Month: March 2024

UPDATE:

Former Chair of Public Utility Commission of Ohio, Sam Randazzo, who you can see in the video above, has been found dead, of apparent suicide. This affair gets seamier and sleazier by the day.
Michigan’s Kevon Martis, also above, is well known as a “Senior Fellow” at fossil fuel “think tank” E&E Legal, and major opponent to clean energy across the midwest. It’s possible that testimony from Randazzo would have shown more light on Martis’ involvement in Ohio’s largest ever racketeering scandal.
Recent events made bells ring for me as I had recently interviewed farmers (see bottom of this post) and local officials in Southern Michigan about run-ins they had with goons from Ohio, during a Martis-lead fight over wind turbines a dozen years ago.

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The largest scandal in Ohio history has sprawled even larger, and has a connection to one of the fossil fuel industry’s leading disinformers, currently active here in Michigan and across the midwest.

New charges have been brought against former speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder, who is already appealing a conviction carrying a 20 years sentence. Most recently indicted is Sam Randazzo (left, above), former Chair of the Public Utility Commission of Ohio, for taking 4 million in bribes, among other things.
Interesting video surfaced recently of Randazzo sharing the stage with Kevon Martis, a “senior fellow” with the Washington DC based E&E Legal, a lobbying firm well known for ties to the fossil industry and a history of threats and harassment against climate scientists.
Mr Martis is currently frontman for a high profile petition drive in Michigan aimed at placing a measure on the November ballot that would repeal recently passed clean energy siting reform, a center piece of Governor Whitmer’s ambitious climate and clean energy plan.
Alleged Bribester, fraudster, and grand thief, (among other charges) Randazzo introduced Mr Martis as a “hero” and an “inspiration”.
Important to say there are currently no charges against “Kmart” as we know him, but many are wondering if, as the charges mount up, Martis is getting nervous about what deals Householder, Randazzo et al may be cutting?

New York Times:

A former speaker of the Ohio State House of Representatives, now serving a 20-year federal prison sentence, was indicted on 10 more state felony charges on Monday in connection with a sprawling bribery scheme that handed a $1.3 billion bailout to a major regional energy utility.

The charges against the former speaker, Larry Householder, followed an inquiry by the Ohio Organized Crime Commission that also produced indictments last month of two former executives of the Akron-based utility, FirstEnergy Corporation.

The two men — Chuck Jones, a former FirstEnergy chief executive officer, and Michael Dowling, a senior vice president — were charged with funneling $4.3 million in bribes to the former chairman of the Ohio Public Utility Commission, Sam Randazzo. They and Mr. Randazzo, who was also indicted, have pleaded not guilty to a total of 27 charges.

The FirstEnergy case has been called the largest political scandal in Ohio history. Mr. Householder was convicted of accepting $60 million in bribes in exchange for shepherding into law a mammoth bailout of two unprofitable nuclear power plants owned by a subsidiary of the utility, as well as two coal-fired electric plants and solar energy projects.

Mr. Householder, 64, is appealing his racketeering conviction, which took place in federal court last June. Among other things, the new state charges assert that he illegally tapped a campaign account to pay $750,000 in legal fees for his defense and that he failed to disclose loans, debts, legal fees and gifts from lobbyists in ethics statements required of members of the state legislature.

Continue reading “Ohio’s Sprawling Utility Scandal Expands”

Report from WRAL, Raleigh.

Grist:

In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, no matter your politics. It’s the hottest state — Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer — and many homes and businesses are clustered along beachfront areasthreatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature has responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats. 

But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on natural gas pipelines, and delete the majority of mentions of climate change from existing state laws. 

“Florida is on the front lines of the warming climate crisis, and the fact that we’re going to erase that sends the wrong message,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of the CLEO Institute, a climate education and advocacy nonprofit in Florida. “It sends the message, at least to me and to a good majority of Floridians, that this is not a priority for the state.”

As climate change has been swept into the country’s culture wars, it’s created a particularly sticky situation in Florida. Republicans associate “climate change” with Democrats — and see it as a pretext for pushing a progressive agenda — so they generally try to distance themselves from the issue. When a reporter asked DeSantis what he was doing to address the climate crisis in 2021, DeSantis dodged the question, replying, “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.” In practice, this approach has consisted of trying to manage the effects of climate change while ignoring what’s behind them.

Hamilton Nolan in How Things Work:

At its core, insurance is a simple business. Companies figure out how much they will likely have to pay out, and then set their rates to ensure they make a profit. Success is dependent upon the ability to accurately assess risk. There is a huge financial incentive to have the most clear-eyed possible understanding of reality. Wishful thinking or misguided ideology will do nothing except lose an insurance company money. 

Because of this, insurance can tell you things about reality. It resembles global investment firms in this: The people running them may be greedy, and the clients may be evil, but the business is all about understanding the true and unvarnished state of the world in order to manage risk in order to protect wealth, and therefore these firms do their very best to operate according to what is true, whereas politicians, for example, often do their very best to lie. This is why every leftist and revolutionary should read the Wall Street Journal. There are far fewer lies when money is involved. 

