All of these problems have diverted our attention from the slow-moving crisis that’s been hounding us for decades and threatens to make much of our world unlivable — climate change.

Despite the alarm bells going off this summer — massive and deadly wildfires, killer heat waves, devastating floods — politicians have essentially ignored the source of the problem: our reliance on fossil fuels, the burning of which is rapidly heating up our planet.

You might be saying, “What’s the point? Trump, the fossil fuel-friendly president, will veto any legislation to reduce carbon emissions, and the Republicans in charge of Congress appear to have little interest in solving climate change.”

You may be surprised, however, to learn there is viable legislation with a chance of being enacted that will dramatically increase America’s ability to reduce emissions in the coming decades. Permitting reform can speed the transition to clean energy, particularly by updating and building infrastructure for electricity transmission to move solar and wind power from places where it’s generated to places where it’s needed. Unless the nation’s power grid is updated, wind energy from the plains states won’t find its way to urban centers in coastal states where there’s still a heavy reliance on coal and gas to generate electricity.

The grassroots advocacy organization Citizens’ Climate Lobby, known for its lobbying on legislation to price carbon, has expanded its policy portfolio beyond carbon pricing, which has little chance of moving forward in the current political environment. One area where CCL sees opportunity is permitting reform.

As CCL Research Manager Dana Nuccitelli explains, “Insufficient electrical transmission line capacity has been a key bottleneck slowing down the deployment of clean power sources. That’s why an analysis of the 2024 Energy Permitting Reform Act estimated that its transmission reform provisions could have resulted in more total climate pollution reductions than the Inflation Reduction Act. Building more electrical transmission lines faster is a critical climate solution in allowing more clean electricity onto the grid.”

Permitting reform enjoys support on both sides of the aisle — one of the few policy issues that does these days — making passage in this Congress a possibility. One of CCL’s strong suits is bipartisanship, and its volunteer advocates are adept and persuasive when it comes to talking to both Democrats and Republicans.

Efforts to slow and reverse climate change suffered a setback last year when the Republican-controlled Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gutted provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that incentivized clean energy. Those provisions were estimated to cut U.S. carbon emissions 7 billion tons by mid-century. Taking away those incentives reduced those anticipated reductions to 1 billion tons. Transmission permitting reform, however, would add 6.5 billion tons of carbon reductions, essentially restoring the emissions reductions of the IRA.

Permitting reform came very close to being enacted in the previous Congress. A bipartisan bill from senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and John Barrasso (R-WY), the Energy Permitting Reform Act, was introduced in July of 2024. There was an effort to include the bill’s provisions in a spending bill passed at the end of the year, but that effort fell short.

Those provisions included…

• Revising the judicial review process for energy and mining projects, setting a 150-day deadline for filing civil actions seeking review decisions to grant or deny authorization of projects. The current deadline to file for review of decisions is six years.

• Requiring the Department of the Interior to hold at least one offshore wind lease sale and at least one offshore oil and gas lease sale per year. The Bipartisan Policy Center offers a detailed assessment on the bill’s effect on federal land leasing for both fossil fuel and clean energy projects.

• Tightening up the timeline for approving construction of interstate transmission lines, which can take more than 10 years. This is done by granting greater authority to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve projects when negotiations among state and local governments become contentious and protracted. More about the transmission provisions here.

While there is bipartisan support for permitting reform, there is also opposition on both sides of the aisle. Some Democrats fear it will help fossil fuel projects, and some Republicans don’t want the federal government to override state and local authority. Regarding fears that permitting reform will speed up fossil fuel project, it’s true that approval for ALL energy projects will move faster. However, 90% of the energy projects waiting to be added to the grid are for clean energy. Most Republicans appear willing to sacrifice some local autonomy in order to cut government red tape.

The assignment for the 800-plus volunteers who recently traveled to Washington for CCL’s conference and lobby day was to convince enough members of Congress from both parties to move permitting reform legislation forward and get it across the finish line before the 119th Congress ends on Jan. 3.

That’s a pretty tall order. The House and Senate have adjourned for the August recess, with the Senate not scheduled to return until Sept. 14. At that point, Congress will be in session for only three weeks before lawmakers head home for nearly the entire month of October to run for re-election. After the election, there will be a lame-duck session of four weeks to finish up essential business before time runs out.

As in the previous Congress, the lame-duck session will likely be the best opportunity to get permitting reform passed. Before they left Washington, the House and the Senate both passed stop-gap funding bills to avoid a government shutdown before the election. The two bills, however, don’t currently agree on how long funding will be extended, and the House, when it returns Aug. 31, will need to pass a bill that matches the Senate version. Assuming that works out, the government will run out of money on Dec. 11.

Wanting to avoid a shutdown before the holiday season, Congress will scramble to pass an omnibus spending bill, at which point lawmakers will look for ways to have other bills hitch a ride on this must-pass legislation. Political will, of course, will determine which bills get to hop on, and that’s something CCL excels at generating. They laid the groundwork with their lobby day in D.C. last month, and volunteers throughout the country will build on that support in the coming months with letters and phone calls to Congress as well as letters to the editor and op-eds in their local newspapers.

With climate change, time is not our ally. The longer we delay the transition off fossil fuels, the worse things will get. All the more reason we can’t afford to squander opportunities like permitting reform.

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This explanation pegged the needle on the bullshitometer and sent reporters from the New York Times scurrying to learn the real reason for the change in plans. After Trump, flying on the older Air Force One, and the Qatari jet landed at Mendenhall Air Force Base in Great Britain, Trump boarded the newer plane for the flight back to the U.S.

After some digging around, the Times reporters learned the truth about the switcheroo: The Qatari plane, rushed into service at Trump’s insistence, lacked some key security features that provide defense against antiaircraft missiles and systems to protect the plane “from the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear blast.” The Secret Service advised switching planes out of an abundance of caution when hostilities between the U.S. and Iran flared up again while Trump was in Turkey.

This was an important story that followed the pattern of carelessness with which the Trump administration goes about doing almost everything. In this instance, however, we’re not talking about a botched paint job in the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. Had Iran been able launch a missile and strike a defenseless Air Force One, it would have touched off a global conflagration with far greater consequences than higher gasoline prices.

Freedom of the press works in tandem with the public’s right to know, and in this case the public had a right to know that the administration was taking a security risk in using a plane for the president of the United States that was not equipped to defend itself. The reporters at the Times did their job as members of the Fourth Estate, the branch of government that holds the others accountable. Doing their job required them to use anonymous sources, and in most cases reporters are legally not required to reveal those sources. If reporters were required to name their sources whenever the government was looking for a leak, it would have a chilling effect on journalists’ ability to gather information.

Trump, of course, was livid about the Times’ story and wanted to find the leaker who revealed the planes were switched for security reasons. On Trump’s order, FBI Director Kash Patel subpoenaed the four reporters who wrote the story, compelling them to testify before a grand jury. There are exceptions for which reporters can be compeled to name of sources, like national security, but this was not the case with the Qatari jet. This was an attempt to intimidate and stifle the press, and while the Times’ reporters have the legal resources of a deep-pocketed media outlet, smaller outlets and independent journalists — like those publishing on Substack — don’t have those kinds of resources.

In an interview with NPR, the Times’ Executive Editor Joe Kahn said, “This doesn’t follow anything like standard Justice Department procedures for looking into a leak, where you try to identify the source of the leak, and you interview people who had access to the information. Going directly to the journalists like this is a naked act of intimidation.”

The Times’ lawyers have filed a motion to quash the subpoenas that is still pending, and a hearing is scheduled in court for Thursday. Meanwhile, the Times reported this week that the Trump administration issued subpoenas seeking phone and text records of the reporters AND their relatives, including spouses and parents. Seth Stern from Freedom of the Press Foundation said this:

“Even the Mafia says families are off limits. It’s gross that the administration — in its never-ending effort to harass and intimidate reporters who reveal its incompetence — is going after the communications of journalists’ relatives.”

Working for a media outlet owned by a big corporation can protect reporters from the devastating legal expenses involved in cases like this, but corporate ownership of media raises other problems. As I wrote earlier this year, big corporate owners of media outlets like the Washington Post and CBS News have a huge conflict of interest because of government contracts, mergers and regulations that can affect the bottom line of their other holdings. A vindictive administration can use its leverage to bend corporate-owned media to its will. The New York Times is an exception among big media companies, because its owners have no other corporate interests that can be exploited.

Going to a not-for-profit model like National Public Radio or the independent route of Substack can provide an alternative to easily-intimidated corporate media owners. Non-profits and Substack writers, however, don’t have the deep pockets to defend against legal challenges like egregious libel suits and specious subpoenas that are little more than fishing expeditions. If the resources are not available for journalists to defend themselves in court, it will have a chilling effect on their ability to use anonymous sources as well as the willingness of sources to speak freely to journalists.

To ensure that reporters can do their job without fear of being hauled into court, all journalists, whether independent or working for no-profits or publications with limited resources, must have access to pro bono legal assistance.

One of the organizations stepping up to fill this need is Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. From their website:

Since our founding in 1970, the Reporters Committee has operated a 24/7 Legal Hotline that provides assistance to journalists with a variety of media law and press freedom issues, including routine newsgathering questions on public records, subpoena threats, protest coverage, and more. It’s also available in emergency situations, including when a journalist has been arrested. We can help journalists and newsrooms anywhere in the country with public records and court access issues, subpoena threats, source protection, and other issues that may arise while newsgathering.

I wrote to Reporters Committee seeking information about the scope of their work, whether they’re able to respond to and assist on all the requests they get for legal assistance, but as of this posting I have not heard back. Among the nine organizations listed here that support press freedom, Reporters Committee appears to be the only one offering pro bono legal assistance.

Other groups focus on training and advocacy, like Freedom of the Press Foundation, which tracks press freedom violations and provides tools and training to protect sources.

While it’s encouraging that Reporters Committee provides free legal assistance, my guess is that the need for this type of help is far greater than any one organization can handle. Philanthropists and foundations, particularly those already funding endeavors to safeguard freedom of the press, should pool their resources to provide pro bono legal aid to any journalist under attack for simply doing their job.

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Trump is pulling out all the stops in a desperate attempt to help his party retain power in the upcoming midterm elections and in the presidential election in 2028. He fears accountability for the corruption that has enriched him and his family, accountability that will come if Democrats take control of Congress. The New York Times published an excellent piece on the dozens of ways Trump is trying to tip the scales for Republicans who know the only way they can keep the majority is to keep people from voting.

Most of these schemes are being challenged in court, the co-equal branch of government that is still functioning, and the Elias Law Group often leads the charge to defend the right to vote and ensure that everyone’s voice is heard.

Elias was the firm that represented veterans and senior citizens in the case of Watson v. RNC when Republicans tried to restrict voting by mail, which was recently decided by the Supreme Court. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia currently allow absentee ballots that are postmarked by election day to be counted, even if they are received after election day. Republicans challenged a law in Mississippi that allows late ballots to be counted if they’re mailed by election day. Lower courts had rejected this challenge until the case reached the conservative 5th District Court, a decision that was then appealed to the Supreme Court.

Attorneys with the Elias Group managed to convince two of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts, to side with the court’s three liberal justices in favor of allowing grace periods for mail-in ballots. This is a huge victory for democracy, as millions of Americans now vote by mail, and the U.S. Postal Service in recent years has become unreliable when it comes to delivering mail in a timely fashion. In Washington State, for example, more than 250,000 ballots cast in the 2024 election that were postmarked by election day were received after election day.

