Month: October 2025

“Principles” and “Integrity” are just woke social constructs, anyway.

Detroit News, July 30, 2016:

Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has declared that his expansive political network would not support Donald Trump, questioning whether the Republican presidential nominee believes in free markets.
The decision was welcomed by many of the 400 donors who attended the weekend retreat, even though “a reasonably significant” number of attendees wanted the Koch network to support Trump, said Chris Wright, a Colorado-based energy entrepreneur.

“Terrible and truly awful are the two choices,” Wright said, suggesting that even if he voted for Trump in November — and that’s not decided — he wouldn’t go any further.

“We’re not going to give any money to support Donald Trump,” Wright explained.

Energy and Policy:

After Trump secured the GOP nomination last year, the Wrights contributed approximately $458,000 to the Trump 47 Committee, plus $289,000 to the RNC. 

Liberty Energy is listed as a sponsor of an upcoming Trump inaugural watch party in D.C., which will be hosted by oil and gas producer Harold Hamm, the CEO of Continental Resources. Hamm helped Trump raise millions of dollars during the 2024 election and then backed Wright for Secretary of Energy shortly before Trump announced Wright as his pick for the position in November. 

Continue reading “Energy Secretary Flexed Principle, and Cash, for Trump”

Bloomberg:

There’s a comforting story that oil bulls like to tell themselves to stave off worries about the future: While the privileged few in Europe and California might have lost their minds over electric vehicles, billions of drivers in the Global South are readying themselves to provide the next wave of petroleum demand.

Those who believe this might want to have a look at the cars and two-wheelers that people are actually buying right now. Far from trailing the rich world in their enthusiasm for battery cars, developing nations are surging ahead.

China (where plug-in vehicles have nearly half the market) gets most of the attention, but neighboring Vietnam isn’t far behind: Pure-play EV-maker VinFast Auto Ltd. accounted for more than a third of car sales in the first half of this year. Turkey’s 13% sales share for fully electric vehicles in the first quarter was about double the penetration rate in Spain and Australia, according to a survey by Strategy&. In Indonesia, the share was about the same as in the US, at 7.4%. In Malaysia, it was 8.6% in the first half.

Continue reading “Fossil Fuel’s Comforting Delusion”

I’ve posted recently about the challenges, if not impending train wrecks, for LNG and SMRs.
As we come up towards a the first full year of the most fossil fuel-centric administration in history, nothing I’m seeing makes me think I’m wrong.

Washington Post:

As President Donald Trump pressures world leaders to abandon the energy transition in favor of a U.S.-led fossil fuel resurgence, the status of India’s gas-fired power plants helps explain why his pitch isn’t getting much traction.

Half of that fleet in India is sitting idle. Although electricity demand is exploding, and the plants are designed to run for decades into the future, Indian officials have turned away from them. Their calculation: that renewable energy provides a cheaper and more reliable alternative.

“And you don’t have to depend on overseas nations for fuel,” said Sumant Sinha, CEO of ReNew, one of India’s largest renewable energy companies.

Last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) nearly halved its forecast of renewable energy growth in the United States, citing the end of tax incentives and other recent policy shifts. Tens of billions of dollars of manufacturing projects to build solar panels, batteries, charging stations and other clean technologies have already been canceled, with hundreds of billions of dollars of additional announced investments imperiled.

But even as U.S. political forces are working against the energy transition, economics are propelling it forward globally. While Trump brands renewables as a “green energy scam,” other countries are pivoting to solar and wind because dramatic price reductions have made them the cheapest options.

Continue reading “Trump War on Clean Energy a Massive Self Own, but is it Fatal?”

They voted for Trump. Now they’re being crushed by him. They still believe he cares about them. Common story these days, it seems.
—

..the national prevalence of black lung in miners who have worked 25 years or more now exceeds 10 percent. In central Appalachia, which includes Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, 20.6 percent of coal miners have evidence of the disease—the highest level recorded in 25 years.
American Industrial Hygiene Association

New York Times:

When coal miners came to Washington in April, they posed behind President Trump at the White House, wearing their hard hats and thanking him for trying to reinvigorate their struggling industry.

But on Tuesday dozens of miners and their families will be in a more unusual position: protesting the Trump administration outside the Labor Department building, arguing it has failed to protect them from black lung disease, an incurable illness caused by inhaling coal and silica dust.

They have been waiting months for the government to enforce federal limits on silica dust, a carcinogen that has led to a recent spike in the disease. But mining industry groups have sued to block the rule, and the Trump administration has paused enforcement while the lawsuit plays out.

