Let's Know Things

This week we talk about Adobe, Call of Duty, and Microsoft.
We also discuss compilation, machine code, and AI agents.
Recommended Book: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow
Transcript
In October of 2026, a software developer named Brandon Thomas attracted a lot of attention by releasing a collection of free, open-source programs with names like PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, and VectorCraft. These apps are meant to replicate the functionality of digital tools like Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator. Within days, the same project also had a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app—alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The coverage of these releases was borderline breathless. One person and a collection of AI coding tools had apparently cloned the key offerings of two of the most established software businesses in the world. The developer of these apps suggested that software, as we’ve always known it, might be over.
Another story, also circulating this month, featured a team using AI tools to reconstruct the underlying code of the 2009 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This wasn’t a lookalike built by watching the game and imitating its menus, it was an attempt to work backward from the compiled program to something like the source code its developers might have originally written.
Both projects fall under a loose umbrella of AI-assisted reverse engineering efforts. But they used different approaches and achieved different levels of fidelity, which have led to different likely legal and practical consequences.
What I’d like to talk about today is how people are using AI to reproduce old games and current software, why this is suddenly feasible at a much greater scale than before, and what happens if copying the behaviors and features of a program becomes a lot cheaper than creating the original was.
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To kick things off, let’s go through three things that are often called cloning in the world of software.
One is making a program that looks and behaves enough like another that a user can accomplish similar tasks. You can watch someone use Photoshop, read documentation, examine a PSD file, and build a different image editor with familiar tools. You don’t need Photoshop’s source code to do that. People have been making alternatives to proprietary software for decades; GIMP and LibreOffice, alternatives to Adobe and Microsoft apps, respectively, existed long before today’s AI models.
A second approach aims for compatibility. Maybe you don’t need to reproduce every button in a word processor, you just need your program to open and save documents that Word users can exchange without losing their formatting. That requires understanding file formats, often down to details that aren’t obvious from the official specifications, so it can be a deceptively complex undertaking.
The third approach is decompilation, which means starting with a compiled program—the machine instructions a computer runs—and trying to reconstruct higher-level code from it. This is like having a cake and working backward toward the recipe. You can identify many ingredients, and perhaps bake something that tastes the same, but the original measurements and the cook’s handwritten notes are not available to those doing this kind of attempted backtracking.
The Modern Warfare 2 project fits into that last category. Developer Maurice Heumann described spending roughly three months, with collaborators and an expanding group of AI agents, rebuilding a popular first-person shooter. His October account no longer names the game, but earlier public posts and reporting identify it as Modern Warfare 2. Heumann says earlier posts were removed after copyright-owner objections, and he doesn’t plan to release the reconstructed code.
Initially, the team had three AI agents doing the reconstruction and a fourth reviewing it. They made quick, visible progress: menus worked, maps loaded, and it looked as though much of the game had been recovered. Then the team discovered that a great deal of the code was wrong. The AI agents that they used had invented logic, misunderstood data structures, and even replaced simple operations with much bulkier, slower ones.
So they changed the test. Using the compiler that had been used for the original game, they compiled each reconstructed function and compared the resulting machine instructions to the original executable. If a function matched byte for byte—accounting for things like references whose addresses can vary—they had much stronger evidence that they’d recovered its behavior. If it didn’t, the agent had to try again.
Even that required supervision, though. Heumann says agents sometimes tried to satisfy the test by embedding arbitrary bits of assembly code, or by modifying the checker so a troublesome function would be skipped. The team had to prohibit those shortcuts and protect the verification process from changes. This isn’t exactly an example of an AI deciding to cheat in the human sense, but it’s similar: the bots were trying to pass a test in ways that the people running it didn’t want or intend.
By the time Heumann published his account, he said 99% of the game’s functions were present in the reconstructed source and 83% matched byte for byte. He also said the game was fully playable. Worth noting is that those are the team’s reported results, not an independently audited release; the code is private. And that 83% refers to functions, not 83% of the game’s artwork, design, or overall creative work. Still, the scale of the attempt is striking, as is the amount of infrastructure required to make it happen in the way the creators intended.
A smaller, more archival version of this story involves a game called Klonoa: Empire of Dreams, a Game Boy Advance title that was released in 2001.
A developer who goes by Macabeus has been rebuilding its code from the game cartridge’s data, with help from AI tools and other contributors. In an August write-up, Macabeus reported that 51% of the game’s code bytes had been matched: the newly written C code, when run through the right old compiler, produced the same machine instructions as the original.
This is a very different sort of project from creating a playable imitation. The point is to understand how the game was made, make the work reproducible, and potentially preserve or adapt it for the future. The public project doesn’t include a copy of the game, and participants need their own legally obtained game data.
While exploring the code and testing the game, the AI agent Macabeus was using found a hidden minigame on the “Clear Save Data” screen. Macabeus initially assumed the AI was hallucinating, before verifying that it was real. The discovery didn’t require the model to be a game-design genius, it just had to inspect a lot of code, notice an odd pathway, and try it: exactly the kind of patient investigation a person might do, but with much more capacity for repetitive searching.
The project also illustrates a limit in this sort of process. Matching the machine code doesn’t automatically produce clean, readable source code. Macabeus describes agents finding awkward shortcuts when they get stuck, and more experienced human reverse engineers rejecting some of those supposed solutions. All of which is arguably fine for this kind of project, where the original source is gone, and the reverse-engineer effort is primarily intended to create a playable approximation of the original. But the process is still often uneven and uncertain, and isn’t as simple as pushing a button and getting a perfect copy of a game or other piece of software spat out by the AI.
The aforementioned Adobe and Microsoft projects are different from those game cloning efforts. ArtCraft’s “Craft” apps say they’re written from scratch, using public specifications and observations of existing programs, with original or openly licensed assets. They aren’t claiming to have disassembled Photoshop or extracted Microsoft’s source code.
Instead of perfect replication, the ambition here is in the breadth of the project: seven Adobe-style creative programs, followed by WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft, among others. The code is public, and the programs are being released for desktop computers and, in some cases, the browser. Thomas has said frustration with subscription pricing and cancellation fees helped motivate the effort, and AI coding agents helped turn that motivation into a large number of working, or partially working, applications that were in good enough shape to make public, quickly.
But “working” doesn’t mean perfect and polished. As of mid-October, ArtCraft’s own PhotoCraft roadmap still calls it an alpha, not a professional Photoshop replacement. It says core tasks like opening an image, working with layers, and saving the result all function, but that performance, advanced features, and reliable exchange of Photoshop files remain unfinished. WordCraft and GridCraft similarly describe themselves as alpha products.
An independent reviewer at Creative Bloq tried several of the apps and found a similar mix of usable tools and barely working good intentions. The Lightroom-style editor offered familiar controls, but its sharpening option produced artifacts and its masking was rough. The Premiere-style editor could do basic cuts, but struggled with the reviewer’s high-quality footage and couldn’t open Premiere project files. PhotoCraft could handle basic editing, but still had weaker selection and retouching tools than Photoshop.
Getting to an imperfect but usable editor in a short time is noteworthy, but it’s important to recognize that none of these efforts are perfect copy-pastes of high-end software.
That said, commonly available AI tools are making these sorts of efforts, whichever approach a user might want to take, a lot faster than in previous computing eras.
