A message from President & CEO Dr. Max Holmes
My house was built in 1870. It has been heated by wood, coal, oil, natural gas, and now electricity drawn from the sun. In one sense, that is a mundane property record. In another, it is the entire history of human energy, compressed into a single address.
Wood came first. It always does. Since our ancestors learned to control fire, biomass has been the default answer to cold and darkness. The house would have had a cast-iron stove, fed by wood cut from nearby forests. This is how virtually every human being on earth stayed warm for tens of thousands of years, and many still do. It worked, but it was labor-intensive, land-hungry, and contributed to deforestation.
Coal replaced wood in the industrializing Northeast not because it was loved but because it was dense, cheap, and abundant. A ton of coal contained far more energy than the equivalent volume of wood and could supply cities that had long since stripped their surrounding forests. Then came oil – heating oil delivered by truck, burned in a furnace that could be thermostatically controlled. Oil heat was modern. It was convenient. It was what the house was running on when my wife and I bought it in 2000. The following year, we switched to natural gas, piped directly to the boiler—cleaner than oil, cheaper at the time, and widely regarded as a “transition fuel.” Last year, we made what I believe will be the final transition: heat pumps, powered by electricity, with solar panels on the roof and a contract for renewable energy for anything we draw from the grid.
The sequence—biomass, coal, oil, gas, electricity—is not just our home’s story. It is the arc of modern civilization. And the direction of travel has always been the same: toward fuels that are denser, cleaner, and more controllable, and away from those that are dirtier, heavier, and harder to move. Electricity, especially when generated from wind and sun, is the logical end of that arc. The sun and wind are limitless natural resources and our ability to harness them into electricity will only continue to be more efficient. The energy transition the world is now debating is not some radical rupture; it is the next step in a journey that has been underway since the first furnace replaced the first wood-fired stove.
The only real question is speed. And here, the conflict now consuming the Persian Gulf offers an unexpected answer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the outbreak of military conflict with Iran has removed close to one-fifth of global oil supplies from the market. Prices have reached $100 per barrel or higher. Nations that import the majority of their fuel from the Persian Gulf are facing genuine shortages. The head of the International Energy Agency has called it the greatest global energy security challenge in history.
The conventional assumption might be that an oil shock slows the energy transition – that higher prices make everything more expensive and governments retreat to fossil fuels out of desperation. History suggests the opposite. The 1973 Arab oil embargo helped to launch solar research, energy efficiency standards, and nuclear expansion. Countries around the world are again confronting the danger of energy dependence. That recognition tends to produce investment in alternatives, not capitulation to the status quo.
There are headwinds, of course. The current U.S. administration has been openly hostile to renewable energy, rolling back incentives and attempting to prop up coal and oil production. But administrations are temporary. Solar panels and heat pumps are not. The economics of clean energy have already crossed the threshold at which policy resistance can reverse them; what governments can do now is slow the transition at the margin, not stop it. And a geopolitical crisis that makes the cost of fossil-fuel dependence unmistakable—not in future climate projections but in today’s energy prices—has a way of clarifying minds.
My house has been through this before. It didn’t choose its fuels for ideological reasons; it followed the logic of cost, availability, and technology. The world’s energy system will do the same.
At a time when climate victories are scarce, an acceleration of the energy transition is reason for hope. Those with the financial means—and perhaps the broader good fortune to live in a time and place where the choice is available—can lean into this transition, doing what they can to speed the inevitable shift away from fossil fuels and toward what I believe will be humanity’s ultimate energy source: clean electricity generated from renewable sources.
The energy transition alone will not solve the climate crisis, but it is an essential step in that direction.
Onward.
South Coast scientists: To improve bay health, start at the source
Miles of rivers and tributaries, including New Bedford’s Buttonwood Brook, empty into Buzzards Bay. Researchers, advocates, and city and town officials are working together to clean them up.
Peering over the edge of a stone bridge, Francesca LoPresti cast a bucket into the Mattapoisett River. She pulled it up slowly and grabbed a syringe, filling it with the clouded water. She then squirted the water back out onto the river below, the stream forming a clean, unbroken arc.
“This is scientific,” she assured with a laugh. “We have to get a clean sample, so we rinse out the first take.”
LoPresti is a fellow with the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth. For the past week, she and her colleagues at the Buzzards Bay Coalition had been visiting the rivers and streams that make up the Buzzards Bay watershed, collecting water samples and testing them for contaminants.
Continue reading on The New Bedford Light.
At COP 30, the Brazilian Presidency announced that it will present two Roadmaps to advance the new global goals set by governments in 2023: halting and reversing deforestation, and transitioning away from fossil fuels. The Presidency has called for civil society inputs for both Roadmaps, and Woodwell experts have prepared an input for the Deforestation Roadmap.
