human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Monday, September 14, 2026 13:16
VIEWED: 61724
PAGE 11 of 12
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Arctic sea ice sets a record low maximum in 2025
THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 2025
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/analyses/arctic-sea-ice-sets-record-lo
w-maximum-2025
Arctic sea ice extent appears to have reached its annual maximum on March 22, 2025. This is the lowest maximum in the 47-year satellite record, with previous low maximums occurring in 2017, 2018, 2016, and 2015.Quote:https://angrybearblog.com/2025/03/arctic-sea-ice-makes-new-record-low-
I am frankly surprised this page has not been taken down, which is one reason I wanted to make a record of the data here. Angry Bear is fortunate to have it also.
annual-max
https://bonddad.blogspot.com/2025/03/arctic-sea-ice-make-lowest-ever.h
tml
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
When Flordia starts sinking, wake me up.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Rush Limbaugh smoked for 50 years. All those years he said smoking does not cause cancer. Then he was dead from lung cancer. Keep burning fossil fuels, especially coal, for another 50 years and about as many people will be dead from climate change as will die over the next 50 years from cancer.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
When Flordia starts sinking, wake me up.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
P.S. Trump gave Rush the Presidential Medal of Freedom for meritoriously lying during his entire radio career about all things all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh#Health_problems_and_death
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
By Michelle Lewis | Apr 17 2025 - 12:01 pm PT
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum gave no indication of what insufficiencies there were in the approval process for the fully permitted offshore wind project, despite Trump’s recent declaration of a national energy emergency that speeds up permitting processes.
The commercial lease for the 810-megawatt (MW) Empire Wind 1’s federal offshore wind area was signed in March 2017 during the first Trump administration.
Why? Trump: ‘We’re going to try to have a policy where no windmills are being built’
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5071767-trump-were-going
-to-try-to-have-a-policy-where-no-windmills-are-being-built/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The European Space Agency has launched the Biomass satellite to study the world's forests using the first space-based P-band synthetic aperture radar, aiming to accurately measure carbon storage and improve understanding of the global carbon cycle. CBS News reports:
Forests on Earth collectively absorb and store about 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, the ESA said. That regulates the planet's temperature. Deforestation and degradation, especially in tropical regions, means that stored carbon is being released back into the atmosphere, the ESA said, which can contribute to climate change. There's a lack of accurate data on how much carbon the planet's estimated 1.5 trillion trees store and how much human activity can impact that storage, the ESA said.
To "weigh" the planet's trees and determine their carbon dioxide capacity, Biomass will use a P-band synthetic aperture radar. It's the first such piece of technology in space. The radar can penetrate forest canopies and measure woody biomass, including trunks, branches and stems, the ESA said. Most forest carbon is stored in these parts of the trees. Those measurements will act as a proxy for carbon storage, the ESA said. [...] Once the radar takes the measurements, the data will be received by the large mesh reflector. It will then be sent to the ESA's mission control center.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biomass-satellite-launches-weigh-worlds-t
rees/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Top-Earning 10 Percent Responsible for the Majority of Global Warming, Study Finds
May 12, 2025
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/study-top-earning-wealthi
est-10-percent-responsible-two-thirds-global-warming-research-paper/
In 2020, the global mean temperature was 0.61C higher than 1990. The researchers found that about 65 percent of that increase could be attributed to emissions from the global richest 10 percent, a group they defined as including all those earning more than $48,600 a year. That includes all those on the UK median salary for full-time employees, which is $49,760.
Wealthier groups bore more disproportionate responsibility still, with the richest 1 percent globally—those with annual incomes of about $166,450—responsible for 20 percent of global heating, and the richest 0.1 percent—the 800,000 or so people in the world raking in more than $608,090—responsible for 8 percent.
“We found that the wealthiest 10 percent contributed 6.5 times more to global warming than the average, with the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent contributing 20 and 76 times more, respectively,” the write in their paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02325-x
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Of course.
Originally posted by second:
Top-Earning 10 Percent Responsible for the Majority of Global Warming, Study Finds
May 12, 2025
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/study-top-earning-wealthi
est-10-percent-responsible-two-thirds-global-warming-research-paper/
In 2020, the global mean temperature was 0.61C higher than 1990. The researchers found that about 65 percent of that increase could be attributed to emissions from the global richest 10 percent, a group they defined as including all those earning more than $48,600 a year. That includes all those on the UK median salary for full-time employees, which is $49,760.
Wealthier groups bore more disproportionate responsibility still, with the richest 1 percent globally—those with annual incomes of about $166,450—responsible for 20 percent of global heating, and the richest 0.1 percent—the 800,000 or so people in the world raking in more than $608,090—responsible for 8 percent.
“We found that the wealthiest 10 percent contributed 6.5 times more to global warming than the average, with the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent contributing 20 and 76 times more, respectively,” the write in their paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02325-x
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
This is news??
When ppl think of global warming, they thinnk of overpopulation... Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan.
In reality, those people aren't the problem.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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China makes thorium-based nuclear energy breakthrough using past US work
https://www.mining.com/china-makes-thorium-based-nuclear-energy-breakt
hrough-using-past-us-work/
A Thorium Reactor in the Middle of the Desert Has Rewritten the Rules of Nuclear Power
https://www.yahoo.com/news/thorium-reactor-middle-desert-rewritten-180
000024.html
China Fires Up World's First Thorium-Powered Nuclear Reactor
https://futurism.com/china-thorium-nuclear-power
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Quote:When the little people refuse to stop polluting the world because they feel poor, the big, rich guys can justify their actions as doing what everyone is doing. Either everybody stops or nobody will stop polluting.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This is news??
When ppl think of global warming, they thinnk of overpopulation... Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan.
In reality, those people aren't the problem.
Then Came A Miracle
By Paul Krugman | May 14, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-this-the-year-we-doom-civilizati
on
. . . Then came a miracle: Dramatic technological progress in renewable energy, making it drastically cheaper, especially but not only as a way of generating electricity. The International Renewable Energy Agency has a striking chart showing how the cost of electricity generation from various renewable sources has plunged compared with the cost of generation from fossil fuels:
Source: IRENA
This technological miracle suddenly made an alternative climate strategy possible, one that was all carrots, no sticks. Instead of using carbon prices or regulations to force people to stop burning fossil fuels, policymakers could subsidize and promote renewable energy, nudging us toward an electrified economy with wind and solar — plus, probably, nuclear, which has its place — providing the electricity. Instead of telling people to eat their spinach, we could be advertising job-creating investments.
Given how cheap renewables have become, the subsidies probably wouldn’t have to be that large. Wind and solar have been taking off on their own:
Source: Energy Information Agency
More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-this-the-year-we-doom-civilizati
on
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why we’re barely keeping track of this growing climate problem
Fossil fuel sites can emit a powerful greenhouse gas long after they shut down.
By Umair Irfan | Jun 16, 2025, 6:15 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/climate/416470/methane-emissions-climate-natural-g
as-pollution-leak-coal
Odorless and colorless, methane is a gas that is easy to miss — but it’s one of the most important contributors to global warming. It can trap up to 84 times as much heat as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, though it breaks down much faster. Measured over 100 years, its warming effect is about 30 times that of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
That means that over the course of decades, it takes smaller amounts of methane than carbon dioxide to heat up the planet to the same level. Nearly a third of the increase in global average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution is due to methane, and about two-thirds of those methane emissions comes from human activity like energy production and cattle farming. It’s one of the biggest and fastest ways that human beings are warming the Earth.
But the flip side of that math is that cutting methane emissions is one of the most effective ways to limit climate change.
In 2021, more than 100 countries including the United States committed to reducing their methane pollution by at least 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. But some of the largest methane emitters like Russia and China still haven’t signed on, and according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, global methane emissions from energy production are still rising.
Yet the tracking of exactly how much methane is reaching the atmosphere isn’t as precise as it is for carbon dioxide. “Little or no measurement-based data is used to report methane emissions in most parts of the world,” according to the IEA. “This is a major issue because measured emissions tend to be higher than reported emissions.” It’s also hard to trace methane to specific sources — whether from natural sources like swamps, or from human activities like fossil fuel extraction, farming, or deforestation.
Researchers are gaining a better understanding of where methane is coming from, surveilling potential sources from the ground, from the sky, and from space. It turns out a lot of methane is coming from underappreciated sources, including coal mines and small oil and gas production facilities.
The report also notes that while there are plenty of low-cost tools available to halt much of this methane from reaching the atmosphere, they’re largely going unused.
The United States, the world’s third largest methane-emitting country, has seen its methane emissions slowly decline over the past 30 years. However, the Trump administration is pushing for more fossil fuel development while rolling back some of the best bang-for-buck programs for mitigating climate change, which will likely lead to even more methane reaching the atmosphere if left unchecked.
Where is all this methane coming from?
Methane is the dominant component of natural gas, which provides more than a third of US energy. It’s also found in oil formations. During the drilling process, it can escape wells and pipelines, but it can also leak as it’s transported and at the power plants and furnaces where it’s consumed.
The oil and gas industry says that methane is a salable product, so they have a built-in incentive to track it, capture it, and limit its leaks. But oil developers often flare methane, meaning burn it off, because it’s not cost-effective to contain it. That burned methane forms carbon dioxide, so the overall climate impact is lower than just letting the methane go free.
And because methane is invisible and odorless, it can be difficult and expensive to monitor it and prevent it from getting out. As a result, researchers and environmental activists say the industry is likely releasing far more than official government estimates show.
Methane also seeps out from coal mines — more methane, actually, than is released during the production of natural
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Good.
You lose again.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Methane capture makes sense, and it's not one of those get-rich-quick schemes that the wealthy are always promoting. I've already pencil-whipped a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions using current technology. Actions that benefit America now and in the future, like regenerative farming, coal to gas conversion, forest management, etc. Add methane capture and that's already a big step in the right direction. If done properly, it will help American production.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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False claims are obstructing climate action, say researchers
By Damian Carrington | Thu 19 Jun 2025 07.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/19/climate-misinforma
tion-turning-crisis-into-catastrophe-ipie-report
Rampant climate misinformation is turning the crisis into a catastrophe, according to the authors of a new report.
It found climate action was being obstructed and delayed by false and misleading information stemming from fossil fuel companies, rightwing politicians and some nation states. The report, from the International Panel on the Information Environment (Ipie), systematically reviewed 300 studies. https://www.ipie.info/research/sr2025-1
The researchers found climate denialism has evolved into campaigns focused on discrediting solutions, such as the false claims that renewable energy caused the recent massive blackout in Spain.
Online bots and trolls hugely amplify false narratives, the researchers say, playing a key role in promoting climate lies. The experts also report that political leaders, civil servants and regulatory agencies are increasingly being targeted in order to delay climate action.
Climate misinformation – the term used by the report for both deliberate and inadvertent falsehoods – is of increasing concern. Last Thursday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalised.
Donald Trump, who has called climate science “a giant hoax” and “bullshit”, is identified as a key influencer, “whose logical fallacies, unfounded claims and cherrypicking of findings were heavily” reposted by other social media users, including many bot accounts.
Much more at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/19/climate-misinforma
tion-turning-crisis-into-catastrophe-ipie-report
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
False claims are obstructing climate action, say researchers
This is quickly becoming the only topic you have left to talk about.
How strong you feeling about this mattering to anyone if we start drilling and opening up the coal mines and letting that natural gas flow and prices for everything start dropping on top of all the other wins that have come our way?
I think that would make this just another 80/20 issue that you're on the wrong side of, buddy.
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Thorium seemed good, you cant really make a bomb from it and more clean and 'Green' for the environment
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Quote:. Good in theory, but too many obstacles for material science so far. Thorium reactors would run as a molten salt, and would need a material that withstands molten salt but also passes neutrons.
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Thorium seemed good, you cant really make a bomb from it and more clean and 'Green' for the environment
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Eco-Hypocrites Take Hundreds Of Private Jets To Bezos Wedding
Saturday, Jun 28, 2025 - 08:40 AM
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
Around a hundred private jets carrying celebrities have descended on Italy to deliver eco-hypocrites including Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates to the wedding of tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Stalled Global Circulation Signals "Stout Heat Dome In July"
Sunday, Jun 29, 2025 - 06:55 AM
For readers waking up across the Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City metro areas, conditions remain gloomy with overcast skies and mild temperatures hovering in the mid-70s°F—quite a change from triple-digit heat that gripped the region earlier last week, straining power grids and sending electricity prices soaring.
However, a new outlook from private weather forecaster BAMWX warns that the heat dome may return in force next month.
"I would recommend none of us sleep on this trend ahead into next week, esp heading into Holiday markets," said BAMWX meteorologist Kirk Hinz.
Hinz noted, "Simply put - the global circulation/momentum has HALTED ... Translation - there will be a stout Heat Dome in July, question is just "where"...stay tuned."
Quote:
Heat Domes Are Hotter and Lingering Longer—Because of the Arctic
A rapidly warming Arctic is driving long-lasting summer extremes, such as this month’s sweltering temperatures, new research suggests
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-domes-are-hotter-and-l
ingering-longer-because-of-the-arctic/
Not so new. The northern jet stream is driven by the temperature difference between the Arctic and the equator. Since the Arctic is undeniably warming, and warming much faster than the equator, the jet stream slows down, makes big loops, and stop precessing. This isn't a model, it's observation.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Electric vehicle manufacturers need to revisit the days of the Model T
Jun 24, 2025
https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-why-high-end-electric-cars-are-fai
ling/
Legacy automakers are losing out to China, at least in those countries where Chinese EVs are sold. Which is most places except the US.
According to a new report from the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), global EV sales will surpass 20 million in 2025, accounting for more than a quarter of cars sold worldwide. In the first three months of 2025, electric car sales worldwide were up 35 percent over the previous year. And, adds the IEA, market share is on course to exceed 40 percent by 2030 as EVs—smaller, cheaper ones, mainly—become increasingly affordable in more markets.
Almost half of all car sales in China last year were electric. Emerging markets in Asia and Latin America have also become new centers of growth, with total EV sales across these regions surging by more than 60 percent in 2024, according to the IEA. Meanwhile, EV sales grew by about 10 percent year-on-year in the US.
