human actions, global climate change, global human solutions by 1kiki

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

human actions, global climate change, global human solutions

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Tuesday, October 28, 2025 05:36
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VIEWED: 42972
PAGE 22 of 22

Wednesday, September 3, 2025 4:07 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Whether blocking the wind farm was a good move or a stupid move depends very much on whether the project was over budget. Completing something just bc something is 80% done is the "sunk cost" fallacy i.e. "We've spent so much already we have to make it worthwhile."

It could be like Biden's EV program: billions spent, few charging stations constructed.

Sometimes ya just gotta pull the plug. So to speak.

*****

But yanno, SIX, some projects are worthwhile. For the first time EVER, we haven't had a "save your power" flexalert, and no threatened or actual outages. Yay!
I personally think that's due to so many rooftop panels and parking lot solar canopies installed lately, producing electricity in the relentless sunshine. Two of my neighbors just installed solar panels and they're happy, happy, happy with the results! Even my fair city installed solar canopies lately on all of their school and city center parking lots.

Maybe the wind farm would make sense too.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Wednesday, September 3, 2025 7:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Whether blocking the wind farm was a good move or a stupid move depends very much on whether the project was over budget. Completing something just bc something is 80% done is the "sunk cost" fallacy i.e. "We've spent so much already we have to make it worthwhile."

It could be like Biden's EV program: billions spent, few charging stations constructed.

Sometimes ya just gotta pull the plug. So to speak.

*****

But yanno, SIX, some projects are worthwhile. For the first time EVER, we haven't had a "save your power" flexalert, and no threatened or actual outages. Yay!
I personally think that's due to so many rooftop panels and parking lot solar canopies installed lately, producing electricity in the relentless sunshine. Two of my neighbors just installed solar panels and they're happy, happy, happy with the results! Even my fair city installed solar canopies lately on all of their school and city center parking lots.

Maybe the wind farm would make sense too.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

Nuclear is the ONLY real answer. Everything else is just bullshit toys.

Eventually enough people will grow up and realize this fact and start doing it again.

Nuclear power is the ONLY CLEAN SOURCE of energy that Humans have ever developed, and they lied to us about it until now.

Quote:
In 1969, the U.S. was flipping the switch on three new nuclear reactors a year—fast, efficient, and powering millions of homes. Then, almost overnight, the industry collapsed, not because of accidents like Three Mile Island, but because of a single rule that changed everything. This video uncovers the little-known story of how fear, regulation, and economics killed America’s nuclear momentum. And why small modular reactors might finally bring it back.

*Chapters:*
00:00 We Suddenly Stopped
01:05 The Radiation Scare
02:45 Your Daily Radiation
04:25 The Actual Result of the Meltdowns
05:54 Linear No-Threshold
07:47 Nuclear Plant Economics
11:09 The Energy Tradeoff
15:55 Small Modular Reactors

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 1:09 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Your insistence on The One Big Solution ( nuclear or nothing,) or the One Sweeping Opinion, (nobody died of Covid) is flawed, all- or- nothing thinking. It appeals to your, er ... colorful... personality but it's not how the world usually works.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 9:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Whether blocking the wind farm was a good move or a stupid move depends very much on whether the project was over budget. Completing something just bc something is 80% done is the "sunk cost" fallacy i.e. "We've spent so much already we have to make it worthwhile."

It could be like Biden's EV program: billions spent, few charging stations constructed.

Sometimes ya just gotta pull the plug. So to speak.

*****

But yanno, SIX, some projects are worthwhile. For the first time EVER, we haven't had a "save your power" flexalert, and no threatened or actual outages. Yay!
I personally think that's due to so many rooftop panels and parking lot solar canopies installed lately, producing electricity in the relentless sunshine. Two of my neighbors just installed solar panels and they're happy, happy, happy with the results! Even my fair city installed solar canopies lately on all of their school and city center parking lots.

Maybe the wind farm would make sense too.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

I'm copying the whole article that Signym is commenting on. Signym, the 80% completed Revolution Wind project was NOT cancelled by an owner rethinking an investment. Trump cancelled it arbitrarily because of his personal whimsy. And about Biden's Charging infrastructure: there is a huge difference between Congress allocating a single huge lump of money and the Executive branch spending that money much later, after thousands of teeny-tiny contracts are signed with different construction companies. $billions were allocated but only $millions were spent before Trump cancelled it.
Total funding: A total of $7.5 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was allocated to expand the national charging network. This includes $5 billion for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) formula program and $2.5 billion for discretionary grants.
Grants awarded: By early 2025, hundreds of millions in grants were announced for dozens of charging projects across multiple states and tribal lands.

-----------

Blocking clean energy is costly

https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=3d7479ba-979c-4e4e-b86c-a0a0f0b235c3&share=true

Imagine if President Barack Obama had pulled the permits for a multibillion-dollar deepwater oil rig after construction was 80% complete, at a time when gasoline prices were rising. The American people would be justifiably outraged.

President Donald Trump did essentially the same thing last week when his administration issued a stop-work order on the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island. Blocking the $6.2 billion project has put 1,000 people out of work and will reduce the reliability of electricity to 15 million people.

U.S. demand for power is indisputably growing for the first time in a decade. Tech firms are building massive data centers to serve our needs for artificial intelligence, cat videos and social media posts. Texas just registered the state’s 400,000th electric vehicle.

Yet it seems like the White House doesn’t want utilities to meet that new demand — at least not with clean, affordable energy. Instead, the administration is pushing expensive fossil fuels that will damage the climate.

Next on Trump’s chopping block is the $6 billion Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which was scheduled to begin construction next year and employ thousands of workers. Earlier, Trump tried to cancel New York’s $5 billion Empire Wind offshore project but relented when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to allow construction of new natural gas pipelines.

Trump parrots lies to justify his assault on wind, but his deal with Kathy Hochul reveals his true agenda. California has cut natural gas use for electricity by 28% over the past two years by switching to renewables. The oil and gas industry is terrified that the rest of the country will follow suit and has begged him for help protecting their market share.

