Month: October 2025

Pseudo science is the wrecking ball that Project 2025 is using to move America back to the Middle Ages, and maximally empower the world’s most ruthless and lawless oligarchs.

And it’s been pretty effective.
Ask around, and I suspect almost everyone has now heard that “Tylenol causes autism”, while almost no one will have heard that the very charlatans who spread the disinformation have now disavowed it.
Rinse and repeat.

The Hill:

“We’ve all said from the beginning that the causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy … is not sufficient to say it definitely caused autism, but it is very suggestive,” Kennedy said. 

“And so there should be a cautious approach to it, and that’s why our message to patients, to mothers, to people who are pregnant, the mothers of young children, is consult your physician, and we have asked physicians to minimize the use to one that’s absolutely necessary,” Kennedy added.  

The secretary’s comments came more than a month after he and Trump held a press conference in September to specifically warn pregnant women against taking the medication, without citing any scientific evidence. 

Reuters:

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff to probe the potential harms of offshore wind farms, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The move is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to scrutinize offshore wind development, which Trump himself has repeatedly criticized.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: RFK Backs Down on Tylenol – Moves on to Wind Turbines”

Above, clip from a presentation by Dr Joseph Romm of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. He refers to a few of the major stumbling blocks to Small Modular Nuclear development.

New York Times:

Nuclear energy has emerged as a rare point of agreement between some Democrats and Republicans, and even between some climate advocates and the Trump administration. The greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear power are low, and it produces a constant hum of power, unlike solar and wind.

And public support has turned a corner in recent years: About 60 percent of U.S. adults now say they support building more nuclear power plants, up from 43 percent 2020, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.

Despite the vibe shift, the U.S. has fallen far behind China in the development of new nuclear plants, Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens report today.

“China is quickly becoming the global leader in nuclear power, with nearly as many reactors under construction as the rest of the world combined,” they write. Since 2013, the U.S. has built just two nuclear reactors. Over the same time period, China has built 13, with an additional 33 in the works.

Continue reading “Trump Tariffs Make New Nuclear a Heavy Lift”

Quaise is one of the competitors in the advanced Geothermal space, distinguished by the star-wars technology at the heart of their model.

Using microwave waves as a drill bit, the company is making rapid progress towards a practical scale demonstration, coming soon.

Quaise:

Quaise Energy, a leading developer of grid-scale superhot geothermal energy, today announced it has successfully drilled to a depth of 100 meters using its proprietary millimeter wave technology at its field site in Central Texas. This achievement sets a record for millimeter wave drilling and marks a major step forward in unlocking the Earth’s vast geothermal energy as a scalable, baseload energy source.

Quaise’s millimeter wave drilling system, developed after more than a decade of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), harnesses a powerful gyrotron to ablate rock for the first time without any downhole hardware. Unlike conventional drill bits, which struggle with hard, hot, rocks like granite and basalt, millimeter wave technology allows access to superhot rock—around 752 degrees Fahrenheit (400℃)—typically found deep within the Earth’s subsurface.

Accessing hotter rock deeper underground enables Quaise geothermal plants to generate many times more energy than traditional geothermal – opening up grid-scale projects that can match the power output of major fossil fuel plants.

“The Earth holds an enormous reservoir of clean energy — energy that could fundamentally change how we power our world if we can reach it,” said Carlos Araque, CEO and President of Quaise Energy. “Quaise has now demonstrated that millimeter wave technology can do what no other technology can do: drill perfectly clean holes through some of the hardest rocks on Earth in record time. This milestone brings us closer to making geothermal energy a practical solution to power communities virtually anywhere.”

File under Windows glitching again.

Or possibly “more evidence that those Epstein files have a lot of powerful people mentioned in them.“

Of course, the poor will suffer, but alas, was it not always so…

Guardian:

Bill Gates has called for a “strategic pivot” in the effort against the climate crisis, writing that the world should shift away from trying to limit rising temperatures to instead focusing on efforts to prevent disease and poverty.

Writing on his Gates Notes website, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder criticized what he described as a “doomsday view of climate change” which is focusing “too much on near-term emissions goals”.

Gates’s memo comes a day after the UN said humanity had missed its target of limiting global heating to 1.5C, with the UN secretary general warning of “devastating consequences” for the world.

In the note on Monday, Gates said: “Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

He said the Cop30 climate summit, which will bring together world leaders in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém in November, was “a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives”.

“Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare,” Gates wrote.

“The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”

Times of India:

In response to the post shared by Gates, US President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to claim victory over what he has long called the “climate change hoax.”
“I (WE) just won the war on the climate change hoax.Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!” wrote Trump.

Daniel Swain PhD on X:

I wanted to offer some thoughts on the Gates climate memo that has been circulating this week. While I can’t directly speak for others, I can say that my own response is one of dismay & deep frustration (and that this view is shared by many climate/Earth scientists)

Continue reading “Bill Gate’s Climate Memo Tone Deaf, Brain Dead, and Ill Timed”

Michael Mann on Hurricane Melissa, and some choice words on Bill Gate’s most recent climate comments.