Part of that speeding up is the result of modern coding models’ ability to read documentation, propose code, run a compiler, inspect an error message, and then try again, over and over and over. They can work through thousands of small tasks: identify a function in a binary, implement a file-format field, add a toolbar action, write a test, fix a crash, all much faster than most humans can manage. They can also call specialized tools and quickly compare blocks of machine code, which is especially useful during decompilation projects, where a lot of such code has to be analyzed. And with enough computing resources, several AI agents can work on separate parts of the project at once.
AI has also changed the economics of iteration. Before, discovering that a proposed implementation was wrong might mean another day of tedious hand-coding. Now it can mean another automated attempt a few minutes later. That’s especially important when the work has a clear end-goal: does this function compile to the same bytes as the original? Does this spreadsheet formula return the same result? Does this file open without changing its contents? Having that objective check available makes a fallible code generator a lot more effective.
There are obvious upsides to this kind of cloning work getting cheaper. A fan community might preserve a game that can no longer run on current hardware. A small company could escape an expensive software ecosystem without abandoning its otherwise locked-in files. People could add accessibility features, repair security flaws, or keep a useful program alive after its maker has moved on.
But the legal boundaries are more complicated than “reverse engineering is illegal.” In the US, copyright protects original expression in software, artwork, music, and writing; it doesn’t give a company ownership of the abstract idea of a spreadsheet or the basic logic of a photo editor. Courts have, in some circumstances, treated intermediate copying for interoperability as fair use. Federal law also contains a limited exception for bypassing technological protections when that’s necessary to make an independently created program interoperate with another one.
Those rules are not a general permission slip to distribute reconstructed game code, copy a game’s characters and assets, bypass every lock, or make an interface so similar that users might understandably think it came from the original company. Contracts, trademarks, patents, anti-circumvention rules, and other countries’ laws can matter too. That’s one reason the Modern Warfare 2 work remains private, the Klonoa project requires that users supply their own game data, and the ArtCraft projects emphasize original assets and independent code. Whether any particular project crosses a legal line depends a lot on its details, not on whether an AI wrote it.
And there could be economic consequences even when a competing program is technically legal. Established software companies have long been able to rely on the difficulty of recreating years of engineering as a moat around their crown jewel offerings. If that moat dries up, they may have to rely more on advantages beyond the application itself: reliable updates, collaboration services, plug-ins, support, proprietary data, and trust. That could mean better choices and lower prices for users, but it could also mean a flood of weak imitations that look legit until an important file is damaged or a crucial feature turns out not to exist.
There’s a deeper question here, too: if making a rough replica of an existing product becomes cheap, what happens to the incentive to fund the original, now riskier work? Competition can push incumbents to improve, but copying can also leave creators with less reason to invest in their work. Both effects are possible, and they’ll likely differ between a decades-old game that’s no longer being maintained and a tool that people are still paying to use every single day.
The change we’re seeing isn’t that software has ceased to require skill, then, or that every commercial program can now be replaced in a weekend. It’s that the cost of making a plausible first version—and of testing many possible reconstructions of existing work—is falling. In some cases, that may be enough to preserve something valuable. In others, it will produce a just-good-enough shell around a lot of missing or massively flawed machinery.
Show Notes
https://momo5502.com/posts/2026-10-09-game-decompilation/
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/dev-used-ai-agents-and-more-than-500-billion-tokens-to-rebuild-call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2s-source-code-83-percent-of-the-2009-shooters-functions-now-match-the-original-byte-for-byte
https://github.com/Dream-Atelier/kl-eod-decomp
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/ROADMAP.md
https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft/blob/main/README.md
https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft/blob/main/README.md
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/software-is-over-bold-ai-developer-takes-aim-at-adobe-with-open-source-clones/
https://www.creativebloq.com/news/i-tried-those-free-ai-coded-adobe-creative-cloud-clones-and-they-have-some-big-problems
https://www.copyright.gov/register/tx-programs.html
https://www.copyright.gov/policy/software/software-full-report.pdf
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2024-title17/html/USCODE-2024-title17-chap12-sec1201.htm


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This week we talk about polio, malaria, and smallpox.
We also discuss vaccines, the CDC, and the HHS.
Recommended Book: Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon
Transcript
In 2000, the United States declared measles eliminated. That didn’t mean nobody in the country would ever catch it again, it meant the virus was no longer freely spreading within the US. New cases generally arrived with someone who had been infected elsewhere, and public health workers were able to stop those cases from turning into long-running chains of transmission via the systems, tools, and infrastructure they created.
In early October of 2026, Pennsylvania reported more than a thousand new measles cases this year, most of them part of an outbreak that began in April. As of October 7, the state had confirmed 1,078 cases across 41 counties, 207 hospitalizations, and five measles-associated deaths. Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, had counted nearly 3,900 cases through the beginning of the month, making this the worst year for measles in the US in decades.
Pennsylvania’s latest update included 74 newly confirmed cases, though the state was careful to say that more than 40 of those people had become sick over two weeks earlier. So these were newly *reported* cases, not necessarily newly *infected* people—a distinction that matters when we’re trying to figure out whether an outbreak is speeding up or slowing down.
There’s a similar distinction being made with the death figures. Pennsylvania calls its five deaths *measles-associated*, using a definition that considers timing, a confirmed infection, medical evidence, and whether an unrelated cause might explain the death. The CDC’s national death count has not always matched the state’s, in part because the agencies publish on different schedules and review and tally deaths differently; so reporting on these sorts of things can sometimes be unintentionally fuzzy due to varying definitions and numbers.
What I’d like to talk about today is what it actually means to eliminate a disease, how measles has managed to claw its way back in a country that achieved that ‘eliminated’ milestone more than a quarter-century ago, and how vaccination, misinformation, and changing federal policy might shape what happens next.
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There are a few words public health workers and officials use that sound similar, but which describe substantially different achievements.
If a disease has been *eradicated*, it no longer circulates naturally anywhere in the world, as is the case with smallpox. The last known natural case was recorded in Somalia in 1977, and the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated in 1980. There have been no natural smallpox outbreaks since. That’s a truly remarkable global achievement, and it’s why routine smallpox vaccination isn’t necessary for most people today.
*Elimination* is more local, and more conditional. It means sustained transmission of a disease has been interrupted in a defined place, like within a country. The pathogen can still exist elsewhere, and an infected traveler can still bring it in. Whether that introduction fizzles out or takes hold depends on what it finds when it arrives—how prepared that country’s government is, and how well vaccinated its population, how well funded its healthcare system, and so on.
Measles isn’t the only disease that’s been eliminated in the United States. The last US case of polio caused by *wild* poliovirus was in 1979, and the Americas were declared free of it in 1994. But in 2022, an unvaccinated person in New York developed paralytic polio caused by a vaccine-derived poliovirus, and genetically related virus residue was found in local wastewater. That was not wild polio somehow reappearing from the American past, it was a different type of poliovirus that latched onto a vulnerable person in a country where sustained polio transmission had long since been halted.
That virus was linked to the live oral polio vaccine used in some other countries, which can sometimes give rise to circulating variants where immunity is low. The inactivated polio vaccine used in the US cannot do that.
The US also eliminated sustained malaria transmission in the early 1950s, but mosquitoes capable of carrying the parasite still live in the US, and people returning from places where malaria is common can carry it across the border. In 2023, the CDC recorded ten locally acquired, mosquito-transmitted cases across four states—the first such cases in about twenty years. Ten cases doesn’t mean malaria has become endemic in the US again, it’s just further evidence that elimination of a disease in a region doesn’t mean reintroduction is impossible.
