human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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Blowin’ in the Wind: How Nordic Countries Made Electricity Free
04.13.2026
words by oliver milman
photographs by bex day
Years of investment in green infrastructure have driven electricity prices down across countries like Sweden and Finland — sometimes below zero. Could the United States do the same?
When the wind blows hard and rivers run full and fast in Nordic countries, a routine scene plays out that would have seemed incredible just a decade or two ago: The price of electricity falls below $0.
In some parts of the region, power has become so abundant that generators effectively have to pay to offload it. Electricity prices in northern Sweden over the course of last year slipped into negative territory for a total of 679 hours—equivalent to nearly a full month—because the grid was flooded with excess energy. It’s no surprise, then, that Sweden recorded the most negative-price hours in Europe in 2025, according to Montel EnAppSys data, overtaking Finland, which had the most negative-price hours the previous two years. Scandinavian neighbor Denmark also regularly racks up stretches of low- to no-cost days, thanks to its abundant clean energy.
None of this means that residents in these countries pay absolutely nothing for electricity; grid costs and taxes still apply. But the Nordic countries have drastically lowered power prices by forging ahead with hydroelectric and wind development. So much so, in fact, that periods of ultra-cheap—and sometimes effectively free—electricity have become a regular feature of life in parts of the region.
when it comes to shifting domestic energy systems away from the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis, the Scandinavian countries offer a striking success story. In Sweden, 99% of electricity was generated from low-carbon sources last year, the highest share of any European Union country. Norway has been tracking just behind this. Finland, meanwhile, is on the brink of phasing out coal well ahead of its 2029 deadline, generating more wind power than ever before.
This transition is happening faster in Nordic countries than in much of the rest of Europe, though the EU as a whole reached a major milestone in 2025 by generating more electricity from renewables than fossil fuels for the first time. This comes on the back of wars in Ukraine and now Iran, alongside mounting climate concerns, which have intensified pressure on Europe to escape the volatility and inflationary pressures of global oil and gas markets.
More at https://atmos.earth/climate-solutions/blowin-in-the-wind-how-nordic-co
untries-made-electricity-free
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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In a first, renewables beat natural gas on US grid last month
It’s just one month, but it’s a sign of where the U.S. is headed as renewable energy — namely solar — surges onto the grid.
By Dan McCarthy | 10 April 2026
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables-beat-natu
ral-gas-us-grid-march-2026
Just look at what happened last month: Over the course of March, the nation got more electricity from renewables than it did from natural gas, which is typically the single-largest source of energy on the U.S. grid.
It’s the first time renewables have bested the fossil fuel in the U.S. across an entire month, per data pulled from the think tank Ember. Meanwhile, emissions-free sources, a category that includes both renewables and nuclear, produced more than half of the nation’s electricity. It’s just the third time that’s happened across an entire month, the first instance being last March.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump administration cites national security in stalling 165 wind farms
Onshore wind development in the United States is being brought to a standstill.
By Martha Muir, Financial Times | May 4, 2026 8:23 AM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/trump-administration-cites-nat
ional-security-in-stalling-165-wind-farms/
The Trump administration has brought US onshore wind development to a halt citing national security concerns, representing a major escalation in the president’s crusade against renewable energy.
Approvals for about 165 onshore wind projects on private lands are being stalled by the Department of Defense, including wind farms that were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations, and some that typically would not require oversight by the department, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and people close to the matter.
Wind farms require routine approval from the Defense Department to ensure they do not interfere with radar systems. This typically involves the level of risk being assessed and the developer paying an agreed sum for the army to update its radar filter system so it can locate the windmill. Some projects can be deemed not to pose a risk due to their distance from army facilities and flight paths. Normally these assessments can take as little as a few days to complete.
Since August 2025, developers have faced a mix of setbacks, including not receiving expected communications from DoD, having meetings to discuss the status of their projects canceled without the opportunity to reschedule, and being informed that the department has stopped processing their applications, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
The affected projects include 35 that had completed negotiations and are awaiting sign-off from the DoD—first reported by Axios in March.
More projects are now facing a shutdown—30 of which had undergone negotiations, received verbal signoffs, and were waiting for written confirmation, about 50 are in the process of negotiations, and 50 that previously would probably have been declared risk-free, according to developers and consultants.