Mr Global strikes again. Matt Randolph is VP and co founder of Sentinel Energy, an oil/gas firm in Oklahoma. Randolph blames energy price rises on the cost of transmission and distribution, and increased exports of natural gas, and the cancellation of renewable projects.
Below, Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy, one of the country’s largest utilities, reinforces that, saying “gas sets the price of energy, 90 percent of the time.”

Wall Street Journal:

America’s power bills are rising even faster than the cost of groceries.

Higher natural-gas prices are partly to blame. Utilities investing billions of dollars to stabilize the aging electric grid are passing those costs on to customers, too. And in some states, huge data centers are pushing power prices higher as electricity supplies tighten.

Electricity prices across the country have increased 4.5% in the past year, according to Labor Department data released Wednesday, topping the 2.2% jump in the price of groceries. More broadly, consumer prices rose 2.4% in May from a year earlier.

Electric bills are expected to keep climbing this summer along with the temperatures. The Energy Information Administration expects the average U.S. residential electric bill to be about 4% higher this summer than last, mostly because of a jump in natural-gas prices, the largest source of power generation. Natural gas deliveries to power plants will cost about 50% more from June through September than last year. 

Hugh Wynne, an analyst with Sector & Sovereign Research, said expected increases in liquefied natural gas exports are likely to continue to pressure power prices in the long term. “The more we export gas, the more the domestic price will begin to reflect the international price,” Wynne said.

Continue reading “If You Worry About Electricity Prices, You Aren’t Wrong”

Trump’s America is telling smart people they are not welcome here.

Washington Post:

Being one of the world’s greatest mathematicians didn’t protect Tao from losing his National Science Foundation grant in late July, when the Trump administration froze about half a billion dollars in federal research funding after accusing UCLA of mishandling antisemitism and bias on campus.

A court order restored National Science Foundation grants, including Tao’s. But no new awards can be made, putting at risk the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where he is director of special projects. Tao works in esoteric realms, which can lead to tangible real world benefits. For example, some of his work at IPAM has helped make MRI scans faster.

Q: A lot of people that I’ve been speaking to, researchers in different fields, have said that they’ll be okay because they’re more senior. But they’ve expressed a lot of concern about early career researchers and scientists.

A: The NSF grant that I had, I mean its primary purpose was to support my graduate students, give them the opportunity to travel to a conference, which is really important for career development at that stage, to buy them out of teaching for one quarter so that they can work on research. And, you know, at that career level, having a paycheck for $3,000 really makes a difference.

Q: You didn’t grow up in the United States. Why did you choose to build your career here?

A: I myself had no strong desire to leave Australia, and I was also 16 at the time — I wasn’t really thinking about geopolitics or anything. … The adviser I ended up studying under at Princeton was actually the one who wrote one of the most influential textbooks for me as an undergraduate. I distinctly remember the experience of going into Princeton’s math department the first time and looking at the list of professors and recognizing the names of people I’d read about in books.

Continue reading “Trump’s Disastrous Brain Drain”

A film that’s meant to shake us awake.

Nutshell of the very worthwhile TED talk above: If you purchase a bunch of solar panels from China, you are not beholden on China the way an oil dependent country is beholden to, say, OPEC.
Or US LNG if you like.
If the oil, or gas, is cut off, you are immediately in deep shit.
If someone cuts off solar panels, you continue as before, just look for another solar panel supplier, since the sun will always be there.

Which is a big clue as to why the Republican Party, a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, is working so hard to destroy democracy and consolidate power that cannot be controlled or questioned, and at the same time, dismantling of clean energy infrastructure at home, and powerful elements of the US military deploying in the Caribbean theater.

Al Jazeera:

Estimated at 303 billion barrels (Bbbl) as of 2023, Venezuela is home to the largest known reserves of oil.

Saudi Arabia ranks second with 267.2 Bbbl, followed by Iran at 208.6 Bbbl and Canada at 163.6 Bbbl. Together, these four countries account for more than half of global oil reserves.

The United States, by comparison, holds about 55 Bbbl, placing it ninth globally. This means that Venezuela’s reserves are more than five times larger than those of the US.

Globally, proven oil reserves, which measure the quantities of crude oil that are economically recoverable with current technology, total approximately 1.73 trillion barrels.

Continue reading “There is No OPEC for Clean Energy. Do We Get it Now?”

Above, John Morales, long time award winning South Florida meteorologist, becoming famous for his unscripted and visceral reactions to increasingly off the chain storms in the Caribbean.
The clip above should start at about 1:53 for John’s reaction to hurricane Melissa.

Below, former NOAA scientist and IPCC Lead Author Jim Kossin described to me his research confirming that the fingerprints of climate change are now showing up in hurricane data.