January 2026
Dear Friends,
Since we began compiling this digest of local and statewide climate news in Georgia, we’ve both weathered storms and basked in the glow of progress. Cleantech has given us high hopes through high-paying jobs and economic growth across our state. At the same time, we’ve been deeply concerned about how climate change is affecting our ability to stay safe and thrive.
We all agree that we need reliable, affordable energy, but our economic future also depends on a stable climate. We need to be clear-eyed about the risks if we want our wonderful Peach State to thrive. As a group of citizens concerned about the economic, health, and national security impacts of climate change, we hope to build consensus across the political spectrum about the urgent need to address it. We welcome your support and ideas. Please reach out to us!
Sincerely,
The C-Change Conversations Athens Team
Georgia News of Hope
Electric vehicle charging projects are resuming in Georgia following a federal court ruling that blocked the suspension of National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure funds. The state’s Department of Transportation is moving forward with procurement and has already awarded $24.4 million for projects. Transportation is the number one source of climate pollution in the U.S., and EVs reduce that pollution.
A new website, ChargeForwardGA.com, connects job seekers with the rapidly expanding EV industry in Georgia, which leads the nation with more than $31 billion in EV investments.
Georgia Tech and UGA researchers are developing a local carbon market so that forest landowners can earn income by selling high-quality carbon credits to Georgia companies. A decline in paper mills, persistently low timber prices, and damage from Hurricane Helene have created an economic dilemma for forest landowners, who face pressure to sell to developers. Because working forests store nearly 27% of the state’s carbon emissions, their loss would be devastating to the environment.
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has awarded nearly $1 million to restore coastal wetlands in Georgia, specifically funding nature-based solutions that protect marine habitats and communities from storms and flooding. Coastal wetlands store more carbon per acre than tropical rainforests.
Georgia News of Concern
Georgia regulators approved a major expansion of natural gas power plants, adding roughly 10 gigawatts to the state’s grid by 2031 – equivalent to about half of Georgia’s current capacity. Driven largely by energy demand from data centers, the plan will lock the state into decades of fossil fuel dependence and reverse more than two decades of emission reductions achieved through renewable energy growth and coal plant retirements.
Georgia Power is seeking permission from the PSC to pay for the cost of recovering from Hurricane Helene by charging its customers a higher rate. The utility has requested approval to collect $912 million over four years, which would add roughly $4.42 per month to the average residential bill. This situation highlights a growing cycle in which fossil fuel use contributes to climate change, which fuels more destructive weather, which leads to higher utility costs. Studies show that climate change made Helene’s rainfall significantly heavier. Environmental and consumer advocates argue the utility should better account for climate risks in its planning.
Georgia lags behind the rest of the country in implementing energy efficiency, which is critical for lowering bills, reducing emissions, and managing rising demand. A new report shows that Georgia Power’s efficiency savings are just over half the national average, and notes that the region particularly fails to capture savings from large industrial users.
Nearly half of all U.S. wildfires in 2025 ignited east of the Mississippi River. While Eastern fires are typically smaller than Western megafires, the region faces unique risks due to its higher population density. The frequency of large burns in the East has increased tenfold over the past 40 years, driven in part by climate change.
Ways to Act
Legislation that would allow state financing of solar installations on closed landfills survived Crossover Day. House Bill 1133, sponsored by Rep. Robert Dickey (R-134), would encourage sustainable energy development as a productive use of underutilized properties unsuitable for most other kinds of redevelopment. You can support passage of this bill in the Senate by reaching out to your state senator’s office.
The Big Picture: U.S. & Global Climate News
Welcome to the great era of “green hushing.” It’s a mind-bending moment in the U.S. when climate change increasingly imperils our economy and well-being, but policymakers, scientists, businesses, teachers, reporters, federal agencies, and even park rangers are not supposed to talk about it.
