human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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Texas set a record for solar power and battery use, proving the electric grid can and does rely on renewable energy.
By Chris Tomlinson | Aug 1, 2025
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article
/texas-grid-electricity-solar-battery-20792617.php
Texas temperatures are rising, and so is the demand for electricity. But the grid is holding up great, thanks to record amounts of solar and battery-stored energy.
At noon on July 29, solar facilities generated 29,275 megawatts of electricity, meeting more than 40% of the state’s demand, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas reported. That was enough electricity for 5.8 million homes.
When Texans turned on their TVs the next night, large-scale batteries set a record by discharging 7,000 megawatts of power, the nonprofit grid operator reported. Batteries provided enough electricity for 1.4 million homes.
The batteries bridged the critical 8 p.m. hour, between when the sun goes down and nighttime winds kick up.
The all-time record for electricity demand in ERCOT was 85,508 megawatts on Aug. 10, 2023. That summer, ERCOT made eight emergency calls for conservation to reduce demand before mandatory power cuts became necessary.
This August, ERCOT expects Texas to use even more electricity, but no one is overly worried about blackouts or emergency brownouts. The state has added so much solar and batteries that the grid will have plenty of juice because air conditioning demand and solar energy are synchronized.
ERCOT predicts peak demand this month to hit a record 85,759 megawatts, but Texas’s all-of-the-above approach to generation provides more than 100,000 megawatts of capacity during peak periods. The competitive wholesale electricity market is working as planned.
New solar and battery facilities make up most of the new capacity added since 2021, with 10,000 megawatts added in the past year. Clean energy’s success makes the state and federal governments’ attempts to kill new renewable energy projects so perplexing.
Texas lawmakers this year tried their best to discourage new wind, solar and battery projects, even though they are the cheapest forms of new electricity, even without subsidies. They also don’t produce greenhouse gases or other emissions that kill tens of thousands of people every year.
I’ve written for over a decade about how clean energy can meet most of the Texas electricity grid’s demand by blending solar, wind, batteries, hydro and nuclear power. Naysayers claimed clean energy could never meet 55% of the grid’s needs as it did on Tuesday.
Clean energy’s success and growing market share are why fossil fuel companies and their minions are spreading lies about its reliability and cost. Natural gas producers in particular are fearful of losing business to cleaner and cheaper electricity generation, so they pressure politicians to give them a leg up.
They should be worried, because clean energy technology keeps getting better and cheaper, and sound economics always defeats bad politics.
Manufacturers are working around the clock to make wind turbines less expensive, solar panels more efficient and batteries quicker charging.
President Donald Trump may try to pull permits for U.S. offshore wind projects, but the rest of the world is moving forward with larger turbines and blades. The amount of installed generation globally is expected to triple from 2023 levels by 2028, with China leading the way, according to a report from Orrick, a law firm that tracks clean energy investment.
Researchers at Stanford University have developed solar panels that generate electricity at night by harnessing radiative cooling. They are capturing tiny amounts of electricity from solar panels, but they are optimistic they can improve output.
Batteries and other energy storage devices are showing the most promise. New chemistries and anode materials can provide power for extended periods, and companies are making breakthroughs in compressed air in underground caverns and kinetic
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America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy
On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” thanks to Trump
By Zoë Schlanger | August 8, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/08/us-climate-liabili
ty/683797/
Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.
A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.
The United States and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” in terms of legal understanding of climate responsibility, the human-rights attorney Lotte Leicht, who works as the advocacy director of the nonprofit Climate Rights International, told me. “I think almost nothing could have painted a starker picture,” Nikki Reisch, an attorney and the Climate and Energy Program director at the Center for International Environmental Law, agrees.
The ICJ opinion was the first time the world court has expressly addressed climate obligations under international law, and it did so with unusual clarity. It removed what Leicht described to me as a legal fog that the world has existed in for decades by rebuking two of the main arguments that high-emitting countries and companies have made to avoid liability. The first is that the climate crisis is simply too big and complex to attribute to any particular entity, rendering individual accountability impractical and unfair. “The court made clear that that is not an excuse that holds up anymore,” Leicht said. Thanks in part to attribution science, a particular country or company’s contribution to the climate crisis can be assessed, and the fact that many entities are at fault is not an excuse to evade individual liability.
The second argument—that only special climate accords, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, could dictate their climate obligations, and that even then those pacts were by and large voluntary—was also struck down. In its opinion, the court wrote that climate action is not, in fact, voluntary at all: Instead, because climate change threatens lives, degrades health, and deprives people of their home, both domestically and across borders, climate agreements are legally binding, and states can be sued for failure to uphold them.
In fact, according to the court, even if a state is not party to a climate treaty, or if a treaty agreement is too weak to prevent the climate harm that country is enacting, that state is still legally liable, thanks to customary law—well-established fundamental legal principles that all countries must comply with, such as the general duty to protect basic human rights.
