Vox clamantis in deserto
Keep them away
Work by Rachel Loischild in her show “Quarantine Islands,’’ at the Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, Mass., through May 24.
She says that the show “delves into the historical intersection of immigration and public health policies, tracing a narrative that spans from the 14th to the 21st Century. Developed over more than a decade of research, this body of work uses large-format color photography to capture the landscapes of former quarantine stations, pest houses, and quarantine hospitals across the U.S., where immigrants, the poor, and people of color were forcibly isolated to protect the broader population. These sites, imbued with invisible histories, serve as a tangible link to a past where public health measures, while crucial in controlling diseases like smallpox, disproportionately burdened those quarantined.’’
Trump vs. Electric buses
An electric bus in New York City.
Excerpted and edited from an ecoRI.org news story
The Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) planned to introduce electric buses to operate on Aquidneck Island in the spring of this year, but federal funding for the project is being held up by the Trump administration.
President Trump inherited an “unprecedented backlog” of unobligated U.S. Department of Transportation grants when he took office in 2025.
One of those grants belongs to RIPTA. The transit agency’s CEO, Christopher Durand, told Rhode Island House Finance subcommittee members on March 10 that he doesn’t know if the funds will be released.
Nearly four years ago, RIPTA announced it would remove diesel-powered buses rolling along Aquidneck Island’s streets, following a U.S. Department of Transportation award of $22.37 million in federal funding to Rhode Island through the Biden administration’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity grant program.
Philip K. Howard: On social trust and accountability
We mostly start with trust…
…but can end up without much.
“The Visit of the Plague in Milan’’ (F. Jenewein, 1899), a painting of a man stoned on suspicion of spreading the plague.
Social trust is a barometer for the health of society. A trusting society is more energetic, more collaborative, and more hopeful. America, unfortunately, is going in the wrong direction. Only one in five Americans trusts governing institutions, and only one in three trusts other people. America is now in a downward spiral of distrust, defensiveness, polarization, and greater distrust.
Social distrust is a kind of cancer, causing gears to grind ever more slowly. David Brooks, in his farewell New York Times column, connects Americans’ “loss of faith” in each other with their loss of hope for the future—over two-thirds of Americans say they no longer believe in the American dream.
How does America pull out of this downward spiral of distrust? Accepted wisdom is that America is just too diverse. But America has thrived with diversity since the latter half of the nineteenth century, and surveys suggest that Americans of diverse backgrounds still share basic values such as truthfulness, reciprocity (“Do unto others …”), and respect for the common good.
Why don’t Americans just do what they think is right? Brooks argues that selfishness eroded trust after “four decades of hyperindividualism.” But Brooks doesn’t explain where hyperindividualism came from. Americans did not suddenly wake up with selfish values. What happened is that, trying to avoid bias, Americans were disempowered from making “value judgments” about other people. An unintended effect was that people learned they could get away with selfishly gaming the system.
The key to social trust is accountability. Trust erodes when people no longer feel others will abide by norms of fair dealing. Selfishness grows as people see it succeeding. What’s been lost is not our values of right and wrong, but confidence that other Americans will also be held to those values.
Social values can’t be sustained unless they are enforced—not by law, but by judgments of other people. Individuals in a free society are free to be rude, selfish, untruthful, irresponsible, and immoral, constrained only by the broad boundaries of law. But the rest of us are free to judge them accordingly. People who act selfishly are no longer respected, or excluded from positions of respect, or lose their jobs.
For most of American history, mutual trust in the values of honor, integrity, and community was taken for granted because good character was an asset, not just virtue for its own sake, but a condition for success. People succeeded, as economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “according to what others think.”
American culture provided a marketplace for good character as well as individual achievement—“a most conspicuous Theatre,” as George Washington predicted in 1783, “which seems to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.”
America became the strongest society in human history not just because it unleashed the initiative of each individual. Atomized individuality soon bogs down in a society riven with distrust. America was supercharged by unleashing individual initiative within a culture of responsible values, or what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest, rightly understood.”
These shared values allowed America to reap the benefits of high “social capital”—greater cooperation and social bonds, innovation, and hope for the future. But shared values evaporate, like a kind of dark magic, when people realize those values are no longer enforced. Mutual trust vanishes when people can act irresponsibly with impunity.