“Our data shows that, despite significant uncertainties, electric cars remain on a strong growth trajectory globally,” says IEA executive director Fatih Birol. “Sales continue to set new records, with major implications for the international auto industry. This year, we expect more than one in four cars sold worldwide to be electric, with growth accelerating in many emerging economies. By the end of this decade, it is set to be more than two in five.”
China accounts for more than 70 percent of global EV production.
Volkswagen’s luxury marques, including Porsche, Bentley, and Lamborghini, are reassessing their EV strategies. Porsche has scaled back plans for an all-electric lineup following a 49 percent decline in Taycan sales. Bentley has pushed back the launch of its first EV from this year to next, and extended its gas-engine phase-out deadline to 2035. Lamborghini has delayed its Lanzador EV until 2029 at the earliest.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump admin tries to kill the most indisputable evidence of human-caused climate change by shuttering observatory
By Andrew Freedman | Jul 1, 2025
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/01/climate/trump-cuts-mauna-loa-keeling
The president’s budget proposal would also defund many other climate labs, including instrument sites comprising the US government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network, which stretches from northern Alaska to the South Pole.
But it’s the Mauna Loa laboratory that is the most prominent target of the President Donald Trump’s climate ire, as measurements that began there in 1958 have steadily shown CO2’s upward march as human activities have emitted more and more of the planet-warming gas each year.
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Warming depletes Arctic soil's nitrogen stores, irreversibly increasing CO2 emissions
July 2, 2025
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-depletes-arctic-soil-nitrogen-irreversib
ly.html
Half of the world's carbon is stored in the frozen soils of the Arctic and subarctic regions, covering territories such as Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, Siberia and Iceland. Scientists were already aware that the microorganisms living in these ecosystems have become more active because of rising temperatures, consuming more carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2).
However, the study published recently in the journal Global Change Biology, led by CREAF and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) researcher Sara Marañón, has revealed that warming also depletes nitrogen in soils.
Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plants: Without enough of it, they grow less, absorb less CO2, and are unable to offset carbon emissions from the soil, leading to an unforeseen, irreversible increase in the overall balance. Specifically, for every degree Celsius of warming, between 1.7% and 2.6% of the nitrogen in soil is lost, resulting, according to the study's data, in a proportional loss of carbon (in the form of CO2) into the atmosphere.
The team behind the study made this discovery through a decade-long experiment conducted in Iceland, a natural laboratory where geothermal activity produces soil temperatures ranging from 0.5°C to 40°C above ambient temperature, allowing direct observation of how heat affects high-latitude soils.
"We already knew that climate change was causing Arctic soils to release more CO2, but we thought at least some of the emissions would be offset by plant growth, which increases slightly with warming," says Marañón. "But our study shows that this isn't the case. Nitrogen is lost and soil fertility decreases, preventing Arctic ecosystems from offsetting microbial CO2 emissions."
Under normal circumstances, Marañón explains, microorganisms are more active in spring and summer. They consume nitrogen and transform it into ammonium and nitrates, compounds that plants take up for nourishment. But warming affects the synchrony of the process: the microorganisms become active in winter, when plants are still inactive due to a lack of light and do not yet need the nutrients the microorganisms provide, resulting in supply outpacing demand.
The upshot is that the transformed nitrogen goes unused and is lost. Some of it may filter into groundwater as nitrates, and can contaminate aquatic systems; another part of it may be released as nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than CO2. This, warns Marañón, is "a dangerous cocktail."
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The ‘Great Dying’ wiped out 90% of life, then came 5 million years of lethal heat. New fossils explain why
By Laura Paddison | July 2, 2025 at 5:02 AM CDT
https://www.yahoo.com/news/great-dying-wiped-90-life-090025845.html
There is a sliver of hope: The rainforests that currently carpet the tropics may be more resilient to high temperatures than those that existed before the Great Dying. This is the q
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Another story about the Arctic releasing billions of tons per year of CO2:
We Are Living in the Age of Fire. And It’s Only Going To Get Worse
By Stephen Maher | Jul 2, 2025
https://time.com/7299284/age-of-mega-wildfires-climate-change/
Mike Flannigan, who has been studying wildfires as long as Joe Gilchrist has been fighting them, is scared.
In 1985, Flannigan gave his first talk predicting that climate change would lead to bigger fires. Audiences were skeptical, but he was confident that he was right. In 1991, he published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research predicting a 46% increase in annual area burned when the amount of carbon in the atmosphere doubled from pre-industrial levels, which measured 280 parts per million (ppm).
In 1991, when the atmospheric carbon levels measured 355 ppm , 2.5 million acres burned in Canada. This year, the level of C02 is 427 ppm ten million acres burnt by July 1.
Flannigan’s models were far too conservative.
“We—the modelers—have done pretty well with getting the temperature increases, but the impacts from those temperature increases has been grossly underestimated,” he says
He finds that disquieting. “It's happening faster than I would have thought, and there may be surprises coming—not just for fire—but for climate change, surprises that catch us all off guard.”
“Fire is always where people are,” Flannigan continues. “It goes with us wherever we go. But the genie is out of the bottle. Fire is now uncontrollable, and we're going to see more and more fire and more and more catastrophic fire.”
Flannigan thinks we are living in the pyrocene, the age of fire, an idea from Arizona environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne. By burning so much coal and oil, we have changed the climate and can no longer control the processes.
Canada’s forests—which make up 8.5%of all global forest area—were once a crucial storehouse of carbon, but because of the fires they have been a net carbon emitter since 2001. The fires of 2023 released 647 million metric tons of carbon, more than the total annual emissions of South Korea that year.
The fires are so hot that they are burning off the top soil in some places, which means some land that was treed will come back as savannah—grasslands which do not store as much carbon.
And the news may get much worse. Many of the trees in northern Canada spring from permanently frozen peat bogs, which contain enormous quantities of carbon. As the climate warms, and that permafrost melts, it becomes susceptible to fire, posing a horrifying climate risk: massive, unfightable northern fires spewing huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, which could push Earth past a climate tipping point that once crossed will cause a spiral-effect of endless warming.
“It's not a steady state,” says Flannigan. “It's not normal. We're on a downward trajectory. Sometimes I say we’re in Dante's circle of hell. I don't know which circle we're on, but I know which way we're going.”
Only one thing might stop the terrifying processes that humans have set in motion.
“The bottom line, until we deal with greenhouse gasses, fossil-fuel burning, we're going to continue to warm and we're going to continue to see more fire.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s plan to replace clean energy with fossil fuels has some major problems
The budget bill sabotages one of the biggest growth sectors of the US economy.
July 3, 2025
https://www.vox.com/climate/418563/trump-big-beautiful-bill-clean-ener
gy-fossil-climate
The first solar cell ever made was built in the United States. Tesla, based in the US, was once the largest EV manufacturer in the world. The lithium-ion battery was codeveloped in the US.
But today, China — not the US — is the largest manufacturer of solar cells and batteries. China’s BYD — not Tesla — is the largest EV manufacturer in the world. And China is starting to outrun the US on research and development investment.
The US has a long history of taking the lead in clean energy, and a long history of losing it. And President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which passed the House on Thursday and is heading for his desk, would again leave the US on the margins of a global clean energy revolution that it could have dominated.
For years now, clean power has been the largest source of new electricity in the US. Solar, batteries, and wind are on track to make up more than 90 percent of new electricity capacity on the US power grid this year. Wind and solar now produce more electricity on the US power grid than coal. Almost twice as many Americans work in clean energy compared to fossil fuels, and the sector is still growing.
But thanks to the bill, that may not be the case for much longer.
Some of the more extreme provisions in earlier drafts of the bill have been removed, like an excise tax targeting renewable energy. But the final version of the bill rolls back many of the investments from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the single-largest US investment to address climate change by giving the energy transition a boost. It calls for more rapid phaseouts of tax credits for wind and solar power, only allowing projects that break ground in the next 12 months or those that connect to the grid by 2027 to take advantage of these incentives. It also eliminates a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of a new electric vehicle. The spending bill doesn’t just undo incentives for clean energy — it also creates a new tax credit for coal and encourages more drilling on public lands.
These provisions are in line with Trump’s longstanding antipathy toward renewable energy and disbelief in climate change. But they stand to hobble the US economy more broadly.
The US is facing significant load growth on the power grid for the first time in decades as the tech industry scrounges for electrons to power their electricity-devouring data centers. Energy demand is rising and the cheapest, most readily deployable supplies of energy are being throttled.
The alternatives, however, are not likely to make up the gap in time. Fossil fuels take longer to ramp up. The US is currently the largest oil and gas producer in the world, but it can take years to site, permit, and acquire the materials to build power plants that burn these fuels. Since these are internationally traded commodities, their prices can fluctuate based on factors beyond the US’s control.
Right now, oil prices are at four-year lows and natural gas prices are falling, and when prices are low, it’s much harder to make the business case for more mining, drilling, and power plants, even with incentives. Trump may have some levers to pull — he can, for example, open up more federally managed lands for energy production — but many of those leases sit unused because energy companies don’t want to create a supply glut. Meanwhile, employment in the oil and gas industry remains volatile, while coal jobs are continuing their decades-long decline.
Energy Information Administration
“We’re in this moment of surging demand and you can’t build another gas turbine for at least five years beyond what’s already been booked,” said Robbie Orvis, senior direct
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The push for electric vehicles is a big boondoggle. EVs don't generate new energy, and - ultimately- they're just a real long tailpipe that extends to the power plant smokestack. Not to mention the pollution they, and windmills and solar cells, create in their lifecycle.
The limiting flaw of "green energy" is ... still... energy storage. Carrying the grid through the hours ... days ... weeks ... even seasons, sometimes ... when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow enough (or blows too hard).
Until you solve THAT problem, you will still need fossil fuel generating capacity to meet 100% of need. You can reduce fossil fuel use by quite a bit, and beef up grid regional interchanges, but you will STILL need that fossil fueled capacity in reserve.
*****
I don't know how this would pencil out, but I see an oppty for capturing methane and boosting the power grid at the same time. One possibility is to compress the gas for sale elsewhere. Another possibility is to use some or all of the gas that would normally be flared off to run microturbines (distributed energy production) and either feed that directly into the grid or use it to power compressors, or both.
Is that more efficient than the big power generating plants? No. But it's more efficient than just flaring it off.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Real Men Burn Stuff
The manosphere and the war on renewable energy
By Paul Krugman / Jul 7, 2025 at 5:09 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/real-men-burn-stuff
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” That famous 2011 quip from the venture capitalist Peter Thiel still resonates, even though Thiel himself has become a deeply malignant force in American politics. I’ll write soon about the madness of the Trumpist tech bros, but for today let me focus on Thiel’s original insight — that everyone, venture capitalists included, had come to focus far too much on digital technology, neglecting the possibilities of breakthroughs in technologies that deal with the physical world.
Yet here’s the irony: In the years since Thiel’s lament we have, in fact, seen revolutionary progress in one fundamental physical-world technology, energy production. Yet the people Thiel and his buddies helped put in power are doing all they can to reverse that progress and send America back into the energy Dark Ages.
Most critiques of the One Big Beautiful Bill have focused on the way it explodes the budget deficit while imposing immense hardship on lower-income Americans. Yet energy policy is also an important component of the OBBB, which basically tries to roll back the rise of solar and wind power — sources that have accounted for more than half the worldwide increase in electricity generation since 2015.
To understand how self-destructive that effort is, you need to know three things about the economics of renewable energy.
First, there are powerful environmental reasons to favor renewables over fossil fuels where possible. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the most important, because climate change is an existential threat. But even aside from climate concerns, the air pollution created by burning fossil fuels takes a major toll on health and productivity, which solar and wind don’t.
Second, a transition to renewables, which might have seemed like pie-in-the-sky, hippy-dippy stuff a generation ago, is now not just feasible but the only sensible energy strategy. Here’s a chart showing estimates of the levelized cost of electricity generation (LCOE), adjusted for inflation, for a variety of renewable energy technologies, compared with the costs of power from fossil fuels. I’m aware that LCOE is an imperfect measure, but the results are still astonishing:
Source: IRENA
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2024/Sep/
IRENA_Renewable_power_generation_costs_in_2023.pdf#page=21
We’re talking in particular about a 90 percent decline in the real cost of power from solar panels and a 70 percent decline in the cost of wind power. This isn’t just progress, it’s a revolution.
And — my third point — the revolution isn’t over. Some technological leaps involve one big idea, which takes time to implement but is basically a once-and-done deal — which seems to be the case, to take an example I’ve studied, for freight containerization. Progress in renewable energy, however, has involved a continual process of “learning by doing,” in which efficiency keeps rising and costs falling as the industry expands. This is exactly the kind of situation in which government subsidies — like the clean-energy tax credits instituted by the Biden administration — can accelerate progress and boost overall economic growth.
But the OBBB killed those tax credits. And the Trump administration has been taking executive action to stall renewable development, for example, by halting federal approvals for wind farms. In general, MAGA clearly wants to move us back to burning gas, oil and above all coal. Why?
Campaign contributions no doubt play a role. Fossil fuel industries donate almost exclusively to Republicans. But renewables are also big business these
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Is anyone who does not know that the Republican Party denies that there is climate change?
Climate change is making severe storms both more common and more intense.
U.S. rocked by four 1-in-1,000-year storms in less than a week
By Denise Chow | July 10, 2025, 4:09 PM CDT
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change/flood-storms-climate-ch
ange-1-in-1000-year-rainfall-rcna217863
First the river rose in Texas. Then, the rains fell hard over North Carolina, New Mexico and Illinois.
In less than a week, there were at least four 1-in-1,000-year rainfall events across the United States — intense deluges that are thought to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.
These events come and go in the news, and before you know it, we’re on to the next one.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Scientists discover what wiped out global ocean life 200 million years ago
By Mac Oliveau | Jul 19, 2025 9:07 AM PDT
https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/scientists-discover-what-wiped-o
ut-global-ocean-life-200-million-years-ago/
What makes the Triassic–Jurassic extinction so important is the clear link between volcanic CO2 release, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. It’s a case where scientists can trace each step of the crisis in the geologic record — from carbon release to acidification to biodiversity collapse. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61344-6
What’s even more alarming is how today’s carbon emissions compare. The size of the pH drop 201 million years ago matches the worst-case expectations for future oceans. But the difference lies in the pace. Back then, it took tens of thousands of years. Today, human activities are pumping carbon into the atmosphere much faster—on a scale of just a few hundred years. This compressed timeline leaves ocean life with far less time to adapt.