The insurance industry is going to serve a very useful role in the climate apocalypse. It is going to be the tip of the spear that punches through all of the bullshit of climate denialism once and for all. Indeed, the process is very much underway already. Politicians and oil lobbyists can lie all they want, but their homeowners insurance rates are going up.

Continue reading “Florida’s “See No Evil, Don’t Say Climate” Policy”

I criss crossed Michigan last week to talk to more farmers, in this case about the advantage of having solar energy on part of their land.
In White River township, near Lake Michigan, Mike Cockerill, above, a 4th generation farmer, told me he wanted to keep his farm in the family, and solar would help him do that.
Plenty of greedy developers eyeing that valuable land near the lake – that’s something a lot of the “antis” don’t get. Keeping farmland as is forever is not an option. Farmers can’t maintain the status quo economically and are being gradually forced to sell out just to keep their taxes paid.
There are *always* Real estate developers in the anti clean energy groups, egging things on, in the hope of driving more farmers out of business and snapping up the valuable land, to cover in strip malls, subdivisions, gas stations, and concrete.

200 miles to the south, Deb Comstock, former Planning Commission Chair and Editor of a much-needed rural newspaper, the Lenawee (County) Voice, had more to add, gleaned from her own research in working on a solar ordinance that cowardly Township board members later gutted.

Yale Center for Business and the Environment:

Our analysis reveals that pollinator-friendly solar may generate private benefits to solar developers that justify its adoption without policy intervention. These benefits largely flow from higher energy output, from panel efficiency gains attributed to the cooler microclimate created by perennial plantings. A small added benefit accrues from the lower operations and maintenance (O&M) costs over the project lifetime thanks to the reduced frequency of mowings for native plants as compared to turfgrass. However, we hypothesize that information and behavioral failures are currently preventing developers from adopting the practice. Thus, there may be a role for policy to spur the incorporation of pollinator-friendly practices in future solar development.

Continue reading “What’s the Advantage of Solar Energy for Farmers?”

If you wonder why we’ve known about climate change since the early 80s, (at least) and yet have done nothing about it, this report is worth watching.
Tobacco Denial, and Climate denial set the standard and the template for what is now standard practice for political “conservatives”, what strategist Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone.”

CNN:

While watching the news coverage of Steve Bannon’s initial appearance in federal court on Monday, I kept thinking about his 2018 confession to the acclaimed writer Michael Lewis. His quote is like a compass that orients this crazy era of American politics. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s the Bannon business model: Flood the zone. Stink up the joint. As Jonathan Rauch once said, citing Bannon’s infamous quote, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”

Below, additional 60 Minutes reporting on “Prebunking” disinformation.
Can people be “inoculated” against lies? (and is that inoculation safe, or a plot by the Lizard people?)

I don’t know why I do this to myself. It’s a kind of masochism.

About the time Exxon researchers were warning their top executives and board members of the potential for “catastrophic” warming from global carbon emissions, CBS News, with a very young Dan Rather at the helm, broadcast this notice of emerging scientific concerns.
Aired 40 years ago, March 25, 1982.
At the time, the New York Times and other media had been reporting on NASA’s research in the area, lead by James Hansen, including

Notably, there is an appearance of Nobel prize winning chemist, Melvin Calvin, warning that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe.”

HT to X account “All Our Yesterdays”.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 341.5ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that climate change was becoming a real cause of concern among scientists and a very small band of civil servants and elected politicians who were in close touch with these scientists. There had already been hearings in 1980, led by Senator Paul Tsongas, who was communicating with scientists like Wally Broecker. And here was another set of hearings, this time within Congress, with Al Gore in the mix too.  It’s also happening just after the AAAS meeting in Washington, DC, with James Hansen and Herman Flohn expressing real concerns. It’s happening just as the Reagan administration, believe it or not, has got the “carbon dioxide science and consensus” meeting going. So the timing is good. 

What we learn is that within the policy subsystems, people are building meetings, reports, seminars, networks, fighting to edge the issue closer and closer to being “on the agenda.” You can say what you like about Al Gore – I’m sure much of it is true. But he has persisted. It’d be interesting to know what Roger Revelle thought of Gore’s efforts in the 80s. 

Nathaniel Rich in New York Times magazine:

Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than at Gore’s first hearing on the greenhouse effect. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding for carbon-dioxide research despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaned the burning of fossil fuels and argued passionately that science should serve as the basis for legislative policy. Bob Shamansky, a Democrat from Ohio, objected to the use of the term “greenhouse effect” for such a horrifying phenomenon, because he had always enjoyed visiting greenhouses. “Everything,” he said, “seems to flourish in there.” He suggested that they call it the “microwave oven” effect, “because we are not flourishing too well under this; apparently, we are getting cooked.”

Continue reading “Unearthed: CBS News Report -Climate Warning in 1982”

As Climate extremes become more and more undeniable, Deniers are not going to say “Geez, I was wrong and the science was right.”
Look for more of this.

Raw Story:

A state senator who was the 2022 GOP nominee for Pennsylvania governor has proposed legislation to outlaw experimental weather modification techniques falsely associated with the “chemtrail” conspiracy theory.

