This is Not Cool

As part of its deal with fossil fuel billionaire donors, the Trump administration has ordered several expensive and obsolete coal plants, slated to be closed, to remain open, using specious “emergency” powers to keep ordering 90 day extensions.
In other words, the same half assed corrupt way they’ve been running everything else, from the War for Oil to the Protections for Pedophiles.
One of those plants is the J.H. Campbell plant near Lake Michigan.

Michigan Public Radio:

The Trump administration has once again ordered the J.H. Campbell power plant in West Michigan to remain open, despite Consumers Energy’s plan to shut the plant down last year.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office last year. After that, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a 90-day order for the coal-fired power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan to remain in operation. That order has been renewed every 90 days since then. The latest order was set to expire Monday, when Wright issued his 5th renewal.

The current order expires August 16.

Detroit News:

The May 23, 2025, order was the first of more than a dozen 90-day emergency orders U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has issued to utilities and power grid operators in four other states, forcing them to extend the life of fossil fuel plants otherwise destined for closure. Wright said their power was needed to protect against shortages.

Advocacy groups and Democratic states tied to the Midwestern electricity grid, including Michigan, are challenging Wright’s use of federal emergency powers, claiming he falsified an energy emergency to prop up the coal industry and overrule local decision-makers. They made their case Friday before a panel of judges on a federal appeals court.

Even officials in Republican states are pushing back after seeing their share of the Campbell Plant’s bill.

“We didn’t even know the plant existed,” said Chris Nelson, South Dakota Public Utilities Commission chair, who estimated his state’s customers already are on the hook for well over $1 million in Campbell costs. “Certainly, the plant is of no benefit to our customers in South Dakota. Now, all of a sudden, we are faced with paying our proportional share of those ongoing costs. Our contention is that that, just frankly, is absolutely unfair.”

Continue reading “This Plant is Coal’s Golden Ballroom”

Greenlanders don’t want MAGA hats, apparently.
Governor Jeff Landry found no takers when he reportedly offered children “all the chocolate chip cookies they could eat” to come to his mansion.
Nothing creepy about that, Jeff.

New York Times:

President Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, came to the island this week on a self-proclaimed good-will mission to “make a bunch of friends.”

So far, he has not found many.

Within hours of landing on Sunday in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, Mr. Landry was touring the town in a cold drizzle when one Greenlander gave his entourage the finger.

After he offered some MAGA hats to Greenlandic children, several shook their heads.

He even told some kids that if they came to his mansion in Louisiana, they could have “all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”

The next day, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, expressed his discomfort with the whole thing.

Continue reading “Greenland Cold to Trump’s Envoy”

Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:

The debate is over.

Clean Energy has won the argument, and the global energy transition will now proceed at warp speed.

“Those who’ve fought to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels are inadvertently supercharging the global renewables boom,” UN official Simon Stiell recently told a conference of nations, 

Future generations will look back on the ill considered and incompetently managed Iran war as the global shock that triggered, finally, a massive rush to renewable energy.

It’s happening now, not because nations have awakened to the urgency of climate change — but rather because the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has finally driven home the critical unreliability of fossil fuels.

Globally, leadership has been making this point clearly.

Continue reading “Column: Hormuz Closure has Ended the Argument on Energy Transition”

The Grift and Graft are beyond staggering.

Wall Street Journal:

Americans have cumulatively spent about $45 billion more on gasoline and diesel during the war with Iran than they did during the same period a year ago, according to an analysis of OPIS pricing data and federal demand figures. The surging costs are eating an outsize share of low- and middle-income consumers’ paychecks, darkening their outlook relative to the well-off.

At the same time, investors in oil-and-gas companies are watching their portfolios swell. Big energy returns bolstered a blockbuster corporate-earnings season and added momentum to the artificial-intelligence-led rally that has pushed the stock market to records. While higher inflation and borrowing costs have added stress on less-affluent Americans, many economists believe high earners will continue powering the U.S. ahead.