Climate change today isn’t just a future problem — it’s unfolding now. And the fossil record is telling us that we’ve been here before. The difference? This time, we know it’s coming. And we have the tools to act.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I know SIX will deny this, just like he denied Covid deaths .... but this is domething we really need to do something about. And I don't mean get-rich-quick schemes like EVs for everyone, or technologically impossible ideas like flue gas carbon capture, but real, practical plans that we can implement today:
Solar for everyone south of 60°N; building nat gas power plants to replace coal fired ones; carbon tax; forest, farm, and ranch management to capture carbon; banning private jets; reducing our military budget by at least 50% and ending our endless carbon-wasting wars; upgrading grids whose efficiency is less than 97%; not only requiring better fleet averages but also capping mpg on all vehicles to eliminate gas guzzlers; urban forests; "cool cities"; methane capture at the wellhead powering microturbines; improving home efficiency thru repair and upgrade...
A kind of "all of the above where practical and effective" approach.
A lot of this would be an impossible sell to politicians and the MIC and the wealthy, but it would actually improve people's lives (Carbon tax can be returned to people. The point of a carbon tax isn't to raise revenues for the government.) and create jobs requiring skilled labor.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."
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Quote:Trump's insane war on renewable energy
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
A kind of "all of the above where practical and effective" approach.
America needs energy abundance, not polarization and culture war
By Matthew Yglesias | Jul 23, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-insane-war-on-renewable-energy
I’ve often had occasion to write that environmentalists are overrating the prospects of 100 percent renewable energy as a strategy for addressing climate change.
Essentially, they are relying on a badly flawed “levelized cost of energy” metric, which says the marginal cost of adding one megawatt of wind or solar to a fossil-dominated grid is cheap, to conclude that an all-renewable grid would be cheap. This is wrong. Developing an all-renewable grid that could reliably power a temperate country through the winter would be much more expensive than a simple LCOE metric suggests. This is one of the reasons why new technology — affordable nuclear, advanced geothermal, or scalable carbon capture — is so important.
But Donald Trump is running the show now, and he’s making the opposite error.
He’s not trying to create a zero-emission grid or reduce fossil fuel use in any way. But he’s not only rolling back tax credits for wind and solar production, he’s doing everything he can think of to raise new regulatory barriers to renewable deployment. He also keeps asserting that China doesn’t use renewable technologies, suggesting that the mere existence of wind and solar power is harmful.
TRUMP: And we are putting up wind. It does not work, aside from ruining our fields and valleys and killing all the birds. Being very weak and expensive, all made in China. I have never seen a wind farm in China. Why is that?
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1941251628386148485
This is totally false. Not only does China have many wind farms, they generate more wind electricity than the United States does despite a much less favorable geography. And they generate a lot more solar electricity than the United States.
The reason China generates so much renewable electricity is that while constructing an all-renewables grid is a lot more expensive than environmentalists want to concede, it’s absolutely true that incrementally adding renewable energy to the grid is cheap. That’s why China has dramatically increased the amount of renewables it deployed in the context of a dramatic increase in the overall amount of electricity the country generates.
This is what a pure “energy dominance” policy looks like: massive buildout of wind and solar and batteries, because wind turbines and solar panels and batteries are all getting cheaper, with the shortcomings of an all-renewables grid addressed by simply not building an all-renewables grid.
It looks like China’s carbon dioxide emissions are finally leveling off. But while China was building out these renewables, they were also burning more fossil fuels. This is obviously not a strategy for achieving the environmental movement’s goals. But if you’re Donald Trump and you don’t want to achieve rapid decarbonization, there is still genuinely no problem with opening the floodgates to renewable deployment.
All Trump will accomplish by throttling renewables is making costs higher and the air dirtier than if he just let Americans use technologies that really are quite cheap at the current margin. He’s letting culture war prejudice, special interest politics, and polarization get in the way of his stated goals of lower costs and energy dominance.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Transitioning the entire U.S. power grid to 100% renewable energy sources is estimated to cost approximately $4.5 trillion, according to a 2019 analysis by Wood Mackenzie and reported by Greentech Media and Yale E360.
This estimate is for a transition over a decade and assumes the replacement of all fossil fuels and nuclear power with renewables like hydroelectricity, biomass, geothermal, wind, and solar.
Key Cost Components and Considerations:
Massive Buildout of Wind and Solar: The analysis estimated a significant investment of $1.5 trillion for the construction of new wind and solar capacity.
Energy Storage: A crucial element is the addition of substantial battery storage capacity, estimated to add $4 trillion to the total cost.
Transmission Infrastructure: Doubling the existing transmission lines, from 200,000 miles to 400,000 miles, is projected to cost an additional $700 billion to accommodate the new distributed power system.
Impact of Nuclear Power: If nuclear power were allowed to remain in the energy mix, the estimated cost would drop to $4 trillion.
Recent Data and Context: While the $4.5 trillion figure is a key benchmark, more recent data suggests that grid upgrade costs for a clean energy transition could be even higher, with one source from 2023 estimating $21 trillion over 30 years for a grid overhaul. Other studies focusing on a clean electricity grid by 2035 suggest potentially lower additional costs for power systems (up to $740 billion) but also highlight significant societal benefits from avoided mortality and climate change damages.
Subsidies and Inflation: Decarbonization Channel analysis notes that subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act make onshore wind and solar very cost-effective, though recent inflation has impacted costs compared to earlier years.
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+cost+for+all-renewables+gr
id+in+US
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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French nuclear energy splits Germany's ruling coalition
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/07/22/french-nucl
ear-energy-splits-germany-s-ruling-coalition_6743591_4.html
also the German electric grid had no link to Fukushima but the 'Greens' shut down Germany's power
not the perfect solution Nuclear does have dangers but it seems to be a lot less toxic and dangerous than coal a very dirty industry
New Mexico’s forgotten 1979 uranium catastrophe that poisoned 80 miles of the Puerco River with radioactive sludge
https://southarkansassun.com/us-news/115017/new-mexicos-forgotten-1979
-uranium-catastrophe-that-poisoned-80-miles-of-the-puerco-river-with-radioactive-sludge/
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Quote:
Japan Bets On Super Thin, Film-Like Panels to Reclaim Solar Leadership At Expo 2025
Friday, Jul 25, 2025 - 03:50 PM
At Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan is using an unexpected location—a bus terminal—to highlight its latest innovation: ultrathin “perovskite” solar panels, according to Nikkei.
More than 250 of these flexible, lightweight panels line the curved roof of the Yumeshima Transportation Terminal 1. Japan hopes this film-like solar tech will not only boost domestic renewable energy and reduce reliance on China, but also help it lead the next generation of solar innovation.
"It's like killing three birds with one stone," said Takayuki Taenaka of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).
Perovskite solar cells, discovered in 2009, are made from layers of chemicals just millimeters thick. Though still in early development, they rival traditional silicon-based panels in efficiency while being 20 times thinner and 10 times lighter, allowing installation on walls, rooftops, and even windows—places unsuitable for heavy panels.
"We believe this technology has the potential to beat the conventional silicon-based solar panels in terms of power generation efficiency," said Futoshi Kamiwaki, president of Sekisui Solarfilm, which developed the panels showcased at the Expo.
Japan, with limited flat land, leads major nations in solar capacity per km² but is running out of space. Installing perovskite cells on buildings could turn cities into vertical solar farms, helping Tokyo meet its 2040 goal: 29% of power from solar, up from under 10% today.
MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/japan-bets-film-panels-reclaim-solar
-leadership-expo-2025
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."
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The Drying Planet
By Abrahm Lustgarten, Graphics by Lucas Waldron, Illustrations by Olivier Kugler for ProPublica
July 25, 2025, 2 p.m. EDT
https://www.propublica.org/article/water-aquifers-groundwater-rising-o
cean-levels
The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.
Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise
Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.
The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. The technique was groundbreaking two decades ago when the study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, who was then a professor at the University of California, at Irvine, used it to pinpoint where aquifers were in decline. Since then, he and others have published dozens of papers using GRACE data, but the question has always lingered: What does the groundwater loss mean in the context of all of the water available on the continents? So Famiglietti, now a professor at Arizona State University, set out to inventory all the land-based water contained in glaciers, rivers and aquifers and see what was changing. The answer: everything, and quickly.
Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents in ways that no one was really anticipating,” Famiglietti said. (Six other researchers also contributed to the study.) The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.
The Drying of the Earth Accelerated in Recent Years
The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.
In the American Southwest and California, groundwater loss is a familiar story, but over the past two decades that hot spot has also spread dramatically. It now extends through Texas and up through the southern High Plains, where the Ogallala aquifer is depended on for agriculture, and it spreads south, stretching throughout Mexico and into Central America. These regions are connected not because they rely on the same water sources — in most cases they don’t — but because their populations will face the same perils of water stress: the most likely, a food crisis that could ultimately displace millions of people.
“This has to serve as a wake-up call,” said Aaron Salzberg, a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved with the study.
Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst. For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.
For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisibl
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We're wasting precious freshwater just like we waste everything else.
But I take exception to the title. It's not the PLANET that's drying, just the parts thst stick up above the ocean,
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."
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EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=66930
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."
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Quote:Trumptards are NOT wasting water. They don't drill water wells, buy pumps and electricity just to waste money. They get paid for the water. The problem is that pumping is destroying the world but the destruction is not in the calculations of how much money will be made for every million gallons pumped.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
We're wasting precious freshwater just like we waste everything else.
But I take exception to the title. It's not the PLANET that's drying, just the parts thst stick up above the ocean,
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."
The same as with water, there is money in pumping oil and gas. And the destruction caused by the pumping does NOT reduce the amount of money made per barrel of oil and per billions of cubic meters of LNG. Which brings me to new rules that guarantee pumping won't stop, no matter how much of the world is destroyed because the new rules claim that nothing is being destroyed:
The EPA gives up on climate change
The agency plans to reverse its own legal justification for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
By Cameron Peters | Jul 29, 2025, 6:00 PM CDT
https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/421548/epa-lee-zeldin-
endangerment-finding-climate-change-emissions
President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency said today that it plans to reverse its own legal justification for regulating emissions, potentially a major blow to efforts to combat climate change.
Why does the EPA want to do this? EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has described the change, which follows a January executive order by Trump to reexamine the policy, as “the largest deregulatory action in the history of America”; more generally, it’s consistent with the Trump administration’s focus on promoting fossil fuels.
What is the agency actually proposing? In 2009, the EPA reached what is known as the “endangerment finding” — a determination that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health because of their role in climate change, on which the agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions rests. Now, the EPA proposes rolling back that finding.
What will the impact be? If the EPA proposal takes effect, it would spell the end of nearly all US climate regulations, including those governing emissions by vehicles, factories, power plants, and more. That change would come even as the US is beginning to face more severe effects of climate change and as the world struggles to fend off warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-threshold-15-degrees-sea-lev
el-2727e81c4d7f57062ab9b1637a0b4ddf
Is this a done deal? No. The EPA announced its proposal on Tuesday, but before it can reverse the finding, the plan will go through a review process, including a public comment period. It’s also all but certain to be challenged in court by environmental groups.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Trumptards have an explanation for climate change, but it is not fossil fuel burning:
Republicans across the country are pushing bills to stop government 'weather modification'
“If it doesn't exist,” said Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., a co-sponsor of federal legislation targeting geoengineering, “then you don't have anything to worry about.”
By Allan Smith and Matt Dixon | July 29, 2025
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/republicans-push-bills-
stop-government-weather-modification-chemtrails-rcna220045
For years, outlandish theories about the U.S. government using airplanes to spray harmful chemicals over U.S. homes or powerful elites controlling the weather were relegated to the fringes of society.
Not anymore.
As the internet has provided rocket fuel for such claims, Republican lawmakers across the country are introducing, passing and enacting laws to ban “weather modification” and environmental geoengineering and allude to the use of “chemtrails,” a longtime theory that planes are spreading chemical agents on an unsuspecting public. As more people are exposed to dangerous flooding, the GOP lawmakers have pointed to the fringe theories as potential explanations for extreme weather, pushing them further into the political mainstream. (Scientists have found evidence tying the increasing frequency of extreme weather to climate change.)
Republican lawmakers in nearly 20 state legislatures have proposed such legislation, with governors in Tennessee and Florida having signed bills into law. On the federal level, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., recently introduced the “Clear Skies Act,” which would outlaw forms of geoengineering and hit alleged weather modifiers with penalties of up to $100,000 for each violation and potential prison sentences of up to five years.
“It’s not a conspiracy theory,” Pennsylvania state Sen. Camera Bartolotta, a Republican who co-sponsored legislation in her state, said in an interview. “All you have to do is look up.”
At its core, the legislative push seeks to outlaw human-made alterations to the climate — notable, given how the party has fought to stop efforts to combat climate change tied to fossil fuel consumption and as the Trump administration has cut funding for climate change research and removed the website that hosted the government’s climate assessments.
“One political party in this country seems especially concerned about the idea of theoretical changes in the weather,” Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist for The Washington Post and other outlets, told NBC News. “Whereas that same political party will largely turn a blind eye to actual weather modification that is happening in slow motion, i.e., human-induced climate change.”
Greene, who is leading the charge to pass federal legislation to ban weather modification, said she saw “kind of a funny hypocrisy” among climate change activists who are “yelling, ‘We’ve got to stop climate change.’”
“But yet they’re like, ‘No, don’t stop manmade climate change,’” she continued. “So I find that to be a laughable hypocrisy. And so it just doesn’t add up to me.”
Greene has for years been subject to heavy criticism over her 2018 claim that lasers from space may have triggered a 2018 wildfire in California. She now feels a sense of vindication as Republicans across the country feel compelled to produce legislation similar to hers.
“This is something I’ve talked about for quite some time,” Greene said in an interview. “Got attacked for talking about it, for saying that, yes, they’re controlling the weather. I said they’re controlling the weather, and people tore me up all over social media.”
