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.
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.
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 wouldmeet 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 healthrecommendations 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. —
I was hoping a spate of thunderstorms across Ontario and Northern Minnesota might dampen the fires that are choking the midwest with smoke, but the briefing from a National Weather Service Meteorologist above does not give me much hope. Turns out that while the rain helps, the lightning starts even more fires.
Notably, the meteorologists describes the conditions that lead to the fires as well above normal temperatures and low humidity.
Another local report from Monday, yesterday, July 20, described additional storms and lightning, and quoted an official saying the fires would “be with us for a long time.”
That ought to do it. Trump imposes tariffs on Canada, in part as a distraction from a disastrous Middle Eastern war, in part to shore up the fraying narrative that increasingly destructive fires are more related to forest management, than climate change.
Report above from Minneapolis local TV points out that temperatures in the Boundary Waters area of Minnesota, near Canada, hovered in the 104° F range prior to the ignition, probably caused by lightning. Data below assembled by Zeke Hausfather shows the relationship between hotter weather and fires.
The new tariffs come after smoke from raging wildfires in Canada drifted into the U.S., blanketing cities including New York, Chicago and Washington. In a Truth Social post Friday, Trump threatened to impose steeper duties on America’s northern neighbor to compensate for the smoke’s impact.
“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump said.
Days later, the president was seen speaking with Carney at Sunday’s World Cup Final. Trump told reporters that Canada needed to stop the wildfires.
“I told them, I mean, you got to stop these fires from coming in and you know poisoning our air,” Trump said. “Our air has been poisoned. Have a good relationship with Mark Carney, but you know we got to stop the fires up there. If we can help them, we’ll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.”
Prompt to ChatGPT: How does the total area of Canadian forests compare to the area of the contintental United States?
Canada has about 347 million hectares (3.47 million km²) of forest, making it home to roughly 9% of the world’s forests.
The continental United States (the 48 contiguous states plus Washington, D.C.) has a total land area of about 7.66 million km².
Here’s the comparison:
Area
Square kilometers
Square miles
Canadian forests
~3.47 million km²
~1.34 million mi²
Continental U.S. land area
~7.66 million km²
~2.96 million mi²
So:
Canadian forests are about 45% of the area of the continental United States.
Put another way, you would need a little more than two Canadian forests to cover the contiguous U.S.
Titusville, Florida is the county seat of Brevard County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 48,789. It’s located between Orlando and the Kennedy Space Center.
Mayor Andrew Connors took to YouTube to explain it was time to do something about stormwater systems no longer up to the job of handling extreme rain events. I’ve had the privilege of observing what real courage looks like up close, and it’s not what people think. It’s not Sly Stallone breaking into a bar and beating people up. It’s a lot more like this man speaking simple truth to people who may not want to hear it. It can be ragged, and messy, and it likely will not make feel all creamy dreamy, or increase your popularity. It’s about doing something that has to be done.
