Newsom Signs Sweeping Bills on Climate, California Energy Affordability, Oil Production By Carlos E. Castañeda
September 19, 2025
Introduction:
(KPIX) California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of bills on Friday charting the state's continuing transition to green energy, which includes an extension of the state's landmark cap-and-trade program.
The slate of six bills seeks to address energy affordability, the stabilization of petroleum markets, and reducing air pollution as part of California's acceleration toward a green job-generating economy. A statement from the Governor's Office said California's action comes as the Trump administration continues "to gut decades-old, bipartisan American clean air protections and derail critical climate progress."
The bills, which Newsom signed at the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco on Friday, were approved with bipartisan support in an extended session of the California legislature last weekend. They represent a balancing act in managing the transition from fossil fuels to green energy amid the challenge of climate change, while keeping energy costs manageable for consumers.
"After months of hard work with the Legislature, we have agreed to historic reforms that will save money on your electric bills, stabilize gas supply, and slash toxic air pollution — all while fast-tracking California's transition to a clean, green job-creating economy," Newsom said in a prepared statement.
Newsom said legislation will bring down electricity costs for Californians by providing up to $60 billion in electricity bill refunds through an expanded California Climate Credit. The legislation also aims to make energy more affordable by accelerating critical clean energy projects and expanding regional energy markets to improve grid reliability.
Renewables supply record 77.9% of power in Australia’s main grid
September 22, 2025
Data from energy advisory company Global Power Energy (GPE) shows the share of renewables in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) energy mix reached a record 77.9% in the late morning of Sept. 21, eclipsing the previous high of 76.8% set the previous day.
Rooftop solar generation accounted for 43.6% of grid demand at the time with utility-scale solar delivering 12.1%. Wind generation provided 19.8% of the energy mix and hydro 2.3%.
“The new instantaneous record highlights how deeply renewables now penetrate the grid during mild spring conditions,” GPE NEMLog energy analyst Geoff Eldridge said. “Rooftop PV, utility solar, and wind combined to push fossil generation to the margins for extended hours.”
Eldridge also noted that the maximum “rolling seven-day mean” reached a renewable share of 50.8% on Sunday, up 0.22% on the previous high of 50.6% set the day previous – the first time it had surpassed the 50% mark. The new high is 2.8% better than the 47.8% recorded this time last year.
Eldridge said the milestone signals that the energy transition is now structurally embedding renewables into the NEM with the rolling seven-day mean providing a stronger measure of renewable integration than momentary peaks.
Mark Carney’s Shift From Climate-Change Warrior to Fossil-Fuel Cheerleader
Canada’s prime minister scraps green policies and pledges to transform country into ‘energy superpower’
Oct. 2, 2025
TORONTO—As an executive and central banker, Mark Carney was a leading voice urging the business world to fight against climate change. As Canada’s prime minister, he is doing everything he can to pump more oil and gas.
Since taking office in March, Carney dismantled many green policies introduced by his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. He scrapped an unpopular consumer carbon tax, paused a 2035 electric-vehicle mandate and enacted a law giving his cabinet authority to override environmental rules for infrastructure projects like oil pipelines.
Now, he is fast-tracking approval of the expansion of a liquefied natural-gas export facility in Kitimat, British Columbia. The expanded plant, run by a Shell-led consortium, would become the world’s second-largest LNG exporter, shipping up to 28 million tons a year of the fossil fuel to Asia. Climate activists are dismayed, but the Canadian leader is undeterred.
“This will directly help transform our country into an energy superpower,” Carney said.
It is a refrain Canada’s leader has often used since he became prime minister. Already the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter and fifth-largest exporter of natural gas, Canada is leaning even harder into fossil fuels and reversing costly climate initiatives to offset the economic shock from President Trump’s tariff war.