Asked who "they" referred to, Greene's office pointed to her post on X last year noting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration collects the names of companies that engage in weather modification. She pointed to decades-old government experiments involving cloud seeding, including Operation Popeye, a military effort during the V
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Fossil Fool
How Europe took Trump for a ride
By Paul Krugman | Jul 30, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/fossil-fool
Like many U.S. institutions, the European Union has abysmally failed the Trump test. The EU is an economic superpower and could have retaliated effectively against Trump’s illegal tariffs — illegal under both U.S. and international law. Instead, Europe did nothing and even made some apparent concessions.
But notice my wording: apparent concessions. The optics of the Trump-EU deal were humiliating, and optics matter. If you examine the substance, however, it starts to look as if Europe played Trump for a fool. Specifically, a fossil fool.
The EU made two sort-of pledges to Trump. First, that it would invest $600 billion in the United States. Second, that it would buy $750 billion worth of U.S. energy, mainly oil and gas, over the next three years. The first promise was empty, while the second was nonsense.
About those investments: European governments aren’t like China, which can tell companies where to put their money. And the European Commission, which made the trade deal, isn’t even a government — it can negotiate tariffs but otherwise has little power. On Sunday Politico spoke with Commission officials, who effectively confirmed that the investment pledge was meaningless:
Speaking Monday, two senior European Commission officials clarified that money would come exclusively from private European companies, with public investment contributing nothing.
“It is not something that the EU as a public authority can guarantee. It is something which is based on the intentions of the private companies,” said one of the senior Commission officials. The Commission has not said it will introduce any incentives to ensure the private sector meets that $600 billion target, nor given a precise timeframe for the investment.
So what the EU actually promised on investment was nothing, Nichts, rien.
The pledge to increase U.S. energy exports was a lot more specific and gave a timeframe. But it’s not going to happen. In fact, it’s going to not happen on three levels.
First, the European Commission, which can’t tell the private sector where to invest, is equally unable to tell the private sector where to buy oil and gas. How would that even work?
Second, the promised level of EU imports is probably physically impossible. Shipping liquefied natural gas (LNG), in particular, requires specialized infrastructure at both ends. On the US side, LNG terminals are already operating at capacity, while Europe’s LNG facilities are “stretched to their limits.” The EU just promised to vastly increase energy imports from America over the next three years, but it’s doubtful whether Europe could build any of the infrastructure needed before the end of that period, even with a crash investment program.
And why would anyone undertake such an investment program in a continent that is rapidly shifting toward renewable energy? As one energy analyst told the Financial Times,
European gas demand is soft and energy prices are falling. In any case, it is private companies not states that contract for energy imports. Like it or not, in Europe the windmills are winning.
Emphasis added because as everyone knows, Trump has a blind, irrational hatred for wind power.
Finally, even if Europe somehow managed to overcome the legal and physical obstacles to buying a lot more fossil fuels from America, both oil and LNG are fungible commodities traded on global markets. This means that any increase in purchases from Europe would reroute U.S. exports rather than increasing them: We’d sell more to Europe but less to, say, Japan and China.
So a big increase in U.S. energy exports driven by demand from Europe is not going to happen. But how will Europe explain its failure to follow through?
It might not have to. Back during Trump’s first term, China promised to buy a lot of U.S. agricultural goods but never did. As far as I know, Trump never made an issue of it. He got to announce a
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
UK breakthrough could slash emissions from cement – May 22, 2024
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxee01m5yero
Scientists say they've found a way to recycle cement from demolished concrete buildings.
Cement is the modern world's most common construction material, but it is also a huge source of planet-warming gas emissions.
That is because of the chemical reactions when you heat limestone to high temperatures by burning fossil fuels.
Recycling cement would massively reduce its carbon footprint. Researchers say that if they switched to electric-powered furnaces, and used renewable energy like wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, that could mean no greenhouse gases would be released at all.
And that would be a big deal. Cement forms the foundation of the modern economy, both literally and metaphorically.
It is what binds the sand and aggregate in concrete together, and concrete is the most widely used material on the planet after water.
It is also a major driver of climate change. If cement was a country, it would be the third biggest source of emissions after China and the US, responsible for 7.5% of human-made CO2.
The problem is the material’s uniquely polluting chemistry.
It is made by heating limestone to up 1600 Celsius in giant kilns powered by fossil fuels.
Those emissions are just the start. The heat is used to drive carbon dioxide from the limestone, leaving a residue of cement.
Add both these sources of pollution together and it is estimated that about a tonne of carbon dioxide is produced for every tonne of cement.
The team of scientists, from Cambridge University, has found a neat way to sidestep those emissions.
It exploits the fact that you can reactivate used cement by exposing it to high temperatures again.
The chemistry is well-established, and it has been done at scale in cement kilns.
The breakthrough is to prove it can be done by piggybacking on the heat generated by another heavy industry – steel recycling.
When you recycle steel, you add chemicals that float on the surface of the molten metal to prevent it reacting with the air and creating impurities. This is known as slag.
The Cambridge team spotted the composition of used cement is almost exactly the same as the slag used in electric arc furnaces.
They have been trialling the process at a small-scale electric arc furnace at the Materials Processing Institute in Middlesbrough.
The BBC was present when the first high grade, or “Portland”, cement was produced.
They are calling it “electric cement” and described the event as a world first.
The lead scientist, Cyrille Dunant, told the BBC it could enable the production of zero-carbon cement.
“We have shown the high temperatures in the furnace reactivate the old cement and because electric arc furnaces use electricity they can be powered by renewable power, so the entire cement making process is decarbonised.,” he said.
He said it also makes steel recycling less polluting because making the chemicals currently used as slag has a high carbon cost too.
Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at University College London, described the way the Cambridge team have combined cement and steel recycling as “genius” and believes, if it can be made to work profitably at scale, it could lead to huge reductions in emissions.
“Can it compete against the existing infrastructure that is very unsustainably going to keep pumping cement into our lives”, he asks.
“Cement is already a billion-dollar industry. It’s David and Goliath we are talking about here.”
The hope is electric cement will be cheaper to manufacture because it uses what is essentially waste heat from the steel recycling process.
Spanish company Celsa will attempt to replicate the process in its full-scale electric arc furnace in Cardiff this week.
The Cambridge team estimate, given current rates of steel recycling, their low carbon cement could produce as much as
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Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis
The heat that hit Svalbard in February was so intense that scientists could dig into the ground with spoons, "like it was soft ice cream."
By Matt Simon | Jul 29, 2025
https://grist.org/climate/troubling-scenes-from-an-arctic-in-full-tilt
-crisis/
The Arctic island of Svalbard is so reliably frigid that humanity bet its future on the place. Since 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — set deep in frozen soil known as permafrost — has accepted nearly 1.4 million samples of more than 6,000 species of critical crops. But, the island is warming six to seven times faster than the rest of the planet, making even winters freakishly hot, at least by Arctic standards. Indeed, in 2017, an access tunnel to the vault flooded as permafrost melted, though the seeds weren’t impacted.
This February, a team of scientists was working on Svalbard when irony took hold. Drilling into the soil, they gathered samples of bacteria that proliferate when the ground thaws. These microbes munch on organic matter and burp methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas and significant driver of global warming. Those emissions are potentially fueling a feedback loop in the Arctic: As more soil thaws, more methane is released, leading to more thawing and more methane, and on and on.
In some parts of Svalbard, though, the scientists didn’t need to drill. Air temperatures climbed above freezing for 14 of the 28 days of February, reaching 40 degrees Fahrenheit, when the average temperature at this time of year is 5 degrees. Snow vanished in places, leaving huge pools of water. “I brought my equipment to drill into frozen soil and then ended up sampling a lot of soil just with a spoon, like it was soft ice cream,” said Donato Giovannelli, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Naples Federico II and co-lead author of a paper describing the experience, published last week in the journal Nature Communications. “That was really pretty shocking.”
Scientists can now dig with silverware in the Svalbard winter because the Arctic has descended into a crisis of reflectivity. Until recently, the far north had a healthy amount of sea ice, which bounced much of the sun’s energy back into space, keeping the region cool. But as the planet has warmed, that ice has been disappearing, exposing darker water, which absorbs sunlight and raises temperatures. This is yet another Arctic feedback loop, in which more warming melts more sea ice, leading to more local warming, and on and on.
Making matters worse, as temperatures rise in the far north, more moisture enters the atmosphere. For one, warmer seawater evaporates more readily, adding water vapor to the air. And two, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. This leads to the formation of more low-level clouds, which trap heat like blankets — especially in the dark Arctic winter — amplifying the warming. That, combined with the loss of sea ice, is why the Arctic is warming up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, with Svalbard warming even faster than that.
During the winter, Svalbard’s soils have historically frozen solid, and scientists assumed this made microbial activity grind to a halt. Reindeer could push through the snow to graze on vegetation. But February’s heat and rain melted the snow, forming vast pools of water that froze once temperatures dropped again. That created a layer of ice that reindeer couldn’t break through. “What we encountered was just so powerful, to be in the middle of this event,” said James Bradley, a geomicrobiologist at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography and Queen Mary University of London, co-lead author of the paper. “It really almost all melted over large, large, large areas of the ground. That ground remained frozen, so the water didn’t have too many places to drain away to, so what we also saw was huge pooling of liquid water over the tundra.”
This new climate regime could be profoundly altering the soil microbiome. Scientists assumed that methane-producing bacteria, known a
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Quote:That is weird because I didn't even notice. Let me check what I posted because Signym didn't bother to: http://fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=20832
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
From May16 to May 22, 2024, SECOND was offline because of a strong derecho that tore thru Houston with winds up to 100mph. Eight people were killed and extensive damage was done.
And nobody noticed.
Wwah-wah.
CINEMA
Sunday, May 19, 2024 10:29:26 PM
The Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Failure Thread
CINEMA
Sunday, May 19, 2024 10:28:34 PM
The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Failure Thread
CINEMA
Sunday, May 19, 2024 7:59:38 PM
The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Failure Thread
CINEMA
Sunday, May 19, 2024 7:59:08 PM
The Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Failure Thread
REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS
Sunday, May 19, 2024 7:40:23 PM
Elections; 2024
CINEMA
Sunday, May 19, 2024 5:54:17 PM
The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Failure Thread
REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS
Sunday, May 19, 2024 4:28:09 PM
Elections; 2024
CINEMA
Sunday, May 19, 2024 8:15:52 AM
The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Failure Thread
REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS
Sunday, May 19, 2024 7:21:18 AM
human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
Not surprising that Signym was wrong.
Around that same period, my wife and daughters had a thousand pictures of me with a chainsaw, my gang, and my heavy equipment cleaning up the neighborhood because the Baytown city government was overwhelmed by the wreckage. I always have the most fun when there is either a war or a natural disaster justifying bringing out my Super Large Toys to play with, or I can shoot to kill with heavy weapons. The grandchildren disapprove of PaPa going Terminator. They say it's not dignified, so "No Guns", at least until a Civil War, and then I can kill as many Trumptards as possible, like it is a reenactment of the 28 Days Later movies with Trumptards as the zombies moaning "Climate change is a Chinese Hoax."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Behind the real reason Americans voted for Trump
By D. Earl Stephens | July 31, 2025 | 05:49AM ET
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/why-trump-voters/
I am going to start today by actually giving the America-attacking Trump credit for something: He understands far better than any politician in America that the majority of the American public is comprised of complete morons.
The sooner Democrats figure this out, the better. And by sooner … I mean RIGHT NOW.
It’s a national emergency.
We’ve all been tortured by these dreaded political operatives, experts, analysts and partisans endlessly ranting at us about Democrats’ inability to craft a message that resonates with the American public. The party is viewed by roughly 80 percent of America as out of touch and irrelevant. I’m sure I have punished you by writing about this 15 times myself.
And while this is no doubt true, it’s actually far worse than that, because even if Democrats could communicate like Abraham Lincoln, they’d have absolutely no idea how or where to reach the people who need to hear what they have to say.
The Democrats have become experts at going high and talking to each other in the clouds, instead of going low and reaching the tens of millions of morons out there who could stand to hear what they are saying, despite themselves.
Since bursting on the scene like a racist hand grenade in 2015, Trump has proven beyond all doubt he understands the American electorate better than anybody. The man is so sure of himself that he went right out there and said he could shoot one of his supporters in the middle of the street and not lose their vote.
Now, there’s confidence, folks.
When you reckon with the fact that most Americans are morons, as Trump has, and start expecting less instead of more, the way forward will seem less daunting.
We don’t have an over-thinking problem in America; we have an under-thinking one.
I’m not wrong about this.
Look, the most important issue facing America, and the entire world for that matter, is climate change. In addition to costing us trillions of dollars, our overheating planet will eventually end all of us if it is not addressed with the urgency it demands.
Spoiler: It won’t be.
It’s hard to get a moron worried about something that they either don’t believe is happening, or if it is, most likely won’t affect them in any meaningful way during what’s left of their moronic lifetime.
When the world ends, they’ll be long gone anyway, so why bother?
I was standing on a beach in North Carolina quietly taking in the breathtaking Atlantic Ocean last summer — true story — when a friendly chap my age approached. We made some small talk before he said quite unprompted that all this talk about climate change was “a bunch of bull----.”
According to him, none of it was happening. It was nothing but political hooey designed to get us all worked up.
I’m certain he thought the old, white guy he was talking to would be a sympathetic ear for his moronic denial-ism, so when I told him that the ocean we were staring at was going to swallow us all whole someday, he said again: “No. That’s just bull----.”
And then just like that, he tipped his cap, told me to genuinely have a nice day, and skipped away to assault the next unsuspecting beach-goer with his pail-full of ignorance.
In the year since I was mentally assaulted on that beach, the pyromaniacs in the new administration are doubling down and literally throwing gasoline on our heating planet.
What the hell are we supposed to do with that, Democrats?
I mean, we can’t ignore climate change, and must do what we can to mitigate it, but continuing to make it a central campaign issue is worthless because of all the damn morons out there.
I was sure democracy was a pressing issue, too, especially after the violent attack on January 6, 2021. Well, not only don’t most people much care about it, the morons who perpetrated the attack have been hailed as heroes by millions of
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Texas set a record for solar power and battery use, proving the electric grid can and does rely on renewable energy.
By Chris Tomlinson | Aug 1, 2025
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article
/texas-grid-electricity-solar-battery-20792617.php
Texas temperatures are rising, and so is the demand for electricity. But the grid is holding up great, thanks to record amounts of solar and battery-stored energy.