The Trump administration’s animus toward “all things green” – including the scientific inquiry that enables us to measure climate change and understand its scale and scope – is working to silence climate discussion and stop critical innovation that could mitigate the threat. Banks have retreated from climate-forward lending, companies no longer speak much about their decarbonization goals, clean-energy projects that promised high-paying jobs and lower energy costs are being canceled, and the U.S. is dropping out of more than 60 international organizations involved with biodiversity, conservation, and climate change. Even the Democratic party has muted its climate messaging, recognizing its longer-term focus isn’t resonating in today’s “hair on fire” political environment.
But, unfortunately, simply “canceling” climate change won’t make it go away.
Two reports issued in January underscore how climate change’s impacts on temperatures and ecosystems are threatening our economic and geopolitical security.
In the first, the United Nations declared that the world is now in “water bankruptcy,” and water systems have been so compromised we cannot reverse the damage. Water systems are being stressed both by climate change – which alters rain patterns, concentrates water pollution, and leads to more frequent and severe droughts – and excessive uptake from aquifers, lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. Concerningly, already three-quarters of humanity live in water-stressed environments, and the challenge will only get greater as temperatures continue to rise. Water stress has been linked to the current unrest in Iran and to the Syrian civil war, and military leaders around the world warn that water scarcity and stress can be weaponized and can lead to increased global instability.
The second report, issued by UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee and based on information from MI5 and MI6, recognizes impending ecosystem collapse as a direct threat to national security. Climate change is turning rainforests into savannahs, coral reefs into lifeless skeletons, boreal forests into wildfire tinder, and is permanently melting critical mountain glaciers. Britain’s security forces predict these ecosystem losses across the world will drive up food insecurity, increase migration, change global weather patterns, and increase the risks of pandemics. These same threats, of course, are true for us on this side of the Atlantic (and climate threats have been named as such in our own intelligence assessments from 2009 until last year).
These security warnings are crystal clear: large-scale disruption of our natural world directly destabilizes our human world.
So, let’s stop calling climate a green risk. Let’s recognize it for what it really is – an economic risk, a health risk, and a security risk.
And let’s start talking loudly about it.
Notable Quote
“Enough critical systems around the world have crossed these [water bankruptcy] thresholds. These systems are interconnected through trade, migration, climate feedbacks, and geopolitical dependencies, so the global risk landscape is now fundamentally altered.”
– Kaveh Madani, director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment, and Health
News of Concern
After years of declining emissions, U.S. carbon pollution increased 2.4% last year, in part due to increased coal usage. Experts believe federal policies set into place in 2025 to boost fossil fuels and curtail clean energy will add to emission pressure in the future.
This push to suppress clean energy is a bigger deal than many realize. It’s not just emissions that are rising – electricity demand and prices are skyrocketing, too. Clean energy can come online in a year or two, while fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants usually take five to 10 (or more) years, respectively. So it is concerning that at a time when we need more supply immediately, almost 2,000 new power projects were canceled last year, with the vast majority (93%) of them in clean-energy generation.
The Trump administration also announced it is shutting down one of the crown jewels of climate research – the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This lab is critically important for predicting, preparing for, and responding to severe weather. The administration’s dismantling of climate institutions and initiatives is so widespread across weather tracking and preparedness, investments in clean technologies, and federal agencies that many say it will take generations to repair.
As warming air and oceans cause Greenland’s ice to melt, access to shipping lanes is expanding and long-buried, important minerals are becoming accessible. But as nations battle over who will control that power and those dollars, we are concerned that the world will lose sight of just how important this island is to our climate and the health of our planet.
One reason researching climate is so critical? To keep our homes safer from more frequent climate-enhanced natural disasters. Whether it’s bigger hailstones, faster-moving fires, or more intense hurricanes, our primary investments – our homes – are increasingly at peril. We can prepare ourselves better for the future if we understand the risks. Real estate buyers can now access climate risk information on every listing. However, this new input is roiling real estate markets because it can harm a seller’s ability to sell a home if climate metrics are poor. It’s another example of the pain ahead as we reckon with the reality of climate change, and begin to price it into our systems.