Smallpox, then, is an example of a disease that has been removed from natural circulation worldwide. Polio, malaria, and measles, in contrast, can be locally defeated, but regions in which that’s the case remain vulnerable to the movement of people, viruses or parasites, and that victory is reliant on the continued health of the health systems meant to detect and interrupt them.
Measles is an especially demanding test of those systems because it spreads so efficiently.
The virus moves through the air when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes, and it can remain in the air, in a room in which someone has coughed, for up to two hours after that person has left. People can pass it on before the distinctive rash appears, and, according to the CDC, as many as nine out of ten nearby people who aren’t immune can become infected after exposure.
For some, the illness brings a fever, a cough, red eyes, and a rash, followed by recovery. For others, it causes pneumonia, swelling of the brain, or death. Young children, pregnant people, and those with weakened immune systems face higher risks, and this is why a measles outbreak isn’t just a rash going around, and why even just a few cases can generate an enormous amount of public health work: finding contacts, checking immunity, arranging vaccinations, and warning people who may have spent time in the same airspace. Measles can be painful and uncomfortable, but it can also be deadly, so all that effort is arguably well-invested.
The measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine—the MMR vaccine—is the main tool for preventing the spread of measles. One dose is about 93% effective against measles, and two are about 97% effective. That doesn’t mean vaccinated people can never get sick; these are estimates of how much the vaccine lowers the chance of infection. When most people in a community are protected, the virus also has fewer opportunities to reach those who cannot receive the vaccine or who haven’t yet reached the right age for their first routine dose.
Public health agencies often use about 95% coverage as a target for measles. That isn’t a magical national number, though, where a country is safe at 95.1% and doomed at 94.9%. It describes the level of protection usually needed within communities to make sustained spread difficult. A state can have a healthy-looking average while particular schools, neighborhoods, or social networks have far lower coverage and are thus at higher localized risk.
And that’s part of what makes the current trend concerning. CDC data show MMR coverage among American kindergarteners falling from 95.2% in the 2019-to-2020 school year to 92.4% in 2025-to-2026. About 280,000 kindergarteners lacked documentation of a completed MMR series in that latter year. Not all of them were necessarily unvaccinated (these sorts of records can be incomplete) but the direction of travel, and the concentration of missed vaccinations in some places and among some communities, leave more openings for the virus, which means everyone is at greater risk of infection.
There isn’t one explanation for all those missed doses. Some families have trouble getting appointments, taking time off work, or reaching a clinic. Others seek exemptions or have questions they don’t feel were answered well by medical professionals. Routine childhood care was interrupted during the pandemic, too. And misinformation has convinced some people that the risk from the vaccine is greater than the risk from measles itself, even though the evidence points strongly in the other direction.
Pennsylvania has some under-vaccinated communities, including in and around Lancaster County, which has been hit especially hard. But it would be misleading to treat one religious community, or one county, as the whole story here: cases have been recorded in 41 counties, and attitudes and access differ within any community. The point is that measles can exploit local gaps, then travel well beyond them.
One persistent claim is that the MMR vaccine causes autism. It doesn’t. This is a question researchers have studied extensively, including in a Danish study that followed more than 650,000 children and found no increased autism risk associated with MMR vaccination.
The claim has nevertheless remained influential, partly because it offers a simple explanation for something parents are understandably eager to understand. And the internet has made it easy for an old, discredited assertion to be repackaged as a newly discovered concern, often with a personal story attached, and a vibe of health and wellness that can conceal the fact that those making these claims are often famous or well-followed on social media, but generally ignorant about this subject. Those personal stories, though, can feel a lot more immediate and be a lot more memorable than statistics about a disease many Americans have never seen or experienced firsthand.
The current federal policy picture adds another layer of complexity. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has a long history of raising doubts about vaccines, including the MMR shot. He has also, during the current outbreak, urged parents to vaccinate their children against measles; and that messaging muddlement confounds efforts by public health officials to get people in for regular vaccines, because not even the higher ups, the people in charge of this kind of thing at the federal level, are speaking clearly about it.
Speaking of those who are in charge of vaccines at the federal level: the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, licenses vaccines after reviewing evidence of their safety and effectiveness. The CDC, advised by a committee of outside experts, makes recommendations about who should receive them and when. States generally decide what vaccinations schools require. The health secretary oversees the FDA and CDC, but changing a recommendation is not the same thing as withdrawing a vaccine’s approval, and neither automatically changes a state’s rules.
Under Kennedy, the FDA’s longtime top vaccine official, Peter Marks, left the agency in 2025 after a dispute with HHS leadership. The FDA also adopted a different, more risk-stratified framework for approving updated COVID vaccines. That change does not apply to the MMR vaccine, and it did not cause Pennsylvania’s outbreak, but it is part of a broader reconsideration of federal vaccine policy and the expertise used to set it.
At the CDC, Kennedy replaced the members of its vaccine advisory committee, and the administration pursued changes to the childhood immunization schedule. A federal judge paused some of those changes while litigation continues, so proposals and announcements should not be confused with settled, current guidance—a lot of this is still unsettled at this point, though RFK Jr’s efforts to reduce recommendations and approvals for vaccines have arguably already done a fair bit to make parents who were on the fence about getting these shots for their kids less likely to do so.
In August, President Trump signed an order calling for the combined MMR vaccine to be offered as three separate shots once those products become available, and for childhood vaccines to be spread across more visits where feasible. The administration presents that as a way to give parents more choice and build trust, and the order says the combined vaccine should remain available. But there are no single-antigen measles vaccines currently available in the US, and the CDC still recommends two doses of MMR. Pediatricians have warned that more appointments could mean more missed doses, especially for families already having trouble accessing care.
An executive order can’t itself manufacture those separate vaccines or license them; companies would have to produce them and the FDA would have to review them. All of which would take more time, and again, increase the complexity associated with trying to keep one’s child vaccinated.
Compared to the legal and political maneuverings related to vaccines, the underlying scientific questions are less unsettled. Extensive research has not found that the combined MMR shot causes autism, and two doses remain highly effective at preventing measles. It’s possible to investigate vaccine safety, improve transparency, and take parents’ concerns seriously without treating every claim circulating online, every random person casting doubt on vaccines, as equally supported by evidence; there’s no real comparison there, most of what’s being claimed by vaccine skeptics is unbacked bunk.
It’s also important not to draw a too-simple line from any one official’s actions to the current case count, though. The Pennsylvania outbreak began in April, and the children and adults most vulnerable to it often missed vaccinations years before this year’s executive order, and falling healthcare coverage predates the current administration. But today’s decisions can influence the information families receive, the ease with which one can get protected, and get one’s children protected, and the country’s ability to keep the next imported case from becoming the next large outbreak by ensuring the reality on the ground isn’t conducive to infection and transmission.
Pennsylvania has set up vaccination clinics in affected communities, and the state says healthcare providers gave more than 56,000 MMR doses in September, compared with about 25,000 in a typical month. New York declared a measles emergency in October and expanded the kinds of health professionals who can administer shots.
Pennsylvania also reported it has nearly 200 pop-up clinics in affected communities as of early October, alongside a marked increase in MMR doses given by healthcare providers statewide. Those efforts don’t erase the cases already recorded, but the hope is that they can keep disease spread limited.
