Cross-posted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places.
Researchers at the REPEAT Project, an undertaking of Princeton University’s ZERO Lab, have in a new report evaluated the impacts of the Republican-designed legislation slashing energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act and other actions. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will, the report states, reduce capital investment in U.S. electricity and clean fuels production by $500 billion and raise U.S. household and business energy expenditures by $28 billion annually in 2030 and $50 billion annually in 2035. That will mean an estimated $280 extra the average household will pay for electricity come 2035.
ZERO Lab chief Jesse Jenkins told Rogé Karma at The Atlantic, “It’s hard to think of a bigger self-own. We’re effectively raising taxes on the country’s main sources of new power at a time when electricity prices are already rising.”
The act will cut additions of solar electricity-generating capacity between now and 2035 by 140 gigawatts and wind capacity additions by 160 gigawatts. That nearly 25% of today’s total U.S. generating capacity from ALL sources.
ZERO Lab chief Jesse Jenkins said “It’s hard to think of a bigger self-own. We’re effectively raising taxes on the country’s main sources of new power at a time when electricity prices are already rising.”
Besides lopping off this much-needed addition of clean energy, the report estimates the act will jack up U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by roughly an extra 190 million metric tons annually in 2030 and and an extra 470 million metric tons in 2035. That last figure is equivalent to 10% of total U.S. emissions in 2024.
Karma writes:
The purported justification for these cuts is that renewables are unreliable energy sources pushed by woke environmentalists, and the country would be better served by doubling down on coal and natural gas. “More wind and solar brings us the worst of two worlds: less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills,” wrote Energy Secretary Chris Wright in an op-ed [June 27]. In fact, renewable energy is cheap and getting cheaper. Even without the tax credits, the price of onshore wind has fallen by 70 percent, solar energy by 90 percent, and batteries by more than 90 percent over the past decade. The IRA, by making these sources even more affordable, was projected to save American consumers an average of $220 a year in the decade after its passage.
The cost savings from renewables are so great that in Texas—Texas, mind you—all of the electricity growth over the past decade has come from wind and solar alone. This has made energy grids more reliable, not less. During the summer of 2023, the state faced several near failures of its electricity grid; officials had to call on residents to conserve energy. The state responded by building out new renewable-energy sources to stabilize the grid. It worked. “The electrical grid in Texas has breezed through a summer in which, despite milder temperatures, the state again reached record levels of energy demand,” The New York Times reported last September. “It did so largely thanks to the substantial expansion of new solar farms.”
In fact, the energy secretary’s description of wind and solar—as unreliable and expensive—is more aptly applied to fossil fuels.
Everybody who voted for the OBBBA yet claim not to be climate science deniers are lying. They are, in fact, reshaping energy policy in the most denier way possible. This will reverse recent U.S. reductions of carbon emissions while jacking up electricity costs and exacerbating extreme weather events with more fossil fuel burning. And who do you suppose they will blame?
—Meteor Blades
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You can also find me @meteorblades.bsky.social
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
RESOURCES & ACTION
GREEN QUOTE
“This [Republican megabill] props up the dirty and expensive technologies of the past while strangling the clean energy investments that are creating millions of jobs across the country. At a time when we need new energy more than ever, Republicans are punishing the plentiful wind and solar power that can be quickly added to the grid.” — Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council
GREEN BRIEFS
The world is investing twice as much in clean energy as fossil fuels. It’s still not enough
Canary Media publishes a new chart each week highlighting some aspect of the green transition. Here’s the latest:
Dan McCarthy reports that $2.2 trillion will be invested this year in clean energy, efficiency, and electrification, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s twice as much as will be invested in fossil fuels.
Led by China, since the Paris Agreement was okayed in 2025, installations of wind and solar have soaring from slightly more than 4% of global electricity generation to 15% in 2024. In that period solar has grown 800%, and photovoltaics will be the energy category that attracts the most investment this year. These investments, of course, mean ever more generation of clean electricity.
Just a couple of problems. First up, despite this growth of clean energy installations, climatologists and activists keep pointing out that large as these investments are, they aren’t enough to meet global pledges made in 2023. To do so requirea a doubling of renewables investmenta, and a tripling of energy efficiency and electrification.