At noon on July 29, solar facilities generated 29,275 megawatts of electricity, meeting more than 40% of the state’s demand, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas reported. That was enough electricity for 5.8 million homes.
When Texans turned on their TVs the next night, large-scale batteries set a record by discharging 7,000 megawatts of power, the nonprofit grid operator reported. Batteries provided enough electricity for 1.4 million homes.
The batteries bridged the critical 8 p.m. hour, between when the sun goes down and nighttime winds kick up.
The all-time record for electricity demand in ERCOT was 85,508 megawatts on Aug. 10, 2023. That summer, ERCOT made eight emergency calls for conservation to reduce demand before mandatory power cuts became necessary.
This August, ERCOT expects Texas to use even more electricity, but no one is overly worried about blackouts or emergency brownouts. The state has added so much solar and batteries that the grid will have plenty of juice because air conditioning demand and solar energy are synchronized.
ERCOT predicts peak demand this month to hit a record 85,759 megawatts, but Texas’s all-of-the-above approach to generation provides more than 100,000 megawatts of capacity during peak periods. The competitive wholesale electricity market is working as planned.
New solar and battery facilities make up most of the new capacity added since 2021, with 10,000 megawatts added in the past year. Clean energy’s success makes the state and federal governments’ attempts to kill new renewable energy projects so perplexing.
Texas lawmakers this year tried their best to discourage new wind, solar and battery projects, even though they are the cheapest forms of new electricity, even without subsidies. They also don’t produce greenhouse gases or other emissions that kill tens of thousands of people every year.
I’ve written for over a decade about how clean energy can meet most of the Texas electricity grid’s demand by blending solar, wind, batteries, hydro and nuclear power. Naysayers claimed clean energy could never meet 55% of the grid’s needs as it did on Tuesday.
Clean energy’s success and growing market share are why fossil fuel companies and their minions are spreading lies about its reliability and cost. Natural gas producers in particular are fearful of losing business to cleaner and cheaper electricity generation, so they pressure politicians to give them a leg up.
They should be worried, because clean energy technology keeps getting better and cheaper, and sound economics always defeats bad politics.
Manufacturers are working around the clock to make wind turbines less expensive, solar panels more efficient and batteries quicker charging.
President Donald Trump may try to pull permits for U.S. offshore wind projects, but the rest of the world is moving forward with larger turbines and blades. The amount of installed generation globally is expected to triple from 2023 levels by 2028, with China leading the way, according to a report from Orrick, a law firm that tracks clean energy investment.
Researchers at Stanford University have developed solar panels that generate electricity at night by harnessing radiative cooling. They are capturing tiny amounts of electricity from solar panels, but they are optimistic they can improve output.
Batteries and other energy storage devices are showing the most promise. New chemistries and anode materials can provide power for extended periods, and companies are making breakthroughs in compressed air in underground caverns and kinetic
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America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy
On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” thanks to Trump
By Zoë Schlanger | August 8, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/08/us-climate-liabili
ty/683797/
Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.
A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.
The United States and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” in terms of legal understanding of climate responsibility, the human-rights attorney Lotte Leicht, who works as the advocacy director of the nonprofit Climate Rights International, told me. “I think almost nothing could have painted a starker picture,” Nikki Reisch, an attorney and the Climate and Energy Program director at the Center for International Environmental Law, agrees.
The ICJ opinion was the first time the world court has expressly addressed climate obligations under international law, and it did so with unusual clarity. It removed what Leicht described to me as a legal fog that the world has existed in for decades by rebuking two of the main arguments that high-emitting countries and companies have made to avoid liability. The first is that the climate crisis is simply too big and complex to attribute to any particular entity, rendering individual accountability impractical and unfair. “The court made clear that that is not an excuse that holds up anymore,” Leicht said. Thanks in part to attribution science, a particular country or company’s contribution to the climate crisis can be assessed, and the fact that many entities are at fault is not an excuse to evade individual liability.
The second argument—that only special climate accords, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, could dictate their climate obligations, and that even then those pacts were by and large voluntary—was also struck down. In its opinion, the court wrote that climate action is not, in fact, voluntary at all: Instead, because climate change threatens lives, degrades health, and deprives people of their home, both domestically and across borders, climate agreements are legally binding, and states can be sued for failure to uphold them.
In fact, according to the court, even if a state is not party to a climate treaty, or if a treaty agreement is too weak to prevent the climate harm that country is enacting, that state is still legally liable, thanks to customary law—well-established fundamental legal principles that all countries must comply with, such as the general duty to protect basic human rights.
An advisory opinion such as this one is not in itself legally binding. But the international laws it is meant to interpret are. In some countries, including the Netherlands and Kenya, international law is incorporated into domestic law at the point of ratification. In others, it can take precedence over domestic law; elsewhere, it may bec
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SECOND: Waaaaaaaaaah! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you need an alarm clock that tells you to "Wake Up, Moron!" There is a world of interesting and worthwhile things to do, but you aren't doing anything with life and you know it.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
SECOND: Waaaaaaaaaah! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump wants NASA to burn a crucial satellite to cinders, killing research into climate change
By Michael Hiltzik | Aug. 19, 2025
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-19/trump-wants-nasa-to-
burn-a-crucial-satellite-to-cinders-killing-research-into-climate-change
By any reasonable metric, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory has been a spectacular success. Originally designed to support a two-year pilot project, it has been operating continuously in space for more than 10 years and could continue doing so for three decades more.
The data it produces “are of exceptionally high quality,” NASA stated in a 2023 review, when it labeled the project “the flagship mission for space-borne measurements” of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Trump administration plans to shut the program down. It gets worse: The White House has given NASA instructions to destroy the spacecraft by plunging it to a fiery demise in the atmosphere.
These are national assets....They are what made this country great. Tearing things down doesn’t make it great again. It just tears things down.
— David Crisp, former NASA team leader
Knowledgeable scientists and engineers say that Trump could choose to temporarily mothball the orbiting observatory, leaving a skeleton staff in place at NASA to monitor its hibernation until cooler heads prevail at the White House. Destroying the spacecraft, however, will hamstring climate research for decades.
The zeroing out of climate research budgets by the Trump White House, of which the cancellation of the OCO program is a part, is taking place just as the value of space-borne climate research has been rising sharply.
“The bottom line is that the societal and scientific benefit of this research increases almost exponentially with sustained and long-lasting measurements,” says Ben Poulter, an expert in greenhouse gas measurements formerly at NASA and now a senior scientist at the nonprofit Spark Climate Solutions. “We’re starting to see the positive impact of OCO-2 at helping to detect trends in greenhouse gas emissions and removals in natural ecosystems as the Earth undergoes the impacts of climate change.”
Under the most recent Republican administrations, NASA’s involvement in Earth science — that is, research into global warming and other climate change — has consistently come under fire.
As I reported recently, these programs were specifically targeted by Russell Vought, currently Trump’s budget director and an architect of Project 2025, in a 2023 unofficial budget proposal. There, Vought groused about NASA’s “misguided Carbon Reduction System spending and Global Climate Change programs.” He called for a 50% reduction in the budget for NASA Earth science research — a cut that made it into Trump’s current proposed budget.
The vastly reduced Earth science budget for NASA was passed by the House earlier this year, but it isn’t part of the Senate version, which hasn’t been passed.
What isn’t understood by Vought, Trump or the current acting director of NASA, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, is that Earth science was specifically made part of NASA’s portfolio in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created the agency. Among the agency’s directives, the act stated, would be “the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere.” That’s where climate change occurs.
The effort to zero out Earth science alarmed more than 60 Democratic House members, who wrote Duffy on July 18 to warn that “the scale of reductions to NASA Earth science would ... severely impair the use
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Warming Twice As Fast As We Thought!?
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Quote:
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Trump administration plans to shut the program down. It gets worse: The White House has given NASA instructions to destroy the spacecraft by plunging it to a fiery demise in the atmosphere.
Why???
You don't throw away data unless you can prove it's no good.
You can ignore reality, but it won't ignore you.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Trump ignores what happens after he is dead. Trump constantly asks, "Why should I care? I won't be President when it happens. How could the future affect me? It won't, so I don't care!"
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Trump administration plans to shut the program down. It gets worse: The White House has given NASA instructions to destroy the spacecraft by plunging it to a fiery demise in the atmosphere.
Why???
You don't throw away data unless you can prove it's no good.
You can ignore reality, but it won't ignore you.
The psychology is elementary: if a climate disaster arrives after Trump is dead, why would Trump allow any data about the disaster to be collected? That satellite's existence will complicate Trump's life, right now, today, but if there is no satellite, Trump doesn't have to keep saying "Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax". Destroying the satellite makes life easier for Trump, now, and reality in the future is not Trump's problem.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s Global War on Decarbonization
By Mark Blyth and Daniel Driscoll | Aug 21, 2025
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-global-war-on-decar
bonization-green-technologies-by-mark-blyth-and-daniel-driscoll-2025-08
There are multiple competing theories about what drives the anti-green policies embraced by US President Donald Trump. Perhaps they reflect the influence of carbon-heavy industries in Republican-controlled states. Or perhaps they channel ideological hostility to the notion that the state should play any kind of planning role in the economy.
Whatever the case, it is increasingly apparent that the Trump administration wants to halt decarbonization not only in the United States but globally. Viewed from this perspective, much of the recent US policy incoherence starts to make more sense – albeit in a dangerously regressive way.
The US sits atop vast reserves of fossil fuels, which have underpinned its national prosperity for decades. They have lit cities, powered factories, stimulated postwar job growth, and forged broad regional political coalitions among labor, agriculture, and corporations. They are also highly profitable commodities, with exports creating global dependence on US supplies (which is especially true for liquefied natural gas following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine). Fossil fuels are a core component of the country’s political economy – and a key factor in US domestic and foreign policymaking.
The Trump administration recognizes this. It includes ideological realists who understand that energy transitions make hegemons – that energy is power. Just as coal drove the industrial revolution in England, oil and gas fueled America’s postwar dominance. Whoever controls energy controls the future.
Unfortunately for the US, if the next energy transition is a green one, the future surely belongs to China, whose green-tech dominance is so firmly established that it does not really matter which metric you look at. In terms of the critical minerals used for such technologies, China supplies the majority of the world’s refined lithium (70%), cobalt (78%), graphite (95%), rare earths (91%), and manganese (91%). In terms of green-tech manufacturing, China accounts for 80% of solar panel production, 50-70% of the wind turbine market, and over half of electric vehicles. And in terms of deployment, it is undertaking three-quarters of the world’s renewable-energy projects.
This is all good news for those who care about decarbonization; but it is bad news for those hoping to extend US hegemony. If the US wants to preserve its global primacy, then realist logic dictates that it needs China to fail. And the US can engineer that outcome by continuing to do exactly what it is doing.
Since Trump returned to office, his administration has been reshaping American consumption by imposing massive import tariffs and abandoning the previous administration’s program of domestic decarbonization incentives and investments. The Inflation Reduction Act was an explicit attempt to compete with China in green tech. But now Americans are being weaned off the renewables that they were just beginning to enjoy.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill spells disaster for the future of US green-tech investment, and his administration is further deregulating fossil fuels and adding more hurdles for clean-energy projects. While the Environmental Protection Agency works to extinguish its own ability to regulate carbon emissions, NASA satellites that track US emissions are being targeted for self-destruction. All these moves, coupled with 30% tariffs on imports from China, signal to green-tech producers that the world’s top consumer no longer wants their wares.
Moreover, the US is trying to undercut global demand for Chinese green tech by compelling its largest trading partners to import US fossil fuels instead. China’s own top trading partner, the European Union, just committed to purchase $750 billion of US oil and gas by 2028 – an amount that far exceeds current US output. And the rest of Chi
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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 shar
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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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
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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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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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Quote: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.
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
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 t
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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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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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"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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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—foreca
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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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Quote:6ix, you are ignoring wind and solar power.
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.
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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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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Quote: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.
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?
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 mo
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Nuclear energy fails in all countries, except when the national government is paying to build the plant because it is a national priority.
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?
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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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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Quote:China Has Overtaken America in Electricity Generation
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
False.
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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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 3
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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 Stre
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Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity
By Jameson Dow | Nov 4, 2025
https://electrek.co/2025/11/04/australia-has-so-much-solar-that-its-of
fering-everyone-free-electricity-3h-day/
Australia has been installing lots of solar power. Formerly a coal-heavy nation (for which coal is still its 2nd-largest export), solar and wind have rapidly taken over Australia’s electricity grid, pushing coal and methane gas out of the equation.
The government did receive some pushback from electricity retailers, who feel they were not properly consulted on the plan. But Australia’s Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said he would make “no apologies” if this scheme reduced their margins, and that “consumers are put first” as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The government plans to implement the scheme starting in July next year, first in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. If it works well, other regions will get it starting in 2027.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Does nuclear power have a place in a green-energy future?
https://news.yahoo.com/does-nuclear-power-have-a-place-in-a-green-ener
gy-future-170518028.html
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COP Can’t Cope With Climate Risks
We need a climate moonshot. That sure as hell won’t come from the UN.
By Quico Toro | Nov 13, 2025
https://www.persuasion.community/p/cop-cant-cope-with-climate-risks
The rigmarole begins again.
It’s that time of year again: climate negotiators from around the world are converging on an exotic locale—this time it’s Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon—to negotiate an intricate global agreement that won’t really change the planet’s climate trajectory.
The yearly Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—COP, to habitués—has morphed, over the years, into a kind of travelling circus grotesquely mismatched to the problem it’s meant to address.
There’s a soul-deadening regularity to the proceedings. Tens of thousands of politicians, negotiators, activists, NGO-types, journalists, and hangers-on of every description declare themselves shocked that global carbon emissions are even higher now than they were when they met a year earlier. Looking solemn, they make heartfelt pledges to do better, to really change this time. A year later, they do it all again.
Having gone through this rigamarole thirty times now, you’d think the world would have caught on that the COP process doesn’t work, and doing it harder won’t help.
But why doesn’t it work? Because it’s built on the wrong model of what determines a country’s level of greenhouse gas emissions. COP imagines these emissions as something a country’s government can set, like the dial on a thermostat. But emissions are more like GDP: the outcome of a complex process that politicians would like to be able to control, but don’t actually control.
