple technological swap. It is a complex, multi-dimensional shift driven by the interplay of policy, technology, and market and social dynamics. While this transition offers immense opportunities for innovation and growth in green sectors, it simultaneously creates the systemic threat of stranded assets — devaluing not just physical infrastructure and fossil fuel reserves, but also intangible intellectual property and the human capital of millions of workers.

Ultimately, the success of this overhaul hinges on the ability to manage these risks. Because the private market is not naturally equipped to solve the social dislocations caused by such rapid change, proactive governance and strategic investment are essential to ensure a just transition, so that the shift to sustainability does not leave vulnerable communities behind. Balancing the urgent need for decarbonization with the economic security of the workforce is not just a moral imperative, but a practical necessity to maintain the political and social stability required to reach our climate goals.

This is a draft of a section of my climate risk textbook (slightly edited & reformatted to make it appropriate for Substack). I’d very much like to identify errors now, so if you see any, please let me know in the comments.

The HOME Alliance invites you to join an upcoming webinar exploring the growing risks and impacts of land-based geoengineering. Approaches such as BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage), biochar, and enhanced weathering are gaining traction. But what do these schemes mean for communities, ecosystems, and climate justice?

Originally published by Californians for Electric Rail on April 24, 2026 In the last installment of this series, we learned about how political choices by specific counties are driving a $30M shortfall that threatens service cuts. These cuts are part of broader flaws in Metrolink governance that have stymied a more ambitious vision since its founding, and threaten to […]

Los Angeles’ Metro and Orange County’s OCTA are seeking to cut nearly $10 million from the Metrolink budget. Read more.

The City of San Francisco has published a complete application notice for the plans to redevelop the 4th and King Station into a master-planned neighborhood in SoMa, San Francisco. The notice establishes a deadline for the planning department to make a final decision by mid-June. Prologis is sponsoring the development, in partnership with Caltrain. Read […]

Seven new books on food, climate, health, rivers, communities, deniers, and energy

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Station construction near 19th and Q streets will begin early 2027, with a 2031 opening planned. Read more!

National Nurses United is proudly and enthusiastically taking part in May Day Strong actions on May 1, 2026. NNU recognizes that May Day presents a unique opportunity to demonstrate to the Trump administration and the billionaire class the real potential of working people’s power when we stand united.

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In this CBC national radio interview with host Piya Chattopadhyay, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford discusses the impacts of the war (on top of the disruptions from Trump’s tariff policies) on Canada’s economy, in the lead-up to the federal government’s spring fiscal update.

What the government's policy playbook might mean for your pocketbook.

The post CBC Sunday Morning Feature Interview: Trump’s War and the Macroeconomic Outlook appeared first on Centre for Future Work.

Ist Conference Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels 1st Conference April 24-29 Santa Marta, Columbia A Just Transition is grounded in the effective respect of our right to self-determination and must be based on the guarantee of our internationally recognized inherent and distinct collective rights over our territories, land and waters. It is not limited to […]

The post Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels first appeared on Indigenous Environmental Network.