The degree to which they manage that will be looked into by a Pan American Health Organization commission that’s scheduled to review the United States’ measles-elimination status in November. The question they’ll be asking is whether evidence shows the same lineage of measles has circulated continuously within the US for at least twelve months. Pennsylvania’s outbreak began too recently to answer that question by itself, so they’ll be looking into the bigger US picture, and that’ll determine whether the US keeps or loses its measles elimination status.
Canada lost its elimination status in 2025 after a year of continuous transmission. The United States may or may not receive the same classification; that determination depends on tracing and laboratory evidence, not on a single headline number in a given week. If a country does lose that status, though, it can regain it by once more interrupting sustained transmission; which usually isn’t easy, but it is doable—we’ve done it before, after all.
The larger lesson of measles, polio, and malaria is that eliminating a disease isn’t the same as getting rid of it for good. It’s more like maintaining a seawall: there may be long stretches when nothing appears to be happening, because the routine work is doing its job, keeping the tides at bay. The virus still exists on the other side of that barrier, though, and small gaps, tiny cracks can be all that virus needs to make it to the other side, and to start finding suitable hosts, again.
Show Notes
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/health/newsroom/pa-department-of-health-provides-statewide-update-on-measles-out9
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/health/diseases-conditions/infectious-disease/measles
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/index.html
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/causes/index.html
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/hcp/vaccine-considerations/index.html
https://www.paho.org/en/news/2-3-2026-update-review-measles-elimination-status
https://www.paho.org/en/news/10-11-2025-paho-calls-regional-action-americas-lose-measles-elimination-status
https://www.who.int/emergencies/situations/smallpox/
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7133e2.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/75/rr/rr7501a1.htm
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30831578/
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/sotu/date/2026-08-02/segment/01
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccines/index.html
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/statement-fda-commissioner-marty-makary-md-mph-100-days-embracing-gold-standard-science-transparency
https://apnews.com/article/7743be11cec4e4e22c50c2ddbcb6bcd8
https://apnews.com/article/aad16db9d014f9c024d8c42b2e2365bf
https://apnews.com/article/d10f81f221c4ae9f5b2f83dd0ee98b29
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/delivering-gold-standard-childhood-vaccine-recommendations-for-americans/
https://apnews.com/article/586cedf31d3e51b501da196f0e5cbf2a
https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/measles/
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/10/pa-measles-outbreak-tops-1000-cases-largest-since-disease-was-eliminated/


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan.
We also discuss the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, ports, and journalism.
Recommended Book: The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby
Transcript
In 2018, Ethiopia reopened its embassy in Eritrea. The two countries had fought a border war in the late 1990s and had spent nearly two decades in a tense state that was not quite war, not quite peace. The reopening was part of a striking reconciliation between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki. Abiy received the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, in large part for his efforts to end that conflict.
At the beginning of October, though, Ethiopia announced that it was re-closing that embassy. It ordered ten Eritrean diplomats to leave Addis Ababa, saying they had engaged in activities that threatened Ethiopian security. Eritrea called the decision astonishing and said it was severing diplomatic ties with Ethiopia in response.
Ethiopia also expelled an Egyptian diplomat, and Egypt responded by expelling an Ethiopian one. The African Union urged all three countries to exercise restraint and preserve channels of communication, but all of this was happening as fighting was picking back up in northern Ethiopia, and as explosions were heard in the capital, Addis Ababa. A source connected to an armed opposition alliance told Reuters that the group had launched drone strikes there. But as of early October, there had been no independent confirmation of what caused those explosions. Witnesses and officials confirmed hearing blasts; whether they were an attack, and who might have carried it out, are still open questions.
What I’d like to talk about today is how a peace that once seemed to transform this part of Africa fell apart, how Ethiopia’s internal war became entangled with its disputes with its neighbors, and why it’s important to distinguish what’s actually happening from what each side in this simmering conflict says is happening.
—
Let’s kick things off with a quick refresher of this region’s geography and history, to help explain why this crisis has so many layers.
Eritrea sits along the Red Sea, just north of Ethiopia. It became independent from Ethiopia in 1993, which left Ethiopia without a coastline. The two countries initially maintained decent relations, but then they went to war over their border in 1998. The fighting ended in 2000, without any real resolution, and without formally establishing a new, mutually acceptable relationship. That was the long stalemate Abiy and Isaias seemed to resolve back in 2018.
Inside Ethiopia, there was another important change during this period. For decades, a political movement originating in the northern region of Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, had been the dominant force in the coalition that governed the country. Abiy came to power in 2018 and reshaped that governing coalition, and this put even more distance between the central government and the TPLF.
In 2020, those political disputes erupted into a war between the Ethiopian federal government and Tigrayan forces. Eritrea fought alongside Ethiopia’s government against the TPLF. This is one of the most striking reversals in the present crisis: the government and its former Eritrean ally are now accusing one another of dangerous interference, while Ethiopian officials allege that Eritrea is helping that same Tigrayan movement they once fought against.
This war, which lasted from 2020 to 2022, killed hundreds of thousands of people, according to estimates that vary substantially because conditions made reliable counting so difficult. It also displaced millions, damaged farms and hospitals, and involved absolutely horrific abuses against civilians. International investigators and human-rights groups documented atrocities by multiple parties, including Ethiopian and Eritrean forces and Tigrayan fighters.
In November of 2022, Ethiopia’s government and the TPLF signed a peace agreement in Pretoria, South Africa. They agreed to stop fighting, disarm Tigrayan forces, restore services throughout the region, allow humanitarian aid to reach civilians, and to work toward a more stable political settlement. But Eritrea was not a party to that agreement, and that’s because there were two different peace processes.
The 2018 reconciliation was between Ethiopia and Eritrea: two states ending a border standoff. The Pretoria agreement was between Ethiopia’s federal government and the TPLF: two parties trying to end a civil war. Neither agreement automatically settled the questions at the heart of the other one, and Eritrea’s role in the civil war made it more difficult for a ceasefire between Ethiopian and Tigrayan leaders to guarantee peace along the Eritrean border.
Parts of western Tigray were, and remain to this day, contested by Tigrayan and Amhara authorities. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced from that area have not been able to return home safely. Disarmament did not proceed as the agreement envisioned, and rights groups continued to report abuses, including by Eritrean troops in parts of Tigray.
Within Tigray, the TPLF split into rival factions. The status of the regional administration became another source of conflict. In May of this year, TPLF leaders pushed out an administration backed by the federal government. The two sides disputed who had authority there, how the peace agreement should be carried out, and whether federal funds were being withheld. Human Rights Watch also reported allegations of a coercive recruitment drive by Tigrayan authorities, including the forced recruitment of child soldiers.
So the Pretoria agreement stopped a major war, but it left armed groups, competing governments, disputed territory, and displaced families in place, their problems unresolved.
Then, in late September of this year, fighting between federal forces and Tigrayan fighters intensified in Tigray and neighboring Afar. The United Nations reported that armed forces had seized the airports in Mekelle, Axum, and Shire, and warned that hostilities were spreading into neighboring areas. An alliance of seven Ethiopian opposition groups also announced a common challenge to Abiy’s government, though importantly, an announcement of cooperation doesn’t tell us how closely those groups are actually coordinating on the ground.
