On Wednesday evening, as people were frantically evacuating in a remote area above Cohasset, near Campbellville, a resident’s truck became disabled. Unfortunately, the resident had to leave the truck behind, which included two adult Rottweilers and their puppies. #ParkFirepic.twitter.com/gFgIRyspVC
Trump: We will be creating so much electricity that you'll be saying, please, please, president, we don't want any more electricity. We can't stand it. You'll be begging me. No more electricity, sir. We have enough. We have enough. pic.twitter.com/fFLs47APYR
Discussion here includes reference to “RTOs” – Regional Transmission Organizations, which are Transmission system operators, similar to system operators like MISO, PJM, or CAISO, which regulate transmission over large areas or several states.
Project 2025’s main goal is to raise market prices received by coal, gas, and nuclear and/or raise market costs paid by wind and solar. Project 2025 calls this “reliability pricing” but it has only half-baked ideas (at best!) for how to implement it.
It asserts that “there is a growing problem with the electric grid’s reliability because of the increasing growth of subsidized intermittent renewable generation (like wind and solar)…” and
“Subsidized renewable resources are undermining electric reliability in RTOs.”
What’s the proof? In a footnote, it says that devastation from Winter Storm Uri in 2021 was due to subsidized renewables and “a lack of dispatchable generation.” There was in fact plenty of dispatchable capacity in TX in 2021. It just didn’t work.
It also cites to a few NERC documents that don’t support the proposition about subsidized wind and solar and notes outages in California in 2020 and 2022.
Of course, it ignores all problems experienced by coal and gas generators. Anyway…
Above, the gigantic Park fire in California is burning close to the same area, Paradise, that was famously destroyed 6 years ago in another disaster, the Camp fire. Residents have continued to build in areas vulnerable to increasing massive disasters.
Insurers taking a beating. We are all paying for this through increased rates already. Clearly this is unsustainable but something no one wants to talk about. Graph below is daunting.
US home insurers last year suffered their worst underwriting loss this century as a toxic mix of natural disasters, inflation and population growth in at-risk areas put a vital financial market under acute pressure. Insurers providing policies to homeowners suffered a $15.2bn net underwriting loss last year, according to figures from rating agency AM Best, a figure it said was the worst since at least 2000 and more than double the previous year’s losses.
The figures lay bare the underwriting conditions that have sparked a pullback by US insurers from disaster-hit areas, either exiting markets or driving up prices, creating an affordability crisis for many homeowners. The report identified rising populations in those regions most susceptible to natural disasters as a significant factor — citing census figures showing that six states prone to severe weather, including California and Texas, accounted for half of the country’s population growth in the 2010s.
“The industry is facing rapidly escalating coverage demands while insured losses are skyrocketing,” said Robert Gordon, senior vice-president of policy, research and international at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade body. “Not only are more homes being built in areas that are at high risk for natural disasters, but these homes are increasingly more expensive to repair and rebuild as inflation has driven up the cost of construction labour and materials.”
Dave Banks, a former Trump climate adviser, said the document would serve more as a wishlist for past and future officials than a reflection of the president’s own priorities.
“I think the big question is, are the people who wrote it going to be back in?” he said. “And I think there’s a strong likelihood that a lot of the folks who worked on Project 2025 will end up in a Trump 2.0, if that happens.”
Mandy Gunasekara, the Trump EPA chief of staff who penned the project’s chapter on EPA, left open the possibility that she might return to the William Jefferson Clinton Building that serves as the agency’s headquarters.
Mandy Gunasekara, former staffer for cartoonishly evil climate denier Senator James Inhofe, is an author of key environmental sections of Project 2025, and on a short list for EPA chair in a new Trump administration
“That’s a question for the president to ask, and an answer for me to give with my husband and family,” she said. “And we’re not there yet.”
Most of the regulatory policies included in her 28-page chapter seem cut from the same cloth as those EPA attempted in the first Trump administration. They were rescinded under President Joe Biden or overturned in court.
But some are new, like a proposal to shrink the pool of industries required to report their greenhouse gas emissions each year to EPA.
Just the fact that the policies are being explored in a widely circulated document marks a departure from 2016. The Trump EPA transition team that formed after his surprise victory eight years ago was famously long on infighting and short on planning. Political appointees were slow to arrive and key components of Trump’s deregulatory agenda were thrown out in court.
Project 2025 would revive some of those rules. For example, the EPA chapter advises the agency to “make public and take comment on all scientific studies and analyses that support regulatory decision-making.” That dovetails with a Trump-era “secret science” rule that was vacated in 2021.
Gunasekara said an incoming EPA team could avoid similar outcomes by “applying lessons learned” from the first Trump term.
“It’s very different regulating from the inside versus applying oversight from the outside,” said Gunasekara, one of several Trump EPA officials who came to EPA from congressional committees. Gunasekara was a staffer on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under the late Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), as was Trump’s second EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler.
Floyd County keeps flooding and the federal government keeps coming to the rescue.
In July 2022, at least 40 people died and 300 homes were damaged in flooding across eastern Kentucky. It was the 13th time in 12 years that Floyd County was declared a federal disaster. These are disasters so costly that local governments feel they can’t pay for it all, so the governor asks the president to declare a disaster freeing up federal funds.
“After that flood I had 500 homeless people looking at me, ‘Judge what are we going to do’?” recalled Judge Robbie Williams, administrator for the county of a bit more than 35,000 people. “It’s overwhelming and it’s just a matter of time before it happens again.”
By now, most of us understand that extreme heat is bad for our health, making our hearts, lungs, kidneys and other organs work much harder. But too often we overlook the quieter, less obvious toll heat takes on another vital organ: our brain.
Extreme heat doesn’t just make us cranky and uncomfortable, it can make it harder to think clearly and be productive at work. It also worsens our mental health, exacerbating common mood disorders like anxiety and depression as well as rarer conditions like schizophrenia and self-harming. With each warming year, that issue deserves more time and attention.
Typically, a part of our brain called the hypothalamus keeps our body at its natural internal temperature (for most, that’s around 98.6F). But the human brain only has so much energy to devote to that, explains Kim Meidenbauer, a social, cognitive, and environmental neuroscientist at Washington State University. On an oppressively hot day, “one of the first things that seems to go is higher cognitive functioning,” she says, making it harder to pay attention and impairing working memory (humans’ ability to process and keep track of information in real time).
John Mayall, the pioneering British bandleader whose mid-1960s blues ensembles served as incubators for some of the biggest stars of rock’s golden era, died on Monday. He was 90.
Though he played piano, organ, guitar and harmonica and sang lead vocals in his own bands with a high, reedy tenor, Mr. Mayall earned his reputation as “the godfather of British blues” not for his own playing or singing but for recruiting and polishing the talents of one gifted young lead guitarist after another.
In his most fertile period, between 1965 and 1969, those budding stars included Eric Clapton, who left to form the band Cream and later became a hugely successful solo artist; Peter Green, who left to found Fleetwood Mac; and Mick Taylor, who was snatched from the Mayall band by the Rolling Stones.