An advisory opinion such as this one is not in itself legally binding. But the international laws it is meant to interpret are. In some countries, including the Netherlands and Kenya, international law is incorporated into domestic law at the point of ratification. In others, it can take precedence over domestic law; elsewhere, it may bec
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SECOND: Waaaaaaaaaah! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you need an alarm clock that tells you to "Wake Up, Moron!" There is a world of interesting and worthwhile things to do, but you aren't doing anything with life and you know it.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
SECOND: Waaaaaaaaaah! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump wants NASA to burn a crucial satellite to cinders, killing research into climate change
By Michael Hiltzik | Aug. 19, 2025
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-19/trump-wants-nasa-to-
burn-a-crucial-satellite-to-cinders-killing-research-into-climate-change
By any reasonable metric, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory has been a spectacular success. Originally designed to support a two-year pilot project, it has been operating continuously in space for more than 10 years and could continue doing so for three decades more.
The data it produces “are of exceptionally high quality,” NASA stated in a 2023 review, when it labeled the project “the flagship mission for space-borne measurements” of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Trump administration plans to shut the program down. It gets worse: The White House has given NASA instructions to destroy the spacecraft by plunging it to a fiery demise in the atmosphere.
These are national assets....They are what made this country great. Tearing things down doesn’t make it great again. It just tears things down.
— David Crisp, former NASA team leader
Knowledgeable scientists and engineers say that Trump could choose to temporarily mothball the orbiting observatory, leaving a skeleton staff in place at NASA to monitor its hibernation until cooler heads prevail at the White House. Destroying the spacecraft, however, will hamstring climate research for decades.
The zeroing out of climate research budgets by the Trump White House, of which the cancellation of the OCO program is a part, is taking place just as the value of space-borne climate research has been rising sharply.
“The bottom line is that the societal and scientific benefit of this research increases almost exponentially with sustained and long-lasting measurements,” says Ben Poulter, an expert in greenhouse gas measurements formerly at NASA and now a senior scientist at the nonprofit Spark Climate Solutions. “We’re starting to see the positive impact of OCO-2 at helping to detect trends in greenhouse gas emissions and removals in natural ecosystems as the Earth undergoes the impacts of climate change.”
Under the most recent Republican administrations, NASA’s involvement in Earth science — that is, research into global warming and other climate change — has consistently come under fire.
As I reported recently, these programs were specifically targeted by Russell Vought, currently Trump’s budget director and an architect of Project 2025, in a 2023 unofficial budget proposal. There, Vought groused about NASA’s “misguided Carbon Reduction System spending and Global Climate Change programs.” He called for a 50% reduction in the budget for NASA Earth science research — a cut that made it into Trump’s current proposed budget.
The vastly reduced Earth science budget for NASA was passed by the House earlier this year, but it isn’t part of the Senate version, which hasn’t been passed.
What isn’t understood by Vought, Trump or the current acting director of NASA, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, is that Earth science was specifically made part of NASA’s portfolio in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created the agency. Among the agency’s directives, the act stated, would be “the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere.” That’s where climate change occurs.
The effort to zero out Earth science alarmed more than 60 Democratic House members, who wrote Duffy on July 18 to warn that “the scale of reductions to NASA Earth science would ... severely impair the use
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Warming Twice As Fast As We Thought!?
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Quote:
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Trump administration plans to shut the program down. It gets worse: The White House has given NASA instructions to destroy the spacecraft by plunging it to a fiery demise in the atmosphere.
Why???
You don't throw away data unless you can prove it's no good.
You can ignore reality, but it won't ignore you.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Trump ignores what happens after he is dead. Trump constantly asks, "Why should I care? I won't be President when it happens. How could the future affect me? It won't, so I don't care!"
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Trump administration plans to shut the program down. It gets worse: The White House has given NASA instructions to destroy the spacecraft by plunging it to a fiery demise in the atmosphere.
Why???
You don't throw away data unless you can prove it's no good.
You can ignore reality, but it won't ignore you.
The psychology is elementary: if a climate disaster arrives after Trump is dead, why would Trump allow any data about the disaster to be collected? That satellite's existence will complicate Trump's life, right now, today, but if there is no satellite, Trump doesn't have to keep saying "Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax". Destroying the satellite makes life easier for Trump, now, and reality in the future is not Trump's problem.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s Global War on Decarbonization
By Mark Blyth and Daniel Driscoll | Aug 21, 2025
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-global-war-on-decar
bonization-green-technologies-by-mark-blyth-and-daniel-driscoll-2025-08
There are multiple competing theories about what drives the anti-green policies embraced by US President Donald Trump. Perhaps they reflect the influence of carbon-heavy industries in Republican-controlled states. Or perhaps they channel ideological hostility to the notion that the state should play any kind of planning role in the economy.
Whatever the case, it is increasingly apparent that the Trump administration wants to halt decarbonization not only in the United States but globally. Viewed from this perspective, much of the recent US policy incoherence starts to make more sense – albeit in a dangerously regressive way.
The US sits atop vast reserves of fossil fuels, which have underpinned its national prosperity for decades. They have lit cities, powered factories, stimulated postwar job growth, and forged broad regional political coalitions among labor, agriculture, and corporations. They are also highly profitable commodities, with exports creating global dependence on US supplies (which is especially true for liquefied natural gas following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine). Fossil fuels are a core component of the country’s political economy – and a key factor in US domestic and foreign policymaking.