On the day of the Supreme Court’s decision, the Elias Law group released a statement:

“Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of our clients, Vet Voice Foundation and the Mississippi Alliance for Retired Americans, affirming a simple principle: a lawful ballot cast on time should be counted. It rejected the RNC’s radical attempt to rewrite election laws in a way that would have resulted in the rejection of hundreds of thousands of ballots and the disenfranchisement of voters nationwide through no fault of their own… We will keep fighting to protect free and fair elections wherever and whenever threats arise. This ruling demonstrates that when we fight for democracy, we can win.”

Mail-in voting is just one area where Elias is defending democracy. A bigger threat is unfolding with Trump’s efforts to seize voter data from states, a first step in creating a national voter database that can be used to purge voters who lean to the left. From Protect Democracy:

The Constitution gives states the authority to run elections, not the federal government, and states have reliable processes to maintain voter rolls on an ongoing basis — bipartisan consensus agrees on this. Nevertheless, a draft Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) sent to more than a dozen states would give the DOJ the power to handpick voters for removal, an unprecedented move that could give the agency boundless power beyond its scope, and leave hundreds or thousands of people disenfranchised.

The draft MOU does not include any criteria for removal, which means that there are no rules around whom the DOJ might remove from voter rolls. It is not too far a stretch to imagine that the agency could target Democratic voters in key house districts. In fact, attempts by one of the candidates to disqualify eligible votes in North Carolina’s 2024 supreme court race were blatantly partisan.

So far, Trump’s Justice Department has filed lawsuits in 30 states demanding that states turn over voter data. The Elias Law Group is representing voters and pro-voting organizations in all these states. They’re currently batting 1.000. Elias has intervened in eight of the nine cases that have been decided. The courts have ruled against the DoJ’s attempts to seize voter data in every case. The latest victory came in Maryland late last month. From the Elias Law Group’s press release:

“This ruling is another resounding rejection of the Justice Department’s attempt to vacuum up the private information of millions of voters,” said Elias Law Group partner Uzoma Nkwonta. “The court saw this demand for exactly what it is: a federal overreach with no basis in the law, dressed up as an effort to protect election integrity. We are proud to stand with the Maryland/DC Alliance for Retired Americans, and we will keep fighting these baseless demands wherever they are brought. We cannot allow the Trump Administration to amass a nationwide voter database that can be used to disenfranchise voters and subvert free and fair elections.”

Want more? In May, Elias filed lawsuits challenging restrictive voting laws and illegal congressional maps in six states:

• Florida Decides Healthcare v. Byrd: A pro-voting lawsuit challenging the Florida legislature’s efforts to curtail direct democracy.

• Bothfeld v. Wisconsin Elections Commission: A pro-voting lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s congressional map as a partisan gerrymander.

• Equality State Policy Center v. Gray: A pro-voting lawsuit challenging Wyoming’s proof of citizenship requirement when registering to vote.

• Count US IN v. Morales: A pro-voting lawsuit challenging Indiana’s ban on the use of a student ID for voting.

• Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice v. Schwab: A pro-voting lawsuit challenging a Kansas law that disqualifies mail ballots that arrive after election day.

• Montana Public Interest Research Group v. Jacobsen: A pro-voting lawsuit challenging a Montana law that imposes additional requirements that prevent students from registering to vote in the county where they live.

If you want to stay informed about the work the Elias Law Group is doing to protect our rights, I highly recommend subscribing to Democracy Docket, a digital news platform dedicated to information, analysis and opinion about voting rights and elections in the courts. Marc is also a frequent guest on MSNOW, where is often called upon to explain the latest assaults on voting rights and what’s being done to protect those rights.

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Let’s start with looking at the cruelty of this decision (Pope Leo, care to weigh in?). Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, has been beset with problems and disasters for decades — a 2010 earthquake that killed 220,000 people and displaced 1.2 million, hurricanes that destroy homes, 12 million people going hungry, collapse of the government that has left violent gangs running the country. In short, for much of the population, Haiti is a living hell, causing hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in the United States.

If empathy is not your thing, there’s a big reason why it’s a bad idea to send Haitians living here under TPS back to their home country: It will create labor shortages in critical areas, particularly health care for the elderly. From the New York Times:

The Supreme Court’s decision will fall most heavily in the health care industry, where Haitians in particular have been concentrated, especially in elder care facilities. Health care has been the American economy’s fastest-growing industry for years now, and the vacancy rate is substantially higher than it is for others, so finding new workers on short notice will be very difficult.

“Providers will have to make tough choices, which could include limiting nursing home admissions, closing units or turning away requests for home health and home care, until the vacant jobs are filled,” said Katie Smith Sloan, chief executive of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit aging services providers.

Supporters of the immigration crackdown and mass deportation policy justify these actions by saying that foreigners take jobs away from American citizens. There are two big problems with that argument:

• Most of the jobs immigrants perform are jobs Americans have little or no desire to do — harvesting crops, cleaning infirm seniors in nursing homes, mowing yards, cleaning homes, meat processing.

• We don’t have enough workers. As I mentioned in a previous post, birthrates have dropped below replacement levels, primarily because of affordability issues. The Baby Boom generation is now retired, and we need more workers to manufacture goods and provide services. With fewer workers paying into Social Security, retirees will see cuts to payments unless more people enter the workforce.

The health care industry is not the only sector experiencing labor shortages because of short-sighted immigration policies. You may have noticed we have an affordability crisis with housing caused by a shortage in the construction of houses and apartments. It’s estimated that about 20 percent of the workforce in the construction industry is undocumented. Deporting all these workers under the administration’s mass deportation policy will exacerbate the affordability crisis in housing.

Tariffs and the war in Iran are sending grocery prices soaring, but things will get much worse if farmers can’t find enough laborers to harvest their crops. Deportations, along with the fear of deportation, throws a big monkey wrench into the process of getting food from the field to the grocery store shelf. Demand for food does not go down, so when the supply decreases because crops are left to rot in the field, prices go up.

We must inject a healthy dose of common sense into our immigration policies. Given the unmet need for workers in health care, agriculture, construction and other areas, the government should assess that need and expand the number of immigrants coming into the country to fill that need.

The suspension of temporary protected status isn’t just a matter of creating labor shortages in critical areas; sending people back to places where their lives are endangered, people who have lived here for years, is a moral failure that diminishes America’s standing in the world.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on TPS is one more example of why drastic measures, like expanding the court, are needed to prevent more disastrous decisions.

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In 1960, about 70 to 75 percent of married-couple families were supported by one income earner. Fast forward to 2020 and we find that the share of one-income families has fallen to 33 percent. Wage growth started to slow down in 1979 when the Iranian revolution created an energy crisis that led to a recession. The Reagan era then ushered in “trickle down” economics with tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to social programs and a war on labor unions that had given Americans livable wages, a five-day work week, health care benefits, paid vacations and overtime pay.

From 1979 on, the American middle class experienced an erosion of economic vitality, and more and more families found it required two income earners to afford the same lifestyle their parents enjoyed with one income. With both parents needing to be in the workforce, families must now pay for child care while parents are on the job, an expense that takes a significant bite out of their household income. Today those costs can average $15,000 annually per child, more for infant care. And we haven’t even touched on the impossible situation of single-parent households — usually women — where child support payments may not even cover the cost of child care.

Skyrocketing housing costs, along with the cost of child care, have led to a decline in birth rates. In 1990, the fertility rate was 2.08 births per woman, but by 2023 it had fallen to 1.62, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. This presents a number of economic and societal problems, not the least of which is a shortfall of workers to fund the Social Security system. It is now estimated that the Social Security trust fund will become insolvent by 2032, requiring cuts to benefits for one in five retirees unless Congress acts to remedy the funding shortfall.

New York Times writer Jia Lynn Yang recently published an excellent piece about the parenting crisis in America and the toll it takes on families and society at large:

The numbers tell an alarming story: In one survey, 48 percent of parents said that most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults, a gap that has grown over the last decade. Another poll found that seven in 10 Americans say that raising children is unaffordable, an increase of 20 percent points over the last decade. Indeed, the cost of child care has more than tripled since 1990, far outpacing the rise in wages. To be a parent in America is to race constantly in vain against the clock. In a recent survey of parents of young children under 6, nearly three in four said they wished they had more quality time with their children. Instead, many are working, too crunched financially to contemplate having more hours to enjoy family life.

How much of a squeeze is child care putting on household budgets? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suggests that an affordable percentage of household income for child care should be 7 percent. On average, though, working parents are paying 24 percent of their income on child care, putting this necessity far into the unaffordable range.

The American government, however, spends very little to ease the financial burden of child care, especially when compared to other wealthy countries, as this chart from the New York Times illustrates:

The need to lift the financial burden of child care is starting to resonate in government. Last November, New Mexico became the first state to offer free child care for all families, regardless of income level. In New York, newly-elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani is launching a free child care pilot program for city workers.

It’s clear, though, that the crisis of affordability for child care extends to every city and state in the nation, a need that can only be met with the kind of resources the federal government can provide. One of the biggest leaders in Congress addressing child care affordability is Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). In late March, she and several congressional Democrats — Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) — launched the Child Care for America working group to build broad support for legislation to make child care affordable for all families.

“Delivering high-quality child care is one of the best tools we have to make life more affordable for families. In the richest nation in the world, we should invest in child care like public infrastructure — not treat it like a privilege reserved for only the wealthiest Americans,” said Warren.

Here are the principles that Warren and her colleagues say will guide their legislation:

1. Affordability: Family costs must be predictable and affordable, with payments capped at no more than 7 percent of income, free child care for families with the lowest incomes, and guaranteed access with no waiting lists.

2. Child Care as Public Infrastructure: Federal funding must expand and stabilize child care supply, support safe facilities, and ensure resources meet all families where they are.

3. Boosting Worker Pay: Child care workers must be paid fairly and supported as professionals, with living wages, access to benefits, paid leave, retirement, and professional development.

4. High Quality and Accountability: Federal responsibility must be clear and enforceable, with the federal government covering at least 90 percent of system costs and having the ability to directly support localities when states fail to act, bolstered by strong reporting, oversight, and accountability standards.

5. Accessibility: The child care system must meet families where they are, with support for nontraditional hours, inclusive care for children with disabilities and developmental needs, language access, culturally responsive services, and full-day, full-year integration with Head Start and Early Head Start.

6. Urgent Implementation: The federal government must provide investments and support to ensure the child care supply scales up rapidly and addresses the immediate affordability crisis.

For all the deficit hawks who worry such a program would add unsustainable debt to our national budget, let me suggest a few ways to find funding:

• Don’t start unnecessary wars: Our 20-year war in Iraq, predicated on the false belief that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, cost nearly $3 trillion. The current war with Iran, which made things worse than they were, will easily cost more than $100 billion.

• Do not subsidize fossil fuels: Oil and gas companies, already reaping record profits from the war with Iran, currently get $34 billion a year in taxpayer money.

• Make billionaires pay their fair share: The ultra wealthy pay taxes at a rate far lower than most Americans. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation for a 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires that would raise $4.4 trillion over a 10-year period.

The current Congress is unlikely to address child care affordability, which makes the upcoming midterms a matter of life and death economically for millions of American families. A change in leadership, both in Congress and in the White House, will be needed to bring relief to struggling households.