Trump Tries to Kill Renewables — and Accidentally Sparks Green Energy Boom By Matthew Chapman
October 14, 2025
Introduction:
(Raw Story) President Donald Trump and his subordinates have done everything in their power to slam the brakes on renewable energy development — but despite it all, the industry is booming, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Trump has long been known to have a personal hatred for renewables, allegedly ever since a wind farm in Scotland altered the view from one of his golf properties — and he frequently rants against the industry, often making wildly exaggerated claims about its storage limitations or the threat it poses to wildlife.
The president signed a massive, controversial tax cut megabill earlier this year that, among other things, phases out most tax credits for renewable energy installation at the federal level. However, reported Rebecca Elliott, this may not start affecting the growth of the industry for years, "because companies are racing to install solar panels, wind turbines and batteries the size of shipping containers before federal tax credits expire or become harder to claim."
In fact, the rush to take advantage of the tax credits as they sunset is so tremendous "that analysts widely expect the United States to add record — or near-record — amounts of renewable energy and batteries through 2027" — with the research firm BloombergNEF revising up their forecast for new wind, solar, and battery installations in 2026 by 10 percent.
"Wind and solar projects must be under construction by July to be eligible for federal tax credits that Congress voted this summer to eliminate, years earlier than previously required," the report continued. "To hit that deadline, many developers have ordered custom power transformers — devices used to increase or decrease voltage — solar panels and other equipment much sooner than they normally would have. Placing such orders is one way to demonstrate to the Internal Revenue Service that a project is underway."
What Trump’s Victory Taught Democrats About Climate Change By Debra Kahn
October 16, 2025
Introduction:
(Politico) Climate policy is decidedly unfashionable in 2025 — among Democrats.
The party isn’t embracing climate change denialism like many in the GOP, nor is it endorsing the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy. But as Democrats continue groping for a way forward after their 2024 defeat, they’ve clearly decided they need to change how they talk about climate and energy issues. And in some cases, it goes beyond rhetoric to the actual policies they’re promoting. The bottom line for Democrats: Climate is out, affordability is in.
With Donald Trump having won back the presidency amid broad frustration with high prices, it’s perhaps no surprise that Democrats are trying to make gains in the affordability debate. But it’s still striking to see longtime climate champions in the party shift gears, and it speaks to concern among Democrats that their focus on climate change has weighed them down.
“It’s an issue that I think we need to continue to engage on and speak out on and work to legislate on, but it’s not a top three issue right now,” Sen. Chris Coons, the Democratic co-chair of the Senate’s bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told me.
Conclusion:
“In the end,” (David) Hill (executive vice president of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center) said, “power flows according to the laws of physics, not according to the laws of politics or economics.”
New England’s Final Coal Plant Shuts Down Years Ahead of Schedule By Sarah Shemkus
October 7, 2025
Introduction:
(Canary Media) Even as the federal government attempts to prop up the waning coal industry, New England’s last coal-fired power plant has ceased operations three years ahead of its planned retirement date. The closure of the New Hampshire facility paves the way for its owner to press ahead with an initiative to transform the site into a clean energy complex including solar panels and battery storage systems.
“The end of coal is real, and it is here,” said Catherine Corkery, chapter director for Sierra Club New Hampshire. “We’re really excited about the next chapter.”
News of the closure came on the same day the Trump administration announced plans to resuscitate the coal sector by opening millions of acres of federal land to mining operations and investing $625 million in life-extending upgrades for coal plants. The administration had already released a blueprint for rolling back coal-related environmental regulations.
The announcement was the latest offensive in the administration’s pro-coal agenda. The federal government has twice extended the scheduled closure date of the coal-burning J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan, and U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has declared it a mission of the administration to keep coal plants open, saying the facilities are needed to ensure grid reliability and lower prices.
However, the closure in New Hampshire — so far undisputed by the federal government — demonstrates that prolonging operations at some facilities just doesn’t make economic sense for their owners
caltrek wrote: ↑Thu Oct 16, 2025 10:34 pm What Trump’s Victory Taught Democrats About Climate Change By Debra Kahn
October 16, 2025
Introduction:
(Politico) Climate policy is decidedly unfashionable in 2025 — among Democrats.
