Really great, sober, much needed, fact based explainer on Canadian wildfires, focusing on data, and addressing the most common “wake up, sheeple” internet memes.
The creator has a good background and experience for the task.
Kyle Brittain is an Alberta-based weather specialist with a passion for forecasting, documenting, and reporting on severe weather events.
Having worked as a weather professional for many years in both the private and public sector, his work as a video journalist has appeared on various networks in North America and beyond, including CBC, The Weather Network, Global, CTV, APTN, NFB, CNN, NHK, Sky News, the Tonight Show, and more.
Kyle has also spent several summers working as a wildland firefighter on a rapattack crew in northern Alberta, and has braved the elements working in high-angle rope access in Calgary and as a glacier guide in New Zealand.
Why the Fauci hearing? To distract from 1. An illegal war? 2.Medicade Benefits being lost? 3. Inflation? 4. Nearly 1 million children losing food assistance (SNAP), 5. Gas prices? 6. Epstein files? If you think Fauci is a relevant talking point you’re not paying attention.
What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.
But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.
If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there.
They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.
Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things?
As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.
George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:
In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.
Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:
If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.
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Which brings me to this yo-yo. What a surprise that one of the internet’s primary “influencers” against clean energy is a MAGA nut job! Writing on Heated, Alex Hannaford did a nice dissection of Alexandra Fasulo, who does viral videos posing as a defender of the land from Upstate New York, but turns out to be just another climate-denying, J-6er defending, anti-vax conspiracist quack.
Before becoming an anti-solar influencer, Fasulo was a self-identified MAGA Republican who expressed fierce loyalty to Donald Trump, and conspiratorial views on everything from the COVID vaccine to the 2020 election.
On a since-deleted Twitter account, Fasulo cheered the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol. She referenced Q, the anonymous figurehead of the QAnon conspiracy theory. She posted about The Great Reset, a conspiracy that claims the coronavirus was an excuse to dismantle capitalism. She falsely claimed that the most violent insurrectionists were secretly members of antifa, and that the COVID-19 vaccine used nanoparticles to alter human DNA.
When HEATED asked Fasulo about those posts, she dismissed the relevance.
“I just think that has nothing to do with this current solar battle,” she said. “It’s like if we brought up your diary from when you were 18.”
These posts matter, however, because they show a longstanding conspiratorial way of interpreting the world. That same logic now runs through Fasulo’s solar campaign.
“My belief is when some people very, very pompously hold their science above other people’s science, I say to them, there’s actually no way of knowing if yours is the right science,” she told me.
When I said that I had spoken with a scientist who disputed her claim that solar panels could poison the environment with lead, Fasulo suggested that he must be paid by the renewable energy industry. (There is no evidence that he is; Mulvaney’s disclosed research funding comes primarily from government and institutional sources. He is also known for helping create the Solar Scorecard, which scrutinizes photovoltaic manufacturers’ sustainability practices).
“Every single scientist is bought in this country,” she said. “Every single scientist has an agenda.”
This creates a self-sealing argument. No scientific evidence can disprove Fasulo’s claims, because any scientist who disagrees can simply be declared corrupt.
Fasulo recently liked a comment on her Substack portraying climate change as a lie and a conspiracy. She told HEATED that she is not a climate denier.
She does not necessarily need to be one. Climate change can remain nominally real in Fasulo’s worldview, so long as the scientists studying it cannot be trusted, the environmental groups responding to it are compromised, and the technologies proposed to address it are more dangerous than fossil fuels. In a Facebook Reel last October, Fasulo denounced ORES and Boralex while displaying the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of employees.
“I refuse to allow these people to live in the dark and do what they do anymore,” she said.
When Fasulo posted a photograph of former ORES executive director Zeryai Hagos, one person wrote, “Where’s our Luigi?”—an apparent reference to Luigi Mangione, the man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. On TikTok, another commenter wrote, “Sounds like a case for Luigi 💯.”
A former ORES employee told HEATED that a staff member had been threatened with hanging. Nathan Stone, an independent media consultant who until recently worked in communications for ORES, said the threats became severe enough that state police had to be involved.
The pattern is not limited to ORES. In July 2025, Outdoor Life documented a clash between Fasulo and Alabama-based conservationist Kyle Lybarger, who had publicly challenged misinformation in her posts. A surge of harassment from Fasulo’s audience, including credible death threats, eventually forced Lybarger to scrub all mention of her from his digital platforms.
Asked about the threats, Fasulo denied responsibility. “I can’t possibly see what all two million people are doing on the Internet,” she told HEATED. “I have never once posted anything that calls for physical violent interactions.”
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Common thread here, from Upstate New York to my home state of Michigan, and across the country, is that propensity of anti-clean energy types to make death threats to anyone that contradicts them. See my interviews with local officials here.
Today I learned – something I had not heard about the forces setting this current massive El Niño cycle in motion – two mirror-image cyclones on either side of the equator, spinning in tandem in such as way as to amplify the winds that bring warm Pacific surface water to the Western Pacific off Peru…
That El Niño event, now emerging, might be more powerful than the largest on record, in 1877, which lead to droughts, heat, crop failures and famine that caused the deaths of 50 million people, 3 percent of the then-population of planet earth.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was driven out of his home by the approaching flames. He could have been speaking for millions of people across Europe.
Ravenous fires. Searing heat waves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval — ruinous wars, deadly pandemics — it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.
It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
If you had to guess which country gets the largest share of its electricity from solar, you might understandably toss out the name of a balmy island nation. Or perhaps you’d pick a country with swaths of blistering desert. At the very least, somewhere notoriously hot and sunny. Right?