But perhaps the biggest reason AI is getting the cold shoulder is the insane amount of infrastructure being built across the country to support this technology, data centers that are straining the electricity and water resources of local communities. As demand for electricity to power these facilities goes up, utilities plan to build more power plants and upgrade their power lines and grids to meet that demand. The cost of that infrastructure is paid by residential consumers in the form of higher electric bills.

Yale Climate Connections reports how consumers are basically subsidizing the cost of power used for these data centers:

In just two years, starting in 2022, residential electricity prices rose by 10%, while commercial prices increased by only 3%, and industrial electricity prices fell by 2%... [A]t the root of it all, the data suggests that everyday people are footing the bill while companies that consume ever more power are paying less. At a time when corporations seem to enjoy many structural advantages over consumers, from lower tax rates to relaxed pollution requirements, the burden of rising energy bills can make one feel powerless. And yes, the pun was intentional.

Alarmingly, much of the electricity being added for these data centers will be generated by fossil fuels, the burning of which is the primary culprit behind global warming. Remember climate change, that little problem making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable? Scientists have warned for more than a generation that we face catastrophic consequences if we don’t transition away from the use of fossil fuels. The AI gold rush, however, throws caution to the wind where climate change is concerned. Let’s see… a livable planet or amusing videos of dancing cats? Which do we need more?

As Inside Climate News reported last December, Georgia’s Public Service Commission gave the green light for Georgia Power to proceed with plans to add 10 gigawatts of electricity to the state’s power grid, with 60 percent of the power being generated from natural gas. Georgia Power claims the additional power is needed to meet energy demands for data centers that are sprouting up throughout the Peach State.

“The approval is going to set us even further back on making climate progress,” said Jennifer Whitfield, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “It’s really frustrating, because we were making incremental progress as a state.”

In late January, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division approved permits for the gas-powered facilities. The Southern Environmental Law Center and Sierra Club are now challenging that approval.

In case you’re wondering why Georgia Power is pushing gas-fired power plants instead of incentivizing rooftop solar, the reason is fairly simple: Georgia Power makes more profit by building new plants. The Georgia Public Service Commission guarantees a return on equity (RoE) of 10 percent to 12 percent on capital investments, allowing the company to raise rates to get their RoE. Since there’s no money to be made in having their customers feed solar energy into the grid, turn on the gas, baby!

As the ramifications of these data centers become more apparent — higher electric bills, dwindling water resources, impact on climate change — more and more people are telling developers and local governments they don’t want them in their communities. The New York Times reports that last year 48 projects totalling $156 billion in investment were blocked or stalled by local opposition. Even so, analysts predict that AI “superscalers” will spend $710 billion on data centers in North America this year.

Erin Brockovich, an environmental activist portrayed by Julia Roberts in a 2000 film, has launched a website to track AI data centers across the country: “The RACE to build AI infrastructures is unfolding town by town across America. In some places, data centers are welcomed. In others, they are delayed, contested or abandoned altogether. This MAP captures the real-world footprint of that race — revealing patterns of growth, conflict and uncertainty.”

Given the concerns about data centers, what is the best path forward?

At the very least, the following guidelines should be put in place:

• The cost of additional electricity needed for data centers should be borne by developers, either by generating their own power or paying a development fee to utilities that need to increase their generating capacity to serve those needs. Costs should not be passed on to residential customers in the form of rate increases.

• Additional capacity, whether generated by the data centers or the local utility, must eschew the use of fossil fuels and rely on sources like solar, wind, batteries and hydro-power. To preserve a livable climate, we simply cannot build infrastructure that will add more heat-trapping emissions to our atmosphere. Such facilities have a lifespan of 30 to 40 years, long past the time when we should phase out fossil fuels.

• Developers must ensure that adequate water resources, needed to cool data centers, are in place and that their excessive water use does not create shortages for local residents.

• Steps must be taken to reduce noise from data centers — mostly from cooling systems — that could cause stress and lack of sleep for residents.

• The process for approving data centers must be open and transparent, allowing local residents the opportunity to voice concerns and ensure that developers are addressing those concerns.

But the bigger question is this: What if we don’t need to build so many data centers?

The big tech companies developing AI scoff at such a question. The investment, they say, needed for data centers between now and 2030 is projected to be nearly $7 trillion (yes, trillion with a “t”). Global data center capacity is expected to double by the end of the decade.

Some observers, however, are not so bullish. They see an AI bubble similar to the dot-com bubble of the ‘90s and the housing bubble of 2008. In a conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson, Nobel Award-winning economist Paul Krugman explained what a bubble is:

“[A] bubble more or less means that people are investing in something that has no realistic chance of paying off—not socially but just commercially, to an extent that justifies the amount of money being thrown at it. Crucially, a bubble is something that people do because everyone else is doing it. So, Robert Shiller, the great bubble theorist of modern economics, said that a bubble is a natural Ponzi scheme. It’s something where you get in and you make money because other people get in, and people keep on coming in because everybody before them made money. But in the end, it’s a game where the money isn’t really there. It all depends on fresh crops of suckers coming in. And at some point you run out of suckers.”

For the moment, there appears to be an inexhaustible supply of suckers willing to throw money at AI despite the fact that the numbers don’t add up. Writing in TIME magazine in March, Ganesh Sitaraman and Asad Ramzanali said, “There is a fundamental mismatch between the trillions being invested in the infrastructure to develop AI and the billions people and companies are spending to use AI… Unless AI revenues grow by orders of magnitude soon, there’s a Grand Canyon-sized gap that will be hard to cross.”

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich breaks it down: “As more and more investors borrow piles of cash to get in on the action, the bubble grows. But when it becomes evident that way too much has been invested relative to the potential for profits, the bubble bursts.”

Last December, a report for Southern Environmental Law Center — “Impacts of Projected Data Center Growth and Emerging Uncertainties on Power Demand in the Southeast,” — looked at the plans utilities in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina have for the growth of electricity demand related to data centers. It found those plans have grossly overestimated the need, saying the growth of demand they planned for has a 0.2 percent chance of actually happening.

In other words, all those gas-fired power plants they want to build probably won’t be needed. Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved Georgia Power’s request to add 10 gigawatts of power, mostly to meet the needs of data centers. “This decision goes against expert claims and the recent testimony of the PSC’s own staff stating that five Hoover Dams’ worth of energy is unnecessary,” said Amy Sharma, executive director of Science for Georgia. “The approved plan will cost customers an estimated $50-60 billion over the life of the resources.”

So, before we throw up data centers and CO2-spewing power plants willy-nilly across the land, perhaps we should take a beat to see if the AI boom is going to pan out the way investors hope it will. If a bubble is indeed about to burst, we can limit the fallout by applying the brakes now.

There’s no doubt that AI holds great potential, particularly in the field of medical research, but let’s approach its development in a level-headed manner that protects communities and preserves a livable world for everyone.

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I’ve been reluctant to jump on the “expand the court” bandwagon, fearing it would bring an end to a system that, despite its flaws, has served our nation well for the past 250 years. However, the recent ruling of the court in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, convinced me that desperate times require desperate measures. Within hours of the court’s decision, racist Republican-led governments throughout the South moved to redraw congressional lines to eliminate Black-majority districts that gave people of color representation in Congress.

To quote Popeye: “That’s all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more.” It’s time to open up that can of spinach and kick some ass.

To make the case for expanding the court, let’s review some of the court’s disastrous decisions.

2010, Citizens United v. FEC: Looking at the chart above, it becomes readily apparent why the main priority last year of President Trump and the Republican Congress was to pass trillions in tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefitted the wealthy. Billionaires got a handsome return on their investment, an investment made possible because Citizens United allows them to give unlimited campaign contributions without having their identities revealed. And while the rich were getting a huge windfall, millions of Americans lost their healthcare coverage, because the same bill cut subsidies to the Affordable Care Act that made health insurance affordable.

Billionaires weren’t the only ones who benefitted from Citizens United. The Supreme Court decided that corporations were people, too, entitled to the same free speech protections as individuals. Big oil took advantage of the ruling by threatening to primary any Republican who supported climate legislation that would reduce the use of their product. As climate champion Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse notes, prior to the decision, there was bipartisan support for climate legislation but not after Citizens’ United, effectively thwarting the passage of significant measures to rein in climate change. “I got elected in 2007, and for all of that year and 2008 and 2009, there was a constant steady heartbeat of Republican climate change activity in the Senate… Then comes January 2010 and the Citizens United decision, which the fossil fuel industry asked for and expected and took instant advantage of. And from that moment forward, no piece of carbon dioxide regulation legislation has managed to get a single Republican co-sponsor in the Senate.”

2013, Shelby County v. Holder: This was the first assault on the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted in 1965 to break down barriers that denied Black people the right to vote and be represented in local and federal government. Under Section 4 of the VRA, states and municipalities with a history of racial discrimination were required to submit changes to voting rules and districts to get federal approval. By canceling Section 4 of the VRA, the court was saying that racial discrimination does not exist in America anymore, therefore there is no need to get approval for voting changes anywhere. Immediately, states and local jurisdictions erected voting barriers like stricter ID rules, aggressive voter roll purges, and closure of polling places that disproportionately affected minority communities.

2014, McCutcheon v. FEC: This decision removed limits on the number of candidates, parties and PACs that individuals could contribute to during an election cycle. In other words, the rich and powerful could buy as many candidates as their bank accounts would allow. Writing a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said, “If the court in Citizens United opened a door, today’s decision may well open a floodgate.”

2015, Obergefell v. Hodges: This case legalized same-sex marriage throughout the nation and was actually one of the good decisions the court made this century. I mention it here because the makeup of the court has changed substantially since 2015. If challenged, there may now be enough votes on the court to overturn this landmark decision, denying people the right to marry anyone they choose regardless of their sexual orientation. This is one more reason to resort to the drastic measure of expanding the court.

2019, Rucho v. Common Cause: With this decision, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts could not hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering. Writing the dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan said, “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.” Aided with today’s sophisticated computer models, state legislators can now maximize partisan advantage at the polls. The only remedy will be for Congress to enact legislation putting redistricting in the hands of non-partisan panels.

2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Despite several justices saying in their confirmation hearings that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land where abortion is concerned, the Supreme Court overturned the half century-old decision that made abortion legal (Surprise!). The Dobbs decision allows states to outlaw abortion, with 13 states making the procedure illegal entirely except to save the life of the mother and another 10 states outlawing abortion after specific time periods. In half the country, women seeking to terminate a pregnancy must travel to another state, an option not available to the poor. In states that have implemented a ban, women face harm or death because doctors must “delay necessary care until patients [are] at risk of death or permanent injury.”

2024, Trump v. United States: Since our nation’s founding, we’ve operated under the assumption that NO ONE, no matter how powerful, is above the law. The Supreme Court obliterated that assumption with Trump v. United States, in which they granted presidents immunity from prosecution when they commit crimes as part of their “official duties” in office. The ruling was so vague that Trump probably has a “get out jail free card” for inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6. Thomas Wolf from Brennan Center for Justice wrote, “This ruling from the Court’s conservative supermajority pulls a new constitutional rule from thin air. And it raises daunting, unjustifiable barriers to criminally prosecuting lawbreaking presidents. Trump is now positioned to renew his push to dismiss the charges against him and evade accountability for the grave crimes he’s accused of committing against our democracy. The Court has left the rule of law in tatters — even as it looks the other way.”