The Trump administration recognizes this. It includes ideological realists who understand that energy transitions make hegemons – that energy is power. Just as coal drove the industrial revolution in England, oil and gas fueled America’s postwar dominance. Whoever controls energy controls the future.
Unfortunately for the US, if the next energy transition is a green one, the future surely belongs to China, whose green-tech dominance is so firmly established that it does not really matter which metric you look at. In terms of the critical minerals used for such technologies, China supplies the majority of the world’s refined lithium (70%), cobalt (78%), graphite (95%), rare earths (91%), and manganese (91%). In terms of green-tech manufacturing, China accounts for 80% of solar panel production, 50-70% of the wind turbine market, and over half of electric vehicles. And in terms of deployment, it is undertaking three-quarters of the world’s renewable-energy projects.
This is all good news for those who care about decarbonization; but it is bad news for those hoping to extend US hegemony. If the US wants to preserve its global primacy, then realist logic dictates that it needs China to fail. And the US can engineer that outcome by continuing to do exactly what it is doing.
Since Trump returned to office, his administration has been reshaping American consumption by imposing massive import tariffs and abandoning the previous administration’s program of domestic decarbonization incentives and investments. The Inflation Reduction Act was an explicit attempt to compete with China in green tech. But now Americans are being weaned off the renewables that they were just beginning to enjoy.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill spells disaster for the future of US green-tech investment, and his administration is further deregulating fossil fuels and adding more hurdles for clean-energy projects. While the Environmental Protection Agency works to extinguish its own ability to regulate carbon emissions, NASA satellites that track US emissions are being targeted for self-destruction. All these moves, coupled with 30% tariffs on imports from China, signal to green-tech producers that the world’s top consumer no longer wants their wares.
Moreover, the US is trying to undercut global demand for Chinese green tech by compelling its largest trading partners to import US fossil fuels instead. China’s own top trading partner, the European Union, just committed to purchase $750 billion of US oil and gas by 2028 – an amount that far exceeds current US output. And the rest of Chi
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Blocking clean energy is costly
https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=3d7479ba-979c-4e4e-b86c-a0a0f0b235c3&share=true
Imagine if President Barack Obama had pulled the permits for a multibillion-dollar deepwater oil rig after construction was 80% complete, at a time when gasoline prices were rising. The American people would be justifiably outraged.
President Donald Trump did essentially the same thing last week when his administration issued a stop-work order on the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island. Blocking the $6.2 billion project has put 1,000 people out of work and will reduce the reliability of electricity to 15 million people.
U.S. demand for power is indisputably growing for the first time in a decade. Tech firms are building massive data centers to serve our needs for artificial intelligence, cat videos and social media posts. Texas just registered the state’s 400,000th electric vehicle.
Yet it seems like the White House doesn’t want utilities to meet that new demand — at least not with clean, affordable energy. Instead, the administration is pushing expensive fossil fuels that will damage the climate.
Next on Trump’s chopping block is the $6 billion Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which was scheduled to begin construction next year and employ thousands of workers. Earlier, Trump tried to cancel New York’s $5 billion Empire Wind offshore project but relented when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to allow construction of new natural gas pipelines.
Trump parrots lies to justify his assault on wind, but his deal with Kathy Hochul reveals his true agenda. California has cut natural gas use for electricity by 28% over the past two years by switching to renewables. The oil and gas industry is terrified that the rest of the country will follow suit and has begged him for help protecting their market share.
Trump’s campaign against clean energy has killed $18.6 billion in clean energy projects within the last year, according to the Atlas Public Policy Center’s Clean Energy Tracker. U.S. renewable energy spending is down 36% this year while global investment rose 10%, energy consulting firm BloombergNEF reported.
Trump’s attacks on wind and solar power plants, the cheapest sources of new electricity generation, come as demand for power for artificial intelligence, data centers and electric vehicles is growing 10% a year nationally. The average U.S. electricity bill is up 5.5% from a year ago and has risen 30% since 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
By killing new sources of electricity, Trump is guaranteeing bills will keep rising. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has blamed previous administrations, but Trump is blocking the cheapest and easiest to install forms of generation from coming online.
My colleague James Osborne reports from Washington that the administration is coming for the Texas grid, too. Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Adam Suess announced new reviews on clean energy projects last month that killed a $250 million solar project in East Texas.
The Commerce Department launched a trade investigation into wind turbines imported from overseas, a possible prelude to tariffs that would drive up costs.
And Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently announced plans to block farmers from selling their land for solar projects, saying she was “protecting our family farms and our way of life.”
None of this matches the traditional Republican commitment to free markets, where private actors compete to provide the best goods or services without government interference. Nor does it seem to respect property owners’ right to buy, sell or use their land as they see fit.
I’ve never missed President Ronald Reagan so much. What happened to the all-of-the-above strategy to provide Americans with the energy they need?
Trump is not a conservative or even a free-market capitalist. He demanded that NVIDIA share profits, that Intel and U.S. Steel give up shar
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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