This is Not Cool

When Development Comes to Farm Communities

For five generations, Keith Peters’ family farmed around Rickenbacker International Airport in Lockbourne, Ohio. Then bulldozers arrived.

“The property around that farm was sold for warehousing. There aren’t any farmers living there anymore,” said Peters, now 65. Over decades, he has watched development “steal the community” of his childhood.

As modern industry pushes into agricultural areas, farmers are losing land and facing added stressors such as busier roads, changing culture and non-ag neighbors who don’t understand farming.

Multigenerational farming families are caught between preserving legacy and accepting lucrative buyouts that could fund larger operations elsewhere. Even then, there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again because tech-driven development, such as data centers and solar, is becoming detached from population centers.

Today’s tech-driven development isn’t just pressuring farms adjacent to population centers. When developers throw outrageous monetary sums at farmland, it’s tempting to take the money and run. And across the country, countless farm families have made that choice as urban sprawl spirals outward from city centers.

When those sales go through, they can have a domino effect: Payouts from the deal often get funneled via 1031 tax-deferred exchanges into farming parcels three, four or 10 times larger in some distant neighborhood where the farmer sets up new operations. That, in turn, puts pressure on local land values and can foster resentment with new neighboring farmers.

While Florida Freezes, Rockies in Snow Drought

Doing an interview with one of the few talk format radio stations left in the state this morning, interviewer observed that although everyone is saying that this winter in the upper midwest has been cold, hard and snowy – if you remember more that 40 years ago, this would just have been called “winter”.

While the Eastern US has had a lot of snow, and continuing cold, the Rockies are in a snow drought that is impacting the economy, above.

Enjoy this one day break. Old man winter roars back in Thursday! Wind chills (and low temps) in the 20s and 30s in #Florida Friday morning!
The good news: it doesn’t last long, and a lasting warm up arrives next week. #cold #Freeze pic.twitter.com/KdYiEPEBVV
— Jeff Berardelli (@WeatherProf) February 4, 2026

What happens in the mountains in winter, makes a big impact on what happens in Agricultural zones in Summer…

In Sweden: First Electric Hydrofoil Ferry

Description:

The world’s first electric hydrofoil service is officially in operation! Passengers are now welcome onboard the Candela P-12 ‘Nova’, traveling from Ekerö center to Stockholm City Hall.
Cutting travel times in half and eliminating emissions, we’re unlocking the potential of our waterways.
The P-12 will run three times a day as a pilot project in collaboration with @regionstockholm, and the regular SL fare applies

Peter Zeihan on US Cities’ Green Potential

Coal Plant Owners Fight Trump’s Coal Mandates as a “Taking” of Ownership Rights

Kind of stunning.
Arbitrary “emergency” power grab by grifting Secretary of Energy Chris Wright opposed by owners of a slated-to-close coal plant in Colorado – who have now sued, calling the action a “taking” of their property rights, to make the right economic decision.
Wright’s actions are divorced from reality, and serve no purpose but to directly transfer ratepayer’s money to the accounts of wealthy cronies and donors.

You really have to ask yourself if Republicans actually believe in anything. In service of their wealthy donors, whether it’s property rights, first or even second(!) amendment rights, or even the safety of children against sexual predators.

Utility Dive:

The owners of a Colorado power unit say the Department of Energy violated their Constitutional rights when it ordered them to continue running a coal-fired generator they had been planning for years to retire at the end of 2025.

By mandating the generator’s availability to operate, the order “constitutes both a physical taking and a regulatory taking” of property by the government without just compensation or due process, in violation of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and federal law, the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and the Platte River Power Authority said in a Jan. 29 request for clarification and rehearing.

Moreover, they said, keeping the unit available to operate “will not best meet DOE’s goal of securing dispatchable electricity resources in the northwestern United States.”

Shut Out: Trump’s Offshore Wind War now 0 and 5 in Court

Reagan appointee Judge hands climate denier and pedophile Donald Trump, as well as climate denier and pedophile protector Chris Wright, their asses, on another offshore wind case.
This makes for a complete 0-5 shutout of the “war on wind”.

New York Times:

A federal judge on Monday struck down the Interior Department’s order to halt work on a multibillion-dollar wind farm off the coast of New York State, the fifth time the courts have ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to throttle the country’s offshore wind industry. The administration is now 0-5 in its effort to stop wind farms under construction along the East Coast.

Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction that would allow the developer of the New York project, known as Sunrise Wind, to restart construction while the broader legal battle unfolds.