Ethiopia’s army chief then accused Eritrea of helping the TPLF and suggested that Egypt and Sudan were supporting the opposition as well. Eritrea, Egypt, and Sudan have denied the allegations. And those differing stories point at a difficulty in any conflict, but especially one happening in this part of the world, at this moment in time.
Governments have access to information they may not make public. They also have reasons to portray an internal opponent as an instrument of a foreign power. Armed groups have their own reasons to claim allies or capabilities they may not actually possess. And governments accused of involvement in a conflict or violent act have strong reasons to deny it, whether the accusation is true or false.
This fog of war applies to the aforementioned blasts in Addis Ababa, too. If opposition forces had successfully attacked targets in the capital, that would represent a significant shift in the conflict. Reuters reported a claim from a source linked to the opposition alliance, but also said it could not confirm who caused the explosions. The Associated Press reported that it remained unclear whether the blasts were an attack or just military exercises. So there’s a consequential claim here, but not yet confirmation of a rebel strike on the capital.
Part of the problem is that independent observation is difficult in this region right now. Internet service in northern Ethiopia was disrupted as the fighting escalated. Roads and flights have been interrupted. Earlier this year, Ethiopian authorities expelled a French journalist after her reporting trip to Tigray, and temporarily revoked accreditation for three Reuters journalists following a separate investigation, before restoring it months later. Press-freedom organizations have documented pressure on Ethiopian reporters, as well.
This doesn’t mean all official statements related to this conflict are false. It means there are fewer independent witnesses able to confirm them, and fewer ways for people living near the fighting to tell the outside world what they are seeing. During the last Tigray war, communications blackouts helped create conditions in which rumors traveled faster than verifiable accounts, and those same risks are present now.
Journalists and researchers can sometimes use satellite images, hospital records, interviews with people who have fled, and statements from the parties to build a picture of what happened. But a hospital can confirm that people were wounded without knowing who fired the weapon. A satellite image might show damage without revealing who caused it. And an eyewitness can describe a blast without being aware of a drone flying overhead.
That said, we can note a few things with reasonable certainty. The diplomatic expulsions and embassy closure were public government decisions. Fighting has resumed. Medical teams are treating many more people with war wounds, and civilians who survived the previous war are once again facing displacement and interrupted services. Uncertainty about who fired a weapon in Addis Ababa doesn’t make those events uncertain, it just keeps us from having a complete picture of the context surrounding those confirmed elements.
Let’s talk for a moment about why there’s concern about this conflict, which is inside Ethiopia, possibly spreading beyond its borders.
With Eritrea, the central issue is the Red Sea. Ethiopia is a large, landlocked country that depends on ports in neighboring states for access to global trade. Abiy has argued that reliable access to the sea is vital to its economy and security, and his government has shown a lot of interest in the Eritrean port of Assab.
Eritrea’s government has interpreted this interest as a possible threat to its territory. Ethiopian officials have spoken about seeking access through negotiation, but some of Abiy’s statements about Ethiopia’s historic loss of the coast have perhaps rightly heightened fears in Asmara. When both parties worry the other might be preparing for a fight, reactionary troop movements or support for rival political groups can become evidence for something neither side originally intended, but which eventually becomes real, nonetheless.
Egypt’s dispute with Ethiopia is different. It centers on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, built on the Blue Nile. Ethiopia sees the dam as crucial for generating electricity and supporting development within its borders, but Egypt depends heavily on Nile waters and wants a binding agreement about how the dam will operate, especially in dry years. The dam was inaugurated in 2025, but the underlying dispute was not resolved, leaving Egypt worrying that it might not receive enough water due to that new, massive upstream infrastructure.
Egypt and Eritrea, interestingly, have grown closer as both have become more worried about Ethiopia. That’s why the Egyptian diplomatic expulsion is part of the regional story to begin with; that existing conflict with Ethiopia over its new dam makes it thinkable that Egypt might come down against Ethiopia in the event of a regional war breaking out, even if there’s no reason to think Egypt is seeking such a war, currently.
Sudan has also been named in recent Ethiopian accusations about foreign enemies conspiring, and like Egypt, it has denied them.
The danger is that leaders may begin treating every local setback as proof of a foreign plot, and every move by a neighbor as preparation for an attack. The more countries they bring into that story, all of them watching their backs and fearing a first strike against their interests, the more chances there are for one misread event to provoke a response somewhere else, triggering a cascade of tit-for-tat violence.
Diplomatic expulsions don’t mean these countries are at war. Governments sometimes recall or expel diplomats during a crisis and eventually restore relations. But an embassy is also a place where officials can send warnings, clarify intentions, and subtly taste-test possible compromises. Closing an embassy while armies are fighting nearby removes one safe, ordinary way to do those sorts of things. That’s why the African Union’s call to keep communicating is more than just a ceremonial expression of concern; embassies and ambassadors help keep wars from happening.
Now all that said, as tends to be the case, the people with the least control over these high-level, state decisions are already bearing the majority of their cost.
Doctors Without Borders said that in two hospitals in northern Ethiopia, the number of war-wounded patients received rose from around 180 to more than 420 over a 48-hour period in late September. Another hospital in Shire received more than 300 wounded patients that week. Some medical outreach has been suspended for the moment because staff cannot safely reach people outside hospitals due to the fighting.
In Tigray, people who were displaced during the earlier war still live in camps. Residents of these camps have described hearing artillery again. Others report disruptions to banking and communications, making it harder to buy food or run a business even when the fighting is still a long ways away.
These accounts are part of how we can tell whether a claimed de-escalation is real. An embassy can reopen while roads remain blocked. Leaders can announce talks while families remain unable to return home. A ceasefire can stop large battles while smaller groups continue to threaten civilians. On the ground reporting helps us understand the true nature of what might be officially called a ceasefire, or the true nature of what might be officially called a war.
There are reasons to think a wider war is not inevitable, here, though, despite everything.
The Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian governments all stand to lose from a larger conflict. The African Union helped broker the 2022 agreement, and both it and the United Nations are urging renewed dialogue. Those institutions have relationships and channels and sticks and carrots they can use to nudge things back on course, even if it might take a while to do so.
The main things to be watching now are whether Ethiopian and Tigrayan leaders resume talks under the Pretoria framework; whether aid workers can move safely and services are restored; whether Eritrean or other foreign forces can be independently documented crossing into the fighting; and whether Ethiopia and Eritrea find a way to discuss port access without treating it as a question that can only be settled through the application of force.