David Brooks is hardly the first observer to lament “the loss of a shared moral order,” in which Americans no longer act on what is “true, beautiful and good.” Almost three decades ago, political scientist Alan Wolfe found that Americans had “lost the distinction between right and wrong and desperately want it back.”
Americans lost the freedom to uphold core social values because of a deliberate change in legal and social philosophy. Coming out of the 1960s, the urge to avoid bias and unfairness became a top social priority. Civil rights laws were vital to end systemic segregation and other indefensible practices. But reformers wanted to go further and create a new system where unfairness would be no more.
The new idea was to replace human judgment with law. Thick rulebooks would prescribe exactly how to do things, and elaborate procedures would require officials to justify decisions with objective evidence. But people can still be unfair, so reformers had one more innovation: A new concept of individual rights that allowed any person to challenge decisions that affected them. Decisions about people in the workplace and elsewhere became fraught with legal risk. Supervisors were put to the proof that someone isn’t pulling their weight, or has bad character.
The freedom to live our values, and to associate with those who share our values, is a core strength of America’s pluralistic society. Each community needs its own moral integrity.
Americans no longer feel free to judge others. There’s hardly any cultural value more ingrained in modern America than the proscription against being “judgmental.” Political correctness is enforced ruthlessly, but judgments about personal character are taboo. Making decisions about someone’s moral character is tantamount to a violation of their rights. The evil to be purged is subjectivity, which is a synonym for bias. Who are you to judge?
Human judgment is indeed subjective. Judgment emerges from the black box of the human subconscious as an amalgam of perceptions, instincts, values, experience, biases, and more. Judgment is fallible—that’s why most organizations run important decisions by other people, and why psychologist Daniel Kahneman urged more reflective thinking.
But the only way to avoid the subjectivity of human judgment is to eliminate judgment altogether. How do you prove that someone has poor character? Even harder, how do you disprove that your judgment isn’t tainted by implicit bias?
So Americans abdicated making judgments about other people. There was “a massive redefinition of freedom,” historian Eric Foner found, “as a rejection of all authority.” The goal was virtuous—to enhance freedom by eliminating any possibility of unfairness. Instead, letting people “come up with their own individual values,” as Brooks observes, infected society with debilitating distrust.
Leadership is a hollow concept without the authority to uphold shared values. Those values are activated mainly in supervisory decisions about personnel.
People judging people is the main mechanism for a moral culture. Otherwise, morality is just words. Does this person act in a way we respect and trust? Or is he self-serving? People who are selfish or antisocial should lose our votes, or lose their jobs, or lose our friendship. To rebuild a moral culture, Americans must be free to make these judgments.
But what if the leader is unfair? Or plays favorites? Law can certainly safeguard against patterns of discrimination. But extruding every personnel decision through a legal sieve has not enhanced fairness and human understanding. It has instead made candor extinct and exacerbated bias by chilling honest interaction.
Fairness in decisions about particular people is beyond the capacity of law. Fairness to one person is unfairness in the eyes of another. Making these judgments is an unavoidable necessity of collective activity. Scrutinizing personal judgments through the lens of objective proof does not enhance relations, but fosters a mindset of grievance and entitlement.
Morality has little connection to legality. The law protects against conduct so bad that it should be banned. Morality, on the other hand, is the practice of doing good. A society works because people come together in groups to achieve common goals, in business and in a wide variety of communal activities. How well those groups succeed depends in large part on adherence to shared norms. People must be free to associate based on their evaluation of moral character.
Rebuilding the framework for a moral society requires removing law from most social interactions—not devaluing moral judgments with legal bickering. Except for tortious conduct, such as sexual harassment and other misconduct, law should have nothing to do with how people get along—no lawsuits for individual personnel decisions, no lawsuits when someone says something offensive or makes someone feel “unsafe.”
