Permitting Bill is an Early Test for Dems, Last Lame Duck Gasp for GOP

I’ll be interviewing an expert today on the ins and outs of the highly touted Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA).

The bill has bipartisan support, as it has goodies for both the climate and clean energy left, and the blood, death, war and corruption fossil fuel right. (see what I did there?) The bet that clean energy advocates like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse are making is that with less permitting friction, renewables win.

One area of leverage for the greenies has been withholding their support unless the Trump administration backs off its irrational hatred for clean energy projects, especially wind, especially offshore wind. As seen above, the administration is sending mixed signals.

Utility Dive:

  • The Pentagon has a queue of around 400 onshore wind projects awaiting approval, but lacks sufficient staffing to address the issue, said Dale Marks, assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations, and environment, in a Nov. 3 legal filing. with the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon.

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The Weekend Wonk: Level Setting on Data Centers

Headlines tell us that Data Centers were the biggest losers in last week’s elections. For a Perfect Storm of reasons, DCs blew up as everyone’s favorite punching bag, for both the left and the right, in the last year. A great deal of that anxiety has to do with the justifiable paranoia about AI and a surveillance state run by sentient terminator robots – got it. We need investigations and strong guardrails in that area, and I think the new congress will get on that.

Much of the concerns relate to more prosaic issues like the cost of electricity, water supplies, local governance, and land use. Polling shows more nuance. A poll by the Southeast Michigan Regional Chamber showed that, while two thirds of those polled said they were against a nearby data center – follow up questions showed that if there were guarantees on electric rates, water use, and restrictions on tax abatements – a plurality of all voters, and a majority of self identified Democratic voters would be willing to reconsider.

Democratic candidates, by and large, proved more adept at leveraging that voter unease, in part at least because of the President’s intemperate rhetoric in favor of unbridled AI, and toxic relationships with Billionaire Tech Bros.

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Good COP, Bad COP, Depends on Your Vibe

“COP” stands for “Conference of the Parties”. It’s the annual meeting where nations come together to assess progress, or lack thereof, in meeting the challenge of Climate Change.

United Nations:

The Mediterranean city of Antalya is no stranger to history. Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans have all left their mark on this stretch of Türkiye’s southern coast. Now, as nearly 200 countries gather here for the latest UN climate summit, COP31, the question is whether they can add a new chapter of their own by turning decades of climate promises into action.

Inside the vast conference venue, the Turkish tulip featured in the COP31 logo is a recurring sight as participants navigate long corridors leading to national pavilions and negotiating rooms.

Beyond the bustle of the conference halls, the stakes are high. As extreme weather impacts mo

Politico:

Forget the U.S. midterms. Another election has dominated the attention of diplomats at the global climate talks in Turkey.

Newly reelected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva got a hero’s reception wherever he appeared at the U.N. conference in Antalya on Wednesday.

Under Lula, deforestation in the Amazon — a key driver of climate change — has reached its lowest levels in 40 years. Climate campaigners feared that Bolsonaro, like his father before him, would have unpacked environmental protections.

And that is why, for many climate diplomats in Turkey, it was the Brazil election — not the U.S. midterms — that will prove to be the one that really mattered for climate.

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But not everyone is celebrating – my old buddy, climate denial warrior Marc Morano showed up on Fox News to warn about the rebirth of the “Green New Deal”.

Continue reading “Good COP, Bad COP, Depends on Your Vibe”

Um…AI Might be Trying to Tell Us Something..

Written and produced by the recently released Claude Fable (updated to Claude Fable 5.2 in November 2026) , the video above is unsettling.

Anthropic’s most powerful publicly available frontier AI model, Fable is said to be built for “ambitious, open-ended technical challenges, complex coding, scientific research, and multi-agent orchestration” – or so Google’s AI, Gemini, tells me.

Meanwhile, another send up of Tech Bros’ turn to “woke” after election thumping.

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Climate is Making Air Travel Bumpier. Trump Cuts Are Making it Riskier

(Wind) Shear terror.

James Fallows in the New York Times:

Air travel has become so safe in large part because of a profound commitment from the people in charge to learn from tragedies — what aviation experts call “lessons written in blood.” In 1956, the Eisenhower administration responded to an airline collision over the Grand Canyon by beginning the decades-long process that would eventually make U.S. airline travel one of the safest forms of transportation the world has ever known. In 2009, the Obama administration responded to the Buffalo crash by overseeing a new set of reforms. With the Potomac crash of 2025, another reckoning was at hand. It would be up to the Trump administration to learn from this lesson written in blood.

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Florida’s Wet Winter Just Warming Up

As I’ve posted, Florida just voted to hobble its response to weather extremes and flooding by limiting property taxes and radically defunding local services.

The state just came thru a stormy period that broke records and dumped 1000 year rains in multiple locations, some of which were still underwater a week later. The state has been spending billions on flood mitigation and pumping systems, but those efforts seem likely to be stressed or curtailed after the passage of Amendment 3. The current “Godzilla” El Niño , which has not yet peaked, will very likely test the systems just as funding is cut off in January.

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Study: Data Centers Not Causing “Heat Islands”

Researcher Andy Masley

For the record, I am hopeful that the new congress will haul a number of high profile Tech Bros before committees and question them under oath about their influence in government, the concentration of their power in political and media spaces, and the dangers of unbridled AI technology.

Put me down also as firmly opposed to sentient AIs taking control of nuclear weapons and driving humanity into extinction.

That said, I’ve done a lot of pushing back on a number of myths that have been bandied about on the more hyperbolic anti-data center spaces, on both left and right wings.

One of the talking points about Data Centers that I believe has been overdone is the idea that they create enough excess heat to actually alter weather conditions locally. Much of this traces back to an unfortunately headlined article in Forbes that allowed for a lot of misinterpretation.

The study mentioned there had a number of deficiencies, as discussed above by Andy Masley, a former Physics teacher in the Washington DC area, who has carved out a platform looking into issues real and unreal in the Data Center space.

In any case, new research has thrown some cold water on the whole idea.

Phys.org:

A new study published in Environmental Research Letters has found little evidence that hyperscale data centers cause significant heating of surrounding land. While a previous study suggested data centers heat surrounding land by about 2 °C on average (up to 9 °C), reaching 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away, 13 years of satellite data reveal that server waste heat causes minimal nighttime surface warming, while building materials actually cool ground temperatures during the day.

Eureka Alert:

Energy balance calculations in the study show that generating such large regional temperature increases would require 6 to 43 times more heat than the facilities can release.

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West Palm Beach Still Flooded 8 Days after 1000 Year Rains

Report from local Palm Beach, Florida TV.

As I mentioned in a recent post, this situation is set to get a lot worse, quickly, as Florida voted to approve Amendment 3, which will impose large cuts on property taxes and severely limit local government’s ability to respond to emergencies, from 911 calls to stormwater and sewage issues.

Takes effect in January, about the time that a giant El Niño event, which historically is linked to these kinds of storms, will peak.