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Thanks to Trump, mercury is surging back
From the New York Times, another story to keep in mind when the Trump administration tries to describe coal as “clean” or “beautiful” (or trots out their stupid little mascot, “Coalie”): As Coal Rebounds, More Toxic Mercury Is in the Air (gift link).
Coal-fired power plants across the country released more mercury last year as power demand surged, reversing a yearslong downward trend in the emissions of a toxic metal that impairs brain development.
Mercury emissions from coal-burning plants increased by roughly 9 percent in 2025, compared with a year earlier, totaling more than 4,800 pounds, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency.
At the same time, the Trump administration launched a series of moves that experts say may make those emissions climb even higher this year and beyond.
Please remember: mercury is an extremely dangerous toxic pollutant. The Mad Hatter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was “mad” because of mercury poisoning. Maybe he would be a better mascot for coal than Coalie? Anyway, this shit is bad:
A potent neurotoxin that settles into waterways and accumulates in the food chain, particularly in fish, mercury can cause premature cardiovascular mortality in adults. In children and fetuses, it can cause developmental delays and permanent I.Q. deficits.
Meanwhile, the Trump toady in charge of the EPA says the quiet part out loud.
And Mr. Zeldin has argued that tougher limits on mercury pollution would have regulated the coal sector “out of existence,”
Yes, you crooked son of a bitch, coal should be regulated out of existence! It already has been, in many countries. It’s filthy, inefficient, and now more expensive than clean, renewable (even – dare I say it – beautiful?) energy sources like solar (and batteries, and wind).
Besides which, the economics are so bad for coal plants that the Trump administration is ordering a bunch of them to stay open even though they were already scheduled to close. So it’s costing people more, contributing to climate change, and poisoning everything with mercury (among other toxic chemicals). We have to stop this.
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Trump admin blocking Texas wind projects
The Trump Defense Department is now using their bogus “security concerns” schtick to block onshore wind development. According to the Texas Tribune, that includes 54 wind projects in Texas.
“It’s not clear why these policies are being implemented during an affordability crisis, but I think it shows the level of disdain the administration has for renewable energy in general and wind power specifically,” said University of Texas energy professor Michael Webber.
As noted previously on this blog, this particular scare-mongering obstructionism is based on plain old bullshit. Like, legally:
Last year, the administration suspended leases for five major projects off the East Coast, citing national security concerns related to radar interference. Federal judges later ruled against the administration in all five cases, finding that the government exceeded its authority and failed to prove that the projects posed national security threats. All five projects have since resumed construction.
If there had been the slightest merit to the “security concerns” raised previously about the offshore wind projects, then at least there could be a pretense for this expansion. But there hasn’t been any merit! There never was!
Dear Texas, Trump is messing with you, which I understood to be something that was frowned upon. Can we get some lawsuits going here?
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Good ol' Lloyd Doggett gets it
Lloyd Doggett (and some other guy who isn’t my representative in Congress) in an opinion piece for The Guardian: The Iran war reminds us: we’ll never be energy-independent with fossil fuels.
Efforts like the Hromada Project, which is named after the Ukrainian term for “community”, will be essential in helping Ukrainians weather the war by connecting local nongovernmental organizations in Ukraine to public- and private-sector support from around the world.
That’s exactly what our government should be doing: helping communities around the world be more energy secure and independent, sourcing their power locally with renewables, storing energy in batteries for backup, and electrifying everything to make the transition seamless. That’s certainly what is happening in China, which has dominated the global wind, solar, battery and electric vehicle markets as a result.
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Apartment A/C batteries: simple & fast demand reduction
From AP, a story that shows an easy and effective way to reduce peak demand: give renters with window unit air conditioners a remote-controllable battery.
“It’s basically a souped up version of the power bank that you would use to charge your phone when you go out,” said Andrew Wang, the chief executive officer of Every Electric, the company behind the pilot, which has partnered with [New York City’s] energy company Con Edison.
The devices, about the size of a microwave, charge when electricity demand is low and then run window AC units for a few hours when demand spikes.
This particular approach doesn’t solve everything, but it’s a great example of the kind of simple innovation that could be quickly deployed, at modest cost, and make a big difference. We don’t have to wait for big, uncertain bets like nuclear, or even for the time and expense of giant clean energy projects. This kind of adaptation can happen as fast as anyone – companies, governments, nonprofits, hyperscalers, whoever – can throw money at it.