Letting people interact freely should not be considered a novel risk for a society organized on the principle of individual freedom. Honest feedback causes pain, but failure is also the main way people learn. Letting people be spontaneous means some will put their feet in their mouths, but their authenticity is also a basis for trust. Let them apologize. Yes, all humans have implicit biases. But, for most people, biases diminish when we get to know each other. Any healthy organization strives to avoid unfairness. Good workers and helpful colleagues tend to do well, whatever their identity group or background.
But what about individual rights? The legal spotlight shines on the predicament of the one employee who may lose a job. But whose rights? What about the 28 students learning nothing from an indifferent teacher? Or co-workers discouraged by someone shirking his responsibility? How about the freedom of the supervisor? Making personnel choices is his job.
The post-1960s concept of rights against others’ choices should be abandoned as a mutant subversion of freedom, not an enhancement. Instead of a shield protecting everyone’s freedom against state power, this new concept of rights is a sword by one self-interested person against the freedom of other free citizens. That’s why so many Americans react viscerally against it, and why it engenders pervasive distrust.
Too much law has suffocated America’s moral culture. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1978 cautioned that “a society with no other scale but the legal one … is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”
Pulling law away from daily interactions will be a historic change. Like victims with Stockholm Syndrome, many Americans will have a hard time imagining how to take moral responsibility. Law everywhere absolves us from making hard choices. But that’s legal servitude, not freedom, and causes cultural rot.
The freedom to live our values, and to associate with those who share our values, is a core strength of America’s pluralistic society. Each community needs its own moral integrity. The resulting trust in shared values within these groups is like rocket fuel for human initiative. That’s what America is losing, and can only be regained by letting us interact freely again.
Philip K. Howard, a lawyer, is chairman of Common Good, a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to simplifying laws. He is a best-selling author, a New York civic leader and a photographer. His most recent book is Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America(2025). This piece, not including the images above, first ran on the Website of Law + Liberty,
Abstract ice
“Polarized Ice” (photo), by Julie Parker, in the show “Zero Celsius,’’ at Mad River Valley Arts, Waitsfield, Vt., through April 23.
William Morgan: An Arts & Crafts response to Industrial revolution
Leila Ross Wilburn, Carr House, Atlanta (1919).
Maureen Meister, an architectural historian from Boston, and sometime Tufts and Northeastern professor, published a book a dozen years ago on the New England followers of Williams Morris, John Ruskin, and the English Romantics who believed that a reverence for nature, simplicity, and a return to craftsmanship could offset the ills of the Industrial Revolution. Late 19th-Century Boston was the crucible of the Arts and Crafts movement in this country, led by architects such as H.H. Richardson, Henry Vaughan, and Ralph Adams Cram, and supported by a remarkable coterie of furniture and glass, textile and ceramic designers. In her latest volume, Arts and Crafts Architecture Across America (Yale University Press, 2025), Meister gathers Tudor revival, Prairie School, Spanish revival, and further offshoots under a broad Arts & Crafts umbrella.
Ralph Adams Cram, St. George’s School Chapel, Middletown, R.I., 1924-28
“There is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England”
The Boston Society of Arts & Crafts, founded in 1897, inspired similar reform-minded idealists and artisans in places such as Detroit, Minneapolis, and San Diego. Meister weaves in such humble designers as Gustav Stickley and Elbert Hubbard, in western New York, while embracing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House, in Buffalo. Making the case that Wright’s Prairie Style is a fundamental part of the Arts & Crafts movement, Meister includes Wright’s Chicago works, along with Jane Addams’ Hull House and Bertram Goodhue’s Gothic chapel at the University of Chicago in The Windy City. The heartland also includes the Edenic handcraft educational community at the Cranbrook design complex, in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen mentored generations of notable designers. (His son was the famous architect Eero Saarinen.)
M.H. Baillie-Scott, The Close, Short Hills, N.J., 1912-13.
The Arts & Crafts represented a cozier, gentler side of the Gilded Age
The scope and ultimate unity of handcraft mindset is demonstrated in Collegiate Gothic campuses, in rustic inns and dude ranches in the Rockies, and the adobe of the so-called Spanish Colonial and Native American style of Texas and the Southwest. In California the “fresh air and fresh thinking” produced a blossoming of handcrafted houses, in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. All of the delightful houses, churches, and civic structures that Meister presents are “myriad responses to a question was once all-important: What native materials, landscapes, and histories will serve us when we build, to suit the special places where we live, in the United States of America.”
