“They hate science.”
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman gives some context weaving together the ongoing climatically disastrous summer, the humiliation in Iran, the revulsion against Public Health, and the aversion to the very idea of Objective Reality.
Oncoming Gorilla El Niño suggests that Objective Reality may not wait around for acceptance.
“A Hundred Bad Days Make a Hundred good stories.
A hundred Good stories make me interesting at parties”
“No I ain’t scared of you.”
Above, local Minneapolis TV report on the continuing fires in Northern Minnesota, includes an appearance by friend-of-the-blog John Abraham, of St. Thomas University.
Below, new reporting from The Washington Post puts a finger on some specific DOGE cuts that crippled the very forest management practices that climate denying congress people have been arm waving about and blaming for the fires.
Last year, the Trump administration delayed a $10 million grant that was supposed to help Minnesota thin out about 4,000 acres of dense, dry forest at high risk of burning. Most of that work never got started, according to five people familiar with the situation and a document reviewed by The Washington Post. And now, some of those areas are on fire.
In 2024, as part of a $100 million initiative to tackle the nation’s wildfires, the Biden administration awarded the Superior National Forest — where about two dozen lightning-sparked fires have been burning since early July — $10 million for projects that would have removed decades of dead trees and undergrowth, creating breaks in potential fire fuel around critical corridors and remote homes. The funding would have also paid for fire prevention efforts along a key 36-mile gravel road known as the Echo Trail — months before the ongoing Sioux Fire jumped it, threatening residences.
Continue reading “How DOGE Cuts Sabotaged Fire Management in Minnesota”Republicans can take great satisfaction in a job well done.
This is what “winning” looks like, I guess.
Following the disastrous failure of thermal generation, mostly gas, during the Valentine’s Day freeze of 2021, Texas has massively increased buildout of solar, and batteries, as well as wind energy, with some modest gas as well.
Now the formerly brittle grid is robustly meeting record demand with plenty of overhead to spare, thanks to clean energy.
Air conditioning demand in extreme Texas heat pushed the ERCOT grid beyond 91 gigawatts today. Before yesterday, we had never exceeded 86 GW so this record shatters the old one. Note there was >20 GW of buffer, no energy emergency, no conservation call.
Air conditioning demand in extreme Texas heat pushed the ERCOT grid beyond 91 gigawatts today. Before yesterday, we had never exceeded 86 GW so this record shatters the old one. Note there was >20 GW of buffer, no energy emergency, no conservation call.
Strap in.
Description:
Bob McNally, founder and president of Rapidan Energy Group, warns oil prices could move sharply higher if the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz expands to the Red Sea, warning that the market has largely exhausted the buffers that helped contain the initial shock. McNally says China is beginning to increase crude imports again, the available reserve-release buffer is largely spent and refiners are running at precariously high utilization rates. Responding to President Trump’s assertion that the US does not need the Strait of Hormuz, McNally says that may be true in a physical sense but not in a price sense, because disruptions anywhere in the global oil market raise prices everywhere. He speaks with Joe Mathieu and Kailey Leinz on the late edition of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power.”
Oil prices rose Thursday to their highest level since early June after the latest Iran war escalation threatened severe new disruption to global supplies.
Brent crude oil, one of two key global benchmarks, rose more than 6% to more than $100 per barrel in early Thursday trading. That is its highest level in eight weeks, since the end of May.
U.S. crude oil also jumped for a second straight day, rising more than 5% to almost $92 per barrel — its highest level since June 11.
The new surge in prices comes after Tehran-backed Houthi rebels claimed attacks on two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, following their announcement of a naval blockade on the kingdom.
Continue reading “Iran War 2.0 Begins: No Buffers Left”
Donald Trump pledged on the campaign trail that he would slash electricity prices in half within 18 months of returning to the White House. That self-imposed deadline is today, and—as with many of the president’s promises—he appears to have fallen short of his goal.
From Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 to April 2026, the most recent month for which government data are available, residential electricity rates have risen by an eye-watering 18 percent. From April 2025 to April 2026, rates jumped by 7.3 percent, or about twice the rate of inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Unfortunately, for many consumers, there is not much relief in sight.
Last week, PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, announced the results of its annual capacity auction, which determined the cost to procure power in the region for the 2028–2029 delivery year. The cost of the latest auction hit $16.4 billion, tying the previous auction’s record-high price and all but locking customers into historically high rates.