Trump’s campaign against clean energy has killed $18.6 billion in clean energy projects within the last year, according to the Atlas Public Policy Center’s Clean Energy Tracker. U.S. renewable energy spending is down 36% this year while global investment rose 10%, energy consulting firm BloombergNEF reported.

Trump’s attacks on wind and solar power plants, the cheapest sources of new electricity generation, come as demand for power for artificial intelligence, data centers and electric vehicles is growing 10% a year nationally. The average U.S. electricity bill is up 5.5% from a year ago and has risen 30% since 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

By killing new sources of electricity, Trump is guaranteeing bills will keep rising. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has blamed previous administrations, but Trump is blocking the cheapest and easiest to install forms of generation from coming online.

My colleague James Osborne reports from Washington that the administration is coming for the Texas grid, too. Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Adam Suess announced new reviews on clean energy projects last month that killed a $250 million solar project in East Texas.

The Commerce Department launched a trade investigation into wind turbines imported from overseas, a possible prelude to tariffs that would drive up costs.

And Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently announced plans to block farmers from selling their land for solar projects, saying she was “protecting our family farms and our way of life.”

None of this matches the traditional Republican commitment to free markets, where private actors compete to provide the best goods or services without government interference. Nor does it seem to respect property owners’ right to buy, sell or use their land as they see fit.

I’ve never missed President Ronald Reagan so much. What happened to the all-of-the-above strategy to provide Americans with the energy they need?

Trump is not a conservative or even a free-market capitalist. He demanded that NVIDIA share profits, that Intel and U.S. Steel give up shares to the government. He has also tried to dictate who companies hire as executives.

This is not what conservatives would call hands-off governing.

To give fossil fuel companies a boost, he’s slashing common-sense pollution regulations that have saved thousands of lives and slowed greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump’s centralized planning is more typical of authoritarian communist regimes. The GOP’s hypocrisy is on full display when they denounce the Green New Deal as a scam and socialism, but embrace Trump’s America First tactics, choosing winners and losers.

The average American works too many hours for too little pay, yet Trump wants them to pay higher electricity bills to protect the fossil fuel industry that poisons our air.

Tragically, their grandchildren will pay the highest price when they must spend trillions to overcome climate disasters and reverse Trump’s setback of clean energy.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 10:24 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Your insistence on The One Big Solution ( nuclear or nothing,) or the One Sweeping Opinion, (nobody died of Covid) is flawed, all- or- nothing thinking. It appeals to your, er ... colorful... personality but it's not how the world usually works.

Did you watch the video?

Or is this a Second/Ted Retarded reply?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 2:22 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

US nuclear firm gets funding to bury mini reactors a mile underground, saving 80%

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/deep-fission-goes-public

Turning to the sun: Solar growth in Central Europe exceeds all expectations as it quickly becomes the continent’s battery hub

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/turning-to-the-sun-solar-rise
-in-central-europe/

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Did you watch the video?

I have wanted videos like this before this in an ongoing Futurist / Space thread

all energy is produced by some form of dirty pollution and waste but Biden and Kamala Harris and Germany closing down Nuclear to create more 'Coal' was just dumb

the only clean energy is 'Cold Fusion' and for the moment that's fiction, stuff that exists in Utopian Scifi movies

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Wednesday, September 24, 2025 5:12 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

"The entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies MUST be rejected completely and totally — and it must be immediate."

https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1970503952484520123#m

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Friday, September 26, 2025 1:42 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump Takes His Fossil Fuel Crusade Global

The U.S. leader is pressuring the world to abandon climate action. Will it work?

By Christina Lu | September 25, 2025, 5:39 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/25/trump-energy-fossil-fuel-climate-
trade-pressure/

If U.S. President Donald Trump has it his way, the United States won’t be alone in its campaign to unleash more fossil fuels and abandon key environmental regulations.

The Trump administration has for months championed the U.S. fossil fuel industry, crushed federal climate research efforts, dismantled regulations aimed at curbing pollution, and dismissed the scientific consensus on climate change.

But it’s also now taking its crusade abroad with a flurry of moves aimed at turning up the pressure on international organizations and other countries to follow in its footsteps.

Climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Trump declared to an audience of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City on Tuesday. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

By embracing fossil fuels, the leader is boosting an industry that has long helped power the U.S. economy. The United States is the world’s biggest oil producer and natural gas exporter, and the Trump administration has prioritized pumping up domestic oil and gas production in its bid to achieve what it has called U.S. “energy dominance.” Stoking global demand for fossil fuels is a part of that plan.

“It is in their interest to convince as many countries as possible to maintain reliance on oil and gas so that the U.S. can be a reliable exporter,” said Tom Moerenhout, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Yet burning fossil fuels also releases copious amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that those greenhouse gas emissions are warming the world, making extreme heat and precipitation more intense and frequent. Those impacts have become more pronounced globally as countries reel from the hottest year ever recorded and climate change amplifies the impacts of floods and heat waves roiling communities.

At the same time, demand for cheap energy has only grown worldwide. That has fed a big new market for China, a key geopolitical rival, which is not rich in its own oil or gas supply and has instead been racing ahead in the clean energy sector. China has poured hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies into its electric vehicle, wind, and solar industries—massive investments that have allowed it to stake out a dominant position in green supply chains and export cheap technologies all over the world.

“Clean energy is spreading at a pace that no one would have anticipated 20 years ago,” said Alice Hill, a climate expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who served on the National Security Council and at the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration.

“There is a play here as well—given China’s dominance in clean energy—to dissuade other nations from turning toward China as they make their energy choices,” Hill added.

Trump is wasting no time in ratcheting up the pressure, from wielding trade threats against world leaders to railing against international agreements designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration is now pushing the World Bank to ramp up its lending to fossil fuel projects, the Financial Times reported. The United States—a top shareholder in many of the world’s development banks—is also publicly and privately pressuring other institutions to boost fossil fuel lending and turn away from green energy efforts.