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, California Building, San Diego, 1911-15.
Erstwhile partner of Ralph Adams Cram, Goodhuewas a native of Pomfret, Conn.
Significant scholarly books, such as Professor Meister’s, were also once all-important, but serious architectural history has all but disappeared in the current era of idiocracy and illiteracy. Thus, university presses, such as Yale, are the keepers of the flame, champions of deserving treatises that might not be “monetizable”.
Providence-based architectural historian William Morgan is the author of, among other books, The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan (MIT) and Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States (Abbeville).
‘Physicality and emotional resonance’
“Gathering #11: An Open Book’’ (horse chestnut leaf stems and waxed linen thread, woven), by Ann Wessmann, in her show “Twig Leaf Husk Thorn,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through April 26.
The artist says:
“In my studio practice, I explore themes relating to time, memory, beauty and the ephemeral, with a focus on the strength and fragility of human beings and the natural world. With a background in fiber and textile processes, I develop objects and installations through repetition and the accumulation of a variety of materials. Over the years materials have been chosen for their expressive potential; translucent vellum, various personal mementos such as locks of hair from family members, texts from family journals and letters, or collections of natural materials such as plants, shells, stones, or bones. The works have a strong relationship to text and textiles, pattern, transformation, order and chaos, landscape and the body.
“I hope to engage the viewer through the physicality and often the emotional resonance of materials, and through the use of scale. Viewers often confront works which mirror the human body. Larger scale installations may surround the viewer. In some cases small pieces are made requiring the viewer to look from a very close perspective.’’
‘Yes, the tunnel is safe’
Storrow Drive at approach to its tunnel
Solarapex photo
From The Boston Guardian, article by Jules Roscoe
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian)
The Storrow Drive Tunnel will begin undergoing regular construction in April to strengthen and repair the roof, as part of a $10 million project to extend the tunnel’s life until it can be fully rehabilitated.
“Closures of Storrow Drive eastbound and Soldiers Field Road eastbound will be implemented nightly beginning the first week of April, Sunday night through Thursday night, from 8 pm to 5 am. the following morning,” MassDOT spokesperson John Goggin said.
These closures begin April 5. There will be posted detours in place. The department will also send out official traffic advisories before work begins and is working on a website to host information and updates about the project. “MassDOT and DCR have been meeting with legislators, neighbors and other stakeholders, and will continue to communicate all closures and any modifications to work schedules in advance,” Goggin said.
These interim repairs will focus on the concrete of the internal ceiling of the tunnel. The last major repair project took place in 2008, and there have been piecemeal repairs like this one since then. Goggin said that future repairs would include “structural mitigation measures.”
“This is phase one,” said State Rep. Jay Livingstone, who serves the Back Bay and Beacon Hill where Storrow Drive is located. Livingstone attended a briefing on the project for officials and community members on March 26.
“There’s a potential phase two in September, depending on if they find additional issues in this phase. They’ve done some preliminary work over the last few weeks.”
The tunnel was originally constructed in the early 1950s, and it requires constant maintenance to keep the infrastructure safe for the public. Two weeks ago, Livingstone noticed a series of lane closures in the tunnel, and asked Kendra Amaral, the deputy commissioner of policy for the state’s conservation department, if it was safe to use.
“I was first told 13 years [ago] that the tunnel needed to be replaced in the near term,” Livingstone wrote in the message. “It seems like it has been a priority to replace at times over my tenure of representative, but nothing has happened.”
“Yes, the tunnel is safe,” Amaral wrote in response. “DCR [the conservation department] and MassDOT are working on a $10 million project to make repairs and improvements to the Storrow Drive Tunnel to extend its useful life until a major tunnel rehabilitation/ replacement project can be implemented, which likely could be up to 10 to 15 years in the future. The last major Interim Repair Project in 2008 was completed for $15 million, and there have been no significant repairs since.”
Livingstone said after the community official briefing last Thursday that the repairs planned this year would extend the life of the tunnel by about eight to 10 years, and that the repairs from the Interim Repair Project in 2008 were holding well.