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EVs: huge in Costa Rica
New York Times: These Countries Embrace E.V.s to Avoid Oil Price Shocks
Costa Rica is a leading example of how electric vehicles are rapidly gaining popularity in many less affluent countries that are not part of the giant U.S., European and Chinese auto markets. There are signs that the war in Iran, which has sharply raised the cost of gasoline and diesel, is accelerating this trend.
Electric vehicle sales in Latin America, Africa and much of Asia — a grouping that includes billions of people but that analysts often refer to as “rest of world” — soared 79 percent in March compared with a year earlier, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a research firm. For all of 2025, sales of electric cars in these countries jumped 48 percent.
The article describes growing pains – worries about grid capacity, and some initial struggles with incompatible charging stations – but this is the way forward. These vehicles are just better.
Biusa, a private bus company, is replacing its entire 60-bus fleet with battery-powered models made by King Long, a Chinese brand.
The electric models cost $50,000 more than diesel buses from King Long, but the company can quickly make up the difference by spending less on fuel and maintenance, Miguel Zamora, a Biusa executive, said as he stood near a row of chargers.
The buses easily cover their daily routes on a single charge, he said. Ridership has increased because passengers like the quiet ride and superior air-conditioning.
The buses, Mr. Zamora said, “literally pay for themselves.”
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Solar's continued US growth
Short article on a recent forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration: Solar generation to rise 17% this summer. Solar’s rise continues, as does coal’s decline. Those are both good news! That news is tempered somewhat by seeing both gas and wind stay steady (we want the former to drop and the latter to climb), but under this anti-clean-energy administration we’ll take what we can get.
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Floating solar: an end-run around NIMBYism
We really have to counteract the anti-solar propaganda, and promote agrivoltaics to dispel the perception of false choice (either farmland or solar, not both). But some folks in Ohio are working on an alternative where they can sidestep those arguments entirely: floating solar panels on reservoirs.
A team of 12 engineers and construction workers are busily connecting more than 3,400 solar arrays to small, floating docks and distributing them across four acres of the reservoir’s surface water.
The electricity generated by the floating photovoltaics will be used to power a nearby water treatment plant, where electricity-powered pumps run 24 hours a day, year-round.
“The water treatment plant is one of the city’s biggest energy costs; it only made sense to put the floating solar site here,” says Sara Weekley, deputy director of Lima’s utilities department.
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Trump can't stop renewable energy
He’s slowing it, for sure, and that’s tragic, bordering on criminal, in my book. But the switch to clean, renewable energy is unstoppable now. As this Guardian article notes, for the first time, the US generated more power from renewables than gas last month.
Static image of a nice interactive graph that you should click through to see on The Guardian article. I couldn't resist showing that first crossover point where the purple renewables line exceeds the gas line. Go on, graph! The fight isn’t won yet, of course. Renewables are inevitable eventually, but time is of the essence. Making the switch away from fossil fuels cannot happen quickly enough. The corrupt obstruction of this administration needs to be overcome, and the transition needs to accelerate. But this is still damned good news.
The clean energy industry still has to contend with an uncertain, volatile political environment as well as logjams that delay projects from being connected to a grid that still struggles to move clean power around the country. But fears of Trump-inspired destruction have somewhat receded.
“I’m not nearly as pessimistic as I was last summer,” said Jon Powers, co-founder of CleanCapital, a solar and battery storage company. “The administration way overplayed their hand on this. They are not where the American people are and they’re having to come back to where we are.”
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DeSantis' Florida is anti-tree-planting, for some jackass reason
Dear Florida voters, please remember the more expensive electricity, the dirtier air, the warmer climate, and the rising seawaters next election, and how your MAGA government made all of that worse just to score a few culture war points and prop up the fossil fuel industry.
Here’s the perfect example: DeSantis signs bill on Earth Day reversing local climate change action.
[offsetting air pollution] can be achieved through cleaner energy or efforts like planting trees that absorb carbon. The new law prevents local governments from passing any “resolution, ordinance, rule, code or policy” that promotes net-zero goals.
That’s Trump’s Republican party for you: heavy-handed government regulation that prohibits local efforts in the name of stopping the unacceptable blight of… [checks notes] clean energy and tree-planting.
