Working

 After a great deal of deliberation, I rented a tractor-backhoe to do some heavy landscaping on the property we are building our retirement home. Felt I could save some money. (The tractor did what tractors do: it broke down halfway through the first of the two days I rented it.)

What was striking was that I planned the rental around a brief heat wave in order not to die. Instead, I had to worry about whether I could breathe the air, as Canada is once again on fire and the sky is choked with smoke.

The good news is that I'm sure I can bet on whether the World Cup final in New Jersey will be played under air quality that is basically the same as being inside a chimney. 

Vandalism

 Buried in Richardson's "documentation of the atrocities" is this nugget:

Aligning with Project 2025, which criticizes federal science programs for paying too much attention to climate change, the Trump administration is also tearing out a $368 million deep-ocean observation system along the Pacific Coast that monitors marine ecosystems, coastal environments, and the ocean currents that affect climate change. Eric Niiler of the New York Times reported that the U.S. began operating the system in 2016 and expected it to continue for 25 years.

The system is in place. It is not a budgetary drain, and I would guess tearing it out will cost money. As we enter a "Super El Nino" cycle, monitoring these ocean currents is really important to understand what the weather will be for the next two years.

There are countless other examples of this rampant vandalism, of which the destruction of the East Wing of White House and turning the reflecting pool on the National Mall into an aboveground pool are only the most obvious physical examples.

We are building our retirement home, and as we have a decent sized pile of money to pay for the build, we wanted to place solar panels on the roof to reduce our monthly bills, once we become fixed income retirees. There had been in place a sizable tax credit for installing solar, and because we want to have as robust a solar array as possible, we could really have benefitted from that. Without getting into details, the difference in cost between what these panels would have cost us last year versus this year is enough to buy a small car.

The only reason to do this is from an ideological obsession with hurting the plans of anyone to operate independently of large utilities and petrochemical companies. It hurts Americans who just want to control their (spiking) energy costs. 

These are policies, and policies are easily changed by future Democratic administrations (providing we have democratic elections), but man, this is going to hurt, ironically because the median voters was upset over nominal prices.

The Hungarian Solution

 Richardson's run down of the news from yesterday is...quite something. The following news stories dropped or were expanded upon:

- The Secretary of Transportation has spent a great deal of his term filming a reality show (his background) on a road trip.
- A No-Bid contract awarded to a Trump crony to paint the bottom of the reflecting pool to mirror an aboveground pool.
- The Iran War's stated cost of $25 billion is simply an equipment cost, not the various other costs that the war has incurred and will continue to incur.
- FEMA is denying aid to states run by Democrats.
- Trump us using "national emergency" to gut the Clean Air Act without letting Congress weigh in.
- Trump's latest tariffs were ruled illegal.
- Trump's cultists unveiled a 22 foot gold statue of Trump at his Florida golf course, in order to get more crypto lucre.

She then concludes with the lead story, which is the Virginia Supreme Court, on partisan lines, ruling that the new gerrymandered maps - which were approved by the Virginia electorate - was unconstitutional under Virginia law. 

In terms of partisan politics, this latest iteration of courts denying Democrats the same relief that they routinely provide Republicans is a gut punch to Democrats hoping to impose a political cost on Republican efforts to destroy majority rule in this country.

The only solution is the example that Hungary offers. Orban entrenched his rule even more soundly than Republicans have, but a massive wave overwhelmed his gerrymander and negated his control of the media. The lived experience was greater than efforts to control the narrative and people threw him out.

The overwhelming corruption of the Trump Administration is going to be increasingly difficult for Fox News to cover up. Gas prices aren't coming down. Food is going to become more expensive. Meanwhile, Trump is squandering money on ballrooms, reflecting pools and wars of choice.

The news from Virginia and about the Voting Rights Act was a gut punch. As Josh Marshall keeps reminding us, the Courts are currently handmaidens to the death of American Democracy. (Not ALL of the Courts, but enough and obviously the Supreme Court.) However, without the consent of the governed, government is illegitimate. Hopefully in November, the Blue Wave is high enough to swamp any barriers put in its place. 

