Month: December 2025

Who Believes in Climate Change? Insurance Companies..

New York Times writers invited readers to submit their experience with climate related Home Insurance costs.

Claire Brown of the New York Times (via email):

We heard many horror stories about rate increases in places like Florida and California, where insurance markets have been turbulent for years. But we also heard similar anecdotes out of states like Ohio, Maryland and Massachusetts, where disasters are less frequent but homeowners say they’re seeing rates climb by 30 percent or more year after year.

A condo owner in Texas, a Dallas senior on a fixed income, said that her annual premium jumped to $1,239 in 2024, a 63 percent rise from the year prior, with no increase in coverage.

In Minnesota, a homeowner’s rates are set to jump up to between $6,000 and $8,000 after their insurer stopped offering coverage. They previously paid $3,300.

In the Colorado mountains, one reader saw their premiums climb to $8,600 last year, a more than a threefold increase over the past 15 years. They switched insurers.

A homeowner in New Orleans said their total home insurance costs, including flood protection, had jumped to about $21,100 a year, up from $3,800 in 2015.

One clear theme: Readers say insurance companies are not providing clear or detailed explanations for rising rates, and a lot of people feel as if they’re paying for someone else’s risk.

“It is as though we are being held up by the mafia,” wrote one Minnesota reader who saw rates for a small homeowners’ association more than triple since 2021. “We have to have insurance, but the coverage we have is abysmal.”

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Trump Administration Promises Kept, as Child Deaths Soar

One of the most toxic, vile, repulsive and hypocritical grifters in a cabinet full of them is Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fracking millionaire who raised his profile on the right wing climate denial circuit crying performative crocodile tears about the poor children in Africa, denied the benefits of electricity by evil environmentalist who worry about, in his telling, inconsequential climate change.

So, how is he doing now that he is in a position of power?

Wall Street Journal:

The number of deaths of children under 5 years old is projected to rise this year for the first time in decades, the Gates Foundation, the philanthropy chaired by billionaire Bill Gates that is a major funder of global health and development causes, said in a report Thursday. 

About 243,000 more children under 5 years have died or will die this year than in 2024, according to the projections, which were made by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which measures global-health indicators and is funded in part by the Gates Foundation.

Driving the shift, Gates said, is a 27% decline in global health aid from donors in wealthy countries, including the U.S. and some European governments. Such aid pays for medicine, health clinics and workers, food and other needs for children in poor countries.

The reductions include the Trump administration’s cutting and reorganizing of the U.S. Agency for International Development. “I believe that was a gigantic mistake, and that’s partly why we’ve had the turmoil and increase in deaths this year,” Gates said.

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Is Africa an Awakening Renewable Giant?

Good report above makes it clear that although some drive exists to exploit fossil fuels in Africa, there is a clear tailwind for renewable development, particularly the huge solar, wind, and hydro resources, and lack of a built out grid system, which encourages distributed resources.

Pakistan has shown how quickly cheap solar panels can upend assumptions about energy demand. Africa could be next.

Ember:

The first evidence of a take-off in solar in Africa is now here:

  • The last 12 months saw a big rise in Africa’s solar panel imports. Imports from China rose 60% in the last 12 months to 15,032 MW. Over the last two years, the imports of solar panels outside of South Africa have nearly tripled from 3,734 MW to 11,248 MW.
  • The rise happened across Africa. 20 countries set a new record for the imports of solar panels in the 12 months to June 2025. 25 countries imported at least 100 MW, up from 15 countries 12 months before.
  • These solar panels will provide a lot of electricity. The solar panels imported into Sierra Leone in the last 12 months, if installed, would generate electricity equivalent to 61% of the total reported 2023 electricity generation, significantly adding to electricity supply. They would add electricity equivalent to over 5% to total reported electricity generation in 16 countries.
  • Solar panel imports will reduce fuel imports. The savings from avoiding diesel can repay the cost of a solar panel within six months in Nigeria, and even less in other countries. In nine of the top ten solar panel importers, the import value of refined petroleum eclipses the import value of solar panels by a factor of between 30 to 107.
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Rock Eating Bugs Might Be Miner’s Newest Tool

Scientific American:

“Microbes are the world’s oldest miners,” says Liz Dennett, founder and CEO of the start-up Endolith Mining, based near Denver, Colo. “They’ve had billions of years to become incredibly good at eating rocks.”

Scientists at Endolith and elsewhere are engineering microbes to get even better at this process, called biomining—to work faster, extract more copper and even pull out other kinds of minerals. Endolith tests different microbes to see which are most fit for the job and then exposes them to harsh conditions to further strengthen them. “Think of it like a superhero training camp,” Dennett says. In May the company’s engineered microbes demonstrated copper extraction superior to microbes found in nature; its first field deployments are scheduled for later this year.