Another reckoning ahead is with our growing plastic addiction. A new report projects plastic pollution is on track to grow by an astounding 58% by 2040: if global plastic pollution were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter. Plastic is a double whammy of climate woes – made from petroleum and produced with petroleum. It’s already clogging our waters and harming our bodies, and similarly to climate change, policymakers are struggling to deal with the problem.
And if you’re reading this while drinking a cup of coffee, we’ve learned that our beloved joe may taste very different in the near future. As climate change damages coffee forests, Brazilian farmers are moving away from smooth arabica beans to more bitter robusta beans, which are more heat and disease resistant.
Finally, it’s when the impacts of climate change hit home that we really begin to understand the threat. This poignant story of a Christmas village in Washington State shows just how fragile we are. Besieged by fire, storms, and power outages, this small mountain town that relies on tourism is scrambling to pick up the pieces from a holiday season that wasn’t. It’s a heartbreaker.
News of Hope
While clean-energy development is hitting headwinds in the U.S., it’s soaring globally. Some important milestones achieved in 2025:
The world produced more electricity from renewable sources than from coal.
The EU produced more electricity from wind and solar than all fossil fuels combined.
In both China and India, the world’s largest and third-largest greenhouse gas emitters respectively, coal-powered electricity generation dropped due to the rapid growth of renewables.More than 25% of all new cars purchased were electric, and sales are rising rapidly because they are now cheaper than combustion engine cars in emerging markets.
The global renewables boom is pushing investment in the cleantech sector to new heights. And it’s happening in places you might not expect. Saudi Arabia is deploying solar energy at the fastest rate in the world, on pace to generate 50% of its electricity with clean power within five years.
In the U.S., batteries are growing at astounding rates. This is a game-changer. During sunny and windy periods, we often produce an excess of cheap, clean energy and have to throw it away. With batteries, we can save that extra energy and use it at peak times after the sun has set, displacing more expensive and emission-intensive fossil fuels.
The renewables and batteries we’ve added are also making our grids more reliable – including helping us meet climate-enhanced winter storm challenges. Experts especially noted that Texas’s grid – with its expanded use of batteries and weatherization of fossil resources – bore the strain of the monster January storm that swept the country, in contrast to a 2021 storm when that grid was more heavily dependent on fossil fuels resources.
The Mid-Atlantic and Northeast corridors received good news this month on resiliency as well. Judges allowed offshore wind development to get back on track at several projects that had been stopped mid-stream last year. Offshore wind peaks in winter, which should help strengthen the grid in future winter storms, and it also can lower our costs during cold weather when our higher-priced natural gas supply is stretched due to heating and electricity demands.
In North Carolina, small mountain towns that were battered by hurricanes in 2024 are not just adapting their infrastructure, they’re re-envisioning their resilience, building microgrids, adding batteries, and thinking of new ways to stay safe from the next storm.
And in the southernmost part of the world, glaciologists are re-envisioning our future by protecting our ability to look to the past. Glaciologists fear ice cores – one of our most important lenses into the Earth’s history – will melt away. So they are building an ice storage vault in Antarctica to enable future scientists to study the ice. It’s an important reminder of how quickly nature is changing around us, and of our need to protect critical resources.
Notable Graph
Science magazine named the renewable energy surge as its “2025 Breakthrough of the Year.” This chart shows the astounding growth of installed capacity that has been driven by falling prices of solar and other renewable sources.
Notable Video
Ice, snow, polar vortex – they’re all connected to climate change, and they merged Jan. 23-25 to sweep the country in a major winter storm. This Climate Central video provides a terrific explanation of how warming global temperatures impact cold weather events.
C-Change Conversations helps people understand the science and risks of climate change and why it matters in daily life.
We frame climate change as a human and community issue – not a political one – and discuss its impacts on our jobs and economy, our health and safety, and our geopolitical stability, as well as the solutions that offer us a safer future.
C-Change seeks to bring everyone to the table for shared understanding about climate change. You can be a part of the conversation by sharing this newsletter with family, friends, and colleagues and by inviting us to talk to your community.