The Red Line

 Republicans are apparently aware of how diminished, even insane, Trump is. His callousness, his vulgarity, his wanton cruelty - these are not unknown to the Washington GOP. His senility and the creatures who surround him - the mental midgets who engineered the Iran War, for instance - have likely given them some pause.

Anyway, Trump has shifted his belligerence back to Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve. In some ways, this is just his typical wounded-animal-thrashing-about style. However, for the Senate GOP, this is shaping up to be a huge test of their ability to put country over party. Many of them have made their deals with the devil - think Lindsay Graham - to stay on the Malevolent Orange Slob's good side. Sabotaging the Fed would be catastrophic to the US and global economy. 

Quite of a few of the people I read were bemoaning the collapse in American support for renewable energy. The world will still move ahead with renewables, because they make sense. Globally, we will continue to scale upwards. Once Trump is gone, we can try and catch up. 

If Trump ends the Fed's independence, that's the sort of catastrophe that will reverberate for a decade of decline and ruin. Are there enough sane, rational people left the Senate GOP to stop him?

Surprised By The Unsurprising

 Anyone with the sense Dog gave a Labrador retriever would have known that Iran would strangle the Straits of Hormuz. Anyone with the sense that Dog gave a guinea pig would have known that there are thousands of Americans and other nationals in the Gulf and they might want to be evacuated.

When people say that we "rushed" to war with Iran, we do know mean that this was a last minute decision. it certainly seems like this was weeks in the planning. It is precisely the incoherence and incompetence of this "plan" that has sober people concerned. Iran has likely been planning for this since last June, but really for decades. It is not clear that Trump and his crew of podcasters and Fox News personalities have done anything but dust off some old Pentagon contingency plans.

This has led to Trump apparently brow beating oil executives to bring down prices of a global commodity that he has just imperiled. "I've cocked things up, but I'm relying on you guys to fix it." Apparently, he didn't even bother to refill the strategic oil reserve before launching this war.

If anything, our latest foray into the chaos of the Middle East should remind us that renewable energy is not just environmentally sound, but it makes sense in terms of economics and national security.

Corruption

 When the Whigs - both American and English - talked about corruption, what they meant was not necessarily outright bribery or quid pro quo relationships, but rather the overall rot at the heart of monarchical politics. I think that's why "corruption" in this archaic sense is really so apt to describe Trump's maladministration. 

When you look at something as facially absurd as actively blocking green energy, you have to balance the supreme idiocy of Cleek's Law (oppose whatever Democrats support) but also the naked financial relationship between hydrocarbon extraction industries and the Republican Party. There is absolutely zero reason to support coal, except to enrich coal mine owners. Solar, wind and battery technology are cheaper and more sustainable, and the lies Trump tells about it are just another example of the rot of corruption in our government.

To be clear, it's not just Trump. If you look at the fall of Marco Rubio or JD Vance from bog standard asshole Republicans to Trumpist creatures actively destroying America's place in the world, you can trace this to Josh Marshall's Authoritarian International. Whether it's the techno-libertarian/post-liberalism of a Peter Thiel or the petrostate autocrats of the Persian Gulf or the cultural revanchists of the post-Soviet world, you are talking about a fundamental corruption and rot at the heart of everything. All of this, by the way, was made possible by the corruption of the Supreme Court and decisions like Rufo and Citizen's United.

Trump is flamboyantly corrupt in so many ways, but when you look at the naked enrichment and entitlement of people like Kristi Noem, it's pretty apparent that Trump is not just the largest practitioner of corruption, but the vessel through which others enrich themselves. 

When a culture becomes corrupt enough, it seems foolish to be honest. 

One of the largest problems Democrats have is trying to focus on one outrage, because Trump commits so many. You can't message against the farrago of horseshit coming from the GOP. As we enter the celebration of our 250 years of independence, we should look to revivify the old Whiggish language of corruption.

It fits to a tee. 