The wind farms could generate 30 gigawatts, enough to power 15,000,000 homes.
Letters sent to developers in early April said the agency was reviewing its processes for evaluating energy projects’ impact on national security.
The moves represent a dramatic escalation of the administration’s effort to shut down wind energy in the US, reaching for developments on private lands as well as public ones.
President Donald Trump has a particular animosity towards wind farms. He has called them the “worst form of energy” and said his “goal is to not let any windmill be built.”
Since its second term in office, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to shut down work on several offshore wind sites in areas administered by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, also citing national security concerns, as well as other renewable energy projects on federal lands. Some of these actions have been thwarted in federal courts.
“This is so unprecedented,” said Jason Grumet, chief executive of the ACP. “The fact the administration is telling private landowners they’re not allowed to pursue economic activity and generate value from their property is hard to reconcile with conservative values.”
The administration has recently started refunding offshore wind leases in exchange for investments in fossil fuels, such as a $1 billion deal with TotalEnergies in March.
“The Trump administration’s attempts to block wind projects keep getting struck down in court, so it’s reaching for ever more extreme and absurd methods,” said Kit Kennedy, managing director for power at NRDC.
The DoD did not respond to a request for comment.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Is Losing a Second War
The Iran debacle is accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels
Paul Krugman
May 05, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-losing-a-second-war
Last month, out of more than 11,000 new passenger vehicles registered in Norway, only around 150 had internal combustion engines. The rest were fully electric. In mainland Europe as a whole, EV sales are up 51 percent from a year ago.
The global energy transition — the shift from fossil fuels to electrotech, which uses solar, wind and batteries to power an electrified economy — is accelerating. It’s now clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz marks an inflection point: the global green energy curve, which was already on a rapidly rising trajectory, has suddenly become even steeper. “Investors,” reports the Financial Times, “are piling into clean energy funds.”
This acceleration isn’t just a consequence of soaring fossil fuel prices. It is also the result of the worldwide realization that, with the end of Pax Americana, depending on imported hydrocarbons is a risk not worth taking. The United States cannot be relied on to keep sea lanes open when cheap drones can take out an oil tanker or a major pipeline. Even relying on oil and gas from America itself is dangerous, since one never knows when an erratic U.S. government – now under the control of a twice-elected malignant narcissist — will try to use energy as a tool of coercion.
Despite the perversity of its causes, the current acceleration of electrotech is overwhelmingly positive for the world as a whole. It will slow climate change and reduce pollution. It will diminish the power of anti-democratic petrostates and limit the vulnerability of the world economy to disruptions at choke points like Hormuz. It will democratize access to cheap energy sources in places like Africa.
There is another positive consequence of the clean energy boom: the diminishment of the carbon coalition — the interest groups and ideologues who hate renewable energy and want the world to keep burning fossil fuels. That coalition currently controls the Trump administration’s energy policy. But this is only the latest stage in the corruption of U.S. politics by fossil fuel interests. When we decry the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act, we should always remember that the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel oligarchs essentially created the Roberts court.
And now we have petrostate oligarchs making naked corruption great again by lining the pockets of the Trump family.
Trump’s own views about energy are defined by petulance and delusions. Wind power kills birds and drives whales crazy! China — which last year added three times as much wind capacity as the rest of the world combined — doesn’t actually use the turbines it has installed! (It does.)
But Trump’s energy officials are barely less delusional than their boss. Last month Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, dismissed the rise of renewable energy as a failed project:
"The result has been 10 or 20 years of just massive investment in energy that wasn’t helpful in better energizing the world. Wasn’t helpful in lifting people out of poverty. Wasn’t helpful in expanding access to energy. In fact, I believe it’ll go down as the greatest malinvestment in history."