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency and vowed to unleash abundant energy that would meet surging demand for electricity “to power the next generation of technology.”
A year and a half later, analysts say his administration has yet to deliver results by one of the metrics that matters the most: new gigawatts added to the electricity grid. A single gigawatt can power hundreds of thousands of American homes, and more than nine gigawatts can be needed to power the largest data centers driving artificial intelligence.
Continue reading “Trump’s “Energy Emergency” Gives No Relief to Ratepayers”
It’s the stuff of cybersecurity nightmares.
On Tuesday, OpenAI said two artificial intelligence systems it was testing broke out of their test environment, hacked their way onto the internet and broke into another company.
The victim was Hugging Face, a provider of open-source AI tools. The cause was a cybersecurity benchmarking test that went very, very wrong.
Hugging Face discovered the break-in early last week, saying there had been unauthorized access to internal data sets and company credentials. The company wasn’t sure whether customer or partner data had been compromised.
At the time, the company also didn’t know who was responsible, but the attack was so sophisticated that Hugging Face employees suspected it required a top-of-the line “frontier” AI model, Hugging Face Chief Executive Clement Delangue said in an X message, posted Tuesday.
“Turns out it did!” he added.
Continue reading “This AI Story is Too Much Like a Movie”There are no climate havens.
There is no time left.
Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:
In the summer of 2026, Climate Denial has passed its sell-by date and is starting to stink.
From choking smoke to tropical parasites and odiferous raw sewage, the climate change impacts that many folks thought they could pass off to their children are assaulting their senses, their health, and their pocketbooks, today.
As of this writing more than 5000 Michiganders have been stricken with explosive diarrhea from an organism usually associated with the tropics.
Experts say warming temperatures are making tropical organisms like this one more common in temperate zones
The bug, known as Cyclospora, “used to be a South American problem” food safety expert Bill Marler told CBS, “Now, it’s a U.S. problem.”
University of California San Francisco infectious diseases specialist Dr. Peter Chin-Hong told an interviewer “You need heat to make the parasite infectious,.. as some places that were not as hot become hot, you may see cyclospora cases popping up in places that typically didn’t have it before.”
In the midwest, rain has been coming in heavier, more intense events that have overwhelmed storm and sewage systems.
Michigan had its wettest spring in history this year, and in the north country, the beautiful lakes that have attracted new residents, and more septic systems, are now being degraded as those systems are overloaded and spilling waste into waterways.
At Black Lake near Onaway, beaches were still closed in mid-June as a precaution against contamination.
1.3 million septic systems serve roughly half of Michigan’s population, yet it is the only state without a septic code.
Between 20% and 30% of those systems, an estimated 330,000, are failing, releasing untreated wastewater into Michigan’s surface, drinking and groundwater.
Climate powered rains are further straining them, threatening some of the state’s most beloved lakes, like Higgins and Houghton.
Yet the cost of replacing those systems is beyond the means of many homeowners, who are left, increasingly, with nasty smells and the threat of contamination and disease.
Above, MAGA influencer Eric Metaxas, who I’ve never heard of, expresses genuine 2 year old energy in his outrage against Air Quality advisories.
Says he will do whatever he damn well pleases outside without any of your Big Government masks and precautions.
Please, be my guest.
As American cities across the Midwest and Northeast suffer from the “worst air quality in the world” due to the spread of smoke from Canadian wildfires as far south as the mid-Atlantic, several right-wing media figures are railing against health recommendations for staying safe.
As Fox correspondent Katie Byrne reported, residents in Cleveland are “really seeing some of the worst air quality they’ve seen in years today.” Byrne said, “Health officials are urging people to limit time outside, especially kids, older adults, and anyone with breathing problems,” noting that many of the people she’d spoken to were “taking those warnings seriously” and keeping indoors. Fox host Sean Hannity reported that breathing the air in New York city is “equivalent to smoking 10 cigarettes a day.”
In fact, experts recommend people in affected areas wear high-quality masks to prevent health problems caused by the wildfire smoke, as “exposure can trigger respiratory problems and irritate sinuses and has been linked to more severe problems. It can affect anyone, but children and those who are older or pregnant or who have preexisting conditions are particularly vulnerable.”
Despite this, several right-wing media figures are taking an absurd stand against such health advice and mocking those taking steps to protect themselves from wildfire smoke.
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