The Damage Done

 The sheer amount of damage that Trump and Republicans are doing to the world is tough to keep track of. Certainly, millions of people - many of them children - are going to die because they killed USAID. Other outrages - putting his name on the Kennedy Center - are easily fixed. Reversing his budgets are done in 2029 (presuming we still have a democracy by then). He is increasingly toxic, and as Minnesota demonstrated, when the people stand against him, he loses.

There are two areas that were especially galling yesterday. 

Trump basically went all in in dragging the power grid back to 1947. By repealing every single piece of constraint on emitting greenhouse gases, he is paving the way for massive amounts of pollution. The question, though, is really whether companies will actively move backwards on this. Yes, the massive open coal pits of Wyoming will continue to feed the data centers being built there. However, some tech companies are more eager to build small scale nuclear plants, because they have to know that once Trump is gone, coal will no longer be viable. It's not viable now, due to cost, not "woke."

Why is he doing this? To pwn the libs? In return for payoffs from hydrocarbon companies? However, if you're Ford or GM, do you really want to fall behind the rest of the world as they spring towards more hybrids and EVs? 

We also have the baffling (but not baffling) decision to simply not review the efficacy of mRNA flu vaccines. This is RFK, Jr's war on vaccines that everyone with half a brain saw coming. The US already takes longer than Europe to approve new drugs and treatments. Now, we have a really promising new form of vaccine and it's being killed to placate the roughly 20% of Americans who are skeptical of vaccines, a 20% that resides overwhelmingly now in the Republican Party.

Europe will no doubt plow ahead with medical advances, but the US is ceding that ground and it has been the US that has usually been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs, which is really the only possible defense for our expensive health care system. Our medical care costs too much in order to fund medical research and treatments. Now, we are destroying that, too. 

All of this is just an inconceivably stupid catering to unbelievably stupid people. 

Providing Democrats win in November, businesses will have to evaluate what the end of Trump and Trumpism might mean for them. I can't imagine the executive that will greenlight a coal burning power plant, knowing that it will never be profitable and won't even come online before Trump is out of office. Hopefully, medical research will simply relocate overseas so that science can progress during our sojourn in the America where race science is more popular with the government than actual science. 

So much awfulness everywhere you look. 

Have Renewables Escaped Containtment?

 Krugman looks at the economic reasons why renewables have exploded in the last 15 years. It's obviously clear that the Trump Administration is waging a mostly pointless, pique-filled war against solar and wind, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Sure, there are the arguments that this is just naked corruption by making coal mines more profitable for the next few years. That's normally a strong argument with these mooks. The other argument is that this is just Cleek's Law at work. Democrats support renewables, so Republicans must oppose them. There's also the argument that Trump has a stick up his diapered ass because he doesn't like the way windmills look from his Scottish golf course.

It still doesn't add up.

Renewables are an absolute economic positive in multiple ways. There's the obvious climate change mitigation, but renewables are cheaper in the long run than hydrocarbons. Once you build a renewable facility, that cost is largely "it."  You don't have to pay fuel costs.

Trump and Republicans have stripped out tax credits for solar, even on residential buildings. We are currently building our retirement home, and we want to get solar on the roof, but we won't be able to before January 1st, when the tax credits expire because of the OBBB.

At the same time, the cost of electricity is spiking, almost entirely from AI data centers. Yes, it will be more expensive to put PV panels on our roof in 2026 than it would have been in 2025, but we can budget around that, especially since otherwise our long term electrical bills would be a real burden.  I'm even looking into residential wind - it's not supposed to be great, but it's really cheap, about $3000 for a 5000 watt turbine. We will need a battery, and those credit, too, are expiring. 

This is among the thousands of outrages committed by the Trump administration against American citizens and their economic interest. 

I do wonder, though, how much renewables will continue to grow simply because they are so economically efficient now. It made sense and was necessary to subsidize renewables a decade ago or even five years ago. While it still makes sense to do so today, I wonder if it's economically necessary.

In the long run, the real issue is climate change, and it's heartening that other countries are picking up some of the slack. If Americans aren't going to be buying solar and wind and batteries, other countries will. It will make us poorer, it's stupid and it's shortsighted, but I don't think it's reversible. 