The party isn’t embracing climate change denialism like many in the GOP, nor is it endorsing the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy. But as Democrats continue groping for a way forward after their 2024 defeat, they’ve clearly decided they need to change how they talk about climate and energy issues. And in some cases, it goes beyond rhetoric to the actual policies they’re promoting. The bottom line for Democrats: Climate is out, affordability is in.
With Donald Trump having won back the presidency amid broad frustration with high prices, it’s perhaps no surprise that Democrats are trying to make gains in the affordability debate. But it’s still striking to see longtime climate champions in the party shift gears, and it speaks to concern among Democrats that their focus on climate change has weighed them down.
“It’s an issue that I think we need to continue to engage on and speak out on and work to legislate on, but it’s not a top three issue right now,” Sen. Chris Coons, the Democratic co-chair of the Senate’s bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told me.
Conclusion:
“In the end,” (David) Hill (executive vice president of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center) said, “power flows according to the laws of physics, not according to the laws of politics or economics.”
This Data Scientist Sees Progress in the Climate Change Fight By Jeremy Deaton
October 6, 2025
Introduction:
(Yale Environment 360) It has been 10 years since countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, and emissions and temperatures continue to reach new highs, fueling unprecedented weather disasters around the globe.
Meanwhile, the shift to clean energy is facing powerful headwinds in the United States, where climate policies are being reversed and support for clean energy is withdrawn.
Yet, while the headlines paint a dismal picture of efforts to rein in climate change, the numbers often tell a different story. That is the assessment of data scientist Hannah Ritchie, a researcher at the University of Oxford and deputy editor of the publication Our World in Data. Analyzing the broader trends on global development, she sees a world making unheralded progress in the fight to stem warming.
Ritchie is the author of a new book Clearing the Air, which uses data to tackle common misconceptions about climate change. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, she explains why she isn’t worried about China’s coal-building spree, why she believes the impact of A.I. on electricity demand is largely overstated, and why the U.S. reversal on clean energy may do little to slow global progress on climate.
Trump Opens Pristine Alaska Wilderness to Drilling in Long-Running Feud https://archive.ph/QDV45
The Trump administration on Thursday announced a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest remaining tracts of pristine wilderness in the United States.
The decision was the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife.
During his first term, President Trump signed a 2017 tax bill that required two oil and gas lease sales in the coastal plain, but the Biden administration later suspended and then canceled those leases.
On Thursday, the Interior Department said it would hold an oil and gas lease sale in the coastal plain this winter. The agency also said it would reinstate seven oil leases in the refuge that the state of Alaska acquired in 2021 but that had been canceled two years later by the Biden administration.
I'm seeing some comments on Reddit from people who are getting severely agitated by China's successes, to the point anything that even mentions the word 'China' clearly must be CCP propaganda and anyone "not holding China to task" for their abuses of the Uighurs and Hong Kong = fifty cent army. Even if we're talking about solar power or robotics, the real topic must be the Uighurs and Tiananmen Square, always and forever, or the ghost cities and real estate bubble and how desperate Xi is to prevent the imminent revolution against him. Being wood by bright neon lights and skyscrapers is now suddenly a pathetic thing and clear CCP bots glazing when it's China, but post Dubai or Las Vegas or London and it's "Wow, this is amazing!"
It's downright uncanny to witness in real time. If it's all real, it's deeply, horrendously propagandized folk who don't realize they're repeating propaganda (not that some of the stuff IS propaganda, we already know those abuses happen, I mean this almost 2 Minute Hate-like inability to even comprehend the idea that China isn't just Airstrip One: Mandarin Edition.)
The creepier part is if it's NOT real and is all bots/Eglin AFB shitposters/New Delhi mass posters trying to keep the whole American exceptionalism going, in which case there's not even much point engaging with most of Reddit.