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Energy expert says oil is over
Comments by ‘world’s leading energy economist’ underscore that some folks are, indeed, learning some good lessons from the oil crisis caused by the U.S. and Israel’s attacks on Iran. The Guardian has the exclusive: ‘The damage is done’: global oil crisis has changed fossil fuel industry for ever, IEA chief says.
“Their perception of risk and reliability will change. Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future,” he said. “And this will cut into the main markets for oil.”
I don’t love nuclear in there, though existing plants are better than fossil fuels, I suppose. He did add that building renewables was an option “I never heard that anybody ever regretted… I don’t see any downsides for renewable energy.”
Ed Matthew, the UK director of the thinktank E3G, said: “The only effective path to energy and economic security is homegrown clean energy. All political parties should now be uniting around that mission. Their failure to do so tells you a lot about whose interests they truly represent.”
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We have to stop burning stuff for power
Sobering news from the American Lung Association, as reported in The Guardian: Nearly half of US children are breathing dangerous levels of air pollution, report warns.
That’s 33.5 million kids being poisoned by bad air. And guess what a key driver is? Climate change, of course! It’s not just a separate problem from dirty air, and it’s not just going to flood us, or roast us, or burn us, or drought us. It’s also directly making air pollution worse:
Several factors contributed to these unhealthy pollution levels, including extreme heat, drought and wildfires which have exposed a growing share of the population to harmful ozone, the report said.
The regions most affected by high ozone levels include south-western states from California to Texas, as well as much of the midwest. This is mainly driven by smoke from Canada’s 2023 wildfires crossing into the US, along with high temperatures and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in 2023 and 2024 – particularly in southern states.
More broadly, the report found that climate change is intensifying ozone pollution by boosting precursor emissions and creating atmospheric conditions such as higher temperatures and lower wind speeds that allow pollutants to build up and ozone to form.
Air pollution is a big problem, as is climate change. And war, and inequality, and oil spills, and etc. The good news is, there’s something that addresses all of these problems at once: solar (and wind, and batteries), of course! The faster we replace fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy production, the better we’ll all be.
And in the nearer-term, we can vote for and support every candidate under the sun (wink!) that opposes the Trump administration. Because they’re literally killing us.
Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has initiated at least 70 actions to roll back environmental and climate protections. Among them is the loosening of regulations on power plants that limit mercury and other hazardous air toxics.
Other rollbacks include overturning limits on major air pollution sources, disbanding EPA advisory committees on air quality and ending the practice of estimating the monetary value of lives saved by limiting fine particulate matter and ozone while still calculating costs to companies.
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Data-centers aren't a reason to use more fossil fuels
There are lots of good arguments in this Canary Media editorial by Amory Lovins and Justin Locke: AI: Does not compute. The dirty, expensive, and failing fossil fuel industry are more than happy to ride the panic-driven AI bubble to energy expansion, building out new plants as fast as they can. But that’s a terrible idea, and we shouldn’t allow it. If you want more power in 2026, it has to be clean power. That’s not even an obstacle! It’s the smarter, cheaper, faster way to do it.
As Lovins and Locke put it:
Renewables also offer essential speed. In Sparks, Nevada, the world’s largest solar-powered microgrid continuously powers modular data centers. Solar panels laid on desert ground feed hundreds of second-life electric-vehicle batteries joined to form a superbattery. It was all built in four months and delivers electricity that’s cheaper, quieter, and more reliable than grid power; uses virtually no water; emits nothing; and is even portable. This is what clean, scalable, market-speed power looks like. Gas isn’t it.
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Innovative solar program in Austin
Really interested to see how well this takes off: Austin Energy Standard Offer Program Ramps Up Local Solar Capacity:
If you’re a commercial building owner, you can now rent out your rooftop and parking lot space to a solar developer who will put in an array and sell that energy to AE. You’ll have another revenue stream, and Austin will have more solar power. Standard Offer is opening up “an untapped market” for solar generation, said Tim Harvey, director of energy efficiency services at AE. “Before, it’s like: I put up solar and my tenant benefits from it. Now it’s like: For no capital cost, I let somebody else put up the solar and I get another revenue stream.”
It took me a minute to wrap my mind around this program, but the realization that made it click is that it’s targeted toward large, multi-tenant commercial buildings, like strip-malls. Those owners aren’t paying the utility bills – the tenants are – so putting solar panels on the roof doesn’t benefit them the same way it does homeowners with residential installations.