Another big target has been the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world’s leading energy organization, which publishes influential forecasts on global energy use. The Trump administration has balked at the IEA’s reports that global oil, gas, and coal demand will peak by 2030 amid greater uptake of electric vehicles and renewable energy—forecasts that could throw a wrench into Trump’s plans to pump up the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

As an IEA member state, the United States contributes about 14 percent of the organization’s budget—money that the Trump administration has threatened to pull. The Trump administration has also pushed to replace a top official in the agency, Politico reported.

“We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates or we will withdraw,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg in July. “My strong preference is to reform it.”

Facing those pressures, IEA officials have vowed to restart a forecast known as the “current policies scenario,” which assesses the global energy landscape on existing national pledges and does not account for new policies that countries are expected to adopt. The current policies scenario will likely have a brighter outlook for fossil fuel demand.

And then there is Trump’s pressure on individual countries. After launching his trade war against much of the world in April, the U.S. leader has harnessed the resulting negotiations to secure fossil fuel deals for the United States. The European Union, for example, agreed to purchase $750 billion in U.S. energy resources over a three-year period, although energy analysts have questioned whether such a pledge is realistically achievable. South Korea and Japan also agreed to purchase $100 billion of liquefied natural gas and invest hundreds of billions of dollars into U.S. energy infrastructure production, respectively.

Much of the world is eager to avoid a direct fight with Trump, experts said.

“Few nations want to have a head-on confrontation,” Hill said. “I think it’s easier to nod, be quiet, try to duck the conversation, and just hope that President Trump doesn’t notice.”

But with momentum for green energy picking up speed worldwide, it remains to be seen whether Trump’s sharp rejection of renewables and clean tech will fully resonate with the rest of the world.

“Other countries are increasingly going to want to embrace technologies of the future,” said Joshua Busby, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who served in the Defense Department under the Biden administration.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 26, 2025 3:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
US nuclear firm gets funding to bury mini reactors a mile underground, saving 80%

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/deep-fission-goes-public

Turning to the sun: Solar growth in Central Europe exceeds all expectations as it quickly becomes the continent’s battery hub

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/turning-to-the-sun-solar-rise
-in-central-europe/

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Did you watch the video?

I have wanted videos like this before this in an ongoing Futurist / Space thread

all energy is produced by some form of dirty pollution and waste but Biden and Kamala Harris and Germany closing down Nuclear to create more 'Coal' was just dumb

the only clean energy is 'Cold Fusion' and for the moment that's fiction, stuff that exists in Utopian Scifi movies

And since we're not currently living in that SciFi movie yet, the absolute closest to clean energy that we have currently at our disposal is Nuclear. Nothing else is even close to it, and until somebody wants to have a serious talk about how we start building Nuclear plants yesterday, they are not worth even offering a seat to the table and will be ignored going forward.

And I have no idea how you could be so certain that you've "already watched videos like this" without watching it. Did your videos include the part about how we've basically made it fiscally irresponsible for any individual or company to even entertain the idea of building a nuclear power plant because of all of the government red tape we allowed to be wrapped around the process after Chernobyl? Did your videos show you several examples of nuclear power plants that were in the process of being built when this all began and the owners of that land and those projects went bankrupt while they were fucked over by the US government and their new laws that made completing a nuclear power plant virtually impossible? Did they show you the laws and the intentional vaguery of their wording pertaining to passing inspections which allow anybody to claim anything as a problem and then allows them to completely shut down the work that was currently going on, or even require them to bulldoze all the work they'd already completed and start over from scratch?

Who in their right mind would sign up for that and invest tens or even hundreds of million dollars into something that you know is essentially doomed to lose every dime and every second you put into it before you break ground?

Did your videos talk about a great solution to this problem that would not require making our government remove this red-tape and would theoretically side-step that issue all together?

I dunno man. Maybe they did.

I'm just pointing out that the video is about a lot more than just extolling the virtues of nuclear while downplaying any negatives.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Tuesday, September 30, 2025 7:05 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

And since we're not currently living in that SciFi movie yet, the absolute closest to clean energy that we have currently at our disposal is Nuclear.

6ix, you are ignoring wind and solar power.

Fossil Fuels and Fossilized Minds

What’s driving Trump’s doomed attempt to revive coal?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 30, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/fossil-fuels-and-fossilized-minds

None of the ostensible justifications for promoting coal make sense. It’s not about saving jobs: Coal mining as a way of life vanished decades ago, not because chardonnay-sipping liberals sneered at it, but because corporations replaced miners with machines and explosives. It’s not about reducing energy prices: Trying to keep coal alive will make energy more expensive, not less.

What it’s really about is culture war. Trying to bring back coal is all about owning the libs. And if it damages the environment, well, from MAGA’s point of view that’s a plus.

Solar and wind power have finally become important sources of energy in recent years. But the reason they have grown rapidly while coal has declined isn’t that the chardonnay set considers coal unfashionable. It’s the simple fact that coal is no longer cost-competitive, while wind and solar are.

Needless to say, Trump and company aren’t going to acknowledge these facts. They may not even be aware of them. In his speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Trump declared that the Chinese sell a lot of wind turbines to the rest of the world, “but they barely use them.” Ahem:

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 8:34 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Pope Leo rebukes climate skeptics after Trump calls warming a ‘con job’

The Illinois native’s comments come a week after the U.S. president derided the fight against climate change.

By Louise Guillot | October 1, 2025 7:10 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-leo-rebukes-climate-skeptics-afte
r-us-donal-trump-calls-warming-con-job/

Pope Leo XIV denounced people who deny climate change on Wednesday, arguing that they are contributing to the destruction of God's creation.

"Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident science of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most," Leo said.

The pope's comments come just a week after U.S. President Donald Trump, in a speech at the United Nations, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” On Tuesday, Leo made a direct foray into U.S. politics, defending the Chicago Archdiocese’s decision to honor Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who supports abortion rights.

“I think it’s important to look at the overall work that a senator has done,” said the pope, a Chicago-area native.

"Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life," he added. "Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

The pope was speaking on Wednesday at a conference commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Laudato Si, a 2015 formal doctrinal letter issued by his predecessor, Pope Francis, that called for the protection of the planet, including the fight against climate change.

"We cannot love God whom we cannot see while despising his creatures, nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded," Leo said.

Following in the footsteps of Francis, Leo called on "everyone in society ... to put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls" to fight climate change and protect the environment.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 6, 2025 4:47 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

And I have no idea how you could be so certain that you've "already watched videos like this" without watching it. Did your videos include the part about how we've basically made it fiscally irresponsible for any individual or company to even entertain the idea of building a nuclear power plant because of all of the government red tape we allowed to be wrapped around the process after Chernobyl? Did your videos show you several examples of nuclear power plants that were in the process of being built when this all began and the owners of that land and those projects went bankrupt while they were fucked over by the US government and their new laws that made completing a nuclear power plant virtually impossible? Did they show you the laws and the intentional vaguery of their wording pertaining to passing inspections which allow anybody to claim anything as a problem and then allows them to completely shut down the work that was currently going on, or even require them to bulldoze all the work they'd already completed and start over from scratch?

Who in their right mind would sign up for that and invest tens or even hundreds of million dollars into something that you know is essentially doomed to lose every dime and every second you put into it before you break ground?

Nuclear energy fails in all countries, except when the national government is paying to build the plant because it is a national priority. France is successful because the French government designs, builds, and owns the nuclear power plants. It can't be done successfully any other way.
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+is+france's+nuclear+program+su
ccessful

Yes, the French government owns Électricité de France (EDF), the company that operates virtually all nuclear power plants in France, making the government the owner of the nuclear power infrastructure. In 2023, the French state fully nationalized EDF, increasing its control from 89% to 100% to accelerate nuclear power construction projects and secure full control over this critical energy sector.

Here is how nations fail when building reactors owned by capitalists rather than the national government:

Paper Reactors vs Practical Reactors

October 3, 2025

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/10/03/paper-reactors-and-paper-tigers/

The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that US firms would invest billions of dollars in Britain.

The symbolism was appropriate, since a central element of the proposed investment bonanza was the construction of large numbers of nuclear reactors, of a kind which can appropriately be described as “paper reactors”.

The term was coined by US Admiral Hyman Rickover, who directed the original development of nuclear powered submarines.

Rickover described Paper Reactors characteristics as follows:

1. It is simple.

2. It is small.

3. It is cheap.

4. It is light.

5. It can be built very quickly.

6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)

7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.

8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

These characteristics were needed by Starmer and Trump, whose goal was precisely to have a piece of paper to wave at their meeting.

The actual experience of nuclear power in the US and UK has been an extreme illustration of the difficulties Rickover described with “practical” reactors. These are plants distinguished by the following characteristics:

1. It is being built now.

2. It is behind schedule

3. It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem.

4. It is very expensive.

5. It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems.

6. It is large.

7. It is heavy.

8. It is complicated.

The most recent examples of nuclear plants in the US and UK are the Vogtle plant in the US (completed in 2024, seven years behind schedule and way over budget) and the Hinkley C in the UK (still under construction, years after consumers were promised that that they would be using its power to roast their Christmas turkeys in 2017). Before that, the VC Summer project in South Carolina was abandoned, writing off billions of dollars in wasted investment.

The disastrous cost overruns and delays of the Hinkley C project have meant that practical reactor designs have lost their appeal. Future plans for large-scale nuclear in the UK are confined to the proposed Sizewell B project, two 1600 MW reactors that will require massive subsidies if anyone can be found to invest in them at all. In the US, despite bipartisan support for nuclear, no serious proposals for large-scale nuclear plants are currently active. Even suggestions to resume work on the half-finished VC Summer plant have gone nowhere.

Much more about Paper Reactors vs Practical Reactors at https://crookedtimber.org/2025/10/03/paper-reactors-and-paper-tigers/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 6, 2025 11:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

And I have no idea how you could be so certain that you've "already watched videos like this" without watching it. Did your videos include the part about how we've basically made it fiscally irresponsible for any individual or company to even entertain the idea of building a nuclear power plant because of all of the government red tape we allowed to be wrapped around the process after Chernobyl? Did your videos show you several examples of nuclear power plants that were in the process of being built when this all began and the owners of that land and those projects went bankrupt while they were fucked over by the US government and their new laws that made completing a nuclear power plant virtually impossible? Did they show you the laws and the intentional vaguery of their wording pertaining to passing inspections which allow anybody to claim anything as a problem and then allows them to completely shut down the work that was currently going on, or even require them to bulldoze all the work they'd already completed and start over from scratch?

Who in their right mind would sign up for that and invest tens or even hundreds of million dollars into something that you know is essentially doomed to lose every dime and every second you put into it before you break ground?
Nuclear energy fails in all countries, except when the national government is paying to build the plant because it is a national priority.

False.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, October 15, 2025 7:07 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Canada heat waves in 2025 tied to human-driven climate change
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/climate/impacts/human-driven
-climate-change-tied-to-2025-canadian-heat-waves

Tariffs Won't Stop China's Clean Energy Dominance
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Tariffs-Wont-Stop-Chinas-Cl
ean-Energy-Dominance.html

Nuclear Naysayers Are Nothing New
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2025/10/13/nuclear_naysayers_
are_nothing_new_1140708.html

Chinese officials reportedly planning ambitious energy pivot: 'Meltdown-proof'
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chinese-officials-reportedly-plann
ing-ambitious-211500317.html

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Wednesday, October 15, 2025 7:15 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

False.

China Has Overtaken America in Electricity Generation

By Paul Krugman |Oct 15, 2025 at 5:35 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/china-has-overtaken-america

In 1957 the Soviet Union put the first man-made satellite — Sputnik — into orbit. The U.S. response was close to panic: The Cold War was at its coldest, and there were widespread fears that the Soviets were taking the lead in science and technology.