And there's only so much longer this bubble can exist before it gets forcibly popped.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
I'm seeing some comments on Reddit from people who are getting severely agitated by China's successes, to the point anything that even mentions the word 'China' clearly must be CCP propaganda and anyone "not holding China to task" for their abuses of the Uighurs and Hong Kong = fifty cent army. Even if we're talking about solar power or robotics, the real topic must be the Uighurs and Tiananmen Square, always and forever, or the ghost cities and real estate bubble and how desperate Xi is to prevent the imminent revolution against him. Being wood by bright neon lights and skyscrapers is now suddenly a pathetic thing and clear CCP bots glazing when it's China, but post Dubai or Las Vegas or London and it's "Wow, this is amazing!"
It's downright uncanny to witness in real time. If it's all real, it's deeply, horrendously propagandized folk who don't realize they're repeating propaganda (not that some of the stuff IS propaganda, we already know those abuses happen, I mean this almost 2 Minute Hate-like inability to even comprehend the idea that China isn't just Airstrip One: Mandarin Edition.)
The creepier part is if it's NOT real and is all bots/Eglin AFB shitposters/New Delhi mass posters trying to keep the whole American exceptionalism going, in which case there's not even much point engaging with most of Reddit.
And there's only so much longer this bubble can exist before it gets forcibly popped.
What's funny is these are the people that vote for Trump. These are the loserterians that want to gut our ability to compete against china as it is they bitch about how spending any money on our own success is too much money. These assholes have no concept of success or greatness. China is showing us what it looks like and that angers these idiots as they have no concept of reality. These people literally live in the poorest and run down parts of this country, yet they think they understand greatness? What a joke.
It's not that there's some psychotic break in reality.
It's more that the result of decades of Heritage Foundation-driven far-right agitprop has completely rewritten what a lot of Americans' idea of state-building civic virtue even can be. In its own context, it makes sense.
For a not-insignificant number of Americans, all that woke proggy Marxist science and public education is exactly what's stopping us from matching China. We could totally beat China if we got rid of the bloated socialist government and forced the lazy welfare queens to actually do honest labor. Plus, we're bringing in way too many brown immigrants who are changing the culture. If we went back to how things used to be in the 1950s, with prayer in classrooms, everyone knowing what a man and woman are, and teaching Biblical values over nihilistic atheist ones, then America would skyrocket into space on its own.
In its own headspace, there's a consistent coherent logic.
The problem, ironically, is this is based on complete misinformation. America at its greatest wasn't because of teaching Biblical values or having prayer in classrooms; that was concurrent to what ACTUALLY led to American dominance. Russia is currently teaching Biblical values and is removing LGBTQ+, and they're not exactly booming. Same thing with Hungary. It probably feels good to nationalists to smash the fags, but that doesn't change the oligarchical economic system. You could have a strong state with the rainbow crowd, and you can have a weak state with extreme Orthodox Tsardom, depending on how that state is actually organized. It's never in the interests in the plutocrats to organize it in any way that doesn't benefit themselves, and it just happens that nationalism appealing to masculine nature (the primal fantasy of every red-blooded man: macho honor and warrior culture where "community" = family and brotherhood, and the drive is to protect said community from enemies, at behest of your leader and chieftain) actually is very profitable to said plutocrats since it's easy to get said nationalists to think that the problem of a society is a bunch of brown foreigners, labor agitators, rabblerousing women, and crossdressers, and not the capitalists who enable them (in fact, attacking the capitalists is always treated as an evil and bad solution and "punishing success" or "disrupting the chain"). And then inevitably once the deviants and subversives are dealt with, the average man sees his lot in life hasn't changed. In fact, it's gotten worse, because usually those folks he wanted to crush were allied with the only people still looking out for him (the activists and solidarity movements, who the capitalists will always go after). So now he's even worse off, even more overworked, even poorer with fewer protections, probably rearing kids he can't even afford to feed without drug money, and also taking care of a stay-at-home woman who isn't even allowed to bring in any extra income from a workforce whose wages mysteriously didn't double despite kicking out the women, and in this agitated state, he is not going to ever think he's been had because the plutocrats own him too deeply. They're going to convince him "Well have you ever thought maybe this is just your place? You're just a poor man, you never needed those luxuries, they were making you less of a man, you are satisfying your survival instincts, you just need to try harder too, and if you can't find enough left over to afford bread at the end of the week, that's just a sign you're not man enough and God is punishing you for your laziness even though you're working 70 hours at muscle-tearing warehouse work!"