This scheme gives those landlords a way to sell the solar power generated on their roofs directly to the utility. The landlord could install it themselves, or they could lease their roof space to some other party. That other party, a solar developer, invests in the installation and maintenance (and so owns the panels), and then they get to sell the power to Austin Energy. And part of their costs are the lease payments to the building owner/landlord.
This was announced early last year, but the new tweak to the program is a price floor that takes away a lot of uncertainty around what the rate of return would be:
Last week, AE created a new incentive that guarantees the minimum compensation for Standard Offer never falls below 11 cents per kWh for the first 10 years of the project. No matter how volatile the market, the department will make up the difference.
It will be really interesting to see how this goes! This could be a model that catches on elsewhere, spurring solar development that sidesteps NIMBY opposition.
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Britain sets solar record (twice)
Good news out of Britain, where their growing solar electricity capability is breaking records (and will continue to, I’m sure).
Britain’s sunny spring weather powered the grid to new solar energy records on two consecutive days this week.
Solar farms in England, Wales and Scotland generated 14.1GW of low-carbon electricity at lunchtime on Monday, surpassing the previous high of 14GW in July last year. And that record was toppled a day later when power generation from the sun’s energy climbed to another new high of 14.4GW on Tuesday afternoon.
This increased generation will soon make it possible for them to turn off gas-fueled power entirely, at least for short periods. Progress!
The article ends with a nod at what may be a sunny silver lining to the monstrous, idiotic war on Iran:
Michael Shanks, the energy minister, said: “…It is crucial we learn the lessons of the conflict in the Middle East – solar is one of the cheapest forms of power available and is how we get off the rollercoaster of international fossil fuel markets and secure our own energy independence.”
Another recent British story strikes a similar note: Octopus reports sharp rise in solar panel sales since start of Iran war. Namely, those sales were up 54% in March compared with February. The article goes on, “Good Energy, a green electricity supplier, said it had seen a doubling of interest in solar panels in the past three months.”
This is the right reaction! Even if burning them weren’t killing us (it is!), depending on and paying for the import of fossil fuels for everything isn’t necessary anymore!
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Polling shows anti-clean-energy BS is working
Sobering opinion numbers from the Pew Research Center on “Americans’ Shifting Views on Energy Issues”:
The share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say the country should prioritize oil, coal and natural gas over wind and solar power has doubled to 71% over the last six years.
I won’t quote extensively; the gist is that respondents generally have shifted away from preferring clean & renewable energy, and toward fossil fuels. This is especially pronounced among Republicans. You can click through if you want to see the rather depressing numbers and charts.
They word all of this very passively, which may be the impartial style that suits an opinion research organization. But presuming that’s the case, they shouldn’t title a section of this article, “Why are views changing on wind and solar energy?”, because they do not even try to answer that question. The answer is very simple: the billionaire class generally, including companies as well as individuals, and the Republican party specifically, have long waged a very concentrated and very well-funded campaign of lies to achieve these very results.
Because – pardon my language – how the fuck could any sensible person, let alone 20% of “Republican/Lean Republican” people, think that solar is “worse” for the environment?! (The 4% of “Dem/Lean Dem” in the same category are equally mystifying, but that number is almost low enough to just chalk up to the uninformed and the fools.) I mean, really. Worse! How??
It’s so tragically comical that I won’t even interrogate it on the merits. There are no merits! This is like a doctor telling an unhealthy, pre-diabetic person with obesity that they should switch from drinking a gallon of soda a day to drinking a gallon of water, and then their crazy (red-pilled, Fox-news-addled, MAGA) buddy convincing them that that would be worse for them. It’s just pure nonsense.
When getting into specific projects, there can be issues to figure out. Land-use by large solar and wind farms, who pays for what and who benefits (i.e., keeping for-profit utilities from ripping off consumers), and so on. But in the big picture, as portrayed by this survey and the people being asked broad questions like “Is solar good or bad?” and “Is coal good or bad?”, anti-clean-energy propaganda is just that. It’s craven, self-serving, for-profit bullshit.
This is the fight: to educate those who need it, and to un-misinform those who have been fed these lies.