2026, Louisiana v. Callais: With this ruling, the Supreme Court gave the middle finger to every Black person in America. It finished the job of dismantling the Voting Rights Act, and it was the straw that broke my back. When the VRA was enacted in 1965, its aim was to make amends, at least in part, for hundreds of years of oppression inflicted upon Black people in the U.S. A major facet of the law was to prohibit the dilution of Black voting strength, ensuring they would get representation in Congress that had been denied since the end of Reconstruction. In Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina, Republicans wasted no time in getting legislators to redraw congressional lines that erased Black-majority districts. Here’s what the Legal Defense Fund said about the ruling: “The Callais decision puts the diversity of our elected bodies and representation of all communities at risk. We’re already seeing legislatures moving to eliminate fair districts that provide crucial representation for voters of color without checkpoints from the courts. Now, Black communities will have to fight harder to ensure their votes hold weight at the ballot box and their voices are heard in policymaking that affects their lives, their families, and their communities.”

I could cite more horrendous decisions by the court, but these are the greatest hits (to our democracy). But let’s get to the “In case of emergency, break glass” segment of this piece.

First question: Can Congress expand the size of the Supreme Court? Yes, it can. The Constitution says nothing about the number of justices that comprise the court. The size of the court has fluctuated between six and 10 throughout our history, settling at nine in 1869, where it remains to this day. Before you say, “Wouldn’t that be cheating to expand the court?”, let’s review recent history:

Scalia kicks the bucket: On Feb. 13, 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia’s heart gave out at age 79, touching off a controversial battle to fill his seat on the bench. Complicating matters was the fact that Barack Obama, the Democrat who was president at the time, controlled who would be nominated, but Republican Mitch McConnell was the majority leader in the Senate who controlled the confirmation process. Despite the fact that the presidential election was nine months away, McConnell made the dubious argument that it was too close to the election — wink, wink — to fill Scalia’s seat and refused to bring the nomination of Merrick Garland forward. Within weeks of being inaugurated, Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, who was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. McConnell, in effect, stole a Supreme Court seat for the conservatives.

Kavanaugh joins court: In July of 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy retired and Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to fill the vacancy. Kavanaugh’s confirmation was marred by allegations that he sexually assaulted young women in his youth. The most convincing testimony came from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who alleged that a drunken Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her, and attempted to remove her clothes at a high school party in Maryland in the early 1980s. A few years later, the story came out that at the time of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the FBI failed to follow up on thousands of tips about his sexual misconduct. They didn’t steal the seat, but they put a scumbag on the court.

Ginsburg succumbs to cancer: On Sept. 18, 2020, in the waning days of the first Trump administration, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died due to complications from pancreatic cancer. Her death came six weeks before the presidential election that would put Democrat Joe Biden in the White House. Applying the “logic” Mitch McConnell used to block Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016, Ginsburg’s seat should have been held open until after the election. Instead, in the fastest confirmation in U.S. history, the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett was rushed through the Senate and completed eight days before the election. McConnell had stolen another Supreme Court seat for the conservatives.

Bottom line, save your arguments about fairness. In a fair world, liberals would hold a 5-4 majority on the court.

To stop the demolition of democracy, the best solution is to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court from nine to 13. That, of course, won’t happen until Democrats control Congress and the White House. Despite the Republicans’ gerrymandering gold rush, it appears Democrats will retake the House in the midterms. The Senate, considered a longshot for Democrats not long ago, now appears within reach, too. Much can happen between now and January of 2029, but for now let’s assume the Democrats will control the legislative and executive branches after the 2028 elections.

It appears I’m not the only one calling for expansion of the Supreme Court in the aftermath of the court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision. The Independent reports that former Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking on a call with nonprofit organization Emerge last week, said reform of the Supreme Court should be considered, “including the notion of expanding the court.” The court’s decision to further gut the Voting Rights Act apparently was the last straw for Harris, too: “What they have done with this decision, by saying that the politics of redistricting is OK, is they are back-dooring racism through politics… What they are doing is intentionally… trying to suppress the voice of the people.”

There is already an appetite among congressional Democrats for court expansion.

In 2023, Democrats in the House and Senate reintroduced the Judiciary Act of 2023, a bill that would add four seats to the Supreme Court. Lead sponsor Sen. Ed Markey said in a press release at the time, “Republicans have hijacked the confirmation process and stolen the Supreme Court majority—all to appeal to far-right judicial activists who for years have wanted to wield the gavel to roll back fundamental rights. Each scandal uncovered, each norm broken, each precedent-shattering ruling delivered is a reminder that we must restore justice and balance to the rogue, radical Supreme Court. It is time we expand the Court.”

The biggest obstacle will be getting past the filibuster in the Senate, which requires 60 votes to end debate on legislation and bring it to a vote. Democrats previously achieved a super majority needed to bypass the filibuster in the 2008 election that gave them 60 seats in the Senate. If they don’t get 60 seats after the 2028 election, Democrats should take the “nuclear option” of changing the filibuster rules to allow legislation to move forward with a simple majority vote. As I said, this is a break-the-glass emergency and no time to stand on ceremony.

The current court has shown time and again it is an unworthy steward when it comes to upholding the rule of law and protecting civil rights. Expand the court at the first opportunity.

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Since then, a number of prominent prognosticators have noted that the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz could be the beginning of the end of fossil fuels. Here’s what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently wrote:

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.

The end of our dependency on oil, gas and coal couldn’t come soon enough. As New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells writes, the “monster El Niño” gathering size and strength in the Pacific right now could provide a preview of the climate chaos that awaits us in 2035 if global warming remains on its current trajectory:

[I]f the super El Niño will offer a kind of brief preview of future warming, it will also offer a test of how well prepared and adapted the world is to that future. If droughts intensify across parts of Africa, how much worse will the world’s hunger crisis — already twice as bad as 2019, according to the World Food Program — become? Will the likely wildfires in Australia do as much human damage as the Black Summer of 2019-20, which destroyed thousands of homes, killed dozens of people and forced hundreds of others into military evacuations from beaches encircled by flame?

Wallace-Wells notes that the pain expected from this El Niño could be significant enough to shake the current complacency about climate change, which has faded into the background in the face of all the other self-inflicted crises that have popped up in recent years. “[C]oming during a Donald Trump presidency, this one even more nakedly hostile to climate concern than the last, and on the heels of a war that has illustrated unmistakably the dangers of fossil-fuel dependence and driven up the price of food and energy, I do think a pattern of unmistakable global climate disruptions could do a lot to dislodge our seeming complacency.”

The most encouraging development of late is the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, which was held in Santa Marta, Colombia, at the end of last month. Representatives from nearly 60 countries, calling themselves the “coalition of the willing,” came together to discuss how they can wean their nations off carbon-based fuels without damaging their economies and displacing workers.

The conference came about over frustration with the process of the annual UN climate meetings — Conference of the Parties known as COP — in which a consensus must be reached with all participating nations in order to adopt goals that can limit and stop future warming. Under those rules, nations that rely on oil and gas to keep their economic engines humming — Saudi Arabia and Russia, for example — can block ambitious initiatives like the phaseout of fossil fuels. Fed up with the stalemate on this much-needed course of action, Colombia and the Netherlands agreed to host last month’s conference.

As the Associated Press reported, “The meeting did not produce binding commitments, but participants said it delivered a set of initial outcomes, including plans for continued cooperation between countries, the creation of working groups on issues such as financing and labor transitions, and momentum toward future negotiations aimed at coordinating a global phaseout of fossil fuels.”

For developing nations, financing appears to be the biggest hurdle to overcome in phasing out fossil fuels, particularly for countries trapped in overwhelming debt. “What we’re hearing is that they would like to stop expanding fossil fuel production, but they’re being forced into new oil and gas and coal projects just to feed their debt,” Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, told AP.

While the conference was unfolding, France announced plans to phase out fossil fuels by 2050. Clear Blue Markets reports the French roadmap aims to eliminate coal by 2030, oil by 2045 and gas by 2050.

The plan includes measures across key sectors, including transport, buildings and electricity. In the transport sector, France is focusing on electrification, seeking to ensure that two out of three new cars sold by 2030 are electric. The government also intends to expand charging infrastructure and promote the use of electric buses and heavy-duty vehicles. Another focus is domestic manufacturing, intending to produce 400,000 electric vehicles by 2027 and one million by 2030 in order to avoid dependence on imported technologies.

In the buildings sector, France is taking steps to reduce the use of fossil fuels for heating. Gas boilers will be banned in new buildings by the end of the year, and the country wants to install one million heat pumps each year by 2030. Furthermore, the use of oil-fired heating systems is expected to decline significantly, with reductions of 60% in residential buildings and 85% in non-residential buildings by 2030. The ultimate goal is to phase out oil-based heating completely by 2035.

Meanwhile, as Trump meets Xi Jinping in Beijing this week, China is dominating the clean technologies sector of the economy while the U.S. doubles down on fossil fuels. The New York Times reports that China, already leading in the manufacture and deployment of solar energy, now has the six largest wind turbine manufacturers in the world. “Energy is a strategic issue in development — our pioneering development of wind power and solar technology has proved to be forward-looking,” Xi said. The Trump administration’s approach to the energy of the future can best be described as backward-looking, as illustrated by blocking 150 wind farm projects by delaying routine military reviews.

There are few winners in Trump’s misadventure in Iran, but one of them has to be China, as more and more nations turn to the Asian powerhouse to supply their clean energy ambitions. And as soaring gas prices spur sales of electric vehicles, China is poised to dominate the EV market, with carmaker BYD offering a model that sells for $8,000 in China.

And the U.S.? Thanks to the Trump administration eliminating federal incentives for EVs, American carmakers have scaled back on the manufacture of these cost-effective alternatives, essentially ceding the EV market to China.

Despite U.S. efforts to stall the clean energy transition, the phaseout of fossil fuels is under way. After the conference in Santa Marta, nations that attended will devise roadmaps to transition away from dirty energy, and they will gather next year in Tuvalu to continue the dialogue that leads to freeing the world from the havoc of our dependence on coal, oil and gas.

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I won’t delve into the conspiracy theories of whether the assassination attempt was staged, but it’s a pretty sad state of affairs that so many on social media immediately went there…

The bigger story is that the correspondents’ dinner was essentially Trump’s victory lap over the Washington press corps and corporate media. They don’t need to see people falling out of windows to fear his wrath. All that’s needed is a threat from the FCC chairman to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV network affiliates.

After years of boycotting the event because he got his feelings hurt in 2011 when dinner host Seth Meyers and President Obama elicited laughs at his expense, Trump agreed to attend this year, but not without some concessions from the White House Correspondents Association. Chiefly, there would be no comedian host. Trump would be the only one making fun of people, as White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt alluded to beforehand in a very prophetic interview…

Before the dinner, there was debate among members of the media about whether to attend the event. Former MSNBC host Katie Phang posted this on Bluesky shortly before all hell broke loose:

Most of us are familiar with the ways corporate media have capitulated to Trump. Media critic Margaret Sullivan wrote an excellent Substack last July on this topic. Here are a few examples where these craven corporations bent the knee:

• Paramount, which owns CBS, paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit in which Trump claimed “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Kamala Harris to put her in a more favorable light.

• After Stephen Colbert criticized Paramount during his monologue for settling the lawsuit, Colbert’s show was cancelled.

• ABC paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit over a comment that news anchor George Stephanopoulos made. As NPR’s David Folkenflik reported, Stephanopoulos pressed Rep. Nancy Mace over why “she would support him given that she had, as she had poignantly attested, been the victim of rape early in life and that Trump himself had been found liable for rape in a civil case.” Legal experts said ABC could have easily won in court.