There’s no clear end timeline for this next slew of repairs, but both Goggin and Amaral wrote that the department would take the number of celebrations in Boston this summer, and likely the tourism they bring with them, into account. Amaral said the work would be conducted “ahead of Massachusetts’ big spring and summer of events.”
“Work restrictions will be implemented as necessary to minimize impacts during significant local events, such as concerts and events at Fenway, TD Garden, as well as during the FIFA World Cup and MA250 celebrations,” Goggin said.
Making good neighbors?
“Fence” (oil on canvas), by Francis Colburn, in the group show “Leaning Into Summer,’’ at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester May 19-July 19
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
— “Mending Wall,’’ by Robert Frost
Our wheel of the seasons
“Nowhere in the United States of America does the wheel of the seasons turn more brilliantly than in New England. Winter’s blankets of white, the long-awaited buds of spring accompanied by the run of maple sap, summer’s bouquets, and the magnificent palette of autumn: all are feasts for the senses, and lead to the characteristic New England feeling of existing in tandem with, and often at mercy of the great mercy of, the great forces of nature.’’
— Tom Shachtman, in The Most Beautiful Villages of New England (1997)
Chris Powell: Lamont and Sharpton
Al Sharpton, still pal of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Twenty years ago Ned Lamont accomplished what may have been the neatest trick in Connecticut political history. He won the primary for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator, defeating the incumbent, Joe Lieberman, and lost the election on the same night.
How did it happen?
While being a good liberal Democrat in most respects, Lieberman was in trouble with many Democrats for supporting the war in Iraq that was being waged by the administration of President George W. Bush, a Republican, in pursuit of imaginary "weapons of mass destruction." Lamont mobilized anti-war Democrats and narrowly won the primary, 52-48 percent.
But as he claimed victory on live television, Lamont was standing next to a supporter from New York, Al Sharpton, who back then was known less for being a "civil rights leader" than a race hustler, a perpetrator of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, an income-tax evader, a violator of federal campaign-finance law, a defaulter on a libel judgment arising from the hoax, and an all-around grifter. In a general election Sharpton was the kiss of political death and so, standing next to him that night, Lamont kissed the moderate vote goodbye. Running as an independent Lieberman easily defeated Lamont and a token Republican nominee, drawing both Democratic and Republican votes.
Now governor and seeking re-election to a third term, Lamont is somewhat in the position that Lieberman was in 20 years ago: He is the moderate or somewhat less liberal candidate in what likely will be a Democratic primary with far-left Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott. So the other day Lamont seemed to see political benefit in paling around with Sharpton in the governor's office at the state Capitol. Sharpton and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump had just spoken at the funeral of a mentally ill Black man who had been fatally shot by police during a psychotic episode in Hartford. They were there to racialize the incident.
For as Lenin and other totalitarians are supposed to have said: If you label something well enough, you don't have to argue with it. No matter how unsubstantiated, accusations of racism still put people on the defensive in Connecticut.
The governor may have been confident that he wouldn't have to worry about being tarnished by Sharpton's misconduct, since most of it happened long ago and Connecticut's politically correct journalists would never bring it up even if they knew about it.
Instead the journalists reported that the governor and Sharpton agreed that police need more training in handling mentally ill people who are threatening others. The journalists did not report that while Hartford two years ago created a special squad of social workers to respond to such troubled people, city government lately has much reduced the squad's funding and has been relying more on intervention by the police to handle the dozens of psychotic episodes that occur in the city every week.
Sharpton didn't bring that up either. Of course he probably didn't know about it, nor about the $70 million deficit being run by Hartford's school system, nor about the system's incompetence in the face of the enduring poverty and neglect at home of its heavily minority student population.
But then why bother? Everyone was having such a good time in Lamont's office, with Sharpton sitting in the governor's chair and remarking, "He's one of the best governors in the country."
Polls suggest that Connecticut well may concur in November, since most people have concluded that nothing can be done about the poverty of the cities except to increase their residents' dependence on welfare and keep raising city government salaries.