He's going to think that now that real men are back in control, his country will finally start doing great projects again. Surely now we'll get new grand monuments and put space stations into orbit. Then that doesn't happen, because it turns out the replacements to all the vanquished woke intelligentsia have no clue what they're doing, or are such ultra-nationalists that they drank the Kool-Aid of exceptionalism and don't realize their own propagandized thoughts is thwarting their ability to even understand the science they're trying to do. They're going to try to become a world leader in science, when the "leaders" of their movement think the world was made 6,000 years ago and reject any evidence otherwise. They're going to try to lead in spaceflight, when all the men building the spacecraft are constantly underfunding everything because they're siphoning anything they deem as "excess" to their own pockets and crypto wallets. They're going to admire this super-sized military, the one feather in their cap, unaware that the fealty to Dear Leader interrupts the generals' ability to operate, and that said military is actually overbloated to the point a tiny operational defeat or even setback could cause the whole thing to implode. As long as it looks strong, that's all that matters.
And pop culture, though. Finally, we have Real Men back on screen, rescuing useless foolish dames, and old school values. How could you be against that? Well, the reason why there were high profile "woke" failures turns out to have been because of a confluence of bad writers and studios trying to badly appeal to too many markets due to ballooning costs and low interest rates. Plus, as said nationalists discovered in their horror, most media has been "woke", but most of it before the past few years was so well crafted that no one other than the previously loony Christian nationalists cared, but now they care and they want a discontinuity. Turns out the nationalists spent so long demonizing all those creatives and liberal-arts types that went into entertainment that there are even fewer good writers than in the high-late woke era, and no one's interested in the slop they're putting out. There could be decent ones, but that requires funding education and the arts, and why do that when you could make more money instead? Within only a few years, it becomes clear the "good times" are a sham to everyone except this man who has been convinced.
There's nothing saying that this man will ever be roused from this mindset. The next generation may, and they invariably destroy the world he helped bring about, but it's also probable that this is just the endstate of his society, all the while he is being told and reinforced "the strong men have made good times again" as he and his countrymen are literally rotting away under a decadent and completely unpatriotic elite who are laughing at how totally they've fooled this man for however long they have until the new rising power buys all their assets and forcibly retires them.
Here in America, there was less welfare because the structure of the economy was completely different and, for the most part, not anywhere near as much need for it. Taking away welfare without addressing that structure just creates a Gilded Age situation more than it does a New Deal/Great Society one.
People sometimes say 1950s America was "Soft Fascist." I now realize what they're recognizing is the economic basis of Fascism— corporatism, probably one of the only decent ideas Fascism utilized, and even that was ruined by Fascism's desperate need for totalitarian control. America after the New Deal could be seen as having a corporatist economy with a strong unionized working class and without some of the more unfortunate aspects of Fascism, and this is why when America survived World War 2 unscathed, it blew up to such extreme heights.
Outsourcing, destroying unions, and culture wars are what did America in in the long run.
China today has a strong corporatist economy, in lieu of a socialist one since clearly you can't reach socialism without automation as I've long said and the CCP is not foolish enough to give the billionaire class in their country unlimited control over the economy.
They are doing what America in the 1950s was doing, if imperfectly (they still have pretty nasty inequality in many places after all), and tripling down on some of the strongest values like education and science funding.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