Then there’s pullback from climate goals thanks to election gains of right-wing forces in Europe and in the United States where the retreat is most visible as the Trump administration cuts budgets and staffs, deep-sixes climate and energy data, and works to demolish or sabotage climate-friendly rules and policies.
And, third, even with record-breaking clean energy investments, carbon missions are still on the rise because electricity demand is on the rise. In the developed countries, a substantial amount of that demand comes from energy-devouring AI data centers, and the juice to run many of them comes from fossil fuels, in particular, natural gas-fired turbines.
—Meteor Blades
Could giving A pod of dolphins legal rights help protect them?
In 2018, former Daily Kos Community Director Neeta Lind and I were part of a 10-member Indigenous delegation from various U.S. tribes to New Zealand to meet with activists and officials to discuss their newly agreed conveyance of legal rights to the Whanganui River. This was promoted into existence by activists of the Māori people who are descended from the island nation’s first human inhabitants.
New Zealand’s was one of the world’s first such efforts. Since then, Mexico City has adopted rights of nature as part of its municipal constitution. The Indian supreme court has ruled in favor of “Mother Nature.” All rivers are now under rights of nature legal protection in Bangladesh. In addition, some 30 communities in the United States have adopted similar policies.
A slice of the Whanganui River in Whanganui National Park
As Lisa Bachelor reports at The Guardian, South Korean activists want to give legal personhood to a pod of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, a species that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature labels “nearly threatened.” The pod around Jeju Island includes about 130 of the dolphins, many of them showing scars from encounters with boats and Jet Skis, as well as abandoned nets and other fishing gear.
One activist known as “Dolphin Man” — Jeongjoon Lee, a Korean director who documents and tries to help the bottlenose population. He says: “Because the dolphins cannot cut the fishing lines themselves, we decided to cut them for them. In one case, we had to cut wire from two different places, one was going in through the dolphin’s face to its body, and another from around its tail where it had become tangled.”
He and others have tried to interest local people in protecting the dolphins and have published a brochure in which they are all pictured and named as part of the effort.
Now, a coalition of campaigners and environmentalists want to take things further. They are hoping to have the bottlenose population recognised as a “legal person”, which would give them additional rights and make it easier to protect them.
The idea is part of a growing movement to recognise rights in law of nonhuman species and places, and is the first attempt in Korea to give such status to an animal.
“The idea is that if an individual or a company threatens their livelihood, then we could act on behalf of the dolphins to sue them or to take action in another way,” says Miyeon Kim, who works at Marine Animal Research and Conservation (Marc), the local NGO responsible for naming the dolphins.
Wherever rights of nature laws are considered, the process is complicated, and it’s no different in Korea, where organizations that work with the dolphins have been pushing the idea for two years.
—Meteor Blades
RESEARCH & STUDIES
Climate Change Degrades Nutritional Value of Crops. Climate change is silently sapping the nutrients from our food. Researchers fine that rising CO2 and higher temperatures are not only reshaping how crops grow but are also degrading their nutritional value especially in vital leafy greens like kale and spinach. Presented July 8 in Antwerp at the annual conference of the Society for Experimental Biology.
New Research Shows More Extreme Global Warming Impacts Looming for the Northeast. Nor’easters, with their heavy precipitation and strong winds, pose significant threats to cities along the U.S. east coast, often leading to devastating impacts. Analysis of nor’easter characteristics reveals the strongest nor’easters are becoming stronger, with both the maximum wind speeds of the most intense nor’easters and hourly precipitation rates increasing since 1940. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Melting Arctic ice bolstering North Atlantic Ocean currents, for now. One particularly alarming consequence of rising global temperatures is the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a conveyor-belt-like system of ocean currents driven by the sinking of cold, salty waters in the North Atlantic. Despite rising temperatures and receding Arctic sea ice, however, measurements suggest that the AMOC has endured and even strengthened in recent decades. Published in Science Advances.