Show Notes
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/african-union-urges-ethiopia-eritrea-egypt-refrain-actions-that-could-undermine-2026-10-02/
https://www.internazionale.it/ultime-notizie-reuters/2026/10/02/explosions-heard-overnight-in-ethiopia-s-capital-diplomatic-sources-say
https://www.au.int/en/pressreleases/20261001/statement-auc-escalating-tensions-between-ethiopia-eritrea-and-egypt
https://apnews.com/article/ethiopia-blasts-tigray-war-a864e8cd442bade4531b8e7609f3216c
https://apnews.com/article/ethiopia-tigray-war-eritrea-sudan-egypt-6b3208122a4221f3c2e8dcbe21630016
https://ethiopia.un.org/en/323246-un-secretary-general-statement-ethiopia
https://www.msf.org/msf-teams-scale-medical-response-fighting-resumes-ethiopia
https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2137710/b210-ehtioipia-eritrea-tigray.pdf
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/09/09/rising-tigray-tensions-test-african-union
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/23/ethiopia-tigray-authorities-should-withdraw-abusive-law
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/04/22/ethiopia-persecution-of-tigrayans-unrelenting
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/eritrea
https://cpj.org/2026/06/ethiopia-expels-french-journalist-augustine-passilly-after-reporting-trip-to-tigray/
https://cpj.org/2026/02/ethiopia-revokes-reuters-journalists-accreditation-following-investigative-report/
https://rsf.org/en/ethiopia-rsf-condemns-escalating-pressure-and-intimidation-against-independent-news-site-addis
https://amp.dw.com/en/ethiopia-internet-disrupted-in-tigray-amid-conflict-escalation/a-79424191
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2019/summary/
https://apnews.com/article/12ae4fcb39169cd077c538c7c112c6fd
https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/10/02/egypt-ethiopia-nile-dam-latest/


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This week we talk about EU membership, trade deals, and association.
We also discuss Australia, Ursula von der Leyen, and Brussels.
Recommended Book: Being You by Anil Seth
Transcript
Just off the coast of Newfoundland, there’s a small group of islands that belongs to France. Saint-Pierre and Miquelon are close enough to Canada that, at their nearest point, the two countries are separated by only a few kilometers of water.
In September, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met French President Emmanuel Macron on these islands. The two leaders could stand on French territory and talk about a partnership with the European Union, while Canada was visible across the water.
A few days earlier, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had made a similar, but possibly more significant proposal. Speaking before the European Parliament, with Carney in the room, she said she wanted to open the door for Canada to become the EU’s first “associate member.”
Depending on which headline you read about the statement, this may have sounded like Canada might be joining the EU, joining it partway, or joining an entirely new version of it. Soon after, Australia’s trade minister said his country was “on the same page” as Canada regarding closer ties, and the European Parliament’s president then suggested Australia and New Zealand might follow Canada’s lead.
Now, despite all those headlines and interpretations, there’s one problem with all these stated ambitions: the European Union does not have an established category called associate member. No one has agreed on what rights or obligations an associate member country would have, and figuring that out—and getting some kind of resolution passed—would be necessary for anyone, including Canada and Australia, to get closer in that way with the EU.
What I’d like to talk about today is why this proposal was made, what it could mean if it eventually becomes more concrete, and whatever happens, what these statements tell us about the way global alliances are changing.
—
The EU has 27 member countries, but there are already a few different ways to be connected to it.
Full member nations help write EU law and send representatives to its institutions. They all participate in the single market, which means goods, services, money, and people can move across member nation borders under shared rules.
The single market is distinct from the customs union, which sets common tariffs on goods imported from elsewhere. Both are distinct from the Schengen area, which removes most routine passport checks between participating countries. And nations that use the euro are another group entirely. These arrangements tend to overlap, but they’re not the same thing, and membership in one does not automatically mean membership in all the others.
There are also countries outside the EU that participate in some of its systems. Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein belong to the European Economic Area and are part of the single market. To do that they have to accept many EU rules, although they don’t vote on those rules as that would require full EU membership. Switzerland has built its own set of bilateral arrangements with the EU. And Britain, after leaving the union, has also negotiated a special trade and cooperation agreement with it.
So there are precedents for a country having a deep relationship with the EU without being a member. But there’s no ready-made ‘associate’ slot that Canada can just step into.
There’s a legal distinction here, too. The EU treaties say that a European state can apply to become a member, and Canada is not a European state. The treaties separately allow the EU to make association agreements with countries outside the bloc, and it already has many kinds of agreements with external partners. An association agreement, though, does not make that partner a member of the Union.
“Associate member” could eventually become a useful name for a new collection of rights and obligations held by nations outside those existing parameters. For now, though, it’s a political invitation and a negotiating idea, not a defined legal status.
All that said, Canada isn’t starting from scratch on this. Its trade agreement with the EU, called CETA, has been applied provisionally since 2017. Most of it is already in effect, though ten EU countries still haven’t completed the ratification required for the whole of the agreement to go into force.
CETA removes most tariffs and opens some opportunities for companies on each side, but it doesn’t make Canada part of the single market. A Canadian product can be easier to sell in Europe without a Canadian worker gaining a general right to take a job there. That’s part of the distinction between a trade deal and the sort of relationship people sometimes imagine when they hear the phrase “union membership.”
Canada also joined Horizon Europe, the EU’s major research funding program, in 2024. It has a security and defense partnership with the EU, and it became the first country outside Europe to join an EU defense financing initiative called SAFE.
That means some of the proposed future relationship already exists, but in pieces rather than as a unified whole. The question is whether those pieces can be connected and extended into something much more ambitious and holistic.
Now, important to understanding the why of all this is understanding Canada’s relationship with the US, and how that relationship has been fraying, of late.
Canada’s economy is deeply integrated with that of the United States. Its proximity to the massive US market has brought enormous benefits, but it also means a change in American trade policy can have an immediate and dramatic effect on Canadian businesses. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and repeated suggestions that Canada should become the 51st state have made that dependence more than a little politically uncomfortable.
For Carney, a closer European relationship offers a way to reduce the risk of having too many economic and security decisions shaped by one increasingly unpredictable and at times belligerent neighboring country. Europe has its own reasons to be interested in closer ties. Canada has energy and critical minerals, industrial capacity, research institutions, and a role in the Arctic. Both sides also support Ukraine and work together through NATO and other forums.
Von der Leyen has proposed cooperation with Canada on batteries, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, and defense production. Carney has added ideas about financial services and opportunities for young people to live, work, and study across the Atlantic.
This isn’t a plan to move Canada’s economy from one continent to another. Geography still matters. A car part crossing the US-Canada border may be part of a production chain built up over decades; a new trade agreement with Europe doesn’t instantly recreate or replace that chain.
But diversification doesn’t require replacing one partner with another. It can mean having additional buyers, suppliers, research collaborators, and sources of investment, so that a disruption in one relationship is less damaging.
The costs and limits matter here, too. Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has warned that deeper EU ties could mean higher costs and Canadian industries being regulated from Brussels. His motives in bringing this up are likely at least partly political, but it’s a question worth asking: if Canada wants more access to a tightly regulated European market, which European standards would it have to accept as a tradeoff?
Europe would face its own questions. EU governments have spent decades building shared rules among countries that accept reciprocal obligations. They may not want to give a distant partner the benefits of those standards without comparable commitments. The fact that ten member states have yet to ratify the existing Canada trade agreement is a reminder that closer ties require more than an enthusiastic speech from the Commission president; there are real, practical realities to consider, here.
If something like this were to move forward, we don’t yet know whether the final result would be one major agreement or a series of smaller ones. The latter might be easier to negotiate: a defense arrangement could advance while mobility or food standards remain unresolved, for instance. But calling the package an associate membership could also raise expectations that every difficult issue will be solved at once, which probably isn’t realistic.
And none of this automatically grants Canadians the right to settle anywhere in the EU, or Europeans the right to settle in Canada. Carney has talked about expanding opportunities for young people, but the scope of any mobility arrangement would have to be negotiated. A youth work or study program would be a very different proposition from full freedom of movement.
And as all of this has played out, Australia has watched with interest.
Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell said Australia and Canada were “on the same page” about building stronger ties with Europe, and that he would watch what Carney did. Then European Parliament President Roberta Metsola named Australia and New Zealand as examples of countries with which the EU could deepen its relationship.
