Green Lights Jan. 24: Top stories this week
Don't miss a single story from the best of Callaway Climate Insights.






. . . . Welcome back to Green Lights. Here’s our roundup of the best of Callaway Climate Insights in recent weeks. David Callaway looks at President Donald Trump’s first days in office and what investors should watch out for. Mark Hulbert has a contrarian analysis on the carbon capture and storage industry. Plus, the Doomsday Clock announcement is coming up. Despite all that, have a good weekend and please subscribe.
. . . . Trump’s inauguration speech careened recklessly but expectedly from insult to calumny to religious proclamation, with only the portraits on the Capitol Rotunda walls rattling at the historical defamation as if the founders were hearing it for the first time, writes David Callaway. History will be the ultimate judge, he says, but markets will serve in the meantime. From catastrophe bonds to new forms of insurance derivatives to municipal bonds and of course, stocks, investors will chart the climate course these next four years based on what they see. Not what they are told.
. . . . Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, has long played second fiddle to renewable energy in terms of helping solve harmful greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, reviled by environmentalists because fossil fuel companies support it, but also regarded as an afterthought to drilling and developing new oil and gas. Mark Hulbert, citing a new survey tied to contrarian analysis, writes that the industry appears to be following similar tracks of the solar, wind and nuclear industries when they were young.
. . . . A small nonprofit that provides amazing real-time information on fires has exploded in importance amid the Los Angeles blazes. In just a few weeks, Watch Duty has received more than twice its normal amount of traffic and has become the priority service app for anybody tracking the fires, from fire crews and first responders to homeowners wanting to know how close the flames are to their houses. This type of service is anything but commodity news. It is vital breaking news — service journalism — designed to educate and warn people on the fly, hopefully in time to save their lives.
. . . . The global temperature record of the past century shows that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate, NASA says in its explanation of how scientists measure temperatures on a global scale. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the past 10 years have been the warmest in recorded history. Each of the past four decades has been warmer than any decade that preceded it, dating back to 1850.
. . . . The annual Doomsday Clock announcement, for decades a symbol of the scientific community’s concern about humanity destroying itself, is sometimes derided by critics as a stunt. But the people who run The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded by Albert Einstein (with help from Robert Oppenheimer) are deadly serious about it. The clock is just a symbol, but an important one. Once a year the scientific community actually puts a number on the threat to the world, expressed in ways we can all understand, in seconds and minutes. The annual Doomsday Clock announcement for 2025 will be Tuesday, Jan. 28 at 10 a.m. Eastern.
. . . . Trump’s freeze this week on spending of the rest of a $5 billion federal fund set up to build EV charging stations across the country might be the death knell for many beleaguered charging stations stocks. According to the Department of Energy, more than 80% of EV owners across the country have home chargers, so drivers may see less impact. But by choking off a key network for early adapters, the president is making good on his promise to give the struggling EV industry an even rougher ride.
More greenery . . . .
Meet Chonkus: A hefty mutant microbe that could help fight climate change (Science News Explores)
Is an oil company connected?: Global hacking campaign targeted prominent American climate activists (NPR)
Davos dispatch: What Companies at Davos are Saying About Climate and Trump (Time)
Stepping up: Bloomberg to fund UN climate change body after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement (Fortune)
Commemorate, encourage: EU leaders name July 15 the EU Day for the Victims of the Global Climate Crisis. (European Commission)