Unprecedented acidification expected for corals in Hawai`i waters. Across the globe, oceans are acidifying as they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, threatening coral reefs and many other marine organisms. Oceanographers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have revealed that unprecedented levels of ocean acidification are expected around the main Hawaiian Islands within the next three decades. Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
Agro-pastoral activities accelerated mountain soil erosion for 3,800 years. During those four millenniums, agro-pastoral activities have accelerated alpine soil erosion at a pace four to 10 times faster than their natural formation. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics. DEHP, a chemical used in plastics, may have contributed to over 356,000 heart-related deaths globally in 2018—most heavily in Asia and the Middle East. The chemical, linked to inflammation in arteries, is found in items like food packaging and medical gear. Scientists now warn of its massive health and economic costs. Published in eBioMedicine.
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Amid setbacks for the U.S., the global energy transition goes on by Dan McCarthy at Canary Media. In China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, wind and solar capacity overtook coal and gas in the first quarter of 2025 — a first, according to a Global Energy Monitor report released this week. The country is still building and using immense amounts of fossil fuels, but reports suggest its emissions may finally be in reverse. In the European Union, solar was the largest source of electricity across all of June. It’s the first time solar has led the pack for an entire month in the EU, according to a new Ember report, producing 22% of the region’s electricity. Meanwhile, coal fell to its lowest-ever level. Ireland shuttered its last coal plant in late June, becoming Europe’s 15th coal-free country. Italy and Spain are slated to close their last major coal plants this summer, too. Across the entire world, $2 is now invested in clean energy, efficiency, and the grid for every $1 invested in fossil fuels. That’s serious progress, and a big reason why clean energy is growing so rapidly worldwide. Last year, more than 90% of the new electricity built globally was clean energy. Meanwhile, EV adoption is set to leap 25% this year, compared with 2024, setting yet another record even amid headwinds in the U.S., according to BloombergNEF.
Four members of Science Moms pose for a selfie at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, December 2024. From left to right: Joellen Russell, Erica Smithwick, Claudia Benetiz-Nelson, and Emily Fischer.
Science Moms lean into ‘humanness’ to educate on climate change risk by Frances Mack at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The flood that swept through Camp Mystic in Texas this month is every parent’s worst nightmare. Hours or days of fear and uncertainty, feeling powerless to help, and, for the families of the 27 campers and staff members who perished, the most painful news imaginable. Although flash flooding is a recurring problem in the region, climate change exacerbates the problem. Scientists in Europe have already conducted a rapid assessment and determined that the storm dropped 7% more rain than it would have otherwise because of global warming. The fact that so many children and young people lost their lives underscores the importance of educational groups like Science Moms, a nonpartisan organization started in 2019 by climatologist Katharine Hayhoe and other leading climate scientists and mothers. The group works to demystify climate change and motivate moms to demand plans and solutions that will protect the planet for their kids—and their kids from dangerous, climate-change fueled extreme weather events.
The cover of World Without End by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain. Penguin Books Ltd.
Facing Climate Anxiety With Visual Comedy: ‘World Without End’ Graphic Artist Christophe Blain by Craig Thompson at EcoWatch. Jean-Marc Jancovici is a well-known lecturer in France, and on YouTube, on the topics of energy and climate change. He focuses on the deep history and interconnections of the Earth’s consumption apparatus – how things are made, what things are made of, how energy is created, distributed and burned, and how the energy needs of the future should be met. Christophe Blain is a French graphic artist known for his humorous historical works, most notably Weapons of Mass Diplomacy. But a few years ago, he was struck by current events in his home country. “In the summer of 2018, there were severe heat waves,” Blain said. “I realized they were linked to global warming. I said to myself, ‘This is it, we’re here.’ I was very anxious for a year.” He began talking to his brother to see what could be done. […] The result of this meeting of minds is World Without End, a full-length graphic book that melds Jancovici’s words with Blain’s vibrant and comical illustrations to tell the story of energy: where we’ve been, and where we might be headed. It’s a long-form book version of one of his lectures, rich in data, theory and commentary, propelled by Blain’s unique method of visual storytelling in which a reader never gets lost or overwhelmed.
The Permitting Crisis for Renewables by Robinson Meyer and Charlie Clynes at Heatmap News. A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio. A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island. A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska. These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants. These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
Pigs clear fields of weeds at Blue Dasher Farm. It saves on machinery and labor, and is healthy for the pigs and the people who eat them.