Electricity

 Yglesias makes one of his arguments that I actually agree with: We should focus on building MORE clean energy, not on making LESS hydrocarbon-based energy. Basically, there is a strong degrowth element to a lot of environmental activism. This is fundamentally a moral or ethical choice from people who want to rollback capitalism, consumer consumption and the impact that has on the planet. Yglesias is right that is so politically toxic, it's not even worth considering. Yet that is a big part of climate and environmental activism. 

A great example of this is nuclear power. Since Three Mile Island, environmentalists have advocated for shuttering nuclear power plants. Germany - for some damned reason - did exactly this and became dependent on Russian natural gas. Nuclear power, however, is carbon neutral and can produce a TON of electricity. There is a ceiling on renewables like solar and wind and batteries. Nuclear can punch through that ceiling. 

What's more, Yglesias is also right that we should not be trying to get "enough" energy for 2030. We should be trying to have so much electrical generation power that we can do things like create hydrogen to make cement and steel - two processes that are big carbon polluters but have no feasible way to decarbonize until we become awash in electricity.

Of course, this is one of those columns that makes a lot of us go "Really dude?" Trump has actively been trying to kill even basic renewables. He has a pathological hatred of wind power and doesn't seem to like solar either. A lot of this is that he is trying to actively resurrect the fortunes of coal mine owners and fossil fuel companies. Killing the tax credit for rooftop solar is just terrible policy.

The reality is that we are increasingly electrifying our economy. Add in the massive demands from data centers and AI and we saw electrical costs go from roughly $0.13 a KwH in August of 2020 to $0.19 five years later. That's an almost 50% increase. If you further constrain supply, that price will continue to rise, which is really bad! Unless you're a fossil fuel company, I guess.

And isn't that the point?

Renewables

 I know I basically have turned this exercise into a reflection of whatever Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman wrote about for today, but apparently I'm going to do it again.

Richardson is writing about how Trump's war on renewables is actually a war on workers. Krugman is writing about stagflation as part of his series on the topic and mentions rising energy costs.

There are just so, so many ways that the Trump administration is deeply stupid that trying to catalog them is pointless. The war on renewables is just so fucking pointless that it boggles the imagination. There could be a (poor) argument for withdrawing subsidies or making permitting harder. That would be within the normal parameters of political stupidity. The Right not wanting to subsidize solar and wind because budgets; the Left wanting more permitting to protect the environment from new building. It's dumb, but it's normal dumb.

Trump's killing of existing renewable projects is just stupid in ways that rival RFK Jr's assault on public health. Meanwhile, SURPRISE!, electrical costs are skyrocketing, as data centers create a building bubble and a need for massive amounts of gigawatts. Also, SURPRISE!, China is set to leapfrog the US in renewable building and use, because if Trump wasn't an agent of the Russian and Chinese he really wouldn't be doing anything differently.

It is true that these actions will make stemming climate change harder. I'll be curious to see what the impact is on rooftop solar. We are building a house, and hopefully we will get the panels in before December 31st, because the tax credit is going away. However, given rising and unpredictable electrical costs, we will be putting them in regardless. 

Richardson makes a key point. Extraction industries have always been highly plutocratic. Whatever the substance being extracted - even cotton, as she mentions - it focuses economic power in the hands of a few people. Renewables - at least solar - can be more "democratic" in their dispersal.

This could be a helpful way to counterattack Republicans on this issue. "They are raising your electrical costs to benefit their billionaire friends."

Stagflation

 I am not an economist, because I suck at math. I do enjoy trying to understand economics, especially in the way that pre-20th century economists did - as a form of moral philosophy combined with empirical observation. 

Krugman gives a really clear explanation of what stagflation was and is. In some ways, it's simply an economic dynamic whereby inflation becomes entrenched. Prices rise because that's what prices are doing and you see a continued upwards spiral as firms try to keep pace with not only current costs but future ones as well. Firms don't want to raise prices in a way that could jeopardize their market share, but they are also not in business to lose money. 