In retrospect those fears were overblown. When Communism fell, we learned that the Soviet economy was far less advanced than many had believed. Still, the effects of the “Sputnik moment” were salutary: America poured resources into science and higher education, helping to lay the foundations for enduring leadership.

Today American leadership is once again being challenged by an authoritarian regime. And in terms of economic might, China is a much more serious rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Some readers were skeptical when I pointed out Monday that China’s economy is, in real terms, already substantially larger than ours. The truth is that GDP at purchasing power parity is a very useful measure, but if it seems too technical, how about just looking at electricity generation, which is strongly correlated with economic development? As the chart at the bottom of this post shows, China now generates well over twice as much electricity as we do.

Yet, rather than having another Sputnik moment, we are now trapped in a reverse Sputnik moment. Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want.

The most obvious example of Trump’s war on a critical sector, and the most consequential for the next decade, is his vendetta against renewable energy. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolled back Biden’s tax incentives for renewable energy. The administration is currently trying to kill a huge, nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as cancel $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. It appears to have succeeded in killing a huge solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes. It has canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more.

While Trump proclaims “Drill, Baby, Drill”, projected growth in U.S. solar and wind power has been stunted, and perhaps even stalled, by the administration’s hostility.

In his rambling speech at the United Nations, Donald Trump insisted that China isn’t making use of wind power: “They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind.” I don’t know where Trump gets his misinformation — maybe the same sources telling him that Portland is in flames. But here’s the reality:

Lots more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/china-has-overtaken-america

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 27, 2025 8:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think

Solar electricity is growing rapidly, but can it really dominate the global energy system? Here is what it will take for us to power the planet on sunshine

By Madeleine Cuff | 23 October 2025

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2500013-solar-energy-is-going-to-
power-the-world-much-sooner-than-you-think/

Is solar power going to take over the world? The past few years have seen a frankly astounding acceleration in the rate of its deployment, with total generation capacity doubling between 2022 and 2024 to supply a full 7 per cent of the world’s electricity. Just how high can that figure go?

The first six months of 2025 saw wind and solar together pass a historic milestone, generating more power than coal for the first time and making renewables the world’s leading source of electricity. The driving force behind this “crucial turning point” in the energy transition, as the UK-based think tank Ember described it, was the growth of solar. It accounted for 83 per cent of the total increase in the world’s electricity demand in 2025, Ember’s analysis indicates, and has been the largest source of new electricity globally for three years in a row.

Solar’s secret weapon? How cheap it is. It is the world’s lowest-cost electricity, with the cost of installing a solar system dropping in price by 90 per cent over the past 15 years. “Right now, silicon panels themselves are the same cost as plywood,” says Sam Stranks at the University of Cambridge.

In other words, we have a plentiful and cheap source of electricity that can be built quickly, almost anywhere in the world. Is it fanciful to imagine that solar could one day power everything?

At the most fundamental level, the supply of solar energy to Earth is almost limitless. Even once you factor in the efficiency rates of modern solar panels, supplying all of the world’s energy needs with the sun’s power would require around 450,000 square kilometres of land, a 2021 report from the UK think tank Carbon Tracker estimated. That’s just 0.3 per cent of global land area.
https://carbontracker.org/reports/the-skys-the-limit-solar-wind/

Kingsmill Bond, one of the report authors and now at Ember, says that, while there are “trade-offs” when it comes to land use – solar may compete with agriculture, for example – “for most countries, there is plenty of space to deploy these technologies”.

A new generation of panels

The question, then, is what is stopping solar power from taking over the global electricity supply entirely? The first issue is that of efficiency. Silicon photovoltaic panels, which make up the bulk of the global solar market, currently convert about 20 per cent of the sun’s energy into electricity. By comparison, hydropower plants convert 90 per cent of the potential energy into electricity, wind turbines about 50 per cent and fossil fuel plants 30 to 40 per cent.

In real terms, this means you need many more solar panels to provide the same amount of power that you could harvest from other sources. That’s why solar firms and scientists are hard at work trying to unlock more efficiency gains from solar panels, in the hope that an efficiency boost will deliver a double win for solar: even lower system costs and less demand for land.

However, crystalline silicon panels are nearing the limits of the efficiencies they can achieve, with best-in-class cells now at about 25 per cent efficiency. “The practical limit for crystalline silicon is probably about 28 per cent,” says Jenny Nelson at Imperial College London.

Pushing efficiencies above that will require a shift to what is known as a tandem solar cell, which introduces a second semiconductor to increase the amount of energy a cell can extract from the solar spectrum. Tandem silicon-perovskite cells are seen as the most promising option, with a theoretical efficiency limit of about 50 per cent. Real-world tandem panels won’t achieve anything like that level of efficiency, but could reach 35 to 37 per cent efficiency, says Stranks.

After years of research, the first tandem silicon-perovskite solar panels are just starting to enter commercial production, and they need to be tested by industry to see how long they maintain their performance under real-world conditions. But Stranks is optimistic about their potential. He estimates that in 10 years’ time, they will become the dominant technology on the market. “On the face of it, they wouldn’t actually look that different from the roof or on the street, but they are producing 50 per cent more power than today’s panels,” says Stranks. “It’s a big change.”

Not only would greater efficiency cut costs even further, but it could also unlock new deployment opportunities, says Stranks. For example, high-efficiency panels could enable solar roofs on electric cars, allowing their batteries to charge during the day. The stored power could then either be used for transport or discharged to the home for use during the evening, he suggests.

Solving storage

Such innovation could help to untangle one of the other major issues with solar power – its fickleness. The sun, of course, doesn’t shine all the time. For countries in the “sun belt”, including India, Mexico and many African nations, this is less of a problem, as the sun shines almost all year round and batteries can be used to store excess energy during the day for use in the hours after dark. This solar-plus-storage set-up is becoming increasingly cost-effective, with the cost of lithium-ion batteries dropping 40 per cent in the past two years alone, according to BloombergNEF.

“Ultimately, the only advantage that fossil fuels have over sunshine as a source for electricity is their storability,” says Bond. “And, suddenly, that storability issue has been solved for 90 per cent of the time by a single technology, which is the battery.”

