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Taylor Ogan, CEO of Snow Bull Capital, explains why he believes Trump rolling back clean energy subsidies could have a ‘staggering effect’ not just on US, but China. He says America’s current policies are actually bolstering China, and Beijing sees itself as a ‘hero’ in a lot of markets.
“The Chinese are joking about this.”
When the fossil fuel industry started its war on science 40 some years ago, they set out to destroy American’s faith in the institutions and media that had informed our civic lives for many decades.
They succeeded, spectacularly. The collateral damage is that, on the fringes, we now have numbers of heavily armed and completely delusional citizens who have become convinced not just that climate change is a deep state conspiracy, but that vaccines are toxic, education is evil, and that Joe Biden and Barack Obama are in a secret bunker steering tornadoes and hurricanes with deadly weather weapons.
The Texas Department of Agriculture is not conducting weather modification, Commissioner Sid Miller said Wednesday, addressing what he describes as false claims circulating on social media in the wake of the devastating Central Texas floods.
“There has been a lot of misinformation flying around lately, so let me clarify: the Texas Department of Agriculture has absolutely no connection to cloud seeding or any form of weather modification,” Miller said in a statement.
Miller said that since SB 1303 was passed in 2011, the Department of Agriculture has had no legal authority, responsibilities, or involvement in any weather modification programs.
“That authority was transferred out of our hands more than a decade ago,” Miller said.
“Weather modification and control,” according to the Texas Legislature, means “changing or controlling, or attempting to change or control, by artificial methods the natural development of atmospheric cloud forms or precipitation forms that occur in the troposphere.”
Miller said that as an eighth-generation farmer and rancher, he turns to faith when faced with a drought.
Continue reading “It’s All Fun and Games Till They Start Blowing Up Weather Radars”By far the biggest number of Climate change’s victims are not human.
Foster homes needed.
Above, WFAA Dallas report.
Below, Houston TV report.
How does this make you feel?
If you go around as I have and talk to farmers, landowners and local officials about the purported effects of wind turbines on birds, you come away more and more convinced that the problem, such as it is, is way overblown.
Technology being used at two Tasmanian wind farms to avoid bird deaths from turbine blade strikes has drastically reduced wedge-tail eagle fatalities at the project sites, while resulting in an average of just 1 per cent curtailment of generation from turbine shutdowns.
Goldwind Australia’s Medard Boutry says the 144 MW Cattle Hill wind farm in Tasmania’s Central Highlands has not had any fatalities for more than a year and a half, since an upgrade to the project’s aerial monitoring and detection system, called Identiflight.
Identiflight, developed by US outfit company Boulder Imaging, uses machine vision and AI technology to detect, classify and analyse avian activity and – if protected bird species are detected – to temporarily shut down any wind turbines that present a risk to the bird.
A lot here.
Mann starts at 7:22 if you’re rushed. No surprise – warmer air holds more water.
Mann underlines how storms can entrain more moisture, and are more likely to stall in a climate changed world.
Lloyd Doggett is the Democrat representing the Austin, Texas area in the US House.
He has raised a number of questions about the Kerrville disaster in a letter to the National Weather Service, and in this interview on CNN.
And Greed. Greed kills, too.
Per a Thursday CNN report citing four FEMA officials, Noem recently enacted a requirement that DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000 be signed off by her office. As a result, the agency was unable to deploy proactive Urban Search and Rescue squads near anticipated areas of flooding, as it usually would. While state rescue teams sprang into action, “FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets”—and they didn’t receive it until Monday, at which point floodwaters had been raging for over 72 hours.
Texas’s request for aerial imagery to help with search and rescue efforts was also “delayed as it awaited Noem’s approval for the necessary contract,” and, at a FEMA-manned disaster call center, “callers have faced longer wait times as the agency awaited Noem’s approval for a contract to bring in additional support staff.”
Chris Tomlinson in Houston Chronicle (paywall):
Former Kerr County Commissioner Jonathan Letz, who retired in December, knew in 2016 that the flood risk was high and the warning system inadequate. Neighboring Comal County had spent about $300,000 to install a flood warning system with sirens.
Continue reading “Lesson from Texas Flood: Ignorance Kills”
But don’t worry.
This is not happening.
At least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees are set to leave under a push to shed staff, according to documents obtained by POLITICO — potentially spelling trouble for White House space policy and depriving the agency of decades of experience.
The 2,145 employees are those in GS-13 to GS-15 positions — senior-level government ranks that are typically reserved for those with specialized skills or management responsibilities. The losses are particularly concentrated at higher levels, with 875 GS-15 employees set to leave, according to the documents.
Continue reading “Bill Nye – 3 “Once in a Lifetime Floods” this Week”Venture Capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya above, appearing on the All In podcast, on why solar beats gas and nuclear right now. Same argument applies to wind.
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian-American venture capitalist, engineer, and politician. He’s the founder and CEO of Social Capital, a fund he established in 2011 to invest in overlooked sectors like education, health, and financial services. Palihapitiya was previously an early Facebook executive, serving as VP of Growth and helping the platform reach one billion users.
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I’ve spoken to a number of clean energy developers who tell me that for a number of reasons, they are not wavering from their course any time soon.
Utilities, for instance, plan on long time scales, much longer than the 2 and 4 year election cycles.
Production tax credits and Investment tax credits for wind and solar respectively have bounced up and down in response to political winds over the last 20 years. We are at the point now where these technologies are so much cheaper than the alternatives that they make sense with or without the tax credits, particularly in light of the increased cost and decreased availability of gas turbines, and long lead times for nuclear.
My biggest fear for the damage that the No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Bill will do is damage to the US Auto Industry, which would be in grave danger even in the best of all possible worlds. More on that another day.
The Senate version of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill repeals the clean-energy tax credits in the IRA for all wind and solar projects that don’t begin construction within a year of the bill’s passage or become fully operational by 2028. (And even if a project begins construction in the first half of 2026, it will need to meet extremely onerous domestic-sourcing requirements that many experts believe will be nearly impossible to satisfy.) As a result, future clean-energy projects, including many that have been announced but not yet built, will cost about 50 percent more than those that received the credits, according to an analysis by Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton ZERO Lab. The inevitable result is that far fewer will come into existence. “It’s hard to think of a bigger self-own,” Jenkins told me. “We’re effectively raising taxes on the country’s main sources of new power at a time when electricity prices are already rising.”
The purported justification for these cuts is that renewables are unreliable energy sources pushed by woke environmentalists, and the country would be better served by doubling down on coal and natural gas. “More wind and solar brings us the worst of two worlds: less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills,” wrote Energy Secretary Chris Wright in an op-ed last week. In fact, renewable energy is cheap and getting cheaper. Even without the tax credits, the price of onshore wind has fallen by 70 percent, solar energy by 90 percent, and batteries by more than 90 percent over the past decade. The IRA, by making these sources even more affordable, was projected to save American consumers an average of $220 a year in the decade after its passage.
Continue reading “Why Renewables Will Continue to Dominate”