Well, you would be wrong. The global leader is Hungary, according to a recent report from think tank Ember that pulls from full-year 2024 data and only considers nations that generated over 5 terawatt-hours of solar.
The Central European country got nearly one-quarter of its electricity from solar panels last year, leapfrogging Chile, which had held the top spot since 2021. Hungary’s win is no fluke: From January through October this year, solar grew to account for about one-third of power generated in the nation of 10 million.
It’s quite the shift. Just five years ago, Hungary got only 7% of its power from solar. Ember attributes the rapid growth to robust policies supporting both utility-scale and residential installations.
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By the way, next time you hear someone say “We are too far north for solar to work”, be advised that Hungary is more northerly than large parts of Canada. Other top ten countries for solar, like Germany and the Netherlands, are at the same latitude as Hudson Bay.
Since ending his tenure as Director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office under Joe Biden, Jigar Shah has been producing hands down the most useful and informed energy transition content available.
Shah has pointed out that my state of Michigan has been doing some of the most forward leaning work to harness Data Centers and the AI juggernaut on behalf of clean energy goals, and I’m hoping he’ll consider doing an interview to help support my work in communicating that reality in a political year when everyone seems to have lost their damn minds in a panic about AI and how to deal with it.
I got my “Energy Empire” swag today, little reward for submitting a question to the “Ask Jigar” segment of the Energy Empire podcast. See Below
The U.S. government is swinging behind a fledgling startup’s moonshot bid to dislodge Boeing as America’s only major maker of commercial airliners.
The aircraft that JetZero wants to do it with is no less radical than its ambition. It looks more like a manta ray than the tube-with-wings blueprint that has been the default for over 70 years. If JetZero can cross the line, the blended-wing aircraft would mark the biggest shift in passenger-jetliner design since the supersonic Concorde.
Forget one or two aisles, this one has four and is set to fly about 10,000 feet higher than today’s airliners. Initial designs replace passenger windows with digital screens and, to compensate, a skylight in the ceiling to flood the cabin with natural light. Each seat, the company says, has its own overhead luggage compartment. And each toilet has a dedicated waiting space.
JetZero, based in Long Beach, Calif., last week reached an early deal with the U.S. Export-Import Bank as part of its Make More in America Initiative for as much as $3 billion in loans and guarantees that the company needs to build its first factory. The preliminary agreement is helping JetZero’s chief executive answer a question that has been plaguing him for years: Is this thing even real?
“The question’s a good one…is it real?” Chief Executive Tom O’Leary said in an interview. He is targeting a first prototype flight of the aircraft, known as the Z4, by the end of next year. “How real it is is effectively, ‘Where’s all the money coming from?’ ”
As energy prices continue to rise and power outages become more frequent amid extreme weather events, ComEd customers have a new option to help navigate both problems.
A giant backyard battery.
Base Power, an Austin, Texas-based startup, has made Chicago its second market for an outdoor battery system that promises to lower monthly electricity supply charges while providing up to two days of whole-home backup power during outages.
The 3-year-old energy company is carving out a unique niche with its residential battery power plant, which charges overnight when electricity is cheaper and then discharges back to the grid during peak demand, generating revenue for Base Power and savings for the customer.
“We’re basically making your home run on 4 a.m. power versus 6 p.m. power,” said Zach Dell, 29, co-founder and CEO of Base Power. “We’re time-shifting that electricity to balance the grid out and drive your prices down.”
Following the disruption to global energy markets caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European Commission launched the REPowerEU Plan in May 2022. The strategy aims to end the EU’s dependence on imports of Russian energy by reducing energy consumption, expanding the use of renewables and securing energy supplies from alternative sources.
Between 2021 and 2024, the EU reduced its gas demand by approximately 78.5 billion cubic metres (bcm), equivalent to a 20% decline. Renewables and heat pump deployment, combined with gas demand reduction policies, were significant drivers of this decline. Between 2021 and 2024, EU households cut gas consumption by 24%, industry by 20%, commercial and public services by 19%, and electricity and heat generation by 18%.
EU heat pump deployment grew rapidly for much of the past decade, primarily in residential and commercial buildings.1 The EU deployed around 7.6 million heat pumps over 2022–2024. France installed the most, with roughly 2 million units, followed by Italy (1.5 million) and Germany (nearly 1 million).
EU countries installed 146 gigawatts (GW) of solar photovoltaics from 2022 to 2024, led by Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, France and the Netherlands. Utility-scale solar makes up 39% of the EU’s cumulative solar capacity, with the rest installed on rooftops, according to SolarPower Europe. EU countries installed more than 43GW of wind capacity from 2022 to 2024, led by Germany, Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland.
No one has tried operating a commercial nuclear reactor deep underground—until now. The so-called Gravity Reactor is the creation of Liz Muller and her father, Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley and an inventor. They founded Deep Fission, a three-year-old California startup that has raised around $150 million in the past year, including $40 million last month through an initial public offering, largely to fund the work in Parsons.
Parsons, with a population of 9,600, sits about midway between Kansas City and Tulsa, Okla. Deep Fission drilled a first test hole this spring on 100 acres at a mostly overgrown industrial park dotted with old munitions bunkers just outside town.
Deep Fission’s is using a common, scaled-down, reactor design; its innovation is putting it underground.
The key to the plan is avoiding the need for hulking containment buildings. Instead, the mile-deep hole will provide the necessary pressure, cooling and containment. A single reactor will generate just 15 megawatts, enough to power about 12,000 homes, but Muller envisions an array of 100 or more, providing more than a gigawatt, enough for a data center. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would oversee approval of commercial licensing, needed to sell electricity.