More at https://www.persuasion.community/p/cop-cant-cope-with-climate-risks
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Our Almost-Apocalyptic Climate Future
By shooting for 3 degrees Celsius of warming, the world could slide toward a more cataclysmic 4 degrees.
Peter Brannen | November 23, 2025, 11:15 AM ET
The author of The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, a 4-billion-year history of carbon dioxide, and of The Ends of the World, about the biggest mass extinctions in Earth’s history.
Download from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Peter+Brannen
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/11/cop-climate-3c-warming/685
036/
This year’s Conference of the Parties, the annual United Nations meeting meant to avert catastrophic climate change, was subject to a ham-fisted metaphor. On Thursday, the Brazilian venue hosting the conference burst into flames from what was likely an electrical fire. In its 30 years, COP has frequently been a ritual in frustration and futility, ending with a set of pledges and promises that have rarely gone as far as scientists say they need to, followed by weeks of postmortem finger-pointing and self-flagellation. And yesterday, once again delegates landed on a heavily compromised text that does little to materially steer the planet off fossil fuels.
Many of the fingers pointed toward an empty chair and the absence of the largest oil-and-gas producer on planet Earth (the United States). Meanwhile, delegates from drowning, subsistence-farming volcanic archipelagos in the South Pacific humbly pleaded with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Russia to pledge to someday stop pumping their oceans of oil, the most profitable commodity in the world. It didn’t work.
“We know some of you had greater ambitions for some of the issues at hand,” COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago sheepishly told the assembly.
Every year, environmental NGOs, climate scientists, concerned citizens, and government ministers alike register confusion and despair over the fact that after so many cycles of these meetings, industrial civilization erupts more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ever before. This year, it reached a staggering new peak with 38.1 gigatons of the stuff—two orders of magnitude more than is put out by all of the volcanoes on Earth combined each year, and a pace that is virtually unprecedented in all of geological history.
Even if all other emissions from fossil fuels halted tomorrow, CO2 emissions from the global food system alone could eventually push us past 2 degrees Celsius in warming, half a degree higher than the always-aspirational 1.5 degrees Celsius goal set forth in the 2016 Paris Agreement. At this point, reaching that goal would require an impossible slashing of global emissions by a quarter every year for the next four years until they reach zero. As things stand, the UN projects that current policies will result in almost 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Unfortunately, that 1.5-degree benchmark wasn’t selected at random. As one landmark paper puts it, the “Earth may have left a safe climate state beyond 1°C global warming,” and even 1.5 degrees would possibly invite inexorable ice-sheet collapse, coral-reef die-off, and permafrost thaw.
All of this grim news has given way to a new kind of cynical resignation to this future, and a vision in which the world scales back its climate ambitions and accepts an all but permanent and prominent role for fossil fuels in the global economy. This forfeit, recently championed by Bill Gates, flies under the banner of “climate realism” or, more sunnily, “climate pragmatism.” In this view, the trade-offs between minimizing global warming and pursuing other goals for humanity are too steep, and the consequences of somewhat-checked warming will be manageable. If climate negotiators were naive about the political economy of the energy transition when COP started 30 years ago, though, then the purveyors of this kind of “pragmatism” are downright oblivious to the implications of a 3 degrees–warmer world that they’ve made conceptual peace with.
______________________________________________________
If warming the planet b
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How China, not the U.S., became the main climate solution story in 2025
By Julia Simon, Anthony Kuhn | December 8, 2025
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/08/nx-s1-5615257/china-us-renewable-wind-s
olar-climate
The Trump administration is reversing federal support for renewable energy, labeling it risky and unreliable. But across the Pacific Ocean, America's biggest competitor, China, is heading in the opposite direction, says Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society.
China now dominates the global renewables sector. In the first half of this year, China built more solar than the rest of the world combined. China accounts for 74% of all large-scale solar and wind under construction, according to the nonprofit Global Energy Monitor. The U.S. accounts for 5.9%. "It couldn't be a stronger contrast between the two countries," Li says.
China's bet on the green transition is paying off. More than a quarter of China's economic growth in 2024 came from wind, solar and battery technologies, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a nonprofit. Energy experts say it's too early to know the full impact of the Trump administration's anti-renewable policies, but in the first half of 2025, U.S. renewable investment fell by 36%.
By backing away from renewable energy investments, the U.S. federal government is forfeiting a key driver of economic growth, says Jeremy Wallace, professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Solar Energy Could Transform Geopolitics
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/21/mckibben-solar-energy-transform-g
eopolitics/
We’re seeing catastrophic results. The hurricane that hit Jamaica a few weeks ago featured the highest winds ever recorded, at 252 miles an hour. That same day, we had possibly the biggest rainstorm ever measured: 5 feet of rain in 24 hours in central Vietnam, the kind of storm you can only get on a globally warmed planet.
So the things that scientists have been worrying about for 40 years are coming true.
But we finally have a scalable and affordable weapon to go after some of this. Energy from the sun and wind, what we used to call alternative energy, is now the straightforward path ahead. Ninety percent of new electric generation around the world last year came from sun and wind and batteries.
This isn’t “alternative” anymore. It’s the most obvious way to proceed. Four or five years ago, we crossed an invisible line; it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal and gas and oil. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That’s a pretty remarkable moment for a species that’s spent the last 700,000 years making its way by setting stuff on fire.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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700 sinkholes have appeared in parts of Turkey
https://x.com/accuweather/status/1999275509037912158
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Solar Energy Could Transform Geopolitics
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/21/mckibben-solar-energy-transform-g
eopolitics/
We’re seeing catastrophic results. The hurricane that hit Jamaica a few weeks ago featured the highest winds ever recorded, at 252 miles an hour. That same day, we had possibly the biggest rainstorm ever measured: 5 feet of rain in 24 hours in central Vietnam, the kind of storm you can only get on a globally warmed planet.
So the things that scientists have been worrying about for 40 years are coming true.
But we finally have a scalable and affordable weapon to go after some of this. Energy from the sun and wind, what we used to call alternative energy, is now the straightforward path ahead. Ninety percent of new electric generation around the world last year came from sun and wind and batteries.
This isn’t “alternative” anymore. It’s the most obvious way to proceed. Four or five years ago, we crossed an invisible line; it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal and gas and oil. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That’s a pretty remarkable moment for a species that’s spent the last 700,000 years making its way by setting stuff on fire.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Your agenda is dead. Deal with it.
Good luck selling your fleet of Ford F-150 Lightnings on the secondhand market in a market that doesn't exist, stupid.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Carbon capture meets new resistance
Trillion-dollar emerging Texas industry now facing uncertainty
By Rachel Nostrant, Staff Writer | Dec 10, 2025
https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=c876f778-193d-456b-845b-510b4bf340d7&share=true
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/houston-oil-e
xxon-climate-carbon-capture-trump-21169874.php
A week after the federal government gave Texas the power to approve permits for a new kind of well that stashes climate-warming carbon dioxide underground, one of the state’s top oil and gas regulators decried it as a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Wayne Christian, one of the three elected leaders of the Texas Railroad Commission, questioned why the commission would spend state funds regulating the practice when the Trump administration believes it is “a scam” and that carbon dioxide “is no longer a threat.”
“I also find myself very disappointed that we make a decision,” he said, referring to the commission’s approval of Occidental Petroleum’s carbon storage project, “at this time that the administration, the world, seems to be realizing that a lot of this extremist environmental agenda has been over the top.”
Christian’s statements highlight the uncertainty surrounding carbon capture and storage — a climate solution that Houston’s oil and gas companies spent billions growing into what they believe can be a trillion-dollar industry.
The Trump administration has gutted regulations of climate-warming gases and cut funding to hundreds of clean energy projects. Climate-focused companies and projects are folding and cutting back. Even Bill Gates, a devoted climate champion for many years, walked back funding for climate initiatives and repositioned some of his philanthropic investments.
These changes highlight the dilemma facing big oil companies and other entrants into the nascent business: Can they launch the carbon removal industry at a time when the importance of addressing climate change is in question?
Peter Findlay, director of CCUS analytics for Wood Mackenzie, said moving forward with carbon capture and storage projects right now feels a bit like Indiana Jones trying to walk across an invisible bridge over a bottomless chasm in an attempt to find the Holy Grail.
“That’s kind of what building some of these projects is, if you don’t have obvious incentives to do so,” Findlay said. “You’re believing there’ll be a value to decarbonization, and all the physics and economics shows that there should be … but that’s very, very difficult for someone to do in a corporate setting.”
Last year, the business case for decarbonization was clear. Lured by global agreements to curb climate-warming emissions and the previous administration’s policies pushing companies to capture and store emissions underground, Houston’s largest oil companies rushed to build up their place in the new industry — an industry in which Texas and the Gulf Coast area offered prime geologic real estate.
Some of the U.S. oil industry’s biggest players threw billions into the prospect. They acquired carbon-focused firms, hired new teams, leased land and engineered facility plans. Exxon Mobil paid $4.9 billion to buy Plano-based Denbury in 2023, largely because of the smaller company’s network of carbon dioxide pipelines and storage facilities along the Gulf Coast.
Occidental Petroleum paid $1.1 billion to acquire Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company with a technology capable of sucking carbon dioxide from the air like a vacuum. Chevron also invested $45 million in Boulder-based Ion Clean Energy, a tech company focused on carbon capture, while Houston-based oil field services company Schlumberger invested $400 million in a joint venture with Norway’s Aker Carbon Capture.
Both Exxon and Chevron leased massive acreage along the Gulf Coast and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico to advance their plans to store carbon dioxide emissions from the region’s chemical plants and refineries underground. In October, Exxon received approval for th
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105.8 to Fahrenheit
Melbourne hits 41C as Australia’s most severe heatwave in six years descends on south-eastern states
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/07/severe-heatwave-hi
ts-southern-australian-states-with-firefighters-warning-many-areas-ready-to-burn
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New Energy Storage Solutions Are Killing Trump’s Coal Power Fantasy
Feb 14, 2026
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/02/14/new-energy-storage-solutions-are-
killing-trumps-coal-power-fantasy/
“While it might sound like science-fiction, A-CAES simply utilizes long-established principles of thermodynamics, along with components and know-how from the oil & gas and mining industries, and readily available rock, water, and air to store and deliver energy at-scale and on-demand,” Hydrostor notes.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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As reported by "cleantechnica", whose "primary revenue sources are advertising and sponsored content from companies in the clean energy sector, such as ABB and EnelX."
Uh huh.
I recognize the player and the game. Can't fault scam artists for wanting to stay alive.
You lost all your government funding. Every dime of it. Now you've all got at least 3 years to try to survive on your own. Maybe 30.
You'd better hope for your own good that your lies can carry you on donations from stupid until the next Democrat comes in and pisses a bunch of money away on bullshit, but I think a lot of them are not going to have much freed up income for donations.
Good Luck. You'll need it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) is a long-duration, utility scale technology that uses surplus electricity to compress air, storing it in underground caverns (often salt formations) for release through turbines during high demand. It offers high capacity, long life, and rapid, flexible, grid-balancing capabilities.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
* * * Angry poor white trash ranting * * *
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
https://www.google.com/search?q=A-CAES+energy+storage
Key Aspects of CAES Energy Storage:
• How it Works: During off-peak hours, electricity drives compressors, pushing air into airtight storage, such as depleted mines or salt caverns. When energy is needed, the pressurized air is released, heated, and expanded through a turbine to generate electricity.
• Performance: Conventional (diabatic) systems have a round-trip efficiency of 40%-60%. Advanced adiabatic CAES (A-CAES) designs, which store the heat of compression to be used during expansion, aim for higher efficiency by eliminating the need for natural gas.
• Applications: Ideal for large-scale energy management, storing energy for hours to months.
Advantages and Disadvantages:
• Pros: Very high storage capacity (megawatts to gigawatts), long lifespan, no toxic materials, and potentially lower costs than batteries over a long lifetime.
• Cons: Highly dependent on specific geological locations (unless using expensive above-ground vessels), lower efficiency compared to lithium-ion batteries, and potential greenhouse gas emissions in conventional (diabatic) systems.
Comparison with Other Storage:
• Flywheels: Provide fast-responding, short-term energy (seconds to minutes), whereas CAES is better for long-duration (hours to weeks) storage.
• Battery Cost: While CAES has high initial investment, it offers almost infinite cycles compared to the limited, decreasing lifespan of chemical batteries.
For a detailed look at the compressed air energy storage disadvantages, problems with compressed air energy storage, and compressed air energy storage cost, refer to the details in the search results.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Turning Our Back on Clean Energy
Why does MAGA hate the planet?
Paul Krugman
Feb 16, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/turning-our-back-on-clean-energy
Source: Berkeley Earth https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2025/
It has been a brutal winter in much of the United States. Weather is a chaotic system in which extreme events are always happening somewhere. But as I am sure you have noticed, extreme weather events — catastrophic storms and flooding, punishing droughts, and yes, extreme cold snaps — are becoming more common as a result of climate change.
For climate change is not just continuing: it’s accelerating. Multiple estimates find that 2025 was one of the warmest years on record for the planet, exceeded only by 2024 and 2023. Indeed, Berkeley Earth reports that “The warming spike observed in 2023 to 2025 has been extreme and suggests an acceleration in the rate of Earth’s warming.”
In other news, the Trump administration has gone to war against any and all efforts to limit climate change. The administration is also imposing a “blockade” against wind and solar projects, delaying or even revoking permits, whether or not these projects have received federal subsidies.
Now, there isn’t a genuine scientific dispute about the reality of global warming and its causes. There isn’t even a serious dispute about the costs of fighting climate change: the economics of green energy are more favorable than they have ever been.
So what’s going on? The Trump administration hates science and science-based policies in general; look at its war on vaccines, which will end up causing an enormous number of deaths. Its assault on universities threatens the best scientific research centers in the world. Its irrational treatment of immigrants means the best and brightest from the around the world no longer want to come here. But in the case of energy, its destructive policy largely reflects the corrupting influence of big money.
I’ll explain in a minute. First, some background.
Almost 40 years have passed since James Hansen’s landmark Senate testimony warning about global warming. He was right. Climate science has been overwhelmingly vindicated by reality.