The false belief that condensation trails left by high flying aircraft are actually trails of chemicals released by the government for nefarious reasons has become conflated with techniques being explored to reduce the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere.

In a memo seeking support for his bill, Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin) said new technology and a proliferation of weather modification patents “owned by a combination of Federal Government Agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations, and large multinational corporations” have brought forward the need to update Pennsylvania’s law.

Mastriano notes the Pennsylvania Constitution guarantees the “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.”

“Spraying unknown, experimental, and potentially dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere without the consent of the people of Pennsylvania is a clear violation of Article 1, Section 27 of the PA Constitution,” Mastriano’s memo states.

The legislation would ban the release of substances within the borders of Pennsylvania to affect the temperature, weather or intensity of sunlight. It would mirror legislation that passed in the Tennessee Senate on Wednesday.

Mastriano, an election denier who lost his 2022 gubernatorial bid to Gov. Josh Shapiro, has made repeated references to the chemtrail conspiracy theory on social media.

In a November Facebook post with a photo of condensation trails in the sky above Chambersburg, Mastriano wrote, “I have legislation to stop this … Normal contrails dissolve / evaporate within 30-90 seconds.”

Shortly after his loss to Shapiro in 2022 Mastriano posted on Twitter — now called “X” — four photos of condensation trails above his district. In a reply to his own tweet, he linked to an article detailing a proposal to distribute reflective material in the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun’s energy back into space, implying the two are linked.

Continue reading “MAGAs War on Chemtrails”

My home state of Michigan is under the international spotlight since the passage of Governor Whitmer’s very ambitious suite of climate and energy bills last year.

In a statewide zoom sponsored by the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council (NMEAC), I updates some of the most salient developments on the climate crisis front, the first 20 minutes or so, that should be of interest to most anyone who reads this blog – and then discuss the obstacles to rollout of clean energy that is somewhat Michigan centric, but deeply relevant across the country – because the fossil fueled MAGA-style anti-clean energy disinformation movement is global, and focusing on how it’s playing out locally here is a good case study.
Actually, developers tell me that Michigan is among the very worst places for right wing paranoia and misinformation, so definitely relevant to anyone following the clean energy transition.

Hope springs eternal for that Nuclear Revival.
I wish them luck. In the meantime, we need to be building solar, wind, and battery storage as fast as possible, because there is no climate solution that does not rely on massive expansion of clean energy.

Bloomberg:

Nuclear-energy officials arrived in Brussels this week amid a growing wave of public support for atomic power. They left humbled by the tepid reaction of bankers assessing the price tag of their ambitions.

The International Atomic Energy Agency convened a summit to build momentum for a low-emissions technology that many expect will be critical for hitting climate targets. A group of mostly Western countries pledged to triple nuclear generation by 2050. But lenders balked at the eyewatering cost of doing so. 

“If the bankers are uniformly pessimistic, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said Thursday after listening to a panel of international lenders explain why they’re unwilling to provide the $5 trillion the industry needs by mid-century.

“The bankers are calling for a proven business case,” said Jozef Sikela, the Czech Republic’s industry and trade minister. “We need to find a way to make it predictable, stable, bankable and affordable.”

Projects in Western economies have been plagued by construction delays and ballooning costs in recent decades. The newest reactor in the European Union — Olkiluoto 3 in Finland — started generating power last year, more than a decade late and three times over budget. Similarly in the US, Southern Co.’s Vogtle facility came in seven years behind schedule and $16 billion over estimates. 

“The project risks, as we have seen in reality, seem to be very high,” said European Investment Bank Vice President Thomas Ostros. While the world’s biggest multilateral lender won’t close the door on nuclear, it recommends that countries needing power quickly focus on renewables and energy efficiency, he said.

China and Russia are building the most reactors. But their state-owned model of development is at odds with the European and US emphasis on private capital. That will likely need to change if Western economies want to maintain nuclear’s market share.

Continue reading “Banks are Party Poopers at Nuclear Revival Revival Meeting in Brussels”

Bunch of very, very old white guys interviewed in a new attempt at muddying the science, using, I kid you not, the same Climate Denial Crocks that I started out debunking in 2008.

Martin Durkin, the same climate-denying lefty weirdo that was completely humiliated after releasing the Fox News lauded dumpster fire of a movie, the “Great Global Warming Swindle”in (Jesus has it been that long?) 2007 – has now, somehow, gotten some misanthropic billionaire to fund yet another stab, even as the planet has continued to rapidly and catastrophically warm in the interim.
One more illustration that progress often has to wait for old guys to die off.
I know I should watch this eco-porn, but honestly I’m way too busy at the moment, and so posting the short synopsis above. The actual thing is somewhere on youtube, if someone wants to find it, I won’t be giving them a link.
Skeptical Science, bless their hearts, have cataloged the list of warmed-over whoppers.

The first 42-odd minutes of this 80 minute long festival of misinformation, once the initial ‘elevator-pitch’ is done with, are dedicated to “The Science”. But instead of that, what one is exposed to is a veritable Gish-gallop of climate myths, with the phrase, “we are told” liberally scattered among them.

Continue reading “New Climate Denial Movie is Same Old Same Old”