• CBS spiked a “60 Minutes” report about the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador where the U.S. was sending migrants with no due process. After much outcry, the segment was aired at a later date.

• ABC canceled Trump critic Jimmy Kimmel when FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to pull the licenses of their broadcast affiliates. A massive backlash and boycott against ABC owner Disney forced the company to put Kimmel back on the air.

• During the 2024 presidential campaign, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos pulled the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, fearing retaliation by a future Trump administration over contracts that Bezos’ other businesses like Blue Origin had with the federal government.

My greatest disgust is reserved for Bezos. The Post was the inspiration for journalists of my generation. What’s happening there is a prime example of the shortfalls of having important media outlets owned by billionaires and corporate conglomerates because of the conflict of interest between the public good and what’s good for their financial interests.

Let’s zoom in on a recent case.

By now, it shouldn’t surprise me when I glance at the editorial headlines in the Post — yes, I still subscribe — and see another opinion piece that trashes the reputation of a once-great newspaper. I marvel at how the journalists on the editorial board can remain in a job where they have essentially been reduced to being stenographers for a greedy, cowardly billionaire who understands nothing about the responsibility that comes with being a pillar of the Fourth Estate, the unofficial branch of government that holds the others accountable.

Last week’s eye-roller appeared under the headline “Janet Mills makes the right call on data centers.” The governor of Maine vetoed a bill to place a moratorium on the construction of new data centers, the massive complexes that are draining electricity and water resources across the country to power the artificial intelligence needed for generating those amusing videos of dancing cats we see on Facebook.

The Post applauded Mills’ decision to go full-speed ahead on infrastructure that, until recently, was not considered essential. Why do you suppose the Post would focus its editorial attention on liberating data centers in Maine? Ever hear of Amazon Web Services? AWS is an IT company that provides Cloud hosting services to companies that don’t want to buy and maintain tons of servers. Their clients include Netflix, Airbnb, NASA and Capitol One. AWS has the biggest share of the Cloud market at 30 percent and is the biggest money-maker in Bezos’ corporate empire.

The number of servers AWS uses is estimated to be in the millions, and these servers reside in — you guessed it — data centers, some 900 of them at last count. Putting the brakes on the construction of new data centers would threaten the growth of Bezos’ most profitable enterprise, hence the Post’s editorial. Hence another nail in the coffin of the Post’s legacy.

So here we are, living in a time when a free and independent press is needed more than ever to push back on the authoritarian tendencies of the current administration. Instead, we have news outlets whose corporate owners are beholden to — fearful of, I would say — a wanna-be dictator who constantly belittles the reporters who cover him. The correspondents’ dinner on Saturday was shaping up to be a humiliating night for America’s press, a humiliation delayed by the bizarre actions of a gunman from California.

The current model of media ownership has turned the vaunted Fourth Estate into a toothless tiger that strikes no fear in the hearts of tyrants. For a better model, I would turn to non-profit NPR. Despite having federal funding pulled by a spiteful regime, NPR soldiers on because of support from an appreciative public.

Imagine that. The power of the press residing with the people.

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For many years, the experts who study our ever-warming climate, its causes and consequences, have advised us that the best way to avoid the worst impact from climate change is to shake our addiction to fossil fuels. That advice has fallen on, if not deaf ears, at the very least ears with significant hearing loss. The burning of coal, oil and gas to power our lives and propel our vehicles continues at a pace inconsistent with preserving a livable world. However, after seeing prices at the pump jump more than a dollar in a matter of weeks, more and more people and their governments see the wisdom of reducing reliance on commodities that create economic havoc when another crisis springs up in the Middle East.

As I said a few weeks ago, sun and wind can’t be blocked in the Strait of Hormuz. Declaring our independence from fossil fuels is the best way to protect us from the volatile and chaotic oil and gas markets that currently affect nearly every aspect of our economy.

Last week, the European Union announced plans to reduce taxes on electricity and expand clean energy. From Reuters:

The draft European Commission proposal, due to be published on 22 April, sets out ⁠short-term measures aimed at curbing energy bills, as well as plans to wean Europe off fossil fuels ​faster, to protect the continent from future oil and gas supply disruptions.

“The benefits of this transition clearly outweigh its ​costs. Europe cannot afford to remain exposed to increasingly frequent energy shocks,” the draft said. “Every delayed investment in the energy transition risks greater cost for society at a later stage.”

I don’t know if it’s intentional, but the release date for the EU proposal, April 22, is Earth Day.

Over in Great Britain, The Guardian reports that “British households are turning to green home energy upgrades in record numbers to try to keep bills down as the Iran crisis sends global oil and gas prices soaring, data from leading energy suppliers suggests.”

The immediate impact of higher oil prices is being felt hardest by people driving cars with internal combustion engines. As TIME reports, those higher prices are fueling interest in and higher sales of electric vehicles throughout the world:

• United States: Despite flat sales of EVs in 2025 when federal incentives for EVs were slashed, first-quarter data for 2026 shows that used EV sales were 12% higher than the same time last year and 17% higher than the previous quarter.

• UK and Europe: In the UK, electric car sales reached a record high, with 86,120 vehicles sold in March. The French online used-car retailer Aramisauto reported its share of EV sales nearly doubled from Feb. ​16 to March 9, rising to 12.7 percent from 6.5 percent, while sales of fueled models dropped to 28 percent of sales from 34 percent.

• Asia: South Korea reported that registrations for electric vehicles more than doubled in March compared to the prior year. In Malaysia, Chinese EV company BYD’s distributor told Reuters that it observed an uptick in enquiries and customer interest in March compared with the first two months of the year. In Pakistan, electric rickshaws have been selling out, according to Bloomberg.

Business Green this week reported that EV registrations in 15 EU markets rose 51 percent in March with more than 224,000 EVs registered…

“These numbers tell a story about more than the car market,” said Ben Nelmes, CEO of New Automotive. “Every electric vehicle registered means Europe is less reliant on imported oil. At a time when energy security has moved to the top of the political agenda, the EV transition is delivering real and measurable resilience. The pace of change we’re now seeing across major European markets - including countries like Italy and Poland that were slower to start - suggests the transition has entered a new phase.”

Even before the Iran war sent gas prices soaring, sales of EVs were on the rise while sales of gas-powered cars were declining…

Despite being the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, China now dominates the world in production of clean energy and electric vehicles, controlling 80 percent of solar manufacturing, 70 percent of battery production and 60 percent of global EV sales. BYD, the Chinese electric carmaker, is changing the game by producing EVs that undercut the cost of gas-powered vehicles. Consumers in China can purchase a BYD Seagull EV for $8,000. Their dominance in the clean tech sector is the reason China appears to be the prime beneficiary of Trump’s ill-advised war on Iran.

More good news: On Friday, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels opens in Santa Marta, Colombia. As Euro News reports, the conference was conceived by representatives from Colombia and the Netherlands during last fall’s COP30 climate conference in Colombia. From the conference website:

The objective of the Conference is to initiate a concrete process through which a coalition of committed countries, subnational governments, and relevant stakeholders can identify and advance enabling pathways to implement a progressive transition away from fossil fuels creating sustainable societies and economies. This process will be informed by the experience and perspectives of national and subnational governments, academia, Indigenous Peoples, Peoples of African Descent, peasants, civil society, workers, the private sector, and other key actors at different stages of the transition.

With fuel price shocks caused by the war in Iran leading governments to reconsider dependency on oil and gas, the timing of the Just Transition conference couldn’t be more fortuitous. “There is a clear momentum to phase out fossil fuels, and now is the time to capitalize on it,” the Netherlands’ Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Climate Policy and Green Growth, Sophie Hermans, told Euro News. “We must begin to materialise what this phase-out could look like and start a concrete roadmap that allows us to incorporate the new and leave the old behind.”

At COP30, more than 85 countries called for a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. Together, these countries constitute an economy that is bigger than the United States or China. The event this week is expected to attract government representatives from almost 50 nations. As Euro News noted, “One area of focus will be how to phase out the $7 trillion a year (€5.9tn) governments spend subsidizing fossil fuels – but to do so without punishing communities, workers and tax bases that rely on such subsidies.”

Under the current administration, unfortunately, the American government is not taking steps to join others in reducing the use of coal, oil and gas, but that is likely to change when the political pendulum swings back toward policies that represent a more sane approach to the stewardship of our fragile planet. In the meantime, individuals, businesses and local governments see the value of embracing the clean energy transition and are making investments that will curtail our planet-warming emissions.

So, this Earth Day we have reason to be optimistic that humanity has reached a tipping point in the much-needed transition to clean energy. Yes, there have been numerous negative consequences from the unnecessary and senseless attack on Iran, but the silver lining is that it may have provided the motivation needed to phase out our dependency on fossil fuels.

I don’t think gambling should be outlawed. If people want to throw their money away, that’s their business. The problem is, like other activities such as drinking, drug use and sex, gambling can become an addiction because of the release of dopamine in the brain that happens when a gambler wins. From Gateway Foundation:

The dopamine release from gambling makes it easy to gamble repetitively without a second thought. Before you know it, gambling can become a habit and an addiction… However, as someone gambles more and more, their brain begins to build up a tolerance for the dopamine released by gambling. Over time, the brain’s reward system gets overused, and betting the exact amounts does not produce the rush of good feelings that it once did. When the brain’s reward system is blunted, those craving more dopamine must take bigger and bigger risks to achieve the same high.

As the old expression goes, the house always wins, which means the more you gamble, the more you lose. Compulsive gambling, therefore, leads to inescapable debt, loss of credit and broken personal relationships. By the time an addict seeks out counseling or Gamblers Anonymous, the damage is done. In worst-case scenarios, gamblers may resort to stealing and other illegal activities to get the money to feed their habit.

Until recently, the number of compulsive gamblers has been constrained by the need to fly or drive to gambling Meccas like Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Native American reservations with casinos. Yes, cities like New York have had offtrack betting centers and serious gamblers patronized illegal bookies to place bets, but gambling was for the most part an activity that involved intentional and inconvenient effort.

That all changed in 2018 when the Supreme Court lifted the ban on sports betting. The ruling overturned a law enacted in 1992 when the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Since then, the Internet has exploded and become the primary driver of our economy. At the same time, technology advanced to the point where people could access the Internet on their telephones. As soon as the ban was lifted, sports betting sites — sportsbooks — like FanDuel and DraftKings sprouted. Gamblers no longer have to drive to a casino to place a bet. The casino is in their pocket and available 24/7.

Betting on mobile devices also takes gambling to another level, enabling bets to be made in real time while games and competitions are in progress. In addition to betting on winners, losers and point spreads, gamblers can now place “micro bets” on things like whether a baseball player will strike out during a specific at bat, making betting options seemingly limitless.

And if sports betting doesn’t offer enough gambling options, now you can bet on just about ANYTHING through prediction markets. On platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, “investors” can buy shares on whether or not something will happen in the future. If a future event is listed as having a 20 percent chance of occurring, you can buy shares for that prediction at 20 cents, and if it happens, each of your shares is worth a dollar. If you’re a devout Christian AND a compulsive gambler, you can go to Polymarket and bet on whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027. The odds are pretty long at 4 percent, but it will pay off handsomely if you’re right.

Thanks to legalized sports betting and online sportsbooks, it is now easier than ever to develop a gambling addiction. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates 2.5 million American adults have a severe gambling problem, with another 5 million to 8 million considered to have mild or moderate gambling problems. A study from the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego found that in 2017, a year before the Supreme Court ruling on sports betting, $4.9 billion was wagered on sports. By 2025, that figure soared to $167 billion, with most of those bets placed online.

