Really good scientific detective work, over years, gives enhanced picture of just how much extreme events impact mortality, for months, and even decades after the initial event. This helps explain a mystery that epidemiologists have grappled with for some time – excess mortality in the US Southeast. The video touches on hurricanes, but also extreme heat, and the newcomer, wildfire smoke, which is becoming impactful in areas where air quality has not historically been an issue, but most definitely is now.
This @WSJ piece on Trump, Witkoff and Kushner's venality for Russian business deals from which they will personally profit at the price of selling Ukraine into Russian slavery and despair is devastating and ugly. https://t.co/uAUaOkz5TR
The Wall Street Journal has an impactful piece dissecting the Trump administration’s “peace” process, which is, exactly like everything else in this regime, a grift for the wealthy and powerful to become more wealthy and powerful, driven in large part by greed to control the world’s fossil resources.
As I have been saying for a very long time to anyone that will listen, if you back up 50,000 miles from planet Earth, and squint a little bit, what you see behind most of the political machinations that dominate the headlines is the single minded, coordinated, well funded and international effort of the fossil fuel industry and its component corporations and petro-states, to preserve, expand and prolong indefinitely, their power and influence, notwithstanding any collateral damage to democracy, rule of law, or the health of the planetary life support system.
For many in the Trump White House, that blurring of business and geopolitics is a feature, not a bug. Key presidential advisers see an opportunity for American investors to snap up lucrative deals in a new postwar Russia and become the commercial guarantors of peace. In conversations with Witkoff and Kushner, Russia has been clear it would prefer U.S. businesses to step in, not rivals from European states whose leaders have “talked a lot of trash” about the peace effforts, one of these people said: “It’s Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’ to say, ‘Look, I’m settling this thing and there’s huge economic benefits for doing that for America, right?’”
A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win.
Rep. Don Bacon, R – Nebraska
– Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia’s biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project if Moscow and Washington gave the green light.
Elsewhere, a cast of businessmen close to the Trump administration have been looking to position themselves as new economic links between the U.S. and Russia.
Gentry Beach, a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and campaign donor to his father, has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project if it is released from sanctions. Another Trump donor, Stephen P. Lynch, paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr. who is helping him seek a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.
President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that the United States is preparing to take new action against alleged drug trafficking networks in Venezuela, telling service members during a Thanksgiving call that efforts for strikes on land will be starting “very soon.”
“In recent weeks, you’ve been working to deter Venezuelan drug traffickers, of which there are many. Of course, there aren’t too many coming in by sea anymore,” Trump told service members in the call.
“You probably noticed that people aren’t wanting to be delivering by sea, and we’ll be starting to stop them by land also,” the president continued. “The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon.
Like clockwork. Snow arrives and climate deniers lose their freaking minds.
There are insights to had in the Rutgers University Snow Lab data. What might at first glance be puzzling, for instance, while overall annual snow cover is decreasing, Fall Snow extent in the Northern Hemisphere is increasing in recent decades. This does make sense if we understand that with more moisture in the air, those first few puffs of sub-freezing air are going to cause some precipitation.
Likewise, Northern Hem Winter extent is showing a small rise. In some places, like northern Russia and Siberia, the increase in open water in the Arctic Ocean can create even deeper snowfall due to increased evaporation.
The greatest impact of a warming planet is most clearly visible in spring snowfall.
FYI, Chinese Government backed news source above, but the basic facts are easily confirmed. A new, Chinese funded port facility in Peru is both an outlet for increasing soy and other ag exports to China, and an ingress for Chinese manufactured good, most importantly in my mind, for EVs, as China gobbles up the most rapidly growing world markets with electric vehicles that have a very competitive price and cost of ownership.
Better to be “anti-woke” than experienced or competent.
Washington Post reporting suggests that nuclear’s long term problems may be exacerbated by Trump Administration incompetence, corruption and good-ol-boy logrolling. Kind of a “holy shit” light bulb moment of an article.