Meanwhile, last year solar and wind power accounted for 99 percent of the growth in world electricity supply, while generation using fossil fuels declined:
Let’s not pretend that hostility to the energy transition has anything to do with faith in free markets or the desire to keep energy cheap. Trump and his minions are actively trying to stop the expansion of green energy even when it’s profitable. In the latest development, the administration is using bogus national security concerns to block the development of wind power:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lqp6!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_
auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe5580050-bb63-47aa-a30f-a2518a268f
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California — Lowest Wholesale Electricity Prices in USA
By Zachary Shahan | May 31, 2026
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-wholesale-elect
ricity-prices-in-usa/
Solar power has grown to enormous levels in California, and that solar power is keeping wholesale prices low. Wind power, water power, and solar power all mean free fuel, and free fuel means low wholesale electricity prices. This is not news, but given how much people love to exclaim “California is expensive,” it did shock me to find out that wholesale electricity is cheaper in California — technically, the California ISO (CAISO) grid — than anywhere else in the country.
That news comes to us via Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford. “CAISO had the lowest U.S. wholesale electricity prices 2025-26, indicating most stable grid. No blackout since 2020,” Jacobson shared on BlueSky.
That was actually the second part of his post, not even the top highlight. “59 straight and 125 of 149 (84%) days in 2026 with WindWaterSolar meeting >100% of demand on the California ISO grid for an avg of 4.9 h/d among all 149 days,” he shared first. In another format, here are those points:
Wind, water, and solar power have provided at least 100% of the California ISO grid’s electricity demand for an average of 4.9 hours a day so far this year. (Expect that to get better in the coming sunnier months.)
In 125 out of 149 days — and 59 days in a row — wind, water, and solar (WWS) power reached more than 100% of electricity demand at some point in the day.
The state may have high retail electricity prices for other reasons, but the abundance of cheap wholesale electricity from sunshine, wind, and water is not one of them!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Solar Power Is Booming Under Trump
“Try as he might to the contrary, Trump will likely preside over the biggest clean-energy buildout in US history.”
By Haley Zaremba - Jun 06, 2026, 4:00 PM CDT
Solar was the single largest source of new U.S. power capacity for 28 consecutive months through year-end 2025, accounting for 72.6% of all electricity additions, per FERC data.
Despite the Trump administration's rollback of Biden-era clean energy incentives, renewables represented 88% of total new U.S. power capacity in 2025, with FERC projecting solar to surpass coal within three years.
A shortage of gas-fired turbines is driving further investment into renewables and energy storage, with NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum noting that renewables remain the fastest path to adding electrons to the grid.
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Why-Solar-Power-I
s-Booming-Under-Trump.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy
His humiliating defeat in Iran has sealed the deal
Paul Krugman
Jun 19, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-champion-of-renewable
On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects. The administration has also tried to stop offshore wind farms already under development — moves that have been blocked by the courts — while the Pentagon has been refusing to grant routine permits for onshore wind projects.
Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to data centers and high gasoline prices.
Yet here’s the irony: Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.. Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.
Why do Trump and his gang hate green energy so much? The roots of their hatred range from the power of fossil fuel interests, to Trump’s petulant whine that wind turbines ruined the view from his Scottish golf course, to a general sense among right-wingers that clean energy threatens their masculinity.
What’s best for Americans has nothing to do with it. Thus, Trump lackeys justifying their hostility to renewables consistently make arguments even they must know are stupid. Consider, for example, an exchange last month between Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior, and Rep. Jared Huffman of Nevada:
Burgum: All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.
Huffman: Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery.
Indeed. To get a clearer understanding of far battery technology has progressed in enabling the transition to renewables, let’s look at how the state of California sourced its electricity this past Wednesday. The chart below shows megawatts supplied at 15-minute intervals over the course of the day. The area shaded yellow represents daylight hours. The light blue line at the top is electricity generated by renewables, mainly solar power (with some wind and hydro as well). In addition to supplying energy for current consumption, renewables supply energy to batteries for nighttime consumption. The black line at the bottom is net electricity supply from batteries — which is negative when batteries are charging, positive when they’re being drawn down:
California — which would be the world’s 4th largest economy if it were a country — gets more than half of its electricity from renewables. It is rapidly becoming a state largely powered by the sun during daylight hours and powered by batteries during the night.
Burgum’s suggestion that solar is an unproven or unreliable technology is completely at odds with reality.