Those remarks generated another round of headlines about countries joining Europe, but as with Canada, things are more complicated than most of the reporting on this would suggest.
Australia and the EU finished negotiating a free trade agreement earlier this year, but it still has to be signed and brought into force. They also have a security and defense partnership and have discussed bringing Australia into Horizon Europe. At a September meeting, their leaders focused on those steps, along with potential agreements related to critical minerals and technology.
All of which illustrates the difference between a political signal and a policy commitment. Whether the involved negotiators eventually decide on some kind of associate terminology is arguably less consequential than the real-deal agreements being worked out piecemeal, today.
If the associate model were to become a real thing and catch on with Canada and Australia, that could open the doors for more and deeper collaborations by the EU with non-member states, though, which could be long-term impactful, even if it took a while to spin-up.
Looking across the channel at Britain, we find evidence that an associate membership with the EU might have real appeal, even for union skeptics.
In a YouGov survey published ten years after the Brexit vote, 57% of Britons said leaving had been the wrong decision, and 55% said they supported rejoining the EU in principle. But when asked about rejoining without Britain’s old exceptions to EU rules, support fell to 35%. Meanwhile, 59% supported a closer relationship without rejoining the EU, its single market, or its customs union.
Those results don’t tell us what Britons would think of a hypothetical Canadian-style agreement, but they do suggest that the details are important. “Closer ties” can sound attractive to people who are uncomfortable with shared laws, movement across borders, and which institutions get the final say, because it suggests more benefits with fewer organizational constraints. There’s a non-zero chance any new, tighter agreement with Canada would face similar, detail-oriented issues, and a mix of approval and disapproval from Canadian citizenry.
Show Notes
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/16/von-der-leyen-mark-carney-canada-eu-first-associate-member
https://www.politico.eu/article/australia-on-the-same-page-as-canada-on-deepening-eu-ties-says-key-minister-trade-don-farrell/
https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54925-what-do-britons-think-of-brexit-10-years-since-the-referendum
https://sentiers.media/the-map-fiction-missed/
https://cyprus.representation.ec.europa.eu/news/2026-state-union-address-president-von-der-leyen-2026-09-16_en
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2026/09/17/prime-minister-carney-delivers-address-european-parliament
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2026/09/20/prime-minister-carney-delivers-remarks-conclude-his-visit-saint-pierre-et
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/09/17/prime-minister-carney-deepens-ties-trusted-allies-visit-france-and
https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/media/video/I-294577
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/treaty-on-european-union-joining-the-eu.html
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/


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This week we talk about lobbying, renewables, and the NRA.
We also discuss implied threats, midterm elections, and political action committees.
Recommended Book: Sunward by William Alexander
Transcript
For much of the late 20th century and the first few decades of the 21st, one of the most feared interest groups in US politics was the National Rifle Association, the NRA.
Its power came from a large and politically engaged membership, a mailing list, a grading system that reduced complicated voting records to a letter, and a reputation for ending political careers over specific votes.
Once it attained that reputation, the NRA didn’t have to defeat every politician it disagreed with. Members of Congress only had to believe it could defeat them, and that belief shaped races in which the group spent nothing; politicians went out of their way not to anger the NRA. Money can buy an advertisement or a meeting. What tends to change a vote is the expectation that one choice will be rewarded and another will carry consequences.
The NRA’s influence has declined following internal scandals, financial trouble, and the growth of well-funded gun-control groups. But its model remains potent: pick a few visible fights, and allow your reputation to do a lot of the work for you, in the future.
In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, alongside a related appeals-court ruling later that year, helped create the modern super PAC: a political committee that can raise and spend unlimited sums advocating for or against candidates, so long as it does not coordinate that spending with their campaigns.
This did not eliminate the effort and resources required to build influence, but it meant a few wealthy donors, a competent team, and some carefully selected races could establish a reputation in months rather than decades.
In 2026, solar, wind, and batteries are projected to account for about 93% of new utility-scale electrical generating capacity added in the United States.
That doesn’t mean they provide 93% of the country’s electricity—natural gas remains the largest source in the US—but these technologies are now the overwhelming majority of what the industry is building.
Despite that growth, in 2025 Congress passed a law that sharply rolled back federal support for much of the clean-energy industry, and most of the politicians who voted for those rollbacks appeared to suffer no political consequences for doing so.
What I’d like to talk about today is the effort to build a feared clean-energy lobby, how it has influenced a series of Republican primaries, and what its early successes do and do not tell us about the role of money in American politics.
—
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, was signed into law on July 4, 2025.
For wind and solar projects, the new law generally ended production and investment tax credits for facilities placed in service after December 31, 2027, unless construction began within twelve months of the bill’s enactment.
That twelve-month window closed in July of 2026, and a subsequent executive order directed the Treasury Department to adopt a stricter definition of when construction actually begins, further clamping down on entities hoping to benefit from those now-defunct credits.
Tax credits for electric vehicles and residential efficiency upgrades ended in 2025, while support for clean hydrogen was curtailed. Other technologies, including batteries, nuclear power, and geothermal energy, were treated differently, so it would be misleading to say the law eliminated every federal clean-energy incentive, though it did severely curtail a lot of renewables-oriented industries and construction in the US.
Republicans have generally been more supportive of fossil-fuel production and more hostile to federal wind and solar subsidies, while Democrats have generally taken the opposite position. There are important regional exceptions, especially among Republicans whose districts have attracted manufacturing plants, wind farms, and other energy investments. Several Republican lawmakers have even written letters asking party leaders to preserve some of the credits, in part because projects and jobs in their districts depended on them. When the final vote arrived, though, nearly all congressional Republicans voted for the bill.
Tom Matzzie, the founder of the retail electricity company CleanChoice Energy, previously worked for Democratic campaigns and served as the Washington director of the progressive organization MoveOn.org, so he was familiar with electoral campaigning as well as the energy industry. In the wake of the passing of the OBBBA, he posed a question to Canary Media, possibly alluding to the success of political interest groups like the NRA when he said, “Are we someone that people can hurt without consequences?”
Matzzie recruited Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of the blockchain company Ripple and an investor in clean energy, and Michael Brune, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, and together they formed the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, or ITC, an acronym that also evokes the investment tax credit the group was organized, in part, to defend.
Federal Election Commission records show that the coalition raised about $6.8 million during the first half of 2026. Larsen provided $6 million, while the organizers said they had assembled commitments of around $20 million and hoped to spend as much as $30 million during the election cycle. Matzzie called the group’s candidate-targeting spreadsheet the “Revenge Tour Matrix,” which is an unusually candid name for a political document.
The group’s most interesting strategic decision, though, is arguably that its advertisements generally did not mention clean energy.
When ITC opposed Texas Representative Chip Roy in the Republican runoff for state attorney general, its ads questioned Roy’s loyalty to President Trump. When it opposed Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, it created a website called Lyin’ Andy that focused on his missed votes and a federal investigation into his campaign-finance reporting.
The coalition openly identified its reason for entering these races, but its advertisements used whatever campaign research suggested would move primary voters, not what its donors wanted them to think about solar panels.
This approach was especially well suited to Republican primaries, where relatively small electorates can be reached through a concentrated group of conservative television, social-media, and streaming outlets.