We've been in a state recently where firms have been reluctant to raise prices, because they assumed the tariffs were transient posturing. As it becomes clear that they are not, they are going to pass those costs along to consumers. Entrenched inflation is when the cycle of raising prices becomes the norm. It's not clear that tariffs would create entrenched inflation, but deportations could, especially in food and construction.

There is also the role of energy costs that Krugman and most economists seem to elide. (UPDATE: Krugman posts about the energy costs!) For me and my innumerate analysis, oil and energy spikes create broad based inflation because everything requires energy to move around the world markets. If we think those spikes are the new normal, then producers will build those into inflation. Yet, in 1990-1 we saw an inflationary spike in oil prices surrounding the Gulf War but that did not lead to entrenched inflation. Energy costs can be an accelerant for inflation, but the entrenchment is something else and that is stagflation.

Krugman also describes the 2021-23 inflationary spike surrounding supply constraints that occurred after Covid. Like the 1990-1 spike or even the 2008 energy spike, this inflation came and went.

However, we are also seeing rising electricity prices. The reason seems to be a combination of natural gas exports and especially the great demands from data centers. The Department of Energy predicts that data centers will use more electricity than all households next year. 

We were in Wyoming and Cheyenne is having a boom from data centers, because Wyoming is a combination open coal pit and an oil and natural gas well. Let's leave aside the potential environmental costs from all this - though they are huge - we are looking at a supply crunch in energy - not oil, but electricity.

At the same time, Trump is killing subsidies for solar and wind, which might help ease the price crunch. Presumably, in the longer term, the lower price of solar will continue to make it viable, but in the short term, people's electricity bills are going to spike. Add in EVs, and the whole thing is the same sort of supply crunch we saw post-Covid.

This means that there are several places were we should see prices rise directly because of Trump's policies:

- Food, as undocumented (and even documented) immigrants are removed from the labor force.
- Energy, as rampant speculation in data centers gobbles up electricity
- Imported goods, because of tariffs.
- All manufactured goods, because of tariffs on inputs like steel and general inflationary pressures.

Meanwhile, we are cutting SNAP and health care subsidies that will impoverish poorer Americans. This should lead to reduced overall demand even as prices continue to rise.

And THAT is stagflation and THAT is bad.

Epstein

 I am generally hostile to conspiracy theories, but even I am struck by what's happening with the so-called Epstein Client List. This skepticism is overwhelmed, however, by the massive schadenfreude that I'm experiencing as we watch MAGA tear itself apart.

Since I'm congenitally skeptical of conspiracy theories, here's my take: There was no "list." Epstein would have been a fool to write those names down with information like "Alan Dershowitz, January 5th, 16 year old girl." To quote Stringer Bell, "Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?" Epstein would have wanted that information kept as close to him as possible; it's existence could let it fall into someone else's hands and destroy whatever leverage he felt he had.

Also, he killed himself, because the mad, depraved world he had created was crashing down and his life in prison would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. 

However, two things.

First, go ahead and run with this as Trump destroying the list. I love that Democrats are hammering Trump and Bondi for covering up the list and hiding links between Epstein and Trump. Those links are absolutely real, whether the list exists or not. The absence of proof is not the proof of absence, so there is really no way for Trump to deflect these attacks. If the list never existed, then Bondi can't prove she didn't destroy it. Go to town on that!

Second, this is already creating MAGA-on-MAGA violence (sadly only rhetorically at this point). This is because conspiratorial thinking is at the very heart of MAGA. Conspiracies are the refuge of the ignorant, and, well, if the shoe fits... Take Marjorie Traitor Greene's bizarre obsession with weather machines and Jewish space lasers. Because she is not only profoundly ignorant, but also profoundly incurious, rather than learn about climate change, why not just create a scientifically impossible conspiracy?

Of course, QAnon was one of the early avenues of Trump's rise to power, which was itself fueled by Trump's embrace of the Birtherism, itself a conspiracy theory. Even the idea that globalists (read: Jews) are outsourcing jobs, importing immigrants and implementing the Great Replacement Theory is central to Trumpist politics.