However, the economics and politics of climate policy have played out very differently from what almost anyone expected.
As late as the 2010s, many observers — myself included — would have said that the big problem in addressing climate change was who would bear the cost. Policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, everyone believed, would slow the growth of the economy and of real incomes. True, anti-environmentalists were grossly exaggerating these costs. In 2009 I wrote that
The best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family.
But what we knew at the time nonetheless said that there would be significant costs to slowing global warming. And this was problematic, because the costs of limiting emissions would be incurred right away, while the benefits of reduced warming would accrue decades later — and many of them would go to other countries. So action on climate appeared to require (a) international cooperation (b) persuading voters to accept costs now in exchange for a better world many years in the future.
And it was all too easy to be pessimistic about the prospects both for cooperation and for persuading voters to accept even modest future-oriented sacrifices.
Then came the renewable energy revolution. Solar and wind power have become cost-competitive with fossil fuels — they are, in particular, clearly cheaper than coal. Huge progress in batteries has rapidly reduced the problem of intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.) There’s now a clear path for a transit
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Climate change is real.
Jet streams are moving north, looping and stalling, and ocean currents are changing. Some parts will get very cold while other parts fry. But the "solutions" foisted on hs by the elites (eat bugs) are just ways to crush ordinary people. The wealthy, who account for most of the problem, will never give up their Wagyu steaks, private jets, superyachts, and air conditioned McMansions.
Also, wars waste a fuckton of material and fuel.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Ask google: “what percent of CO2 emissions are from war? what percent from the wealthy?”
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Climate change is real.
Jet streams are moving north, looping and stalling, and ocean currents are changing. Some parts will get very cold while other parts fry. But the "solutions" foisted on hs by the elites (eat bugs) are just ways to crush ordinary people. The wealthy, who account for most of the problem, will never give up their Wagyu steaks, private jets, superyachts, and air conditioned McMansions.
Also, wars waste a fuckton of material and fuel.
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percent+of+CO2+emissions+are+from
+war%253F+what+percent+from+the+wealthy%253F
Global militaries account for approximately 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a figure on par with the global cement industry. Meanwhile, the world's richest 1% are responsible for 16% of all CO2 emissions, a share equal to the emissions of the poorest two-thirds of humanity.
CO2 Emissions from War and Military
• Total Impact: Recent estimates suggest the global military-industrial complex contributes around 5.5% to 6% of total global emissions.
• Context: If the military were a country, it would be the fourth largest emitter in the world, producing over twice the emissions of global civil aviation.
• Key Drivers: The U.S. Armed Forces are the largest single military emitter, using over 100 million barrels of oil in 2017.
• Post-War Impact: Reconstruction after conflicts, such as in Syria and Ukraine, generates massive, additional emissions.
CO2 Emissions from the Wealthy
The distribution of emissions is highly unequal, with a small percentage of high-income individuals responsible for the majority of global warming.
• The Richest 1%: This group (approximately 77 million people) is responsible for 16% to 17% of global CO2 emissions. Their emissions are more than those of all cars and road transport globally.
• The Richest 10%: The wealthiest 10% of the population accounts for roughly half (50% to 52%) of all global consumption-based emissions. This group is also attributed to two-thirds of global warming between 1990 and 2020.
• Comparison to the Poorest: The richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity combined (approximately 5 billion people).
• Billionaires and Investments: Beyond personal lifestyle choices like private jets and yachts, a significant portion of billionaire emissions comes from their investments. The average billionaire's investment portfolio produces 1.9 million tonnes of CO2e annually, with roughly 60% of these investments in high-impact sectors like oil and mining.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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TOPCon Solar Cells Are Killing A Key Anti-Solar Talking Point
Feb 15, 2026
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/02/15/topcon-solar-cells-are-killing-a-
key-anti-solar-talking-point/
The anti-solar organization Citizens for Responsible Solar provides a good example of the “solar pollutes” talking point. CRS has loomed large in the US anti-solar disinformation machine since its launch in 2019 by political operative Susan Ralston, known for her tenure at the White House during the George W. Bush presidency.
CRS styles itself as an apolitical, “grassroots group of concerned citizens.” However, multiple news organizations have drawn attention to the pool of conservative talent populating CRS offices, and alongside the organization’s ability to amplify its easily debunkable talking points among local anti-solar efforts.
On its website, CRS prioritizes five points that everyone “needs to know” about solar, including one titled “Solar Energy is NOT clean or free from CO2 emissions.”
Much more at https://cleantechnica.com/2026/02/15/topcon-solar-cells-are-killing-a-
key-anti-solar-talking-point/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The War on Wind Continues
The burn, baby, burn compulsion persists amid a fossil fuel crisis
Paul Krugman
Mar 25, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-war-on-wind-continues
Electricity generation in Texas. Source: Energy Information Agency
We are now in a global fossil fuel crisis. With oil and liquefied natural gas from the Persian Gulf unable to reach international markets due to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, hydrocarbon prices have been soaring around the world and widespread shortages are emerging. Anyone who thought that the U.S. would be insulated from this dire picture thanks to its large domestic oil production has had a rude awakening: the average retail price of gasoline has risen more than $1 per gallon over the past month, while the price of diesel is up $1.60.
But the Trump administration hasn’t allowed these short-run distractions to divert it from its long-run goals: It remains deeply committed to killing renewable energy, especially wind power, and increasing America’s reliance on fossil fuels.
True, some of the administration’s attacks on wind power have failed: Its efforts to throttle offshore wind development by ordering developers to stop work on projects that are already underway have repeatedly been overruled by the courts. But the administration is continuing to block development of onshore wind and solar power by freezing the issuance of federal permits.
And on Monday the Interior Department unveiled a new tactic in its war on wind: It announced that it will pay TotalEnergies, a French energy giant, almost $1 billion to not produce energy — specifically to abandon its plans to build two large wind farms off the East Coast.
To understand the Trump administration’s motives in its campaign to kill renewable energy, one must realize that this campaign is both economically self-destructive and, despite the best efforts of the fossil fuel industry, deeply unpopular.
Fifteen years ago wind and solar power were still relatively marginal energy sources, which those hostile to their development could portray as unproven and uneconomic. Today they are major contributors to energy supply in many nations — and in some U.S. states. Perhaps most notably, as the chart at the top of this post shows, renewables — mostly wind, but with a growing role for solar — now account for more than a third of electricity generation in Texas, America’s largest producer of electricity and not exactly a state run by environmental extremists.
Even more impressively, renewables have dominated the growth in Texas’s electricity generation in recent years:
You almost have to admire the administration’s persistence, its determination to turn back the clock on energy even though renewables are big business, its tenacity in trying to block new, secure energy sources even in the face of a global energy crisis. But what’s this all about?
The administration has argued that offshore wind farms are a threat to national security, supposedly interfering with radar. But that doesn’t explain the efforts to block onshore wind and solar, and the courts have remained unconvinced. In announcing the buyoff of TotalEnergies, the Interior Secretary claimed that wind power is expensive and unreliable; but in that case why is it necessary to pay private companies not to develop it?
Campaign finance is part of the story. At this point, political contributions from fossil fuel companies go almost entirely to the GOP, while alternative energy favors Democrats.
Beyond campaign finance, fossil fuel interests, especially but not only the Koch brothers, have spent man
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US has caused $10tn worth of climate damage since 1990, research finds
US, top carbon emitter in history, has ‘a lot of responsibility’ for causing ‘substantial’ harm globally, scientist says
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/25/us-climate-damage-
research
---------------------------------
Economic Costs From Oil And Gas Burning Today Will Hit Future Harder
By Nick Nuttall | Mar 26, 2026, 04:06am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/we-dont-have-time/2026/03/25/economic-cos
ts-from-oil-and-gas-burning-today-will-hit-future-harder/
The world’s biggest oil and gas company-- Saudi Aramco—has already locked-in cumulative damages to the global economy of around $64 trillion by 2100 according to a new assessment by researchers at Stanford University.
The bill, based on the pollution already generated by its products since the late 1980s, spotlights how economic losses from climate change will escalate over the coming years and decades without urgent action.
Private oil and gas companies like Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP could, based on the same modelling and time scale, each conservatively and cumulatively will trigger damages of more than $20 trillion by century’s end.
The team from Stanford University also looked at the future economic impact of a private plane or jet journey taken today by well known people like Bill Gates and Taylor Swift.
“We use public data on private jet flights and associated emissions by numerous American celebrities to calculate the future discounted damage of flights these celebrities (or their aircraft) took in 2022,” say the researchers.
"We calculate that emissions from private flights taken by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Floyd Mayweather, Elon Musk, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift in 2022 will each generate more than $1 million in discounted aggregate damages by 2100”
These are just some of the findings from a new study in the leading journal Nature released today by a team at Stanford University led by Marshall Burke of the University’s Doerr School of Sustainability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10272-6
They have been modelling how past, present and future cumulative carbon pollution triggers rising temperatures that in turn lead to economic losses.
This damage could include impacts such as increasing, extreme weather events, like floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms that can damage global GDP.
It is designed as a contribution to the ongoing discussions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on the Loss and Damage fund agreed three years ago at COP28 in Dubai.
Leonie Wenz is Professor of Environmental Economics at Technical University Berlin and deputy head of the Complexity Science department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
She commented:” The study proposes a framework to connect local climate damages to sources of carbon emissions, aligned with well-established approaches to estimate the Social Cost of Carbon. The general framework is straightforward and convincing”.
“At the heart of this framework is a “damage function”, which describes the relationship between a given level of warming and the economic damages it causes.
This is mainly driven by their underlying assumption of economic growth being permanently stunted from a permanent temperature rise – an assumption that implies compounding damages in the future,” - Professor Leonie Wenz of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Professor Tim Lenton, Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, said in a video interview today with We Don’t Have Time that he hoped the findings would focus minds at the upcoming first conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels being hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands in late April.
“I am sure that this will influence that conference and others such as those pursuing litigation cases against specific fossil fuel companies or state actors whose policies have not been strong enough to limit this d
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The High Cost of Canceling Offshore Wind in the United States
By Haley Zaremba - Mar 29, 2026, 10:00 AM CDT
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-High-Cost-of-Canceling-
Offshore-Wind-in-the-United-States.html
“When the Trump administration came to power and began setting U.S. energy policy, we said that we’ll have to reconsider, clearly, these offshore wind project developments,” says Patrick Pouyanné, the CEO of TotalEnergies. A $1 billion payout is therefore a pretty good alternative.
“To be clear, we don’t renounce onshore wind,” Pouyanné went on to say. “We continue to invest in onshore solar, onshore wind, batteries [in other countries].”
Last year, Trump tried to order an immediate halt to the construction of five wind projects along the East Coast of the U.S., but judges overturned this ruling across the board. This failure has led to the administration’s current tactic, paying off companies to cancel their wind power projects before they’ve even begun.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why India is switching to thorium for nuclear energy
https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/why-india-is-switching-to-th
orium-for-nuclear-energy/tldr
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Toyota’s new luxury EV in China receives over 3,000 orders in 1 hour after launching for $22,000
By Peter Johnson | Mar 30 2026 - 7:13 am PT
https://electrek.co/2026/03/30/toyotas-new-luxury-ev-china-receives-31
00-orders-in-1-hour/
The flagship EV is available in five variants with prices ranging up to 199,800 yuan ($29,000).
Buyers can choose from two CALB-supplied lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery packs: 71 kWh and 88 kWh, providing a CLTC range of 600 km (372 miles) and 700 km (435 miles), respectively.
It’s also equipped with Momenta’s R6 advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), which includes a roof-mounted LiDAR to support nearly 50 safety and convenience features, such as Navigation on Autopilot in cities and highways.
----------------
How is it possible that a 202-in long large sedan with a 373-mile standard range costs much less than America’s cheapest EV, the 2027 Chevy Bolt that starts at just under $29,000? The price includes some subsidies from the Chinese state.
https://www.autoblog.com/news/toyotas-new-electric-sedan-is-huge-high-
tech-and-cheaper-than-a-chevy-bolt
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Chinese Electrotech is the Big Winner in the Iran War
An energy-hungry world is being pushed away by America and into China’s arms
Paul Krugman
Apr 14, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/chinese-electrotech-is-the-big-winn
er
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Blowin’ in the Wind: How Nordic Countries Made Electricity Free
04.13.2026
words by oliver milman
photographs by bex day
Years of investment in green infrastructure have driven electricity prices down across countries like Sweden and Finland — sometimes below zero. Could the United States do the same?
When the wind blows hard and rivers run full and fast in Nordic countries, a routine scene plays out that would have seemed incredible just a decade or two ago: The price of electricity falls below $0.
In some parts of the region, power has become so abundant that generators effectively have to pay to offload it. Electricity prices in northern Sweden over the course of last year slipped into negative territory for a total of 679 hours—equivalent to nearly a full month—because the grid was flooded with excess energy. It’s no surprise, then, that Sweden recorded the most negative-price hours in Europe in 2025, according to Montel EnAppSys data, overtaking Finland, which had the most negative-price hours the previous two years. Scandinavian neighbor Denmark also regularly racks up stretches of low- to no-cost days, thanks to its abundant clean energy.
None of this means that residents in these countries pay absolutely nothing for electricity; grid costs and taxes still apply. But the Nordic countries have drastically lowered power prices by forging ahead with hydroelectric and wind development. So much so, in fact, that periods of ultra-cheap—and sometimes effectively free—electricity have become a regular feature of life in parts of the region.
when it comes to shifting domestic energy systems away from the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis, the Scandinavian countries offer a striking success story. In Sweden, 99% of electricity was generated from low-carbon sources last year, the highest share of any European Union country. Norway has been tracking just behind this. Finland, meanwhile, is on the brink of phasing out coal well ahead of its 2029 deadline, generating more wind power than ever before.
This transition is happening faster in Nordic countries than in much of the rest of Europe, though the EU as a whole reached a major milestone in 2025 by generating more electricity from renewables than fossil fuels for the first time. This comes on the back of wars in Ukraine and now Iran, alongside mounting climate concerns, which have intensified pressure on Europe to escape the volatility and inflationary pressures of global oil and gas markets.
