This is a wonderful conversation, but to save some time I’ve set the link to start about halfway in just before the main event. Edward Norton and Stephen Colbert agree on their mutual love of Walt Whitman, someone who, Colbert says, is not read nearly enough anymore.
As a long time worshipful follower of the Good Gray Poet, this was like an unexpected lightning stroke from heaven.
We’re at the equinox, so as good a time as any to repost an excerpt from one of Whitman’s greatest – “Song of the Rolling Earth”. I did this last some years ago on an Autumn Equinox, and had kind of forgotten, but since it’s Spring Equinox tomorrow, seems appropriate. I think we need it now as much as ever.
Song of the Rolling Earth:
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete, The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
It’s said that if anything pushes to its furthest infinite expression, it transforms into its opposite. Is it possible that Trump’s sheer stupidity, greed and narcissism is so extreme that it flips the world to an accelerated Green transition?
Iran has now proven that control of the strait “gives it a stranglehold over the world economy . . . Even if the Islamic republic decides, at some point, that it has an interest in reopening the Strait of Hormuz — it will always want to retain the option of closing it again as a visible threat to ward off aggressors.”
Heavy reliance on imported oil and gas, in short, means a chronic risk of severe and unpredictable economic shocks. The Iran crisis has focused the minds of governments around the world on this problem — and on how clean energy could help them address it.
Senator Angus King questioned Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (also known on Russian State TV as “our girlfriend”) on the impacts of climate change on mass migration. Jesus, what a colossal fraud this woman is.
In Russian state television, the debate is whether Tulsi Gabbard should be referred to as "our agent" or as "girlfriend." https://t.co/qa4W8m0Fmu
Although the average American likely isn’t driving a vehicle that runs on diesel, the heavier gasoline is crucial to fueling the global supply chain.
“Diesel is what moves the real economy. It hauls the food, the packages, the building supplies and the inventory sitting on store shelves,” said Paul Dietrich, chief investment strategist at Wedbush Securities.
“If the Iran war keeps diesel prices elevated, this becomes a direct hit on consumer prices. Groceries get more expensive, delivery costs rise and household budgets are tightened,” he said.
The latest diesel prices are especially jarring because of how quickly they have risen. Just a month ago, the average cost of a gallon of diesel was about $3.65, according to daily AAA fuel pricing data.
Farmers were some of the first Americans to feel the shock from skyrocketing diesel costs.
John Boyd Jr. is a fourth-generation farmer in Virginia who grows soybeans, corn and wheat. Like thousands of other family farms across the country, Boyd’s business is under increased financial pressure this year because of price hikes triggered by events halfway around the world.
But when I look into the larger picture of Trump administration policy — not just the attack on Iran but domestic policies, especially the administration’s seemingly irrational hatred of renewable energy and its determination to keep America burning fossil fuels no matter what — I keep coming back to the huge influence now being wielded by oil money.
I don’t mostly mean the domestic U.S. oil industry, although them too. The U.S. oil and gas sector spent large sums helping Republicans in the 2024 election, while giving very little to Democrats.
But what really stands out is the centrality of oil money from the Persian Gulf, money that has been crucial in two areas: Trump’s international economic schemes and his personal enrichment.
Trump: I'm proudly telling you that we're going to try and have no windmills built in the United States. They're very bad environmentally. They killed the birds. They're unsightly. They make a lot of noise. pic.twitter.com/dE0pr90Ngm
Just so we’re clear on what The New York Times is reporting today. Instead of just letting a company that is all ready to build a US wind farm, with US labor, for US consumers, in US waters, bringing their own money, the Trump administration plans to allocate a billion dollars of taxpayers money to pay the company to go away. During the biggest energy crisis in history, that they caused, and continue to exacerbate.
The Trump administration is considering a new strategy for throttling the country’s offshore wind industry, after federal judges blocked its five previous attempts to stop wind farms under construction off the East Coast.