Trump is the hub from which a hundred conspiracy theories radiate outwards.

All of this means that you cannot really disentangle Trump from the unfortunately large number of Americans who marinate in conspiratorial thinking. This is why the Epstein shit is potentially really harmful for him and the various minions who are already drawing the long knives for each other. I don't care if both Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi lose their jobs, but if one of them does, that's great! (It will be Bongino, if anyone.)

A central tactic of Trump that he learned from Bannon is to "flood the zone" with shit. It is a constant struggle to know which outrage to focus on from day to day. However, while the tactic might work to fluster your enemies, it is also antithetical to decent governance (which we know Trump doesn't care about, but stick with me). What's more, the chaos within Trump's inner circle is an inevitable byproduct of the people he needs around him and the batshit lunacy that they swim in.

For every ounce of energy expended in Epstein crossfire, that's energy that can't be focused on dismantling the government, expending resources on creating an American Gestapo and destroying the rule of law. It's not a perfect cure, but "confusion to my enemies" is always a good step, especially when Democrats are largely excluded from power at all levels of the Federal Government.

If Epstein leads to a full on MAGA civil war (I'm skeptical, but these people really are nuts), that will be to the advantage of the country as a whole. 

UPDATE: You want to see how this brain rot plays out? Watch these bullshit.

Good Government Matters

 Cynics will say that "All politicians lie" or "Both political parties are the same."

They are wrong, especially on the second point, which should have become obvious even before the OBBB passed.

There are two ways in which Republican governance is actively hurting the country - today and in the long run.

The first is that, as Krugman notes, the OBBB guts clean energy funding and tax breaks. This is so manifestly bad policy that it staggers belief. Clean energy is more cost effective than the dirtier forms of energy, while being far more environmentally sound. It's difficult to tell whether this is simply a matter of Cleek's Law or an inefficient and somewhat corrupt giveaway to fossil fuels industries.

The second is simply bad governance, which is a hallmark of Republican rule. Because the post-Reagan GOP has decided that "gubmint bad, taxes worse" we get hollowed out and poorly run public services. In our town, the corrupt/incompetent ruling Republicans decided not to pay the nearby city from which we get our water the market rate. For years. Just didn't pay. Now the town owes tens of millions of dollars after two court losses, and the Republican plan seems to be "appeal the case again, while not setting aside money for when they lose again." Rather than raise water bills a few years ago, they simply plugged their fingers in their ears and stomped their feet hoping the problem would go away.

A far more lethal example just played out in the horrific floods in Texas. As Richardson summarizes, the local officials did not put in flood sirens, because it was expensive. Now, maybe a 100 or more people are dead. Maybe the Trump cuts to NOAA and NWS are also responsible, but the official position of Kerr County officials on installing a flood warning system was "Taxpayers won't pay for it."

Further in the article, you get this perfect GOP response to a tragedy:

Current city officials on Sunday did not discuss the earlier deliberations over warning systems. Dalton Rice, the Kerrville city manager, sidestepped a question about the effectiveness of local emergency notifications, telling reporters at a news conference that it was “not the time to speculate.”

This is the response to school shootings, floods, any crisis that occurs, because GOP policies facilitate them happening, "Don't politicize it!" "Thoughts and prayers."

Of course, the two themes come together. The floods are "historic" and "once a century" which seems to happen a lot, and most climatologists have been saying that crazy weather is exactly the immediate impact of global warming. 

But, by all means, let's gut clean energy. 

The proper role of government is to do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves. This is more or less what Lincoln said many year ago. Even then there was an understanding that government action could be more than the libertarian limits of public safety. Governments could actively improve things, usually be aggregating resources. If Kerr County was too poor to put in a warning system, the state government could have helped. 

Guess who runs the state government.

In the end, the solution would likely have been that federal funds - voted into the budget by Democrats and paid for by wealthier blue states - would have been needed to build a system that might have saved those people's lives. Everything Republicans do - from Reagan to Dubya to Trump, from Gingrich to Delay to McConnell to Johnson - stands in opposition to the idea that government can save and improve lives and Trump and Congressional Republicans are bringing this theology to our national government.

