Bonehead ICE raid at still-under-construction Georgia Battery Facility. ICE arrested hundreds of Korean engineers and technicians who were here to train American workers for good paying jobs. All of the workers have elected to go home. Many will refuse to come back. Gigantic red flag message sent to all potential investors in the US. Great job, team.
The electric-vehicle battery plant under construction in Georgia — a joint venture between Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, which is part of the broader LG Group — represents a significant foreign investment in the United States. In 2023, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) called it “the largest project in state history.”
The Trump administration touted last week’s raid at a partially constructed Hyundai-LG car battery plant in Georgia as a victory for American labor and evidence that he won’t tolerate unauthorized workers.
But immigration and manufacturing experts say the episodelays bare how U.S. immigration rules hamper foreign companies from bringing in workers crucial to building modern manufacturing centers that President Donald Trump and his predecessors have pursued and that would ultimately employ tens of thousands of American workers.
Nobody deserves to get shot, and violence is completely unacceptable. I fear this terrible incident is putting a target on everyone, left and right. That said, nobody should get a pass for deliberately spreading destructive mistruths and lies, and everyone with a platform is ultimately responsible for their public pronouncements.
Mr. Kirk frequently dismissed concerns about climate change, even as polling showed that young conservative voters prioritize the issue. He said incorrectly that there was no scientific consensus on global warming.
He also rejected the idea that climate change posed an existential threat to humanity, describing it as “complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash” in December 2024 to members of Turning Point UK, the British offshoot of Turning Point USA.
Last month, Mr. Kirk’s podcast featured Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who has called global warming “not incredibly important.”
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I’ve made the connection many times between racism and climate denial, and Charlie Kirk fits the pattern. Mehdi Hassan has a collection of gems.
“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” (source)
Black pilots
“If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ’Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” (source)
Black women
“They’re coming out, and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’ Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” (source)
Civil rights
“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.” (source)
The death penalty
“[The death penalty] should be public, should be quick, should be televised… I think at a certain age, it’s an initiation… At what age should you start to see public executions?” (source)
Democrats
“The Democrat Party supports everything that God hates.” (source)
Empathy
“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage.” (source)
Feminism
“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” (source)
Gay people
“You might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture, is in Leviticus 18 is that, ‘thou shalt lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just sayin’! So Miss Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19… the chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” (source)
“It’s not a Great Replacement Theory, it’s a Great Replacement Reality. Just this year, 3.6 million foreigners will invade America. 10-15 million will enter by the end of Joe Biden’s term. Each will probably have 3-5 kids on average while native born Americans have 1.5 per couple. You are being replaced, by design.” (source)
Guns
“It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” (source)
An hour before dinner service begins at Ikoyi, a small two Michelin-starred restaurant at 180 Strand in central London, the open kitchen is a hive of activity. It’s also close to completely silent.
The zen-like atmosphere extends to the stove, a sleek, shining black slab at the center of the kitchen. No gas here — the restaurant uses a four-ring induction stove, installed two and a half years ago when Ikoyi moved to this site.
The switch to induction means the restaurant is cooler, the cooking process more exact, and nothing is at risk of accidentally catching alight on a gas burner, says Jeremy Chan, the restaurant’s head chef. Chan says he still loves the earthy, emotional experience of cooking with gas, but in the end he picked induction for its safety, efficiency and practicality.
Most importantly, it gives him confidence that his chefs can follow his recipes absolutely to the letter, meaning every dish coming out of the kitchen meets the high standard he expects. He now has an induction stove in his home, too. “As much as I love [gas], I’m never going back to it,” he says.
Chan is part of a quiet movement of chefs who are making the same transition. Gas stoves run on methane, which produces carbon dioxide when burned, contributing to carbon emissions. They are also linked to respiratory health problems, including asthma, and using a gas range at home contributes to some 40,000 premature deaths in the UK and European Union each year, according to research published in 2024.
Trump on Truth Social, Aug. 20: “Any State that has built and relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS. THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!”
The facts: The four states where wind and solar produce the greatest share of electricity — Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas and New Mexico — are among the 20 cheapest states for electricity, according to federal data. Despite the upfront cost, wind and solar are immune from price spikes on the gas market, and the rapid drop in battery prices means pairing them with storage is increasingly competitive with fossil fuel plants.
In fact, analysis of federal data by University of Oxford scientist Hannah Ritchie showed there’s not much correlation between a state’s resource mix and prices. Most renewable-heavy states have lower rates, but California has some of the costliest electricity, in part because of utility spending on wildfire prevention.