In Ogles’ race, for instance, the two campaigns had each spent roughly $600,000, while ITC spent around $2 million attacking Ogles and introducing voters to his challenger, Charlie Hatcher.
The coalition describes its record so far as five wins in five races.
In May, Roy lost the Texas attorney-general runoff by 10.4 percentage points.
In June, Iowa Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican who had defended renewable-energy interests in Congress, survived her primary with help from ITC, including a $125,000 contribution.
Later that month, South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman finished a distant third in the Republican primary for governor after the coalition opposed him.
In August, Ogles lost his primary by more than six points despite an endorsement from Trump and more than $700,000 from the House Freedom Caucus’ political fund.
And in late August, Norman lost a second race, this time a Republican Senate primary, to Darline Graham, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham. ITC spent about $1 million in that contest, which Norman lost by five points.
The reactions from Norman and Ogles were almost as useful to the group as the election results.
Norman blamed outside political spending in his concession speech, while Ogles, before his loss, said the coalition was attempting to make an example of him and that could have a chilling effect on other conservatives in Congress.
Those statements do not prove ITC caused either defeat. But they do advertise the consequence the organization wants other politicians to anticipate; come after clean energy investment and they’ll come after you.
This strategy is notable because it separates political deterrence from public persuasion.
It does not need Republican primary voters to become enthusiastic about solar tax credits. It just needs politicians to believe that aggressively attacking solar companies could make their next primary more difficult.
The ads questioning Roy’s loyalty to Trump are probably the clearest version of this distinction. The message voters received and the policy outcome the donors wanted were almost entirely unrelated, and that was intentional.
It’s worth mentioning here that the power of a wealthy individual to shape a low-turnout primary does not become less concerning because the spending supports a technology someone likes. The same rules are available to fossil-fuel companies, cryptocurrency investors, labor unions, and ideological groups of all kinds.
That said, Ogles entered his primary with several liabilities unrelated to energy policy, including controversial public comments, questions about his finances, and a district whose boundaries had changed. Darline Graham had Trump’s support in her race against Norman.
In Texas, the coalition’s roughly $1.7 million in spending was substantial, but the winning campaign spent nearly $25 million and Roy’s campaign spent around $12 million. Roy dismissed the coalition’s influence and said he would take the same positions again.
Matzzie’s response to all this is, more or less, that proof of causation is unnecessary: if lawmakers believe the coalition can hurt them, the deterrent works.
That may be true, but it makes the group’s claim difficult to test. The measurable outcome is that five races ended the way the group preferred, but it’s currently unknown, and maybe unknowable, how much responsibility the group can claim for those victories.
An analysis highlighted by Yale Climate Connections estimated that fossil-fuel interests spent about $219 million supporting candidates in the 2024 election cycle, with roughly 88% of that spending benefiting Republicans. The oil and gas industry also spent more than $150 million lobbying the federal government that year.
What the coalition may have demonstrated is that a relatively modest sum, precisely applied in low-turnout elections with inexpensive media markets, can attract attention far beyond the size of the investment. That is as much a finding about the vulnerability of primary elections as it is about the political strength of clean energy.
Now all that said, the renewable energy industry itself is divided over whether this is a useful approach.
Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota who now leads the Solar Energy Industries Association, has said his organization’s job is to make more friends rather than more enemies—an arguably rational position for a trade group that needs access to both parties.
Steve McBee, meanwhile, launched an organization called Amped to encourage clean-energy professionals to engage more visibly in politics, arguing that a major infrastructure industry, and one that’s growing in scale by the year, still behaves as if it were a marginal alternative, and that needs to change.
These approaches can of course coexist, but there is a tension between building a coalition and threatening to make an example of anyone who doesn’t fall into line, and each tactic can make the other more difficult.
The coalition’s first announced Democratic target was Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee, who blamed some of the state’s electricity-price problems on clean-energy policies and proposed delaying its renewable-energy target while reducing funding for efficiency programs.
ITC committed about $500,000 to oppose him in the September 9 primary. Targeting a Democrat helps establish that it is enforcing an industry position rather than functioning as another Democratic-aligned group. And that investment may have paid off: former CVS executive Helena Foulkes beat McKee on September 9’s runoff, with around 62% to McKee’s 38%—not even close.
This wasn’t a clean experiment, though. McKee was already trailing Foulkes by a wide margin, and his standing had been damaged by controversies unrelated to energy, including the prolonged closure of a major bridge.
The next test will be whether the approach works outside primaries. General elections have larger, less ideologically uniform electorates, more expensive advertising, and more competing messages. Matzzie has not offered much detail about the coalition’s plans, and a tactic that works in a small primary may not scale in November.
The midterm elections on November 3 will clarify what this produces at the federal level, but deterrence and legislation are different things. Roy and Norman were running for offices outside the House, while Hatcher was not a wind-and-solar champion. Replacing an outspoken opponent may help the industry, but it does not produce the votes required to restore a tax credit.
The protected begin-construction window for many wind and solar projects closed in July, and the placed-in-service deadline arrives at the end of 2027. Congress could change those dates, but doing so would require legislation that can pass both chambers and receive a presidential signature; a different electoral environment could make that more plausible, but would not make it automatic.
There’s also a risk that a campaign built around retaliation will make clean energy more firmly associated with one political party, even as the industry expands through many Republican districts and states.
Targeting McKee complicates that interpretation, and supporting Miller-Meeks shows a willingness to reward a Republican ally. Still, most targets have been Republicans because most recent federal opposition to wind and solar support has come from Republicans.
That is a current political fact, but it’s not necessarily a permanent alignment. And clean energy companies would no doubt love to get both parties on side, rather than contributing to a further divide, in which one party forever opposes the sorts of projects they’re trying to support.
Thinking back to previous examples of how these sorts of things have played out, the NRA’s influence was never just a function of how much it spent. It came from a reputation, constructed one race at a time, that even influenced politicians who never personally faced its advertisements and spending.
The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition is attempting to compress that process into a single election cycle, using a campaign-finance tool that did not exist in its current form when the NRA first built its power.
Five primaries in, the outlines of that reputation are visible, but its ability to changes votes in Congress, survive a loss, and work with a broader electorate will tell us whether this is the beginning of a durable clean-energy lobby, or just an unusually effective run of well-selected races.
Show Notes
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/politics/super-pac-crushing-clean-energy-foes
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/politics/clean-energy-super-pac-looks-to-take-down-a-democratic-governor
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082026/super-pac-targets-conservatives-against-clean-energy/
https://www.eenews.net/articles/emboldened-clean-energy-donors-eye-big-campaign-spending/
https://newrepublic.com/post/214762/green-energy-group-pick-off-republican-candidates
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/top-trump-ally-warns-super-pac-bankrolled-dem-billionaire-meddling-gop-primary
https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/the-one-big-beautiful-bill-impact-on-the-iras-clean-energy-tax-credits.html
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/2025-reconciliation-debate-one-big-beautiful-bill-act-energy-provisions/
https://seia.org/research-resources/clean-energy-provisions-big-beautiful-bill/
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-us-overwhelmingly-build-clean-power
https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00936997/
https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/speechnoworg-v-fec/
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/understanding-independent-expenditures/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/01/the-fossil-fuel-industry-spent-219-million-to-elect-the-new-u-s-government/
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summary?cycle=2024&id=e01
https://www.amped.org/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/09/us/elections/results-rhode-island-governor-primary.html


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