Food giants graded a “D” on sustainable farming practices by Shannon Kelleher at The New Lede. Major food corporations are failing to effectively support farming practices that protect human and environmental health, according to an assessment of 20 companies released Thursday by a corporate watchdog group. The report scored corporate programs and policies related to regenerative agriculture — a type of farming that prioritizes healthy soil — determining that, on average, the companies deserved a near-failing grade of “D.” The nonprofit group As You Sow, which said it based its analyses on industry reports and other publicly available data, assigned the lowest grades to W.K. Kellogg Co., known for popular cereals including Frosted Flakes and Rice Krispies, and B&G Foods, Inc., whose brands include Crisco and Cream of Wheat. Companies earning the highest scores included PepsiCo, the global snack and beverage giant, as well as McCain Foods and Lamb Weston, both known for their French fries and other potato products. Regenerative farming practices have been surging in popularity in recent years, driven by concerns that industrial agricultural practices are contributing to global warming, polluting waterways, degrading soil health, harming delicate ecosystems and endangering human health and the health of many important species with widespread use of toxic chemicals.
In the Sweltering Southwest, Planting Solar Panels in Farmland Can Help Both Photovoltaics and Crops by Tina Deines at Inside Climate News. For 12 years, researcher Gret Barron-Gafford has been investigating agrivoltaics, the integration of solar arrays into working farmland. This practice involves growing crops or other vegetation, such as pollinator-friendly plants, under solar panels, and sometimes grazing livestock in this greenery. Though a relatively new concept, at least 604 agrivoltaic sites have popped up across the United States, according to OpenEI. Researchers like Barron-Gafford think that, in addition to generating carbon-free electricity, agrivoltaics could offer a ray of hope for agriculture in an increasingly hotter and drier Southwest, as the shade created by these systems has been found to decrease irrigation needs and eliminate heat stress on crops. Plus, the cooling effects of growing plants under solar arrays can actually make the panels work better. But challenges remain, including some farmers’ attitudes about the practice and funding difficulties.
WEEKLY BLUESKY SKEET
ECOPINION
Trump’s Logging Push Thrusts a Dagger at the Heart of Wilderness by Ted Williams at Yale E360. On June 23, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the administration’s decision to abolish the rule that bans roads in 58.5 million roadless acres of the 193 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service, including 9.37 million acres of Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska.The Tongass is Earth’s largest essentially intact temperate rainforest and the ancestral homeland of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples. It includes glaciers, mountains, fjords, and most of the Alexander Archipelago’s 1,100 islands. It’s drained by 15,700 miles of streams and rivers that sustain some of the continent’s healthiest populations of Pacific salmon (all five species), steelhead, rainbow, Dolly Varden, and coastal cutthroat trout. The Tongass is an important sanctuary for wildlife, much of it imperiled elsewhere. In winter, it’s warmer than my home state of Massachusetts, which it exceeds in size by 11.7 million acres. Throughout the Tongass’s roadless section, old-growth Sitka spruce, western hemlock, red cedar and yellow cedar stabilize soil, shade and cool salmonid habitat, sequester carbon, and pump out oxygen. Some of these trees were alive in the Middle Ages. Secretary Rollins did not mention any of that in her statement that called the roadless rule “disastrous.”
Kate Yoder
Why the federal government is making climate data disappear by Kate Yoder at Grist. For 25 years, a group of top experts has been tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the U.S. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, on June 30, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on. The erasure of the National Climate Assessments isn’t the elimination of climate information by the administration but it’s “by far the biggest loss we’ve seen,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future. While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they’re no longer as easy to access. And it’s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form.