But for countries further north, where winter days are short and grey, it is a different story. “[Solar] is an unbelievably, amazingly good energy source, with zero pollution, rapid payback of energy investment – it just ticks every single box,” says Andrew Blakers at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. “Unless you live in northern Europe, north-east Asia or the north-east United States, where you have plenty of sun in summer and not much in winter, [solar] is simply the best.”

For countries that suffer long, dark winters, wind power can step in to fill much of the gap, says Blakers. But energy storage solutions that can bank power for weeks or months at a time will also be needed. Such “interseasonal storage” is still in its infancy, with few solutions operating at commercial scale. But pumped hydro, hydrogen and compressed air storage could all provide an answer to this conundrum. Blakers’s prediction? “Batteries take care of the short term, pumped hydro takes care of the long term.”

Political headaches

If anything, efficiency and storage are the easy problems to solve. “I think the bottlenecks probably lie in politics, consistency in policy, regulation, vested interests of other industries,” says Nelson.

The climate-sceptic Trump administration in the US is a case in point. Earlier this month, federal officials cancelled a huge proposed solar project in Nevada that would have been one of the largest schemes in the world, just the latest in a series of actions to curtail solar funding programmes and block projects.

But Bond believes the transition to renewable power is now all but unstoppable given its economic advantages over traditional generation sources. “Incumbents can hold back the tide for solar in individual countries and individual projects and individual years,” he says. “The current Trump administration is doing its very best to slow down the current deployment of renewables. But all it really means is that they then fall behind in the global race to deploy superior technology.”

Blakers agrees, adding that solar energy may be the only way to meet fast-growing power demand from AI data centres. “Even in the US, it’s difficult to see solar being turned off even by a determined federal government, because many states like it, and it’s by far the quickest way to get large amounts of energy,” he says.

The other major bottleneck for clean energy is logistical. Existing electricity networks need to be rewired to cope with huge, fluctuating supplies of electricity coming from new areas. A more flexible grid, which can cope with surges in generation and even tweak power demand in response, will help to maximise the use of green power. But delivering these grids of the future costs money. In the UK alone, energy companies plan to spend £77 billion over the next five years refitting the transmission network to cope with the shift to wind and solar.

In lower-income nations, where grid networks aren’t yet so comprehensive, countries can move more quickly to build renewable-friendly infrastructure from the get-go, allowing renewables to penetrate further into grid supply. The 10 so-called BRICS nations – Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates – now collectively account for more than half of the world’s electricity generation from solar, according to Ember.

A wider challenge for countries is to electrify greater chunks of their energy demand, from heating to transport. Such progress is crucial to cut fossil fuel use in other parts of the global economy. As Nelson puts it: “If we want to decarbonise the planet, then we need to electrify first.” Here too, lower-income nations are racing ahead of higher-income ones. China’s share of electricity in final energy consumption hit 32 per cent in 2023, far outstripping the 24 per cent electrification rate of the US and richer European nations, says Ember.

A solar future?

Despite the success this year, the technical, logistical and political challenges outlined above may slow the rollout of solar in some countries in the short term. Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency predicted that renewable power will more than double by the end of the decade, but is set to fall short of an international goal to triple capacity by the same date. The agency said policy changes in the US and the challenges of integrating solar into grid systems were headwinds to the expansion in renewables capacity.

But energy market experts are confident that, by mid-century and beyond, solar will dominate global energy supply. “By the end of this century, it is pretty clear that we will be getting all of our electricity from renewable sources, of which the vast majority will be solar,” says Bond, estimating that as much as 80 per cent of the world’s electricity supply will be generated by solar by 2100. Added to that, at least 80 per cent of the world’s total energy demand will be electrified, he expects.

Roadblocks from politics, energy storage and infrastructure will all be cleared out of the way to usher in the green power revolution. “The human condition is to turn energy into stuff,” says Bond. “We use energy for everything. And now, suddenly, we found this cheap, universal energy source – of course, we are going to figure it out.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025 5:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump and Republicans Join Big Oil’s All-Out Push to Shut Down Climate Liability Efforts

Republican attorneys general, GOP lawmakers, industry groups and the president himself are all maneuvering to foreclose the ability of cities and states to hold the fossil fuel industry liable for damages linked to climate change.

By Dana Drugmand | October 26, 2025

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26102025/trump-republicans-big-oil-
climate-liability/

As efforts continue to hold some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations liable for destructive and deadly climate impacts, backlash from the politically powerful oil and gas industry and its allies in government is on the rise, bolstered by the Trump administration’s allegiance to fossil fuels.

From lobbying Congress for liability protection to suing states over their climate liability laws and lawsuits, attempts to shield Big Oil from potential liability and to shut down climate accountability initiatives are advancing on multiple fronts.

“The effort has escalated dramatically in the past six or seven months,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that advocates for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for selling products they knew were dangerously warming the planet.

Pushback to liability initiatives from fossil fuel interests is not new. But the political landscape has shifted dramatically this year as the second Trump administration works to reward loyalists and campaign donors, including fossil fuel interests.

The oil and gas industry spent $445 million during the last election cycle to influence President Donald Trump and Congress, including $96 million on Trump’s re-election campaign, according to the progressive advocacy group Climate Power.

“What has changed is that there is a new administration,” said Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group. And the Trump administration, she said, “is continuing to defend the fossil fuel industry and assail anyone who dares try to hold them accountable.”

Over the past eight years, communities across the country have filed tobacco-style lawsuits targeting ExxonMobil and major players in the fossil fuel industry, seeking to recover damages for localized climate impacts or to force companies to cease greenwashing and other misleading behavior.

More than 30 of these lawsuits brought by municipal, tribal and state governments are working their way through the courts, and several are now closer than ever to reaching trial.

At the same time, some states are enacting or considering so-called climate superfund legislation that would hold large fossil fuel companies strictly liable for climate damages and require them to help pay for a portion of climate change costs incurred by state governments. Vermont and New York both passed climate superfund laws last year, and similar legislation is pending in a handful of other states.