Senior administration officials are drafting settlement agreements that would pay nearly $1 billion to TotalEnergies, the French energy company behind two wind farms off New York State and North Carolina, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times, including copies of the agreements.
Under the terms of the proposed settlements, the Interior Department would cancel the leases in federal waters for the two projects, known as Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay, the documents show. The Justice Department would then pay more than $928 million to TotalEnergies, reimbursing the company for its winning bids in lease sales during the Biden administration.
In exchange, TotalEnergies would abandon its plans to begin building the wind farms. It would also commit to investing in natural gas infrastructure in Texas, as the Trump administration prioritizes the production of fossil fuels over renewables like wind and solar power.
Obviously didn’t like kids. Including the next 50,000 generations of kids.
Hundreds of years from now, this is what history will remember about the climate denial movement, just as today, we remember Nero fiddling while Rome burned – as a shorthand for the decadence of a corrupted wealthy class’ culpability in a collapse.
I’ve posted before about the meeting between Epstein and climate “lukewarmer” Bjorn Lomborg. Amy Westervelt has more details, I’ve brutally excerpted longer story here.
Until that moment, Lomborg, a political scientist who has consistently argued that climate change is real but governments should not do anything to address the issue and should instead focus on other priorities, didn’t know Epstein. He was more of a friend of a friend. In documents released as part of the latest trove of materials published by the United States Department of Justice, he is described by Epstein’s staff in a notation for their boss as “John Brockman’s friend”.
Brockman, an influential New York literary agent, was a long-time associate of Epstein, once described by The New Republic as the pedophile’s “intellectual enabler”. The relationship was mutual. Epstein was a funder of Brockman’s foundation, Edge, and in return Brockman organized lavish “billionaire’s dinners” at which Epstein and his associates could mingle with the intelligentsia. As part of this relationship, Brockman regularly ran errands for Epstein. In one example from June 2011, he sought to make contact with Gavin Andresen, the author of a book on cryptocurrency, on Epstein’s behalf. As a foot in the door, Brockman’s email spotlighted some of the more noteworthy names on his literary agency’s list—including trader-turned-thought leader Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak—and Epstein’s billions. His email signature included a five-page list with the names of every author represented by Edge, including Bjorn Lomborg’s.
Brockman had arranged the meeting as a favor to his client who, at that time, had been crying poor. In January 2012 he told The Ecologist his thinktank, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre needed money. He claimed to have been the “victim of a vendetta” after his funding was cut by the Danish government. As a philanthropist, Brockman suggested, Epstein might be able to help Lomborg out.
The Iran war has plunged the world into an overnight energy crisis. The closure of the Hormuz Strait and reduced Middle East energy exports have sparked fears of higher bills for already stretched households.
But one European country is well placed to weather these shocks thanks to its investment in renewable energy.
Since 2019, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity, adding over 40 GW – more than any other EU country except Germany, whose power market is twice the size of Spain’s.
As a result, Spain’s electricity price is much less influenced by the ever-fluctuating cost of gas, which increased by 55 per cent the day after the Iran war started and has continued to rise.
“Spain’s wind and solar growth has reduced the influence of expensive fossil generators on the electricity price by 75 per cent since 2019. This decline in the hours where the electricity price was tied to gas power cost was faster than in other gas-reliant countries, such as Italy and Germany,” according to a report by energy think tank Ember, published in October last year.
Experts agree that reliance on fossil fuel imports leaves countries dangerously exposed.
A Kuwaiti analyst openly criticized Gulf policy toward Washington after the latest strikes, saying the region paid billions for influence and received nothing in return. He pointed directly to Jared Kushner, noting that Gulf money flowed heavily into his orbit, yet the same states that financed those channels still ended up facing strikes and pressure.
His conclusion was appeasing Zionist interests and trying to buy leverage in Washington has produced humiliation, not protection. Gulf governments, he argued, must rethink the entire strategy of trying to influence the United States through money while being expected to serve Israel’s regional agenda.