The EPA’s Lee Zeldin Is Unleashing a Chemical Nightmare by Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. EPA chief Lee Zeldin announced Thursday an effort to “compile everything we know about contrails and geoengineering” and release it to the public. Contrails are cloud-like trails of condensation left behind by aircraft, known as “chemtrails” to those who believe they’re signs of the government clandestinely drugging the population with dangerous chemicals for the purposes of population control. Zeldin is giving chemtrail theorists more credence than they’ve enjoyed in previous administrations, and arguably elevating some crackpot theories as legitimate lines of inquiry. But the resources EPA links to largely debunk the fringe theories. The real scandal isn’t that Zeldin is talking about chemtrails, or even that the EPA seems to have devoted some amount of state resources to disproving the more conspiratorial beliefs of the MAGA coalition. Out in the open, Zeldin’s EPA has been dismantling protections against precisely the sorts of dangers that right-wingers warn are coming from alleged deep-state conspiracies: toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that corporations have lobbied to freely inject into our air, water, food, and bodies. For instance, the EPA withdrew a Biden-era proposal that would require plastics produced by Chevron and other major Republican donors to be free of 18 chemical contaminants.
NEPA: The Accepted Lies and Mistakes About This Critical Environmental Law by Alejandro E. Camacho and Robert L. Glicksman at The Revelator. In 2020, Trump 1.0 adopted the first significant revisions to the regulations of the Council on Environmental Quality that govern agency compliance with National Environmental Protection Act since their initial adoption in 1978. These revisions sharply scaled back opportunities for public input, completely contrary to Congress’ intent when it enacted NEPA in 1969. President Biden restored the pre-2020 status quo while retaining some of the streamlining the critics desired. But Trump 2.0 seeks a more permanent, more radical, and more dangerous solution. CEQ is trying to repeal in their entirety the regulations that have governed NEPA for more than 45 years. This would leave individual agencies free to adopt their own, disparate versions of NEPA review, with attendant inconsistencies and uncertainties. The Trump administration has also introduced what it calls “alternative NEPA procedures” that ludicrously reduce project timelines, even for major projects, from what would normally require a couple of years to evaluate carefully to as little as two weeks.
Trump Administration Sets Stage for Attack on National Monuments by Morgan Sjogren at Sierra magazine. When it comes to monuments, no decisive actions have been taken in the wake of the Department of Justice opinion saying a president can abolish or shrink national monuments. John Leshy, who served as an Interior official in both the Carter and Clinton administrations, thinks this is because of public support for monuments. “I think they’re hesitating, frankly, because all the opinion polls show that monuments and protecting public lands are incredibly popular practically everywhere across the board,” Leshy said. “So, I think that makes them a bit nervous.” The bipartisan support for national monuments is incredibly strong: 89 percent of Western voters support maintaining existing monument designations. In Utah, over 70 percent of voters support continuing to protect Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. “Americans more broadly care so deeply about the fate of their federal lands and have a deep and abiding love and appreciation for national monuments,” Bloch, who is also the legal director for SUWA, said. “No surprise that in Utah, four of our five national parks were born from national monuments. As national monuments, nobody looks back on those designations as a bad idea.”
Looking down at the Colorado River, Lees Ferry, and the Paria River.
Colorado River users come to their senses? by Jonathan P. Thompson at The Land Desk. After years of bickering, wrangling, fighting, and digging in their heels, representatives of the seven Colorado River Basin states may have finally agreed on a “revolutionary” way to split up the river’s waters: They’re going to base it on how much water is actually in the river at any given time. So, apparently, in this world, “revolutionary” is a synonym for the most common sense, obvious, and, really, necessary way to do things. […] While this may be the closest the states have come to reaching some sort of consensus on how to run the River beyond 2026, it seems as if there is still many sticky details to work out. How are they going to agree on a fixed percentage? What will the minimum release be? And how will that fly with the Upper Basin during years such as 2002, when the natural flow at Lees Ferry was a mere 5.8 million acre-feet? Time’s running out.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
• What’s next for advanced nuclear technology? • Nuclear could replace wind power at Lava Ridge site in Idaho • Scientists are trekking into the heart of a hurricane disaster zone — to save these rare creatures • Trump budget axes clean energy funds for city fleets, sparking health and industry concerns • Trump’s Tax Law Throws Lifeline to Unloved Energy and Climate Sectors • Proof — Why People Deny Climate Change Is Real • How Hot Can It Get? Scientists Are Struggling to Find an Answer • Abbott says megafloods are “just part of nature.” The fossil fuel industry disagrees.