In response to these budding accountability efforts, the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress and GOP attorneys general are mounting what Wiles describes as a “massive orchestrated campaign” to try to stop climate liability laws and lawsuits in their tracks, and to push for legal immunity akin to what gun manufacturers received two decades ago. Trump’s Department of Justice has even filed highly unusual, if not unprecedented, lawsuits against Vermont and New York seeking to overturn their climate superfund statutes.

“It’s just this superbly choreographed effort on the part of the oil industry and its allies to get gun-industry-style legal immunity for all the damage that they’ve caused,” Wiles told Inside Climate News.

Oil Industry Is Lobbying Congress for a Liability Shield

Among the climate liability lawsuits inching closer to trial: a consumer protection case brought by Massachusetts against ExxonMobil, and suits seeking damages filed by Honolulu, Hawaii, and Boulder, Colorado.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier this year and confirmed by The New York Times last month, industry representatives are lobbying Congress for a liability shield of some kind.

The details remain unclear. But the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, reports lobbying on “draft legislation related to state efforts to impose liability on the oil and gas industry,” while disclosures from ConocoPhillips show that the company has lobbied on the matter of “state superfund legislation,” including draft legislation in Congress addressing it.

Neither API nor ConocoPhillips responded to requests for comment.

Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Inside Climate News that he thinks immunity provisions for the fossil fuel industry are unlikely to pass the Senate.

But the fact that the fossil fuel industry is lobbying for legal protections suggests to Wiles that the industry realizes it could be facing serious legal jeopardy. “Let’s be clear. You don’t seek a [liability] waiver unless you know you’re guilty,” Wiles said.

Over the summer, language emerged in a draft House Appropriations Committee spending bill that specifically would prohibit the District of Columbia from using funds to enforce its consumer protection law “against oil and gas companies for environmental claims.” The bill that included this provision passed the committee but was not brought to the full House for a vote.

But climate accountability advocates say the provision was still alarming because it effectively would have shut down D.C.’s ongoing consumer protection lawsuit against Big Oil. That suit, filed in 2020, alleges that several major oil companies lied to consumers about the climate risks of their products and that they continue to mislead consumers through greenwashing campaigns. In April the D.C. Superior Court rejected the companies’ motions to dismiss the suit.

Anne Havemann, deputy director and general counsel at Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said the appropriations provision “is a threat to this ongoing lawsuit.”

“If [D.C.] can’t use any money to prosecute these cases and advance these cases, then it effectively can’t work on them,” she said.
Big Oil Lawyers Seek Supreme Court Intervention

A parallel effort to skirt accountability is playing out in the courts. Fossil fuel companies are vigorously defending themselves in climate liability lawsuits, and they have seen some success in recent months getting cases dismissed by state trial courts.

Now Boulder’s lawsuit is back before the nation’s highest court on a fresh petition from the oil company defendants, after Colorado courts, including the state Supreme Court, refused to dismiss the case. The question posed by the companies in their petition is whether federal law precludes such state law claims.

It is unclear whether the Supreme Court will take up the case this time.

In January the Supreme Court denied a similar petition from oil companies in a case brought by Honolulu. Courts in Hawaii have rejected the companies’ bids to have the case dismissed, and with the Supreme Court declining to intervene, Honolulu’s case is advancing toward a trial.

Parenteau said the prospect of facing a trial and a potential adverse verdict likely has the oil companies extremely worried. “They’re certainly frightened of a trial just from a reputational standpoint,” he said.

The new petition in the Boulder case now offers the Supreme Court another opportunity to step in. Should the justices decide to intervene, legal experts say that it could essentially shut down all climate liability attempts.

“If they do step in, that’s huge. That changes everything,” Parenteau said. “That is the end game.”

“In one fell swoop it could get rid of all of these cases,” said James May, a law professor at Washburn University.

On Oct. 9, over 100 Republican House members submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court backing oil companies ExxonMobil and Suncor in their petition to block Boulder’s lawsuit from moving forward. It is the first time that Republicans in Congress have called on the Supreme Court to intervene in this litigation and to shut down not just this one lawsuit but all others like it.

“In recent years, multiple state and local governments have launched a courtroom war against the American energy industry,” the brief asserts in its opening. “It must stop now.”

The 103 Republican House members who signed onto the brief argue that the municipal and state lawsuits against oil and gas companies are trying to “dictate national energy policy” and that only the federal government has the authority to regulate transboundary greenhouse gas emissions.

“They are arguing that it’s solely EPA’s role to regulate greenhouse gases, but the Trump administration is attempting to eliminate that role by revoking the Endangerment Finding. If that revocation goes through and survives in the courts, it will greatly weaken the oil companies’ preemption defense,” Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Inside Climate News.

“This full-court press to block these lawsuits shows that the oil companies and their allies in Congress are really nervous about what would come out if any of these cases actually went to trial,” Gerrard added.
Trump Administration on the Offensive

The Trump administration, through its Department of Justice, is fully backing the fossil fuel industry in climate liability litigation, filing amicus briefs, for example, in cases now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Maryland Supreme Court.

But its efforts to shield the industry from accountability extend beyond friend-of-the-court briefs.

Following a White House meeting where oil company executives raised concerns about state climate laws and lawsuits, Trump issued an executive order in April directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to try to put a stop to these legal initiatives.

In response, the DOJ then sued four states, including preemptive suits brought against Hawaii and Michigan before either state had filed such a lawsuit (Hawaii sued major oil companies the next day). The DOJ’s other lawsuits targeted Vermont and New York to try to strike down their climate superfund laws, which are based on the “polluter pays” logic of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program aimed at forcing polluting companies to remediate damage from toxic waste sites.

Advances in a field known as climate attribution science have made the “polluter pays” aspect of the superfund laws possible, enabling scientists to quantify the individual contributions of major fossil fuel producers to climate impacts such as sea level rise and heat waves.

The DOJ has now filed motions for summary judgment in both of these lawsuits, asking federal courts to permanently block the states’ climate superfund laws.