Senate Democrats on X, Sept. 8: “Prices are up on groceries, utilities, healthcare … This is all a result of the Trump administration’s chaotic policies.”
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Aug. 7: “The big ugly bill is going to mean a lot of big ugly energy bills arriving in the mail for Americans around the country.”
U.S. demand for power is indisputably growing for the first time in a decade. Tech firms are building massive data centers to serve our needs for artificial intelligence, cat videos and social media posts. Texas just registered the state’s 400,000th electric vehicle.
Yet it seems like the White House doesn’t want utilities to meet that new demand — at least not with clean, affordable energy. Instead, the administration is pushing expensive fossil fuels that will damage the climate.
Next on Trump’s chopping block is the $6 billion Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which was scheduled to begin construction next year and employ thousands of workers. Earlier, Trump tried to cancel New York’s $5 billion Empire Wind offshore project but relented when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to allow construction of new natural gas pipelines.
Trump’s campaign against clean energy has killed $18.6 billion in clean energy projects within the last year, according to the Atlas Public Policy Center’s Clean Energy Tracker. U.S. renewable energy spending is down 36% this year while global investment rose 10%, energy consulting firm BloombergNEF reported.
The fracking services company Chris Wright founded has lost +50 percent of its value since he took over at DOE
Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a pseudo intellectual clown of the highest order. Perfect fit for this cabinet of fools. I thought I was the only one noticing his continued meltdown on social media. Rob Meyer is scratching his head at HeatMap, (below) but it’s really very simple. Wright is a devious deceptive shill for fossil fuels. He knows his audience is Fox-addled MAGA morons, and he’s out to make more money for himself and the oligarchs he seeks to emulate.
An intensive influence campaign seeks to resurrect a “nuclear renaissance” from the industry’s slow-motion collapse documented in the independent annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Claims that past failures won’t recur have convinced many politicians that socializing nuclear investments rejected by private capital markets, weakening or bypassing rigorous safety regulation, suppressing market competition, and commanding military reactor and data-center projects as a national-security imperative will restore nuclear expansion and transform the economy.
This illusion neatly fits the industry’s business-model shift from selling products to harvesting subsidies.
A few awkward facts intrude. Even the most skilled firms and nations keep delivering big reactors with several times the promised cost and construction time. A swarm of startup firms that have never built a reactor are dubiously rebranding their inexperience as a winning advantage. New designs are said to be so safe they don’t need normal precautions (though not safe enough to waive nuclear energy’s unique exemption from accident liability). Political interference in nuclear licensing is eroding public confidence. Proposed smaller reactors cost more per kWh, produce more nuclear waste per kWh, and often need more-concentrated fuel directly usable for nuclear weapons.
And nuclear power faces the same fundamental challenges as fossil fuels: uncompetitive costs, runaway competitors, dwindling profits, and uncertain demand. Few if any vendors have made profits selling reactors — only fueling and fixing them. Nuclear electricity loses in open auctions, so only Congressional bailouts — $27 billion ($15 billion paid out) in 2005, $133 billion in 2021-22, tens of billions more in 2025 — saved most existing U.S. reactors from closure.
Now comes another vision: powering the glorious new world of artificial intelligence. This may be a trillion-dollar bubble, but it’s sellable until market realities intervene. The International Energy Agency expects data centers, mostly non-AI, to cause only a tenth of global electricity demand growth to 2030, doubling their share of usage — to just 3%. So AI won’t eat the grid. But IEA forecasts renewables will power data-center growth10-20 times over, while Bloomberg NEF predicts over 100. Nuclear lost the race to power the grid, so new reactors have no business case or operational need.
For months now, the popular comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan has been telling his vast audience of a study that shows Earth is cooling – even though this research states the complete opposite.
Rogan’s false claim about the climate crisis, which he has repeatedly aired on the Joe Rogan Experience, one of the world’s most popular podcasts, has exasperated the scientists who authored the research.
It has also highlighted the tide of climate misinformation that regularly emanates from some of the biggest podcasts in the US – outlets where many Americans, particularly younger people, now get their news.
“Joe is speaking to his audience and they want it to be entertaining, I get it, but it concerns me because he isn’t giving the right message,” said Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the research frequently mentioned by Rogan.
“I’ve watched his clips and gone: ‘Oh jeez.’ I can only laugh sometimes. But it is a bummer that these podcasts with large audiences are spewing this old-school denier nonsense. It’s not helpful. In the US, people are in silos now and climate scientists can’t easily reach people who aren’t sure how climate change works. It’s not a healthy situation.”
