Above, discussion of impacts that DOGE chainsaw is having on government agencies and services that have a lot of impacts in the Reddest states – one example being the severe storms that swept across mostly MAGA America last week. NOAA, which is critical to predicting and preparing for those events, which are becoming more frequent, and FEMA, which is our mechanism for repairing and restoring after those events, are both on the chopping blocks.
Below, specific case in point in dramatic footage as on-air weather caster watches a tornado on camera approaching the station, then sounds an alarm and gives emergency leadership as the station is engulfed in debris.
Above, Chris Wright, the Grifter in Chief now at Department of Energy, from a 2019 video where he demonstrated that fracking fluid, the stuff that gets pumped down into frack wells, is so safe you can drink it. As I’ve pointed out before, the lie here is that people aren’t worried about the fluid that goes down the tube – it’s what comes back up that is causing the damage.
Fracking, the increasing use of which has driven the past decade’s oil and gas boom, has been central to much of the mounting pollution concern. Environmentalists and researchers have warned that the technique, in which cocktails of chemicals are pumped underground to shatter rock and release oil and gas, can contaminate groundwater — accusations the industry has fought for years.
But much of that discourse has centered on the direct impact of the fracking process, which leaves out a great deal of oil and gas operations. The EPA study also identified multiple other ways that the fuels’ extraction threatens water supplies — like spills or deliberate dumping. In the Permian, for example, The Hill observed numerous pumpjacks and storage tanks dripping “produced water,” or wastewater resulting from the fracking process, on the soil, sometimes in close proximity to farms. This water can resurface tainted with salt, heavy metals, benzene, toxic “forever chemicals” and even radioactive isotopes.
BYD on Monday unveiled a new platform for electric vehicles (EVs) that it said could charge EVs as quickly as it takes to pump gas and announced for the first time that it would build a charging network across China.
The so-called “super e-platform” will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling cars that use it to travel 400 km (249 miles) on a 5-minute charge, founder Wang Chuanfu said at an event livestreamed from the company’s Shenzhen headquarters.
Charging speeds of 1,000 kW would be twice as fast as Tesla’s superchargers whose latest version offers up to 500 kw charging speeds. Fast-charging technology has been key to increasing EV adoption as it is seen to help assure EV drivers’ concerns over being able to charge their cars quickly.
“In order to completely solve our user’s charging anxiety, we have been pursuing a goal to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refuelling time of petrol vehicles,” Wang said.
The Trump administration recently denied a funding request from the city of Asheville, North Carolina, to help its recovery from Hurricane Helene, telling the city it must cut a program meant to aid female and minority contractors. The mayor said the city has cut the reference to the program and now expects the plan to win approval.
During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly used the devastation Helene wrought on North Carolina to spread lies and conspiracy theories about the Biden administration’s recovery efforts. In a speech in January, Trump claimed he’d be “taking strong action to get North Carolina the support that you need to quickly recover and rebuild,” and he specifically named Asheville as “a great place, and we’re going to have it be a great place again.”
“Strong action” apparently comes with some strings attached. Because on Monday, Trump’s secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner, denounced Asheville’s 125-page funding planbecause of one line, in a section touting the plan’s benefits for vulnerable populations, that said some of the funds to support small businesses would help the city “prioritize assistance for Minority and Women Owned Businesses (MWBE) within the scoring criteria outlined within the policies and procedures.”
He claims to use the IPCC science in service of his fossil fueled agenda. Jeff takes him to task here, with receipts.
The more I watch Wright in action, the less impressed I am. For that matter, anyone in this cabinet who has not resigned over the threats to invade our allies, has shown their true colors, and disqualified themselves as good faith actors in any debate.
See my previous vid with Jim Kossin adding more on this, below.
Ketchum ends by saying “Renewables are the bridge” that will get us to a future where we can, I guess, build all that great gas. I remember 15 years ago it was supposed to be gas that was the “reliable bridge fuel” that would get us to the renewable energy. In the meantime, renewable prices have plummeted, fossil gas challenges have multiplied, and we live in a different world.
Investors are betting on natural gas. If these demand projections aren’t just hot air, the energy resource fueling all this growth will be, so to speak. Where actually deploying new gas power is concerned, however, there’s a big problem: All major gas turbine manufacturers, slammed by massive order growth, now have backlogs for new turbine deliveries stretching out to 2029 or later. Energy news coverage has mentioned these potential project development delays sometimes in passing, sometimes not at all. But this looming mismatch between gas power demand and turbine supply is a real problem for the grid and everyone who depends on it.
In recent months I’ve spoken to hurricane experts Jim Kossin, and Jeff Masters, both of whom were formerly, in younger days, Hurricane Hunters with NOAA. (the kind of experts the administration is now firing)
The U.S. is set to plug over 18 gigawatts of new utility-scale energy storage capacity into the grid in 2025, up from 2024’s record-setting total of almost 11 GW, per Energy Information Administration data analyzed by Cleanview. Should that expectation bear out, the U.S. will have installed more grid batteries this year alone than it had installed altogether as of 2023.
The U.S. grid battery sector has been on a tear in recent years — and California and Texas are the reasons why. Combined, the two states have installed nearly three-quarters of the country’s total energy storage capacity of over 26 GW.
California has long held the top spot on large-scale battery storage installations. Even last year, when the EIA forecast that Texas would claim the lead, California held on by a few hundred megawatts. This year EIA again expects Texas to outpace California, only now by an even wider margin than last year. The Lone Star State could build nearly 7 GW of utility-scale storage in 2025 compared to California’s 4.2 GW.
But the new state-level storyline to watch is the rise of Arizona. The state built just under 1 GW of storage in 2024, buoyed by massive new projects like the Sonoran Solar Energy Center and the Eleven Mile Solar Center that pair solar with batteries to soak up as much desert sun as possible. This year, EIA says Arizona is on track to nearly quadruple last year’s total and build 3.6 GW of storage.
It’s worth noting that EIA’s 2024 storage forecast overshot actual installations by about 3 GW — and developers didn’t have the Trump administration to contend with then. President Donald Trump has not outright targeted energy storage, but the uncertainty surrounding the future of clean energy tax credits could have a chilling effect on investment, as it has had on projects in adjacent sectors like solar and battery manufacturing.