“Vermont’s flagrantly unconstitutional statute threatens to throttle energy production, despite this Administration’s efforts to unleash American energy. It’s high time for the courts to put a stop to this crippling state overreach,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement issued by the DOJ on Sept. 16.

Havemann, with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, told Inside Climate News that the current Trump administration seems to be taking a more aggressive approach to protecting the fossil fuel industry and to fighting attempts to hold it accountable.

“The Trump administration has come in and used many different tools in its toolbox to go after these accountability lawsuits and the laws that also seek to hold the biggest polluters accountable for climate damages,” she said. “It’s very much on the radar of the Trump administration in a way that it has not been in the past.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Enter the Dragon”

With U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) holding the gavel, climate litigation came up as the subject of a Republican-led congressional hearing this summer before a Judiciary Committee subcommittee.

The hearing’s provocative title: “Enter the Dragon—China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance.”

Cruz used the hearing to attack climate liability lawsuits and claim that they are a nefarious left-wing plot that is in part funded by, and that benefits, the Chinese Communist Party. “Both China and the Democrats want to bankrupt the American energy industry,” Cruz said during the hearing.

NPR’s Michael Copley reported last month that “Cruz’s office has not offered evidence that China or a China-linked nonprofit that Cruz identified by name has funded climate lawsuits in the United States.”

In response to that reporting, Cruz told Inside Climate News that “NPR deliberately ignored objective facts.”

“The Chinese Communist Party uses cut-outs and ‘nonprofits’ to shape U.S. energy policy, funding propaganda, advocacy, and litigation that harm American workers,” Cruz said in an emailed statement, which was also included in the NPR story after it was published. The “China-linked nonprofit” referenced in the NPR story, Energy Foundation China, does fund some climate initiatives, Cruz said in his statement.

“In January 2024, three House committee chairs opened an investigation into Chinese influence, citing EFC’s ties and funding of groups like [the Natural Resources Defense Council] and RMI,” he added.

A spokesperson for RMI, a nonprofit group working on the global energy transition, said that the organization “does not participate in litigation.” RMI’s “work supported by Energy Foundation China, which is a U.S. based charitable organization, is focused squarely on the energy transition inside of China,” the spokesperson added.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit group that works to protect public health and the environment, does some “work in China for one reason: there’s not a single global environmental problem that can be fixed unless China is part of the solution,” NRDC spokesperson Josh Mogerman said. He added that the organization “does not fundraise in China” and that “money from China does not fund NRDC litigation in the United States, period.”

Cruz, who represents the country’s biggest oil and gas producing state, did not respond to Inside Climate News’ question about whether he supports immunizing oil companies from liability.

GOP Attorneys General Enter the Fray

During the Cruz-led hearing, the Republican attorney general for the state of Kansas, Kris Kobach, testified as one of the majority witnesses. He referenced the New York and Vermont climate superfund laws, claiming these statutes impose extraterritorial regulation on energy companies, and mentioned that his state and other Republican-led states are suing to try to overturn these state laws.

“We will continue these fights in court as state attorneys general. But we do need some help from Congress,” Kobach said. He suggested that Congress could legislate to expressly preempt state climate laws like the climate superfund laws.

Kobach and 15 other Republican state attorneys general also made this suggestion, along with several other recommendations for congressional action, in a letter addressed to Bondi, the U.S. attorney general.

The June 12 letter references Trump’s executive orders to “unleash” fossil fuels and protect the fossil fuel industry from “state overreach.” The letter says its purpose is to “suggest additional steps” the Department of Justice could take to effectuate these orders and assist in the “fight against anti-energy interests.”

Specifically, the Republican AGs suggest the DOJ could recommend legislation to reinforce federal preemption of state climate liability laws or lawsuits; restrict federal funding for states seeking to impose liability on energy companies; create a right of removal to federal district court for climate suits; and, among other items, stop “activist-funded climate lawsuits” with a liability shield, similar to the law that granted immunity for gun manufacturers.

Wiles, with the Center for Climate Integrity, said it is especially striking to see Republican attorneys general explicitly recommend a similar liability shield for fossil fuel companies. “The attorneys general actually called for Congress to enact a gun-style liability waiver for the oil industry,” he said. “We saw how that [gun industry immunity] ended up. It certainly was not helpful in curbing gun violence or in serving any public interest objective.”

The coordinated litigation strategies and actions of Republican state attorneys general in defense of fossil fuel and other industries stem from an organization called the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which Graves said was created in the wake of the tobacco industry being held accountable through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.

The organization, which currently lists 29 Republican state attorneys general as members, has been funded through donations from conservative judicial activists like Leonard Leo as well as from corporate interests including those in the fossil fuel industry. The American Petroleum Institute gave over $125,000 to RAGA in 2024, and in the first six months of this year Chevron’s Policy, Government and Public Affairs division donated $25,000 to the organization, for example.

Graves describes RAGA as a “pay-to-play organization.”

“It has a pay sheet listing what kind of access you get to attorneys general based on how much you give,” she told Inside Climate News.

“These attorneys general use the prestige of their office and their power and the resources that their taxpayers are providing to serve the interests of industry, select industries that they are most tied to, and that certainly includes the fossil fuel industry,” Graves added.

The Republican Attorneys General Association did not respond to a request for comment.

“A Perilous Moment”

The intensifying backlash to climate accountability efforts coming from the fossil fuel industry and its political defenders is happening at a time when some political scholars warn that the U.S. is sliding into some form of authoritarianism, which advocates say magnifies the challenges of holding powerful interests to account writ large.

“It’s a perilous moment for democratic norms and institutions,” said Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Anybody who is pursuing policy change or litigation for accountability or enforcement is counting on the courts to be a real backstop for democratic institutions,” Mulvey told Inside Climate News.

Should the fossil fuel industry somehow succeed in securing legal immunity, Wiles said it “would be consistent with the erosion of the rule of law that we’re seeing.”

“No industry should be above the law,” he added.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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