Indeed, poverty is big business for many people now, including Sharpton himself, whose non-profit "civil rights organization," the National Action Network, pays him annual salaries of between $600,000 and $1 million, money drawn in part from donations made by corporations afraid of being targeted by boycotts staged by the group. Such extortion may be what the group means by its slogan: "No justice, no peace."
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
‘Preserving the emotional temperature’
Work by Michael Guinane in his show “That Feeling of a Place and Time,’’ at Lily Pad East gallery, Westerly, R.I., through April 1
The gallery says:
“Michael Guinane transforms past and current observation into art. His paintings don't merely depict scenes—they preserve the emotional temperature of specific moments in time. His work depicts figures caught in contemplation and action, and the collective energy of crowds set in often historical settings. These works ask us to remember a place long out of time, creating an intimate dialogue between the artist's memory and our own.The emotional capture of a single moment in time is what motivates Michael Guinane to paint. Michael creates an atmosphere for the viewer to feel. Whether it be a moment in history, the artist's personal experience, a lake scene, a trip to Cuba, or a busy city street, these works capture the feeling and mood of being present in a certain place or time.Everyone experiences the world uniquely. Michael's work creates the opening to read a scene in our own way and see and connect with the characters and places caught in a moment of suspension, sparking the imagination of what has happened and what is to come next.’’
Bare heads would be tacky
Boston Episcopalians on their Easter Parade on March 24, 1940, after leaving services at Trinity Church, on Copley Square.
And no need to feed
“Little Rabbit” (pastel), by Jonathan Rose, in the group exhibition “Show 72,’’ at The Front Gallery, Montpelier, Vt., through April 26.
North shore light show
“Moonlight Over Marblehead, Massachusetts” (oil on canvas, 1914), by Richard Hayley Levereran, at the Westerly (R.I.) Museum of American Impressionism.
Ezgi Canpolat: Renewable energy in war-torn Mideast
From The Conversation, except for image above
Ezgi Canpolat is a visiting post-doctoral scholar at theCenter for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
She received funding from The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University for the research referenced in this article. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed herein are entirely those of the author and should not be attributed to any institution with which the author is or has been affiliated.
The oil-dependent world is in crisis. Ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz – through which more than a quarter of global seaborne oil trade and a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas flow – is at a virtual standstill. Oil prices have climbed, briefly topping US$119 a barrel.
The largest release of oil from countries’ strategic reserves in history is under way, in an effort to ease prices. But even so, billions of people are dealing with surging energy prices and spiking food and fertilizer costs. Governments are scrambling for alternatives, too. To reduce energy demand, Sri Lanka has declared every Wednesday a holiday for public officials, Myanmar is limiting private vehicle use to every other day, and Bangladeshi colleges have canceled classes.
Leaders of South Korea and the European Commission have used the current energy crisis to call for accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels and toward homegrown renewable sources. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres put it plainly in a March 10, 2026, social media post: “There are no price spikes for sunlight and no embargoes on the wind.”
I grew up in a coal-mining town in Turkey. I now study energy transitions across the Middle East and North Africa in a research project I co-lead at Harvard University. I have seen that a country’s desire to increase renewable energy is not the same as a plan to do so.
The very region embroiled in this war reveals that there is not a linear shift from fossil fuels to renewable sources. Rather, there are distinct trajectories, driven by energy dependence, fiscal pressures, governance and stability. Disruption at the Strait of Hormuz does not mean the same thing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as it does in Ankara, Turkey, or Baghdad, Iraq.
The petrostates hedging both sides
For Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, this crisis is a warning dressed as a windfall.
Oil prices have surged, which in theory means higher revenues. But the very infrastructure that produces and delivers that wealth is under direct attack. Iran has targeted oil refineries and shipment centers across the Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz closure is simultaneously choking off their ability to get product to market, exposing how vulnerable the infrastructure of fossil fuel wealth can be.
All three countries have also committed to boostingrenewable energyproduction. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the government aims for renewable energy sources to account for 50% of electricity generation by 2030, up from just 3% at the end of 2023.
Saudi Arabia’s biggest group of clean energy companies has pledged to spend $17 billion on solar and wind – across all their projects, spread out over several years.