Which Way Does The Wind Blow?

 Krugman engages in some climate doomerism. He notes that the most promising approach to climate change is the increasingly cheap access to carbon zero energy like solar and wind. He also notes that externalizing the cost of climate change via a carbon tax of some kind is politically toxic. The solution, therefore, is simply to subsidize various green energy technologies with tax credits. Buy a hybrid or EV and get a tax credit. Put solar on your roof, get a tax credit.

However, the Republicans want to repeal all that, because they are awful people. Sure, there's the fealty they owe to a few deep pocketed fossil fuel types, but honestly, it really seems to be because Cleek's Law demands that they do it.

I disagree with Krugman on two point. First, I think plenty of people and places will continue to adopt renewables, because they have gotten so cheap. Second, the rest of the world will still move in the renewables direction. We aren't going to be taking solar panels off of roofs the way Reagan did. The real issue right now is China's existing carbon emissions and India's potential ones. That has nothing to do with us, and oddly, a small retreat from solar and wind might actually make it cheaper for a country like India.

Still, as with everything, Trump and his minions' malevolence is really breathtaking.

Make It Make Sense

 Yesterday, RFK Jr's brain worm forced out the head of vaccine regulations, Dr. Peter Marks, in favor of someone who was is not a doctor and was in fact cited for practicing medicine without a license. David Geier is, of course, a vaccine "skeptic" who thinks vaccines cause autism. 

Vaccines do not cause autism.

Meanwhile, Trump is rolling back regulations with regards to mercury pollution. Mercury - like most heavy metals - is a neurotoxin. It absolutely causes birth defects and brain damage. 

So...fuck I can't believe this is real life...Trump is firing a doctor to put in place a charlatan to push the lie that vaccines hurt your kids, while simultaneously allowing industry to pump an extremely poisonous chemical into the air and water.

Again, if his sole purpose was destroy America, what would he be doing differently?

California Aid

 The wildfires that struck - and continue to strike - residential areas of Los Angeles are already becoming a political football for the atrocious people making up the Republican Party. Routine threats are now attached to relief bills. As Paul Krugman points out, Red States are the ones on the receiving end of most federal tax dollars and an unusually large percentage of federal disaster relief. At no times have Democrats threatened NOT to give disaster relief to Florida for all the hurricanes it faces, even as Florida and southern Republicans threaten to withhold aid from California.

The point Krugman makes is not to say that Red States shouldn't get aid. The point is that California is the main source of federal revenue and what's more, providing aid to fellow citizens is exactly what a national government does. It's not wrong to provide aid; it wrong to withhold it. It tears at the fabric of our common national project.

But isn't that the point of withholding aid? To sic Americans at each others' throats? Isn't that the heart and soul of MAGA?

Climate Catastrophizing

 In the lead-in to his column, Yglesias talks about how climate catastrophizing is a road to illiberalism. He mentions "watermelons" (different than the pro-Palestinian emoji) who are "green on the outside, red on the inside." These are people who want to "solve" climate change by ending capitalism.

I think that's a pretty interesting insight. When California says it wants to ban ICE vehicles, there's an element of unreality to it. We have an entire infrastructure set up to service ICE cars, but we do not have the grid to support everyone driving EVs. The solution, in my mind, is hybrids. If we mandated that every vehicle was to be a hybrid, that would both have a major impact on emissions, drive down the price of gasoline and provide a glide path to eventual EV fleets. 

I can't help but wonder how many EV Acolytes are really invested in destroying the "power" of Exxon Mobil. Hating petrochemical companies is performative leftism, because they do, in fact, suck. However, your feelings about Exxon or extractive companies or capitalism all seem tangential to the goal of simply reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

We Need Electrical Abundance

 This piece is...whatever. At least it hints at skepticism of our Tech Bro Overlords actually solving this problem.