Woodwell’s input related to the process of developing the Roadmap highlights, in particular, that:
- The Deforestation Roadmap should focus on key priority opportunities, be specific about what actions should be taken and by whom, define clear milestones, and prioritize conservation of existing forests and halting forest loss and degradation;
- The Presidency should harmonize the two Roadmaps, and ensure that the Fossil Fuel Roadmap (also known as TAFF) does not encourage energy sector solutions that undermine forest goals, such as policies that promote electricity generation from wood pellets; and
- The Presidency should ensure that the Roadmap is a living and relevant document at least through its target year of 2030. Such continuity could be achieved, for example, through partnerships with the COP31 and COP32 Presidencies.
Woodwell’s input related to substantive content of the Roadmap highlights six types of action to address barriers to halting and reversing deforestation and degradation, i.e.:
- Actions that drive the systematic incorporation of the costs and risks of deforestation and forest degradation into economic and financial decision-making processes in order to shift public investment and private financial flows away from activities that cause forest loss and towards investment in maintaining forest resilience;
- Actions that address fire as a driver of forest degradation, shifting from reactive suppression towards and integrated approach that combines prevention, risk assessment, preparedness, response, and recovery, and explicitly recognises the socio-ecological and cultural context in which fires occur;
- Actions that accelerate implementation of commitments to recognize Indigenous rights and tenure and increase access to finance;
- Actions that increase financial flows and price signals that incentivize forest conservation, including accelerated implementation of payments for ecosystems services schemes, high-integrity forest carbon markets, and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility;
- Actions that integrate policy and planning across sectors that affect forests, including agriculture, extractive industry, infrastructure, and energy, as well as into structures that govern global trade and finance, such as sovereign debt management; and
- Actions that enable countries to generate, maintain and integrate multiple types of data and information that are necessary to enable the efficient and effective targeting of forest-related interventions and finance.
The quality, legitimacy and continuity of the Roadmaps will depend on the expertise and buy-in of government and stakeholders. Woodwell looks forward to the Presidency’s first Roadmap proposal in the coming weeks and will stay engaged to ensure that the Roadmaps are built on the latest available science and best practices.
The Trump administration wants to take an ax to the East’s last great forests
The fight over the roadless rule has long focused on the West, but its repeal could fragment some of the last pristine forests in the eastern United States.
When most people think about national forests, they imagine vast Western landscapes: Alaska, the Rockies, the Pacific Northwest. But millions of acres of federal woodlands dot the eastern half of the country, too. These great swaths of vibrant ecosystems have long been free of roads, protected by a policy called, appropriately enough, the “roadless rule.”
That may soon change.
How a retired cranberry bog helped change the game for wetland restoration
Glorianna Davenport looks out at hundreds of acres of protected wetlands that were once her family’s cranberry farms. In her hands are laminated pictures of striking red cranberry bogs fed by razor-straight water channels. It’s hard to believe the land where she stands — full of sinuous streams, wildlife, moss and tall trees — once looked so different.
The land’s transformation, documented through a network of cameras and sensors, offers a playbook for wetland restoration as cranberry farms see slimmer profits from New England to Wisconsin because of climate change and other factors. The crop requires cold winters and plenty of water, but warmer temperatures and longer droughts are challenging harvest seasons.
The return of river herring
Every spring, river herring migrate from the ocean to freshwater rivers to spawn. Before Europeans arrived in this region, millions of fish could be seen in herring runs. But pollution, dams, and overfishing drastically reduced the number.
Over the past two decades, conservation groups, local towns, the state and Mashpee Tribal leaders have worked to restore river habitat. The herring are making a slow comeback. So much so that for the first time, people who are not members of a tribe are allowed to take herring from a run in Harwich.
Chaotic March weather has a surprising secret
Seemingly unrelated weather systems illustrate how connected we are by larger patterns that move around in our atmosphere. Meanwhile, “weather whiplash” could be evidence of the warming climate.
As its final days wind down, weather in March 2026 has been one for the record books. It showed why old sayings endure and rivaled college basketball for “March Madness.”
True to the proverb, the month came “in like a lion,” and later echoed Shakespeare’s warning to “beware the ides of March.”
Relentless, record-breaking heat persisted in the West. Powerful storms and bouts of polar air blew through the Central and Eastern U.S., bringing extreme swings in temperature within hours. Hawaii endured flooding rains in a string of kona lows.
It may come as a surprise, but these weather systems also illustrate how connected we are by larger patterns that move around in our atmosphere.
Continue reading on USA Today.
Beneath the frozen surface: How AI is uncovering the secrets of permafrost
Beneath the surface of the Arctic, frozen ground holds clues about our planet’s past and its critical information about its future. Known as permafrost, this ground remains below 0°C for at least two years at a time and stores massive amounts of ice, organic carbon, and environmental history accumulated over thousands of years. But understanding how permafrost is changing throughout the Arctic landscape is no small task.
These regions span millions of square kilometers, and the datasets used to study them (from satellite imagery to high-resolution terrain maps) are often too large for most researchers to access or explore. Now, researchers working with the Permafrost Discovery Gateway, a platform hosted by the Arctic Data Center at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), are using artificial intelligence to change that. In collaboration with Google.org, the gateway combines satellite imagery, high-performance computing, and machine learning, opening a new window into Arctic change. One that anyone with an internet browser can explore!