Continue reading “War for Oil Siphoning from Middle Class to Rich”

I am still on travel but monitoring the big picture of the current poly-crisis.
Above, Oil expert Jeff Currie has been one making some of the most dire warnings. Short 2 minutes above, longer discussion below.
Addresses the disconnect between the dire threat to physical markets and the relatively muted response of oil futures. If people like Currie are right, there is a very sharp cliff coming.

The current energy crisis has already made a deep enough impression on world political and business leaders to lock in a rapid transition to renewable energy, but the potential exists for even much more traumatic impacts if the Hormuz closure is extended.
The first of June is the date that keeps coming up, and the key phrase is “operational stress”.

CipherBrief:

A new JP Morgan flash note, aptly titled “The Illusion of Plenty,” lays out the arithmetic in blunt terms. At the start of 2026, the world held approximately 8.4 billion barrels of oil and oil products — a number that sounds reassuring until you examine what’s actually usable. According to JP Morgan’s analysis, only around 800 million barrels of that stockpile can be drawn without pushing the physical system into what they call “operational stress.” Roughly 35 percent of that accessible buffer had already been consumed by late April.

The distinction between oil-on-paper and oil-you-can-actually-use matters enormously. Much of the global stockpile is locked up in pipeline fill, minimum tank levels, refinery feedstock requirements, and other operational necessities. Draw below those floors and you don’t just run short — you damage the infrastructure itself. Pipelines lose flexibility, terminals seize up, and refineries lose the feedstock they need to function.

Goldman Sachs reinforces the urgency: global oil inventories are draining at a record pace of 11 to 12 million barrels per day, driven by the loss of roughly 14.5 million barrels per day of Middle Eastcrude production. The IEA has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the assessment of the institution responsible for coordinating emergency energy responses among developed nations.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Oil Off a Cliff in June, the Rise of China”

Government out to get us. Check.
Evil Scientists working to depopulate the Planet. Check.
Bill Gate’s looking for new ways to inject you with poisonous “vaccines”. Check.
Climate change? What climate change?
Check. Check. and Check.

Grist:

“Tell you what,” Drew Maciel told his Instagram followers in April, “I’m sick of finding dead moose.” He zoomed in on a dead bull moose lying prone on the ground, running the camera over clusters of ticks nestled within every crevice of the corpse.

Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90 percent of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species.

Continue reading “This Conspiracy Theory Ticks all the Boxes”

Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum has announced a series of reforms that will decrease Mexican reliance on US natural gas, not just for power, but presumably as an industrial feedstock.
At the same time, she announced an acceleration in renewable energy, hastening an energy transition.

Significant, because the Trump administration, lead by Energy Secretary, shameless grifter and, of course, Fracking millionaire Chris Wright, has had big plans for the developing world, hoping to lock in huge investments and dependent on US gas.
Having shown the world that a Trumpian United States is no longer a reliable ally or partner, Mexico is looking after itself.
Scheinbaum, who has a background as a climate scientist, obviously knows the stakes here, and Mexico’s renewable resources are vast.

Mexico News Daily:

Alongside natural gas, Sheinbaum said her government would continue expanding renewable energy capacity, including solar, wind and geothermal, while maintaining oil and fertilizer production.

The natural gas challenge is significant. As previously reported by Mexico News Daily, virtually all of Mexico’s gas imports arrive via pipeline from the United States, creating a dependence that some energy analysts describe as a national security risk.

Sheinbaum’s government is currently studying whether what it describes as sustainable fracking could help unlock domestic reserves, though no final decision has been made.

Above: During a House Natural Resource Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Dave Min (D-CA) asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about investments into energy.

Below:
During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about wind farms.

MIT Sloan School of Management:

“We find that RPS mandates have virtually zero impact on prices, and utility-scale renewables are actually associated with lower retail rates,” said Christopher Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor and Associate Dean for Climate and Sustainability at MIT Sloan, and faculty director of the MIT Climate Policy Center. “Energy generated by large-scale solar plants, for example, comes with lower transmission, distribution, and maintenance costs for utilities, and these efficiencies can be passed on to the consumer.”

Continue reading “Secretary Burgum Under Fire for Anti Clean Energy Policies”