More at https://atmos.earth/climate-solutions/blowin-in-the-wind-how-nordic-co
untries-made-electricity-free
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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In a first, renewables beat natural gas on US grid last month
It’s just one month, but it’s a sign of where the U.S. is headed as renewable energy — namely solar — surges onto the grid.
By Dan McCarthy | 10 April 2026
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables-beat-natu
ral-gas-us-grid-march-2026
Just look at what happened last month: Over the course of March, the nation got more electricity from renewables than it did from natural gas, which is typically the single-largest source of energy on the U.S. grid.
It’s the first time renewables have bested the fossil fuel in the U.S. across an entire month, per data pulled from the think tank Ember. Meanwhile, emissions-free sources, a category that includes both renewables and nuclear, produced more than half of the nation’s electricity. It’s just the third time that’s happened across an entire month, the first instance being last March.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump administration cites national security in stalling 165 wind farms
Onshore wind development in the United States is being brought to a standstill.
By Martha Muir, Financial Times | May 4, 2026 8:23 AM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/trump-administration-cites-nat
ional-security-in-stalling-165-wind-farms/
The Trump administration has brought US onshore wind development to a halt citing national security concerns, representing a major escalation in the president’s crusade against renewable energy.
Approvals for about 165 onshore wind projects on private lands are being stalled by the Department of Defense, including wind farms that were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations, and some that typically would not require oversight by the department, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and people close to the matter.
Wind farms require routine approval from the Defense Department to ensure they do not interfere with radar systems. This typically involves the level of risk being assessed and the developer paying an agreed sum for the army to update its radar filter system so it can locate the windmill. Some projects can be deemed not to pose a risk due to their distance from army facilities and flight paths. Normally these assessments can take as little as a few days to complete.
Since August 2025, developers have faced a mix of setbacks, including not receiving expected communications from DoD, having meetings to discuss the status of their projects canceled without the opportunity to reschedule, and being informed that the department has stopped processing their applications, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
The affected projects include 35 that had completed negotiations and are awaiting sign-off from the DoD—first reported by Axios in March.
More projects are now facing a shutdown—30 of which had undergone negotiations, received verbal signoffs, and were waiting for written confirmation, about 50 are in the process of negotiations, and 50 that previously would probably have been declared risk-free, according to developers and consultants.
The wind farms could generate 30 gigawatts, enough to power 15,000,000 homes.
Letters sent to developers in early April said the agency was reviewing its processes for evaluating energy projects’ impact on national security.
The moves represent a dramatic escalation of the administration’s effort to shut down wind energy in the US, reaching for developments on private lands as well as public ones.
President Donald Trump has a particular animosity towards wind farms. He has called them the “worst form of energy” and said his “goal is to not let any windmill be built.”
Since its second term in office, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to shut down work on several offshore wind sites in areas administered by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, also citing national security concerns, as well as other renewable energy projects on federal lands. Some of these actions have been thwarted in federal courts.
“This is so unprecedented,” said Jason Grumet, chief executive of the ACP. “The fact the administration is telling private landowners they’re not allowed to pursue economic activity and generate value from their property is hard to reconcile with conservative values.”
The administration has recently started refunding offshore wind leases in exchange for investments in fossil fuels, such as a $1 billion deal with TotalEnergies in March.
“The Trump administration’s attempts to block wind projects keep getting struck down in court, so it’s reaching for ever more extreme and absurd methods,” said Kit Kennedy, managing director for power at NRDC.
The DoD did not respond to a request for comment.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Is Losing a Second War
The Iran debacle is accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels
Paul Krugman
May 05, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-losing-a-second-war
Last month, out of more than 11,000 new passenger vehicles registered in Norway, only around 150 had internal combustion engines. The rest were fully electric. In mainland Europe as a whole, EV sales are up 51 percent from a year ago.
The global energy transition — the shift from fossil fuels to electrotech, which uses solar, wind and batteries to power an electrified economy — is accelerating. It’s now clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz marks an inflection point: the global green energy curve, which was already on a rapidly rising trajectory, has suddenly become even steeper. “Investors,” reports the Financial Times, “are piling into clean energy funds.”
This acceleration isn’t just a consequence of soaring fossil fuel prices. It is also the result of the worldwide realization that, with the end of Pax Americana, depending on imported hydrocarbons is a risk not worth taking. The United States cannot be relied on to keep sea lanes open when cheap drones can take out an oil tanker or a major pipeline. Even relying on oil and gas from America itself is dangerous, since one never knows when an erratic U.S. government – now under the control of a twice-elected malignant narcissist — will try to use energy as a tool of coercion.
Despite the perversity of its causes, the current acceleration of electrotech is overwhelmingly positive for the world as a whole. It will slow climate change and reduce pollution. It will diminish the power of anti-democratic petrostates and limit the vulnerability of the world economy to disruptions at choke points like Hormuz. It will democratize access to cheap energy sources in places like Africa.
There is another positive consequence of the clean energy boom: the diminishment of the carbon coalition — the interest groups and ideologues who hate renewable energy and want the world to keep burning fossil fuels. That coalition currently controls the Trump administration’s energy policy. But this is only the latest stage in the corruption of U.S. politics by fossil fuel interests. When we decry the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act, we should always remember that the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel oligarchs essentially created the Roberts court.
And now we have petrostate oligarchs making naked corruption great again by lining the pockets of the Trump family.
Trump’s own views about energy are defined by petulance and delusions. Wind power kills birds and drives whales crazy! China — which last year added three times as much wind capacity as the rest of the world combined — doesn’t actually use the turbines it has installed! (It does.)
But Trump’s energy officials are barely less delusional than their boss. Last month Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, dismissed the rise of renewable energy as a failed project:
"The result has been 10 or 20 years of just massive investment in energy that wasn’t helpful in better energizing the world. Wasn’t helpful in lifting people out of poverty. Wasn’t helpful in expanding access to energy. In fact, I believe it’ll go down as the greatest malinvestment in history."
Meanwhile, last year solar and wind power accounted for 99 percent of the growth in world electricity supply, while generation using fossil fuels declined:
Let’s not pretend that hostility to the energy transition has anything to do with faith in free markets or the desire to keep energy cheap. Trump and his minions are actively trying to stop the expansion of green energy even when it’s profitable. In the latest development, the administration is using bogus national security concerns to block the development of wind power:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lqp6!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_
auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe5580050-bb63-47aa-a30f-a2518a268f
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California — Lowest Wholesale Electricity Prices in USA
By Zachary Shahan | May 31, 2026
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-wholesale-elect
ricity-prices-in-usa/
Solar power has grown to enormous levels in California, and that solar power is keeping wholesale prices low. Wind power, water power, and solar power all mean free fuel, and free fuel means low wholesale electricity prices. This is not news, but given how much people love to exclaim “California is expensive,” it did shock me to find out that wholesale electricity is cheaper in California — technically, the California ISO (CAISO) grid — than anywhere else in the country.
That news comes to us via Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford. “CAISO had the lowest U.S. wholesale electricity prices 2025-26, indicating most stable grid. No blackout since 2020,” Jacobson shared on BlueSky.
That was actually the second part of his post, not even the top highlight. “59 straight and 125 of 149 (84%) days in 2026 with WindWaterSolar meeting >100% of demand on the California ISO grid for an avg of 4.9 h/d among all 149 days,” he shared first. In another format, here are those points:
Wind, water, and solar power have provided at least 100% of the California ISO grid’s electricity demand for an average of 4.9 hours a day so far this year. (Expect that to get better in the coming sunnier months.)
In 125 out of 149 days — and 59 days in a row — wind, water, and solar (WWS) power reached more than 100% of electricity demand at some point in the day.
The state may have high retail electricity prices for other reasons, but the abundance of cheap wholesale electricity from sunshine, wind, and water is not one of them!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Solar Power Is Booming Under Trump
“Try as he might to the contrary, Trump will likely preside over the biggest clean-energy buildout in US history.”
By Haley Zaremba - Jun 06, 2026, 4:00 PM CDT
Solar was the single largest source of new U.S. power capacity for 28 consecutive months through year-end 2025, accounting for 72.6% of all electricity additions, per FERC data.
Despite the Trump administration's rollback of Biden-era clean energy incentives, renewables represented 88% of total new U.S. power capacity in 2025, with FERC projecting solar to surpass coal within three years.
A shortage of gas-fired turbines is driving further investment into renewables and energy storage, with NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum noting that renewables remain the fastest path to adding electrons to the grid.
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Why-Solar-Power-I
s-Booming-Under-Trump.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy
His humiliating defeat in Iran has sealed the deal
Paul Krugman
Jun 19, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-champion-of-renewable
On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects. The administration has also tried to stop offshore wind farms already under development — moves that have been blocked by the courts — while the Pentagon has been refusing to grant routine permits for onshore wind projects.
Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to data centers and high gasoline prices.
Yet here’s the irony: Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.. Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.
Why do Trump and his gang hate green energy so much? The roots of their hatred range from the power of fossil fuel interests, to Trump’s petulant whine that wind turbines ruined the view from his Scottish golf course, to a general sense among right-wingers that clean energy threatens their masculinity.
What’s best for Americans has nothing to do with it. Thus, Trump lackeys justifying their hostility to renewables consistently make arguments even they must know are stupid. Consider, for example, an exchange last month between Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior, and Rep. Jared Huffman of Nevada:
Burgum: All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.
Huffman: Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery.
Indeed. To get a clearer understanding of far battery technology has progressed in enabling the transition to renewables, let’s look at how the state of California sourced its electricity this past Wednesday. The chart below shows megawatts supplied at 15-minute intervals over the course of the day. The area shaded yellow represents daylight hours. The light blue line at the top is electricity generated by renewables, mainly solar power (with some wind and hydro as well). In addition to supplying energy for current consumption, renewables supply energy to batteries for nighttime consumption. The black line at the bottom is net electricity supply from batteries — which is negative when batteries are charging, positive when they’re being drawn down:
California — which would be the world’s 4th largest economy if it were a country — gets more than half of its electricity from renewables. It is rapidly becoming a state largely powered by the sun during daylight hours and powered by batteries during the night.
Burgum’s suggestion that solar is an unproven or unreliable technology is completely at odds with reality.
Nor is California the only economy that now makes substantial use of renewable energy. Burgum’s home state of North Dakota gets more than a third of its electricity from wind power (don’t tell Trump). In South Dakota wind supplies 57 percent of the electricity. And renewables generate a large share of electricity in many countries, including most big European economies. (France is the outlier, not because it relies on fossil fuels, but because it has large nuclear capacity.) Spain, for example, now reli
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Beyond Denial
How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study
June 25, 2026, 5:55 am
https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-f
uel-princeton
• Conflicted Funds: BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels, handpicking scientists aligned with their interests.
• A Paradigm-Setting Paper: Princeton scientists who wrote a climate paper criticized as making solutions seem "easy” coordinated with the oil company's executives and showed them multiple drafts.
• Oversold Solutions: Researchers depicted technology to capture carbon and store it underground as being proven and in use at industrial scale, a characterization that stretched the facts.
. . . Jeff Greenblatt, a former researcher for Socolow who contributed to the “Wedges” paper, said the researchers had engaged in “a delicate dance” between maintaining their intellectual integrity and pleasing BP. “I’m sure that if they included that fossil fuels were not part of the solution to a significant extent, they probably would have seen their last year of funding,” he said. “That’s just the reality of these kinds of things.”
Socolow, in an interview, agreed that BP’s funding was likely conditioned on his support for maintaining fossil fuels. “There was a synergy,” he told ProPublica and Drilled in January. When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,” the renewal document said. “This is still our job.”
BP extended its funding for Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) three times. It was originally slated to sunset in 2010 but was renewed through 2015, then 2020 and finally until 2025. All told, the company gave Princeton’s program more than $56 million. https://cmi.princeton.edu/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Oops, scientists may have miscalculated our global warming timeline
Story by Darren Orf | July 9, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/oops-scientists-may-have-
miscalculated-our-global-warming-timeline/ar-AA27zI3Y
. . . “The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate change has been brought forward by at least a decade,” Malcolm McCulloch, lead author of the study, told the Associated Press. “Basically, time’s running out.”
The study concludes that the world started warming roughly 80 years before the IPCC’s estimates and that we already surpassed 1.7 degrees Celsius in 2020. That’s a big “whoa, if true” moment, but some scientists are skeptical. One such scientist, speaking with LiveScience, said that “it begs credulity to claim that the instrumental record is wrong based on paleosponges from one region of the world … It honestly doesn’t make any sense to me.” Other experts expressed wanting to see more data before completely upending the IPCC’s climate goalposts, which say the Earth is currently hovering at a long-term temperature change of around 1.2 degrees Celsius.
Unfortunately, even if the sponges are wrong, there’s mounting evidence that we are in the process of crossing that 1.5 degree threshold as we speak, according to New Scientist. In order to save the planet for future habitability, humans need to curtail emissions immediately—after all, the sea sponges are telling us so.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Oops, scientists may have miscalculated our global warming timeline
Story by Darren Orf | July 9, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/oops-scientists-may-have-
miscalculated-our-global-warming-timeline/ar-AA27zI3Y
. . . “The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate change has been brought forward by at least a decade,” Malcolm McCulloch, lead author of the study, told the Associated Press. “Basically, time’s running out.”
The study concludes that the world started warming roughly 80 years before the IPCC’s estimates and that we already surpassed 1.7 degrees Celsius in 2020. That’s a big “whoa, if true” moment, but some scientists are skeptical. One such scientist, speaking with LiveScience, said that “it begs credulity to claim that the instrumental record is wrong based on paleosponges from one region of the world … It honestly doesn’t make any sense to me.” Other experts expressed wanting to see more data before completely upending the IPCC’s climate goalposts, which say the Earth is currently hovering at a long-term temperature change of around 1.2 degrees Celsius.
Unfortunately, even if the sponges are wrong, there’s mounting evidence that we are in the process of crossing that 1.5 degree threshold as we speak, according to New Scientist. In order to save the planet for future habitability, humans need to curtail emissions immediately—after all, the sea sponges are telling us so.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
That reads to me like "OOPS! We fucked up. Sorry for making you listen to Greta Thundberg all these years.
Yeah... I'll bet the entire fucking EU hates her right now as they're being roasted alive in their houses without A/C.
Fucking dummies.
We're done listening to any of you. Don't try it again. This issue is dead.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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