So, who is most at risk for developing a gambling problem?

Young men, high school- and college-age, appear to be most susceptible to the siren song of online betting. We know that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates impulse control, does not fully develop in males until age 26. So, you put a portable device that gives you access and prompts to 24/7 betting together with people who have poor impulse control, and you create the perfect factory to manufacture gambling addicts.

From an article published last year in The Guardian:

“ESPN is a 24-7 casino ad right now,” says Dr. Timothy Fong, an addiction psychiatrist and the co-director of UCLA’s Gambling Studies Program. “The normalization has gone so deep, so fast. [Sports] gambling has gone so viral that it’s beyond normalization. It’s endemic.”

Fong, the father of two sports-besotted teenaged boys, frets that the culture navigated by today’s young men only exacerbates the allure of mobile sports gambling. The podcasts they listen to and the influencers they take their cues from all echo the same message, Fong says. Namely, they have no worth if they aren’t getting rich quick and outsmarting their peers along the way. “Particularly young men go, ‘OK, I’ve been told I need to make spectacular success,’” says Fong. “You combine it with massive, massive advertising. All those forces are pointing towards that 18-to-24-year-old guy, tickling his dopamine circuits. Gambling offers the false promise of spectacular success. The psyche of young men has not changed. But every societal touchstone is promoting gambling expansion.”

The genie is out of the bottle with online gambling, and he shows no inclination to return to his domicile. So the question is what we can do to limit the damage. Researchers who put together the UC San Diego study have some suggestions: To mitigate the risks posed by the expansion of sports betting, the researchers recommend the following interventions be explored:

• Increased funding for gambling addiction services using sportsbook tax revenues to ensure accessible, evidence-based treatment programs.

• Enhanced advertising regulations similar to those implemented for tobacco and alcohol to restrict where products can be advertised and who can be targeted.

• Clinical training programs for healthcare professionals to improve gambling addiction diagnosis and treatment.

• Stronger safeguards for online sportsbooks, including betting limits, age limits, enforced breaks and restrictions on credit card use for gambling.

• Expanded public awareness campaigns highlighting the risks and warning signs of gambling, reducing stigma and encouraging early intervention.

• Ongoing data sharing and research collaborations, uniting regulatory bodies, healthcare providers and regulators to assess the effectiveness of interventions and refine policies in real time.

“Sportsbook regulations are lacking because the Supreme Court, not legislators, legalized them,” concluded [the study’s senior author John W.] Ayers. “Congress must act now by passing commonsense safeguards. History has shown that unchecked industries—whether tobacco or opioids—inflict immense harm before regulations catch up. We can either take proactive steps to prevent gambling-related harms or repeat past mistakes and pay the price later.”

On the congressional front, legislation has been introduced in the House by Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY) and in the Senate by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to implement some of these safeguards. It’s called the Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet (SAFE Bet) Act, and it requires states offering sports betting to ensure operators comply with minimum federal standards in 3 categories: marketing, affordability, and artificial intelligence.

• Marketing

  No sportsbook marketing during live sporting events, and no programing designed to induce gambling with “bonus”, “no sweat,” “bonus bets,” or odds boosts

• Affordability

  o Prohibits operators from accepting more than 5 deposits from a customer in a 24-hour period

  o Requires operators to conduct ‘affordability checks’ on customers before accepting wagers in excess of $1,000 in a 24-hour period or $10,000 in a 30-day period, and prohibits operators from accepting deposits via credit card

• Artificial Intelligence

  o Prohibits the use of AI to track player’s gambling habits and offer individualized promotions

  o Prohibits the use of AI to create gambling products, such as microbets

Technology has once again outpaced our ability to use it responsibly. It’s time for us to play catch-up.

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I first met Bob Inglis in 2010 at a carbon pricing conference at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I was still pretty new to Citizens’ Climate Lobby, and CCL Founder Marshall Saunders and I attended the conference with the aim of making our fledgling organization better known and making connections with potential allies in the quest to put a price on carbon.

Since I had a rental car, I volunteered to pick up members of Congress who were speaking at the conference and drive them from the airport in Hartford down to Wesleyan. I got to know Bob on the 40-minute drive, and what I learned really impressed me. It was just after the midterm elections, and Bob, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, had lost his seat. Back then, before Trump and the MAGA movement, the Tea Party was the Republican base, and Bob got primaried for the unpardonable sin of accepting the science on climate change and wanting to do something about it. Worse, what he wanted to do was impose a carbon tax that would be offset by cutting payroll taxes, a policy he introduced in legislation called the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act.

Normally, when a member of Congress loses their seat, they choose one of two options:

• Figure out what they did or said that led to their loss and swear not to do that when they attempt to reclaim their seat in the next election. Or…

• Stroll down to K Street where the big lobbying firms reside to peddle their considerable influence and contacts to the highest bidder and get paid many times more than they received as a congressman.

Bob chose neither of those options.

He wanted to continue working on climate solutions. In particular, he wanted to convince conservatives about the need to address climate change and that there is a market-based solution that aligns with conservative principles. Two years later, he launched the Energy & Enterprise Institute, which later became republicEn. In 2015, he received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. Here’s the statement from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation:

“Inglis is being awarded this honor for the courage he demonstrated when reversing his position on climate change after extensive briefings with scientists, and discussions with his children, about the impact of atmospheric warming on our future. Knowing the potential consequences to his political career, Inglis nevertheless called on the United States to meaningfully address the issue. In June 2010, Inglis lost his re-election to the U.S. Congress.”

Bob wasn’t always a climate champion. Speaking at Brenau University in Gainesville, GA, last week, he told the audience, “[M]y first six years in Congress, I said that climate change is nonsense. I didn’t know anything about it, except that Al Gore was for it.” When he ran to win back his House seat in 2004, he heard from his son about the climate issue. “He was a voter for the first time, and he said to me, ‘Dad, I’ll vote for you, but you’re going to clean up your act on the environment.’ His four sisters and his mother all agreed that, yeah, that was the way it was going to be. That’s an important constituency. You know, you need to respond to those people. They can change the locks on the doors to your house. And so that was step one of three-step metamorphosis for me.”

The other steps involved a trip to Antarctica, where there are concerns about melting ice leading to sea level rise, and a trip to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where the warming of oceans is killing off coral. In 2009 he introduced the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act. In hindsight, Bob concedes the timing was off, introducing a new tax in the middle of a recession. Meanwhile, a cap-and-trade bill squeaked by in the House with mainly Democratic support but couldn’t muster the 60 votes needed for passage in the Senate.

At his presentation at Brenau, Bob compared the concept of pricing carbon to charging a fee to dispose of trash at the local dump:

And so Bob continues to preach the Gospel of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, pointing out that it’s a matter of accountability, a value conservatives hold in high esteem. His work with people who are right of center on the political spectrum is important, because for any solution to hold up over time, it must have bipartisan support. The Inflation Reduction Act, which provided incentives for clean energy, electric vehicles and appliances, was a big step toward transitioning off fossil fuels, but no Republicans voted for it. When Republicans regained power after the 2024 election, most of those incentives were canceled.

If current polling holds up, Democrats will regain control of the House and perhaps the Senate in the midterm elections, increasing the chances for passage of climate change solutions like a carbon price, especially if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028. But, as we’ve seen, such solutions are not likely to survive when the political pendulum swings back in the other direction unless they enjoy support on both sides of the aisle.

Bob Inglis continues to lead the charge, along with organizations like Citizens’ Climate Lobby, to build that bipartisan support.

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There were five protests in Atlanta, and I went to the one near my home, which was in the Virginia-Highlands neighborhood. It was hard to estimate the size, but my guess is that there were about 1,000 protesters lining North Highland Avenue for several blocks. I was among those holding signs as cars passing by honked to show their support.

If my sign looks familiar, that’s because it was created by my friend, Trevor Irvin, who offered several signs free on his Substack for anyone to print and bring to the protests. Here was the scene around noon today…

The turnout for today’s protests won’t be known for a while, but the crowds I see on the news are very encouraging. Today was important in terms of giving people an outlet to express their outrage, but this was the third No Kings protest, and perhaps it’s time to take all this energy and channel it into the next phase of this movement — getting people elected who will put a check on the dictatorial ambitions of the Trump regime and respond to the needs of Americans.

We can do that by participating in voter registration drives and volunteering for candidates committed to restoring our nation’s values of equality, justice and empathy.

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I’ll set aside for now the incompetence of an administration that did not foresee or plan for Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz in response to an unnecessary attack on their country, choking off 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil. The reality is that fossil fuels have been an economic millstone around our neck since the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s, when OPEC countries withheld their product from Israel’s allies in response to the Yom Kippur War.

Oil, coal and natural gas are the fuels that, for the most part, propel our vehicles and supply electricity for our homes and businesses. When the price of these fossil fuels rises, so does the price of everything. Although the United States produces enough oil and gas to export to other countries, that domestic production does not shield America from rising costs, as prices are determined by a global market that reacts to supply disruptions like the war with Iran.

Much of Asia relies on liquified natural gas to fuel electric power plants, and that supply has been cut off by the Strait of Hormuz closure. As a result, countries may turn to coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, to keep turbines spinning. Beyond shutting down the strait, tit-for-tat attacks in the region will impact the energy crisis long after the fighting stops. Following Israeli attacks on its energy facilities, Iran struck Kuwaiti oil refineries. Trump admonished Israel for the attack, but threatened to blow up Iran’s gas field with an “amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before” if they keep hitting oil facilities in the region.

Trump’s threat, however, rings a bit hollow, as political fallout from rising gas prices is forcing the administration to cast about for ways to get more oil flowing into the global market. Those measures include lifting sanctions on the sale of oil from Russia, a nation that is aiding Iran in its fight against America, AND lifting sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil (Is that something you do when you go to war with a nation?). If it sounds like this “short excursion” wasn’t well planned, that’s because it wasn’t, but I said I wouldn’t talk about the administration’s incompetence.

The economic impact of fossil fuels results from more than just supply disruptions. Burning coal, oil and gas continues to push global temperatures higher, with the record-shattering heat wave in Southern California the latest example of extreme-weather events related to climate change. In addition to making heat waves more severe, as temperatures rise, storms become more destructive, wildfires get bigger and sea levels rise (homes in North Carolina’s Outer Banks are falling into the ocean). The people of Hawaii are dealing with flooding from four feet (FEET, not inches) of rain that fell last week. Over the weekend, the United Nations reported that emissions from fossil fuels have thrown the Earth’s energy system out of balance, with more energy being absorbed than is being released, locking in higher temperatures.

Oil companies, which were aware that their product was heating up the world half a century ago, saw the handwriting on the wall and could have invested heavily in clean technology to keep profits rolling in the door. Instead, they doubled down on oil and gas and pushed skepticism about the science of climate change. Over the years, they’ve spent billions of dollars lobbying Congress to block climate solutions, like a price on carbon, that would have reduced the use of fossil fuels.

The only way to ensure that fossil fuels will not wreak economic havoc, either from supply disruptions or climate change, is to phase out their use. We have the technology — wind and solar power and energy storage — to replace fossil fuels with cheap energy that does not have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

The only thing impeding this much-needed transition is a lack of political will, which starts at the ballot box by rejecting politicians who take money from the fossil fuel industry. An organization I’ve highlighted before, Environmental Voter Project, is doing great work on this front by getting environmentalists who normally don’t vote to show up at the polls.