The issue is that computing centers gobble up a LOT of energy. And, since they use the same grid, that means that so much of our carbon neutral energy that we add is not making the necessary dent in our emissions. In fact, the piece mentions that in the Salt Lake City area, they are keeping open a coal-burning plant that was scheduled to close and there is a new data center that will use the same amount of energy that a large nuclear reactor produces.

The disparity between the greenwashed rhetoric of these tech companies and the actual impact on the power grid seems pretty large and significant to me. Even more, that Microsoft and others are looking at fusion, of all things, to solve their voracious need for electricity means that they are - effectively - not looking for feasible solutions to this problem. This is the "and then a miracle occurs" phase of long term planning.

The bum rush into an AI future has a LOT of problems, and the electrical needs are but one of them. What has to happen yesterday. The good news is...something happened yesterday! One of the big problems we have in decarbonizing our electricity needs is that regulations have made it all but impossible to build new reactors. New legislation has just helped with that. 

It was telling that the only two votes against the bill in the Senate came from Markey and Sanders. That's the old school anti-nuke shit lingering around. It's also interesting that - once again -  Biden was able to shepherd important legislation through a supposedly broken legislative body.

Any feasible solution to climate change that isn't based on wishful thinking would be building nuclear reactors in as many feasible places as possible. Frankly, I think every single sizable military base in the country should have a reactor run by the Corps of Engineers that sells energy at market prices. Help fund the base and produce power without the downsides of needing to cut corners to make a profit.

If we are going to have a future where the planet doesn't cook AND we enjoyed whatever benefits of an increasingly digital world, then we have to aggressively move to harness nuclear and geothermal power because we know that they work and we know how to build them.

The Kids

 One of the disturbing trends of this election is the defection of young people from Biden. It is routinely put on the Gazan War, but I can't help but think it's a combination of vibes and a rampant disinformation campaign, because so many young people get their news from really, really dodgy sources. 

One thing young people claim to care a lot about is climate change, and if they are telling the truth, then they really should not only vote for Biden, but volunteer for his campaign. Of course, you have climate grifters like the Sunrise Movement withholding support from Biden, which kind of encapsulates much of what's wrong with Leftist politics, but it also demonstrates how bullshit narratives warp the debate. (I read about a focus group where someone said they were leaning Trump, "because he will create jobs" which flies in the face of every piece of factual evidence about the current job market - one of the best in US history.)

If the republic dies in November, the cause of death will be that too many people believed some seriously bullshit stuff.

The Hurdle

 Trying to properly put a price on emissions is really tricky and politically unpopular. One way that has worked overseas is congestion pricing. It's basically a toll on driving into and around cities. New York was considering such a move, but the feckless governor killed it. As an aside, let's take a moment to reflect on just how wretched the New York Democratic Party really is. There is pretty much nothing they can't fuck up. Congestion pricing would've hit Connecticut and New Jersey drivers the hardest and been to the benefit of NYC's transit system, so naturally Hochul killed it.

Aside from the awfulness of NY Dems, this is a great example of how difficult it will be to use market mechanisms to decrease emissions. Anything that raises prices directly - like a tax - is pretty much DOA in an era of inflation worries, but really at any time. Asking people to pay more for something they are already doing for "free" is going to lead to a revolt.

That's why you have to rely on the more cumbersome measures like regulatory action. I think the rush to EVs is a little premature, given our power grid - which itself can be addressed by regulation and direct action - but there is no reason that we can't mandate a move to hybrids and EVs together. Yes, cars will cost more, but ALL cars will cost more and it won't be a tax or a toll that voters see directly.

Also, there is some work on this, but Democrats need to be hammering Trump's tariff plans as being a tax more heavily. It's a tax AND it's inflationary. 

If the criminality of the modern Republican Party can ever sink through and voters reward Democrats with the trifecta in November (and Dems finally kill the filibuster), then I would actually argue for very little new spending. There's a strong case for raising taxes on the rich, limited new programs and a reduction in the deficit.

The one place, though, that they should spend is on carbon-free electrical generation and new transmission lines. The market won't do it fast enough.