But those efforts sit alongside vastly larger investments in fossil fuel production. In 2025 alone, the country’s nationally owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, spent $52.2 billion building new oil and gas infrastructure.
This is not a contradiction. It is a strategy built on the assumption that the world will keep buying fossil fuels for decades to come. The current crisis reinforces that assumption, but it also exposes its vulnerability: As war drives up oil prices, every oil-importing country is feeling the cost of continuing oil dependence. And every stranded export proves the energy transition can’t wait.
Renewable energy helps drive this farm in Turkey. Muhammed Enes Yildirim/Anadolu via Getty Images
Price shock and necessity
Energy-importing countries such as Jordan, Morocco and Turkey are investing in renewable energy for a different reason: Fossil fuel dependence is bankrupting them.
Turkey imports over 70% of its fossil fuels, including virtually all of its natural gas, 17% of which comes from Iran. Natural gas accounts for less than a fifth of electricity generation, but it is the backbone of the country’s heating and industrial sectors and a major concern if supply falters. Turkey’s energy import bill is climbing at a time when the economy is already under strain from rising borrowing costs and weakening currency value.
Jordan, which historically has imported over 90% of its energy, faces similar pressure.
But these countries would be in far worse positions had they not already been investing in alternatives.
More than half of Turkey’s installed electricity capacity now comes from renewable energy sources. Morocco built one of the world’s largest concentrated solar facilities, and renewable sources now supply 25% of the country’s electricity. Similarly, Jordan has gone from virtually no renewable electricity to renewable sources providing more than a quarter of its power in roughly a decade.
The current war has vindicated their investments in renewable energy – though the vindication has limits. The same crisis that proves the value of renewable energy investment also raises inflation, tightens credit and strains the very public finances these countries need to keep building.
Every kilowatt-hour generated by a Turkish wind turbine or a Moroccan solar panel is one that does not depend on a tanker passing through the Strait of Hormuz. But the financial pressure means building the next renewable generating project just got harder.
Crisis upon crisis
Then there are countries where this war lands on top of existing emergencies.
Iraq, the second-largest oil producer in the region and in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, depends on Iranian gas imports to generate much of its electricity – a supply line now directly threatened by the war. Oil exports through the southern port of Basra, on the Persian Gulf, fund roughly 90% of Iraq’s government revenue. If those revenues are disrupted, the government may be unable to function. Iraq already suffers chronic electricity shortages and has virtually no renewable energy capacity to fall back on.
In Yemen, Libya and Syria, energy infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed by years of conflict. These countries import fuel at global prices to run generators and keep hospitals lit. Every dollar added to the price of oil makes that harder. For them, this war is not pointing out reasons to shift to renewable sources: It is threatening energy access itself.
In war-torn Syria, renewable energy is a lifeline. Ed Ram/Getty Images
An international challenge
In November 2026, the U.N.’s annual climate summit comes to the region at the center of this crisis, with Turkey as host.
The war in the Middle East has made a powerful case for the economic, political and humanitarian benefits of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. But it has also exposed something the global conversation consistently misses: Different countries are heading in different directions, based on their own circumstances, many of which predate this war.
Understanding those paths matters because it reveals what countries’ promises cannot: where the real barriers are, where the incentives already exist, and where support would make a difference – before the next disruption hits. In my view, this war has helped win the argument about whether to shift to renewable energy, but it has also highlighted a harder question: What does it actually take to build those sources, country by country?
Nature and us
From the show “Birds, Bees, Flowers, and Trees: Images of Nature’s Past and Present,’’ at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., May 22-Sept. 20.
The museum says the show “pairs historical illustrations from the age of scientific inquiry with contemporary artists’ books featuring similar themes. From delicate wildflowers to high-tech dragonfly drones, this installation explores our ever-evolving relationship with the natural world.’’
They should Bear examination
Burning of heretics in the Spanish Inquistion
“We think ourselves possessed, or at least we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact. There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny, or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself, it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not much better; even in our Massachusetts, which, I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemies upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any arguments for investigation into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Volney's Recherches Nouvelles? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws... but as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed.’’
— Letter in 1823 from Founding Father John Adams to Founding Father Thomas Jefferson