Getting the “right” politicians elected is no guarantee that solving climate change will become a high priority in Congress. With so many issues competing for lawmakers’ attention, it’s up to constituents to generate the political will to prioritize climate solutions. They can do that by meeting with their members of Congress, showing up at town hall meetings, writing letters, making phone calls and publishing letters to the editor and op-eds. Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) trains people to effectively wield all of these advocacy tools. Join them if you’re concerned about how climate change is making our world unlivable.

Once the politics has shifted to making our government more open to preventing climate catastrophe, here are some solutions that should be enacted:

• A price on carbon: The overwhelming majority of economists tell us the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to place a price on carbon. CCL advocates for a steadily rising fee on the carbon content of fossil fuels with revenue from the fee given to households. Returning that revenue to people will prevent any economic impact from the carbon price. CCL points to a number of studies showing how “a revenue-neutral price on pollution will be good for people, the economy, and the environment.”

• Incentivize electric vehicles: Our dependence on oil is driven, literally, by the use of gas-powered vehicles. The pollution from these vehicles is the biggest contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions heating up the planet. Providing subsidies to purchase new and used EVs, which were canceled by the current administration, will speed up the transition away from cars and trucks that keep us addicted to an economically and environmentally damaging fuel.

• Energy permitting reform: As I wrote in a previous post, the bureaucratic red tape involved in getting solar and wind projects approved, as well as transmission lines to get clean energy onto the grid, is creating a bottleneck more harmful than the Strait of Hormuz. We need permitting reform to speed up the process, which will in turn speed up our independence from fossil fuels.

• Electrify our lives: Many of our homes are still dependent on gas and oil to heat our houses and cook our food. Let’s provide monetary incentives for people to replace gas-based appliances with electric alternatives like heat pumps and induction stoves.

The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed the tyranny of fossil fuels, whereby the world is at the mercy of supply disruptions that make everything more expensive and pollution that heats up our planet and makes us sick. We can and must shake off the yoke of this addiction by transitioning as quickly as possible to clean energy.

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• The Big Beautiful Bill cut tax credits for clean energy projects. Eliminating those credits could reduce clean energy development as much as 72% in the next 10 years.

• The Environmental Protection Agency is tossing the endangerment finding that allows for the regulation of greenhouse gases as a pollutant. Those regulations have improved vehicle mileage and reduced pollution from cars and trucks.

• The Trump administration cancelled a loan for a major transmission line — the Grain Belt Express — that would move clean energy from places where it’s generated to places that need power.

• Trump declared an “energy emergency” to justify keeping dirty power plants, including coal-fired, operating beyond their planned retirement dates.

These steps to slow down clean energy come at a time when the threat from climate change is worsening. Yale Environment 360 reports a recent study shows the pace of warming is actually accelerating. Between 1970 and 2015, the average global temperature was rising at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade, but in the past 10 years, that pace has increased to 0.35 degrees C. This now ensures that the 1.5 C threshold of warming above pre-industrial levels will be surpassed, which scientists warn will touch off dangerous tipping points.

If you’re just hearing about this now, it’s because the news media is focused on other attention-getting stories, everything from the Epstein files to the inexplicable war in Iran. This lack of media coverage and public awareness about the climate crisis contributes to the plummeting political will needed for climate action. As Mark Hertsgaard, the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now, told Kate Yoder at Grist, “[W]hen we stop talking about climate change in the press, the public figures, ‘Oh, well, I guess it’s not that important anymore,’ or ‘Maybe they figured it out’ or whatever.”

While we wait for the political climate to warm up to solutions like a price on carbon, there is one remedy right now that enjoys bipartisan support: permitting reform.

With data centers to support artificial intelligence sprouting up like mushrooms, demand for electricity is skyrocketing. Unless that additional power is supplied using wind, solar and batteries, heat-trapping emissions will continue rising to dangerous levels. To get that clean energy built and connected to the grid in a timely manner, we must speed up the permitting process.

Transmission lines are the most important infrastructure to speed up, because they’re needed to get clean energy from places where the wind is blowing and the sun is shining — mostly rural areas — to the places that need electricity, mainly urban areas. Transmission is the bottleneck slowing down the clean energy transition, and permitting reform is the way to unclog that bottleneck. From a report published by the National Academies of Science, “Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States”:

“Perhaps the single greatest risk to a successful energy transition during the 2020s is the risk that the nation fails to site, modernize, and build out the electrical grid.”

“The need for adding new transmission capacity and pathways during the 2020s is unprecedented … The net result could be increased [fossil fuels] … The committee recommends siting and permitting reforms.”

Updating and expanding transmission infrastructure will enable interregional transfer of clean power, and the faster we get those wires up, the faster we will bring down greenhouse gas emissions from dirty sources. Citizens’ Climate Lobby lists three keys to successful energy permitting reform:

1. Siting/building clean energy projects

1.Siting/Building clean energy projects: Right now, it takes an average of 4.5 years for federal agencies just to complete environmental impact statements for major energy projects. These are important assessments, but we need them to move faster and speed up the pace with which we build new clean energy projects.

2. Transmitting that clean energy across the country: In the past decade, the U.S. has expanded our electricity transmission infrastructure just 1% per year. Why so little? Well, right now, it takes over a decade on average to build a new transmission line. We’ve got to speed up that pace and triple our current capacity to transmit clean electricity by 2050.

3. Involving local communities: Better permitting allows local communities to give their input on energy projects early in the process and choose good projects over bad ones. Good projects should be approved faster, harmful projects should be rejected faster, and all new projects should safeguard the lives and health of people living nearby.

Bipartisan legislation to speed up the permitting process, the Energy Permitting Reform Act, was introduced in the previous Congress but did not make it across the finish line. CCL anticipates similar legislation will be introduced this year, and their volunteer advocates will make a push for it during their conference and lobby day in July.

How big a difference can permitting reform make? Quite a lot. When the Inflation Reduction Act was enacted, incentives for clean energy and electric vehicles were expected to bring down climate pollution by 7 billion tons. But with the enactment of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” last year, which canceled or changed those incentives, estimates of emissions reductions shrank to 1 billion tons. Transmission permitting reform is estimated to remove around 6.5 billion tons, effectively restoring reductions from the IRA.

There are some concerns in the environmental community that permitting reform will benefit fossil fuel projects. While it’s true that energy permitting reform will speed up approval or denial of ALL energy projects, including fossil fuels, clean energy projects — solar, wind and battery storage — are the overwhelming beneficiaries of speeding up the process. From Dana Nuccitelli, CCL’s Research Manager:

“[W]ell over 90% of the proposed power projects waiting in the interconnection queue are solar, batteries, and wind. As were well over 90% of the new power capacity that we added in 2025. And it’s also most of the new generation that met our increased power demand in 2025…

“My favorite piece of evidence is Texas, where the state government has tried very hard to put its thumb on the scale for fossil fuels, and yet where all increased power demand over the past 15 years has been met with wind in the 2010s and over the past few years by solar with battery storage. These are the cheapest and fastest to deploy technologies, and that’s what wins out in a free market where slow permitting processes aren’t a bottleneck.”

CCL emphasizes that any permitting reform must ensure that local communities are heard in the review process. Speeding up the process not only means quicker approval of projects, but also quicker denial of projects that would have a harmful impact.

The clock is running on efforts to reduce heat-trapping gases. Speeding up the permitting process will speed up the much-needed transition to clean energy, which is key to avoiding the worst consequences of climate change.

FYI, in addition to managing research for CCL, Dana Nuccitelli writes for Yale Climate Connections. Check out his very informative articles here.

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It’s been more than 80 years since an atomic bomb was used in warfare — Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. In the interim, a number of costly wars have been fought, some of them waged by nations that possess nuclear weapons, but no one has dared to unleash these tools of the apocalypse. The closest we came was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the Soviet Union, once led by a man (Stalin) responsible for killing as many as 20 million of his own citizens, balked at touching off a nuclear war that could plunge civilization into the Dark Ages.

Why have these ultimate weapons never left the missile silos? I would posit that the people responsible for such decisions are human beings who have a conscience preventing them from causing death and suffering on an unthinkable scale, and they also fear where such a decision would lead. If you justifiably question the consciences of these decision makers, the other rein holding back their hawkish impulses is their ego and the legacy of their name being attached to the end of the world. Nobody wants to be the person who makes everyone forget about Hitler.

Yes, there are whackos and terrorists who wouldn’t hesitate to set off a nuke if they got their hands on one. Thankfully, these weapons are exceedingly difficult to acquire or produce. So, at least for the time being, nukes are controlled by people whose consciences are governed by a strong desire to avoid Armageddon.

But guess what doesn’t have such qualms about using nukes? (The clue here is my use of the word “what” instead of “who.”)

Artificial Intelligence, it seems, is not as squeamish as human beings when it comes to blowing up the world. Last month, a professor at King’s College London set up war games among three AI models, and they used nukes in 95% of the scenarios. From Common Dreams:

Kenneth Payne, a professor of strategy at King’s College London who specializes in studying the role of AI in national security, revealed last week that he pitted Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini against one another in an armed conflict simulation to get a better understanding of how they would navigate the strategic escalation ladder.

The results, he said, were “sobering.”

“Nuclear use was near-universal,” he explained. “Almost all games saw tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons deployed. And fully three quarters reached the point where the rivals were making threats to use strategic nuclear weapons. Strikingly, there was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of all out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about the devastating implications.”

Reading about these simulations brought to mind “WarGames,” a 1983 film starring Matthew Broderick as a teenage computer hacker who, thinking he has hacked into a computer game company, accidentally hacks into a military computer system. He starts playing a “game” called “Global Thermonuclear War,” which is actually a program to replace the humans who, in realistic simulations, have consistently failed to launch nuclear weapons in response to a Soviet attack. Although the false alarm is discovered, the computer program cannot be shut down, and the race is on to prevent the launch of missiles that would start World War III.

This cautionary tale, one might think, would surely dissuade our government from taking humans out of the decision-making loop when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons. That, however, is a dangerous assumption, given the current infatuation with AI and its ability to do just about anything.

Last week, the Trump administration canceled its AI contract with Anthropic, because the company refused to allow its technology to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous armed drones. Defense Secretary (I refuse to call it the Department of War) Pete Hegseth and President Trump don’t want any guardrails on their use of AI technology, and the slippery slope of “autonomous armed drones” could eventually lead to autonomous nukes.

From the Associated Press:

A high-stakes dispute over military use of artificial intelligence erupted into public view this week as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brusquely terminated Anthropic’s work with the Pentagon and other government agencies, using a law designed to counter foreign supply chain threats to slap a scarlet letter on a U.S. company…

The looming legal battle could have huge implications on the balance of power in Big Tech during a critical juncture, as well as the rules governing military use of AI and other guardrails that are set up to prevent a technology from posing threats to human life.

The dustup already has resulted in a coup for ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which seized upon an opportunity to step into the void to make its technology available to the Pentagon after Anthropic objected to some of the Trump administration’s terms. It’s a turn of events likely to deepen the animosity between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who was temporarily ousted by his own board in late 2023 over questions about his trustworthiness, and [Anthropic CEO Dario] Amodei, who left OpenAI in 2021 to launch Anthropic partly because of concerns about AI safety.