Nor is California the only economy that now makes substantial use of renewable energy. Burgum’s home state of North Dakota gets more than a third of its electricity from wind power (don’t tell Trump). In South Dakota wind supplies 57 percent of the electricity. And renewables generate a large share of electricity in many countries, including most big European economies. (France is the outlier, not because it relies on fossil fuels, but because it has large nuclear capacity.) Spain, for example, now reli
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Beyond Denial
How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study
June 25, 2026, 5:55 am
https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-f
uel-princeton
• Conflicted Funds: BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels, handpicking scientists aligned with their interests.
• A Paradigm-Setting Paper: Princeton scientists who wrote a climate paper criticized as making solutions seem "easy” coordinated with the oil company's executives and showed them multiple drafts.
• Oversold Solutions: Researchers depicted technology to capture carbon and store it underground as being proven and in use at industrial scale, a characterization that stretched the facts.
. . . Jeff Greenblatt, a former researcher for Socolow who contributed to the “Wedges” paper, said the researchers had engaged in “a delicate dance” between maintaining their intellectual integrity and pleasing BP. “I’m sure that if they included that fossil fuels were not part of the solution to a significant extent, they probably would have seen their last year of funding,” he said. “That’s just the reality of these kinds of things.”
Socolow, in an interview, agreed that BP’s funding was likely conditioned on his support for maintaining fossil fuels. “There was a synergy,” he told ProPublica and Drilled in January. When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,” the renewal document said. “This is still our job.”
BP extended its funding for Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) three times. It was originally slated to sunset in 2010 but was renewed through 2015, then 2020 and finally until 2025. All told, the company gave Princeton’s program more than $56 million. https://cmi.princeton.edu/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Oops, scientists may have miscalculated our global warming timeline
Story by Darren Orf | July 9, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/oops-scientists-may-have-
miscalculated-our-global-warming-timeline/ar-AA27zI3Y
. . . “The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate change has been brought forward by at least a decade,” Malcolm McCulloch, lead author of the study, told the Associated Press. “Basically, time’s running out.”
The study concludes that the world started warming roughly 80 years before the IPCC’s estimates and that we already surpassed 1.7 degrees Celsius in 2020. That’s a big “whoa, if true” moment, but some scientists are skeptical. One such scientist, speaking with LiveScience, said that “it begs credulity to claim that the instrumental record is wrong based on paleosponges from one region of the world … It honestly doesn’t make any sense to me.” Other experts expressed wanting to see more data before completely upending the IPCC’s climate goalposts, which say the Earth is currently hovering at a long-term temperature change of around 1.2 degrees Celsius.
Unfortunately, even if the sponges are wrong, there’s mounting evidence that we are in the process of crossing that 1.5 degree threshold as we speak, according to New Scientist. In order to save the planet for future habitability, humans need to curtail emissions immediately—after all, the sea sponges are telling us so.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Oops, scientists may have miscalculated our global warming timeline
Story by Darren Orf | July 9, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/oops-scientists-may-have-
miscalculated-our-global-warming-timeline/ar-AA27zI3Y
. . . “The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate change has been brought forward by at least a decade,” Malcolm McCulloch, lead author of the study, told the Associated Press. “Basically, time’s running out.”
The study concludes that the world started warming roughly 80 years before the IPCC’s estimates and that we already surpassed 1.7 degrees Celsius in 2020. That’s a big “whoa, if true” moment, but some scientists are skeptical. One such scientist, speaking with LiveScience, said that “it begs credulity to claim that the instrumental record is wrong based on paleosponges from one region of the world … It honestly doesn’t make any sense to me.” Other experts expressed wanting to see more data before completely upending the IPCC’s climate goalposts, which say the Earth is currently hovering at a long-term temperature change of around 1.2 degrees Celsius.
Unfortunately, even if the sponges are wrong, there’s mounting evidence that we are in the process of crossing that 1.5 degree threshold as we speak, according to New Scientist. In order to save the planet for future habitability, humans need to curtail emissions immediately—after all, the sea sponges are telling us so.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
That reads to me like "OOPS! We fucked up. Sorry for making you listen to Greta Thundberg all these years.
Yeah... I'll bet the entire fucking EU hates her right now as they're being roasted alive in their houses without A/C.
Fucking dummies.
We're done listening to any of you. Don't try it again. This issue is dead.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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