In December, the Interior Department ordered all work to halt on Sunrise Wind and four other wind farms off the East Coast. To justify the sweeping move, officials cited a classified report by the Defense Department that they said found the projects to be a national security threat.

But Judge Lamberth, who was nominated to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, said he was unpersuaded by the government’s claims about national security after reviewing the classified report under seal. He said the actions of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had caused “irreparable harm” to the developer of Sunrise Wind.

Heat Pumps: What’s the Deal?

I want very much to electrify my home, but am still finding it difficult to budget for a heat pump.
In addition there is a problem with installers, in that most of them are the same plumbing and heating guys (bless ’em) that installed your (most likely) gas unit and AC if you have one.
They specialize in those and they don’t like moving out of their comfort zone. So it’s hard to. know where to get good advice that is specific to my geographic area.
I’ll keep looking – in the meantime, the video above is a good summary of what we know, and what the costs still are.

Time Magazine Breakdown: What is Driving Electric Rates?

Time magazine has a rundown of what is driving higher electric rates. Turns out it’s not clean energy. Huh.

Time:

If you’ve found yourself drained by your electricity bill this winter, you’re not alone. Electricity costs have been steadily rising for years now, outpacing inflation. The average monthly residential electricity bill increased from about $121 in 2021 to $156 in 2025, a nearly 30% rise. And from last January to October alone, electricity bills rose 12.7%.

Brace yourself: things are likely only going to get more expensive. The average U.S. household is projected to spend nearly $1,000 this winter to heat its home, according to data from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA). The rising costs come as more Americans are finding themselves unable to afford their utility bills. NEADA estimates that up to four million households experienced utility disconnections in 2025, nearly 500,000 more than in 2024. Meanwhile, total funding for federal heating assistance is on the decline—falling from $6.1 billion in 2023 to about $4 billion in 2025.

Here are five reasons why your electricity bill might be higher than normal.

Inflation

Since the pandemic, electricity prices have been getting more expensive—just like almost everything else.

“Consumer electricity prices have been growing at a much faster rate than the rate of inflation in the general economy, which is important because the rate of inflation and general economy has been pretty high,” says Christopher Knittel, faculty director of the MIT Climate Policy Center.

Rising inflation also means that maintaining the nation’s electricity grid costs more than it used to. “Anything that’s being built or installed right now costs more than it did just five years ago,” says Kenny Stein, vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research.

EV Sales Pass Petrol in EU

Reuters:

Sales of fully electric cars surpassed those of petrol-only vehicles in the European Union for the first time in December, data from ‌the auto industry group ACEA showed on Tuesday, even as hybrids held onto the largest overall share of the market.

The data underscores how the bloc is shifting slowly towards electric and hybrid vehicles, even as policymakers have proposed loosening emission regulations that should allow vehicles with combustion engines to stick around for longer.

Independent automotive analyst Matthias Schmidt said that the fewer petrol car sales partly reflect reclassification of some as “mild ‌hybrids”, which still have petrol engines and only modestly contribute to lowering emissions.

“It will still take around half a decade before pure electric cars genuinely overtake combustion-engine models across the region, but this is nonetheless a start,” he said.

Fully electric vehicles made up 22.6% of cars registered in the EU last month, edging out petrol cars ‍on 22.5%. Gasoline-electric hybrids, including plug-in hybrids that can go limited distances on battery power alone, were the top group with 44%.

The EU unveiled a plan in December to abandon an effective 2035 ban on combustion engine cars, bowing to pressure from carmakers as ‌they fend ‌off challenges from Chinese rivals, U.S. import tariffs and difficulties in selling EVs profitably.

Another Climate Denier Caught up in Epstein Files

Bjorn Lomborg “looking forward” to meeting Epstein, years after the financier had been convicted and served time for trafficking

Not all climate deniers are pedophiles, but I bet most pedophiles are climate deniers.

just sayin’.

Yale Climate Connections:

The newly released documents show that in late 2016 and early 2017, after Donald Trump was elected to his first term, Epstein exchanged emails with celebrity physicist Lawrence Krauss, who at the time was the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. Epstein was a major donor to the Origins Project.

In the emails, which contain numerous typos and grammatical errors, Epstein pressed Krauss – who himself left Arizona State University in 2019 amid allegations of sexual misconduct – about several common claims by climate deniers. In each exchange, Krauss politely pushed back.

“i liked the argument that more co2 is good for plants?” Epstein wrote.