Labor unions, Democrats and a growing number of miners accuse the Trump administration of ignoring workers while using hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies to bolster the companies that operate coal plants and mining operations.

“The companies might be getting a handout, but the miners ain’t getting none,” said Gary Hairston, 71, a retired coal miner from West Virginia who is the president of the National Black Lung Association. Mr. Hairston has been living with black lung disease since he was in his 40s.

Continue reading “Beautiful Black Lung Not a Concern for MAGA”

Wow.
Several cuts above normal AI slop. This made me laugh out loud.

Like a short “Black Mirror” episode, but rooted in actual facts the 2024 election, this film, an entrant at the Toronto International Film festival, fictionalizes the very real phenomena of foreign influence operations using social media to influence American politics.
Often, with the willing participation of American politicians.

CNN:

It’s hard to find a flat Earther who doesn’t believe most other conspiracies under the sun; a flat-Earth conference is invariably also a gathering of anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers and Illuminati subscribers, to name a few.

It’s that hyper-skeptical mindset that helps flat earthers answer the big questions – like who’s hiding the true shape of the planet from us?

“The ruling elite, from the royal family to the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds … all of those groups that run the world, they’re in on it,” says Weiss.

Continue reading “Bots: Short Film Examines Internet Disinformation”

Revolution Wind, the mammoth offshore project that was halted by the Trump administration even though 80 percent completed, was recently restarted following a Judge’s order.

What’s new here is how working with the wind project has been a boon for local fishermen, and a quantification of the potential increased costs for New England ratepayers.

In case you were wondering.

NPR:

Last spring, tens of millions of people lost electricity across Spain, Portugal and part of France. Trains stopped in their tracks, and people were stuck in elevators, as southwestern Europe went without power for — in some cases — more than ten hours.

Immediately, the finger-pointing began. Many people blamed solar and wind energy. Spain, one of Europe’s front runners in renewable energy, gets about 46% of its power from solar and wind, according to the think tank Ember— sometimes more than 70%.

In the hours after the outage The Daily Mailpublished the headline “Could renewable energy be to blame for huge Spain blackout?”

And on the day of the outage U.S. energy secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright went on CNBC to talk about the outage and criticized solar and wind. “When you hitch your wagon to the weather,” Wright said, “it’s just a risky endeavor.”

The idea that solar and wind are inherently risky and unreliable is a common talking point for critics of renewable energy, often repeated by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry. It’s false. When renewable energy is paired with large batteries or other forms of grid management, it’s proven to be reliable.

Now a new report from an expert panel of European grid operators details what happened. The report finds that for the first time in Europe, a voltage surge caused the massive outage. Voltage needs to remain within limits for an electrical grid to work. While many things went wrong, the problem was not a power grid with too much wind or solar, says Chris Rosslowe, a senior energy analyst at Ember who was not involved in drafting the report.

“It contradicts the numerous claims that we’ve seen that an overreliance on renewables was the cause,” Rosslowe says. “That is clearly not true.”

Continue reading “Study: Spain’s Blackout Not Caused by Renewables”

"Humans are not causing it."

In conversation with Joe Rogan, scientist and author Gregg Braden debunks the man-made climate change narrative, citing 420,000 years of ice core data showing temperature rises precede CO₂ increases.

He argues that natural geologic and oceanic… pic.twitter.com/iPVZKHSPxX

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) October 8, 2025

Above, clip from an appearance on the MAGA-centric Joe Rogan podcast, where Greg Braden, a self proclaimed scientist with a history, he says of communing with extra-dimensional beings, repeats verbatim the infamous “Temp Leads Carbon” Crock, which I thought I plunged a stake in 15 years ago, with the video here.

In the video below, Braden describes “meeting God”, as well as “higher dimensional life force, ..maybe from outside the simulation.”
Also, dark warning about “UN sustainability goals” which will force us to “surrender our humanness.”

Continue reading “Climate Denial’s Newest Crank Revives an Old Crock”

Why does MAGA want to politicize the weather?
So they can piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining.

Don’t need a weatherman to know that blows.

Former NOAA expert interviewed above mentions Donald Trump’s use of a sharpie to alter satellite weather forecasts, and resulting fallout at the agency.
CBS reviewed the “soviet style” case when one of the malignant players was nominated to be new head of the agency.

Little appreciated is that the 80 year primacy of the US economy and the US dollar globally is in large part built on the trust earned world wide in our science and technology establishement.
Tearing that apart will have a cost.