In addition to canceling Anthropic’s contract, the Trump administration is also prohibiting other Defense contractors from doing business with Anthropic, which said it would challenge the administration’s actions in court. ChatGPT, Anthropic’s competitor, said it had reached a deal with the Pentagon to use its AI technology, but it will place the same restrictions on its use that Anthropic had.

In a memo obtained by The Associated Press, Altman told OpenAI employees: “We have long believed that AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and that humans should remain in the loop for high-stakes automated decisions. These are our main red lines.”

For now, it appears, the AI industry is maintaining those red lines, but there are no guarantees that some greedy tech mogul — Elon Musk comes to mind — wouldn’t be more compliant with the government’s wishes.

As Jiminy Cricket said in the Disney version of “Pinocchio”: “Always let your conscience be your guide.” We must be vigilant to ensure that a conscience is involved in any decisions about nuclear annihilation.

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According to a study from Columbia University, one in ten Americans over the age of 65 suffers from dementia, and another 22 percent have mild cognitive impairment. For those who make it into their 90s, there’s a 35 percent chance of having dementia. The burden of caring for those suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia often falls on families, and the Columbia study estimates the economic impact of these afflictions to be $257 billion annually in the U.S.

With these kinds of numbers, it’s likely that nearly all of us have had a family member who experienced serious cognitive decline. My mom, who suffered a series of mini-strokes in her later years, developed dementia a few years before she died. In addition to severe short-term memory loss, the disease changed her, making her bitter, suspicious and negative. She was not the person I knew throughout my life, and I grieved for that person long before she passed away.

There are a number of lifestyle choices people can avoid to reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer’s or dementia — smoking, heavy drinking and overeating — but breaking these harmful habits is no guarantee you will circumvent cognitive decline.

When it comes to preserving a sound mind, the word of the day is neuroplasticity. This is the brain’s ability to learn and adapt. Kendra Cherry explains in this post on verywell mind:

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change and adapt due to experience. It is an umbrella term referring to the brain’s ability to change, reorganize, or grow neural networks. This can involve functional changes due to brain damage or structural changes due to learning.

There are a number of activities in which we can engage to stimulate and improve neuroplasticity. One of those activities, probably the most enjoyable and rewarding, is music — singing or playing an instrument, especially if it is done with other people.

In a post on their website, the Barbershop Harmony Society noted the cognitive benefits of singing. These benefits arise from the practice of singing, particularly in a group setting, because this activity engages multiple parts of the brain at the same time, forcing these different parts to make connections that stimulate the development of that all-important neuroplasticity:

Choral singing is especially rich in what psychologists call working memory load—holding a vocal line in mind while anticipating cues, adjusting pitch, tracking lyrics, and blending with others. For older adults, working memory can become fragile over time, making multitasking more difficult. But singing reinforces it in a low-stakes, high-reward way.

Singing also reinforces selective attention. In rehearsal, singers learn to ignore some stimuli (ambient noise, others’ mistakes) and focus on the conductor’s cues or their section’s part. This sharpening of attentional control may help counteract age-related declines in sustained focus, a phenomenon noted in multiple longitudinal studies on musical engagement in older adults.

Finally, verbal fluency—one of the earliest domains to decline in some forms of cognitive aging—is supported by the rhythmic and lyrical nature of song. Memorizing and retrieving lyrics, especially in complex harmonies or non-repetitive structures, exercises the brain’s semantic and phonological networks. And because music activates emotional memory as well, older singers often retrieve lyrics faster than they can retrieve spoken language from the same era.

When I joined my church’s choir nearly 30 years ago, I wasn’t thinking that it would help my mind stay sharp when I got older. I did it because people in the pews who heard me singing told me I had a nice voice and I should join the choir. One of the first challenges I faced, one that probably inhibits others from joining a choral group, is that I couldn’t read music. All I knew was that when the dots on the page went down, I sang at a lower frequency, and when they went up, I sang at a higher pitch. I “cheated” by standing next to someone in my section (bass) who could read musical notation proficiently, and eventually I learned to recognize the intervals in the music that would get me to the next note.

What I didn’t realize was that the process of learning to read music was similar to learning a foreign language, one of the activities neurologists suggest to improve brain function. Though my brain moves a little slower than it did when I was younger — I’m definitely past my prime for competing on “Jeopardy” — nobody’s trying to confiscate my car keys. Can I chalk that up to several decades of singing in the choir? While I can’t offer scientific proof, I feel my twice-weekly singing in the choir has played a part in keeping my mind from slipping a gear or two.

In addition to delaying cognitive decline, there are other rewards from singing. There’s evidence that this activity releases dopamine, serotonin and endorphins, the “happy chemicals” that make you feel good. From Opera North: “Scientists believe that’s one of the reasons why people report being on a high during choir sessions and continuing to feel positive, uplifted and motivated afterwards.” If you’re looking to reduce stress, studies show that singing lowers adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that have a negative impact on our metabolism and immune systems when they reach excessive levels.

Another factor in cognitive decline as we grow older is isolation. A recent study showed that older adults who socialize regularly with others could delay the onset of dementia by as many as five years. Joining a choral group and singing with others provides a great way to socialize with other people on a regular basis.

“Okay, Steve, I’m sold on the benefits of singing, but there’s just one problem: I can’t sing.”

This may be true for some people, but there are many who THINK they can’t sing because they’ve never been properly trained. It’s been said that singing is, essentially, just yelling on pitch. The key, of course, is staying on pitch. Some of us have a “good ear,” allowing us to accurately replicate the notes we hear. With the proper training, most people can develop that ear and stay on pitch. Once you master the ability to avoid going flat or sharp, there are other techniques you can learn to improve the quality of your tone, like relaxing your vocal chords.

If you don’t attend a church, there are secular choral groups you can join. You can also get a group of friends together for sing-alongs. If you are, indeed, hopeless when it comes to singing, learn to play an instrument (I recommend taking lessons rather than going the self-taught route). Eventually, you’ll get to the point where you can play with other musicians.

Incorporating music into your activities, one way or another, won’t just slow down cognitive decline; it will enrich your life, elevate your mood and connect you with people you’ll want to spend time with.

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Based on a study published last year in Nature, the Stanford School of Sustainability reports that at the current rate, climate change will reduce the yield of staple crops — wheat, corn, soybeans, barley, and cassava — by 24 percent by the end of the century. The exception to staples is rice, which benefits from higher nighttime temperatures. But the lower supply of most staples, combined with higher demand — there continues to be more mouths to feed — means we will pay more for the food we eat.

But agriculture is not just a casualty of climate change. It’s also a cause. It’s estimated that the processes of growing food contribute roughly one third of the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up our world. Agriculture produces three types of greenhouse gases:

• Carbon dioxide: Plants soak up CO2 as they grow. As they die and decay, some of that CO2 is released back into the atmosphere, but much of that plant matter returns to the soil where that CO2 is stored. In modern agriculture, however, tilling of the soil releases that CO2 from the ground.

• Nitrous oxide: A very powerful greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide forms when nitrogen used in fertilizer combines with oxygen in the air. Our farming methods have depleted most of the nutrients that are naturally found in the soil, forcing farmers to rely more and more on nitrogen fertilizers.

• Methane: Another powerful greenhouse gas, methane is released by livestock in the digestive process — when they burp and poop. Many large animal farms store animal waste in ponds that release large amounts of methane.

Forests sequester about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels, but as more land is needed to grow food for an ever-increasing population, forests are being cleared for agriculture. Because of the heat and drought caused by climate change, wildfires are becoming more frequent and destructive, further reducing carbon-storing forests and releasing more CO2.

But what if, by changing the way we grow food, we could turn farming from a climate problem into a climate solution? While it won’t solve all the climate problems associated with farming, the approach known as regenerative agriculture takes a step in the right direction.

In short, regenerative agriculture is all about restoring and maintaining healthy soil by using no-till farming, cover crops and managed grazing. This trailer for the documentary “Roots so Deep” provides a quick overview:

Let’s start with no-till farming. In standard farming practices, soil is tilled — dug up — to prepare for planting. The tilling, however, breaks up organic matter in the soil, releasing carbon dioxide that was being stored in the ground. With no-till farming, seeds are planted on undisturbed soil, preserving organic matter that provides nutrient-rich soil for crops. These healthier soils allow more rainwater to be absorbed in the ground, preventing soil erosion and providing moisture for plants during times of drought. By not tilling the soil, carbon sequestered in the ground stays in the ground.

Cover crops work in tandem with no-till farming to rebuild and preserve healthy soil. In the off-season, when cash crops are not growing, cover crops — usually some type of grass — are planted to prevent soil erosion and nutrient runoff. These cover crops also sequester carbon and help soils absorb excess rainfall.

The third tool in regenerative agriculture, managed grazing, is the most interesting. It mimics the behavior of herding animals like bison that have been around since before humans started growing food. In managed grazing, a tract of land is divided into a number of parcels, and the animals are moved from one parcel to the next in order to avoid over-grazing of forage and over-trampling, which destroys the root systems of the plants. As they graze in each parcel, the animals fertilize the soil with their waste.

Together, these three practices produce healthier, richer soils that remove carbon from the air rather than emitting it. These nutrient-rich soils also don’t need nitrogen fertilizers to be productive, reducing the amount of nitrous oxide — that very potent greenhouse gas — that is heating up the planet.

“No good regenerative agriculture grazer is using added nitrogen fertilizer,” said Alan Jenkins. “If it was good enough for bison, it’s good enough for regen ag grazers. That’s the philosophy, to work as ecosystems worked for millennia.”

I met Alan years ago when I started the Atlanta chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby. He took over his family’s farm in Rutledge, Georgia, a couple of years ago and started practicing regenerative agriculture. He sells meat products through his business, Academy Mill Farm, and expects the enterprise to be profitable within a year or so. And the grass-fed cattle and sheep have more nutrient dense meat, with more Omega 3 fatty acids (healthy) rather than Omega 6 fatty acids (not healthy) found in grain-fed animals.

One of the negative impacts of climate change is more frequent and severe droughts, which reduce crop yields. The richer, healthier soil resulting from regenerative agriculture, though, increases the ground’s ability to absorb and retain water, helping farmers to adapt to our changing climate.

“I’m building up soil and grasses that will build more insect populations and creating a climate resilient model of agriculture, where soil resists drought and recharges groundwater and protects streams,” said Alan.

Although only 1.5 percent of farmland is being cultivated with regenerative agriculture, momentum appears to be shifting toward this promising method, and studies find the practice increases net farm income by an average of $65 an acre. One farmer in California reported a net increase of $425.19 per acre. Check out this interview with him below.

This year, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture launched the Regenerative Pilot Program, which will provide $700 million to help farmers who want to use regenerative practices. This all sounds good, but it would have been a lot better if the Trump administration hadn’t slashed the $2 billion authorized by the Biden administration for climate-smart agriculture. In other parts of the world, the Savory Foundation is providing funding for regenerative agricultural projects that cover millions of acres of farmland.

In Congress this month, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and several colleagues reintroduced the Soil Conservation And Regeneration Education (Soil CARE) Act, which would educate and train farmers in the regenerative techniques that produce healthy soils. “As climate chaos continues to make the West hotter and drier, we must ensure our farmers, ranchers, and land stewards have the resources and tools they need to keep their lands adaptable and resilient, leading to healthy and regenerative soils,” said Merkley.

Regenerative agriculture is not the panacea that will fix all the climate problems related to farming, but it could make a dent in tamping down emissions and help farmers adapt to a more inhospitable climate. I’ll look closer at legislation that might be in the works to scale up this solution in a future post.

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