The fledgling Texas company Fermi America has yet to produce an electron, split an atom or survive the torturous gantlet of regulatory and manufacturing obstacles required to build a nuclear reactor.
But investors are betting big that the Trump administration will help Fermi turn froma glossy, aspirational marketing brochure into a cutting-edge nuclear operation to meet the rapacious energy needs of AI data centers. So much so that they catapulted its founders into the ranks of the world’s richest men a few months after Fermi filed paperworkwith regulators to build the “Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.”
Typically, a company’s revenue, track record and market advantage drive valuations. But in the age of President DonaldTrump’s promised nuclear revival, shareholders and backerssee connections to the White House as the road to profitability, investment analysts and longtime industry insiders say.
Fermi was founded by three men: Rick Perry, who served as Texas governor and was U.S. energy secretary during Trump’s first term;Perry’s investor son; and the son of a former Texas congressman celebrated by the right when he founded an “anti-woke” bank that later failed.
Money is speech. Lying is speech too, right? Just not telling you what we’re doing to make worse the problem that we knew about in the 70’s, but covered up and obfuscated for 40 years.
Exxon, an oil firm consistently ranked among the world’s top contributors to global carbon emissions, is suing the state of California over two climate-focused state laws, arguing that the rules infringe upon the corporation’s right to free speech.
The 2023 laws, known collectively as the California Climate Accountability Package, will require large companies doing business in the state to disclose both their planet-heating carbon emissions and their climate-related financial risks, or face annual penalties.
The laws would thereby force Exxon to “serve as a mouthpiece for ideas with which it disagrees”, says the lawsuit, filed in the US district court for the eastern district of California on Friday.
Asked for comment, Exxon referred the Guardian to the lawsuit. The state of California was not immediately available for comment.
Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, told the New York Times it was “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency”, adding that the laws “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.”
Exxon is asking the court to block the enforcement of the laws, which is set to begin in 2026. The company already reports emissions and climate risks voluntarily, using different methodologies, it said in the lawsuit.
“New research shared with The New York Times estimates the extent to which rising home insurance premiums, driven higher by climate change, are cascading into the broader real estate market and eating into home values in the most disaster-prone areas.
The study, which analyzed tens of millions of housing payments through 2024 to understand where insurance costs have risen most, offers first-of-its-kind insight into the way rising insurance rates are affecting home values.
Since 2018, a financial shock in the home insurance market has meant that homes in the ZIP codes most exposed to hurricanes and wildfires would sell for an average of $43,900 less than they would otherwise, the research found. They include coastal towns in Louisiana and low-lying areas in Florida.”
Changes in an under-the-radar part of the insurance market, known as reinsurance, have helped to drive this trend. Insurance companies purchase reinsurance to help limit their exposure when a catastrophe hits. Over the past several years, global reinsurance companies have had what the researchers call a “climate epiphany” and have roughly doubled the rates they charge home insurance providers.
According to the Official Data Foundation’s analysis of government data, auto insurance premiums have increased 161% since 2008, outpacing general inflation by a wide margin. In the same timeframe, insured losses related to hailstorms — a major driver of auto claims — have increased fivefold in the U.S., costing an estimated $10 billion annually. Research has linked climate change to larger hailstones, which can produce deeper and bigger dents.
I still spend a decent amount of time engaging with folks who disagree with me on X (nee Twitter). One thing there has recently caught my eye is the integration of Grok, xAI’s large language model (LLM), into twitter engagements. Users can ask Grok questions and get answers, and in many cases (particularly for scientific questions) these answers are not necessarily what they are looking for:
Grok is somewhat of an outlier in the LLM space as its developers have tried to manipulate its outputs to fit their ideological priors (with some unfortunate results). But even Grok is surprisingly consistent at giving scientifically accurate answers to questions about topics like climate change, vaccines, evolution, GMOs, and others where the US public tends to be divided along ideological lines.