Biomining, if it can be scaled up, could make it possible to decrease reliance on global supply chains, which are becoming ever more fragile. “If we can make biomining work, we can break the monopoly that states like China have on critical metals,” says Buz Barstow, a biological and environmental engineer at Cornell University. Barstow is leading a project called the Microbe-Mineral Atlas that catalogs microorganisms, their genes and how they interact with minerals. The project’s goal is to build genetically engineered microorganisms that can effectively mine critical metals.

Wall Street Journal:

The metal is coming from Gunnison Copper’s Johnson Camp mine, where excavation stopped in 2010 when the previous owners reached ores that weren’t rich enough to profitably process. It is being restarted in partnership with Rio Tinto’s RIO  Nuton venture, which uses microbes to strip copper from ores that are otherwise uneconomical to mine.

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Pakistan’s Solar Boom a Warning for Trump’s Fossil Plans

Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a fracking millionaire, so no surprise, he views every global problem as waiting to be solved with more gas and more drilling (and more profits for him and his friends).
So a big thrust in Trump’s energy policy has been pushing huge investments to expand Liquified Natural Gas facilities on the US Gulf Coast, and pressuring other countries, particularly in the developing world, to become more dependent on fossil gas and US exports.
There are signs that strategy may have some blind spots. Like, do developing countries really want to be dependent long term on a country (the US) that has now shown itself to be treacherous and double dealing to it’s long time friends, much less the rest of the world, that our President so delicately calls “shithole countries”.

World Resources Institute:

Pakistan has witnessed one of the most rapid and unanticipated transitions to clean energy, driven largely by homes and businesses installing rooftop solar panels. In just a few years, the country’s electric grid transformed from negligible solar power to an expected 20% of all its electricity coming from solar by 2026.

What began as modest adoption under a 2015 incentive program turned into a mass phenomenon a decade later, with households, businesses and farmers rapidly turning to solar. While energy transitions are often imagined as a complicated political process that requires long-term planning, international climate finance or industrial policy, Pakistan proves a different story is possible: A revolution driven by market forces, rather than climate-driven or state-led green policies.

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Elizabeth Kolbert: Climate Crisis on a Little Known Planet

Elizabeth Kolbert has been tireless in documenting the Climate Crisis as a writer for the New Yorker, and author of a number of books on the topic.
I met Kolbert in Greenland, when we both hopped a chopper to a remote research site on the ice sheet.
John Stewart asks a lot of the questions that normal citizens might ask.

“Narco Terrorists” are the New WMDs

Richard Steiner in Raw Story :

President Donald Trump’s saber-rattling about potential military action in Venezuela is indeed about drugs, but not cocaine. It is about a far more dangerous drug that former President George W. Bushadmitted (in his 2006 State of the Union address) the US is addicted to.

Oil.

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world — 300 billion barrels — even larger than reserves in Saudi Arabia.

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Disasters, Grid Outages becoming “a Fact of Life”

Almost like something weird is going on.

Utility Dive:

U.S. electricity customers experienced an average of 11 hours of power outages in 2024, nearly twice as many as the annual average across the previous decade, according to a new report from the Energy Information Administration.

Hurricanes accounted for 80% of those lost hours, with most of last year’s outages resulting from major weather events like hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton, EIA said in the report released Monday.

“Interruptions attributed to major events averaged nearly nine hours in 2024, compared with an average of nearly four hours per year in 2014 through 2023,” EIA said. “Service interruptions that aren’t triggered by major events routinely average about two hours per year.”

Customers in South Carolina were significant outliers in terms of outage duration, the report said, experiencing an average of 53 hours of outages in 2024. Much of this was due to last September’s Hurricane Helene, which left 1.2 million customers in South Carolina without electricity.

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Mr Global: Why Venezuela Will Be Trump’s Debacle

Markets rule.

Matt (Mr Global) Randolph points out that even if you buy into the “take the oil” rationale for a military regime change operation, Venezuelan oil costs $90/barrel to extract, in a world where current oil prices are $60/barrel, and falling.
Could hardly be a clearer illustration of the “greed is good” stupidity of the MAGA regime. Makes George Dubya look like Talleyrand.

Google AI overview:

Venezuelan oil is predominantly heavy and sour, meaning it is dense and high in sulfur, making it difficult to process. This “sour crude” is often mixed with lighter crudes or upgraded before it can be refined into standard products like gasoline and diesel. While some refineries, especially along the US Gulf Coast, are specifically equipped to process this heavy crude, other issues like poor quality control, high water and salt content, and lack of investment have further impacted its quality and marketability. 

Key characteristics

  • Heavy and sour: Most of Venezuela’s reserves consist of extra-heavy crude oil, which is dense and has a high sulfur content.
  • Requires specialized processing: This type of crude needs to be processed by specialized, more complex refineries.
  • Can be high in contaminants: Problems like high levels of water, salt, and metals have been reported, sometimes due to a lack of chemicals and equipment for proper treatment. 
Continue reading “Mr Global: Why Venezuela Will Be Trump’s Debacle”