Here’s your cheat-sheet if you ever get included in a survey like this:
- Production of wind and solar power: encourage 👍
- Use of electric vehicles: encourage 👍
- Production of nuclear power: discourage 👎
- Oil and gas drilling: discourage 👎
- Coal mining: discourage 👎
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One Black community bearing the brunt of Trump's oil wars
From Capital B News, a stark article detailing how An Oil Explosion in a Black Texas Town Traces Back to Trump’s Iran and Venezuela Crises:
The evening blast at the Texas oil refinery jolted the long-polluted community [of Port Arthur, TX] awake to their role in a much larger situation, residents told Capital B. It exposed how President Donald Trump’s global oil maneuvers have turned the long-impoverished Black area into a front line of his energy war, residents and advocates said.
As U.S. airstrikes in Iran sent fuel prices soaring, the administration has leaned harder on Venezuelan crude, driving more of the dirtiest oil on the market into refineries like Valero’s Port Arthur plant, which sits within yards of Black homes, churches, and schools. The refinery operator, Valero, has been the largest receiver of Venezuelan oil since the January military action.
When affluent rural and suburban folks complain that they don’t want a wind or solar farm nearby because they don’t like how it looks, remember stories like this. Nobody living near one of those has to shelter-in-place until the explosions stop, or ends up in the only county in their state “having unsafe levels of the cancer-causing chemicals benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide.”
The other big difference, of course, is that communities near clean energy production (usually) get the benefit of that power. The people of Port Arthur pay just as much at the gas pump as anyone.
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San Francisco getting huge new battery
Cool story from Canary Media on an example of how battery technology can be nimbly deployed in an urban area: Nation’s largest urban battery to take center stage near San Francisco.
the Cormorant Energy Storage Project, which will occupy an 11-acre vacant lot just southwest of the Cow Palace in Daly City… will be large by industry standards, with 250 megawatts of Tesla Megapack containers, capable of discharging for four hours straight, for 1 gigawatt-hour of total stored energy. Bigger batteries have been built, but when Cormorant comes online in about a year, it will be poised to be the country’s largest battery nestled within a major urban area.
The article points out the difficulty of “sticking a smokestack in San Francisco”, even if California were building new gas plants (which they’re not). This project is a much more feasible way to bring power right into the city.
These days, California expands generation by building large-scale solar plants in wide-open spaces, but those plants need to ship their power over many miles of transmission lines to reach the cities where it gets consumed. The Cormorant battery provides something new: a dense source of on-demand power that can slip into the urban fabric without any local air pollution, and which absorbs the far-off solar generation at midday to discharge later at night.
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Could MAGA come around on renewables?
With the economics (clean energy cheap vs. oil expensive) daily growing more stark, will Trumpworld actually flip on renewables? Even modest softening of their hardline stance could help. We hate hypocrisy but we hate fossil fuels even more, so here’s hoping! Why MAGA suddenly loves solar power
[R]ecently that Make America Great Again fire hose has also contained posts that seem off-brand for the former GOP official, whose spouse is Trump’s domestic
policy[terror] chief Stephen Miller.“Solar energy is the energy of the future,” Katie Miller posted recently. “Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky – we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” Another of her posts suggested solar is more vital to the U.S. than coal power, contradicting White House messaging and policy.
This article, syndicated from the Washington Post, is a month old now, and I haven’t seen much else about it. But again, every solar panel, battery, and wind turbine we can put up helps. If the grifters currently in charge of our country (“Asked if she is getting paid for her advocacy, like some other MAGA heavyweights promoting solar, Miller would not comment”) make a dirty buck off of this, too… well. It’s not ideal, but in the big picture it’s better than nothing.
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Canary Media: Sky-high oil prices are about to hit Puerto Rico’s grid.
“In the continental U.S., no one’s burning a significant quantity of oil to generate electricity,” said Cathy Kunkel, an energy consultant at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. But that’s not the case in Puerto Rico, where oil-fired plants make up about 60% of generating capacity. The island “just has a lot of old oil-fired power plants that were constructed in the ’60s and ’70s, when oil was obviously a lot cheaper.”
Island nations like Puerto Rico really highlight the costs of having to import fossil fuels, both in money and in dependence. The economic barriers are often high, but situations like these should be prime candidates to move to distributed renewable energy sources. Unfortunately, “Jenniffer González-Colón, the Trump-allied governor of Puerto Rico elected in 2024, has supported plans to boost the island’s gas generation and weakened a 2019 law that commits it to ditching fossil fuels by 2050.”
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This is cool & clever, and reduces some workforce stress as we transition away from fossil fuels: The future of geothermal energy may depend on fossil fuel workers
[Sage Geosystems cofounder Cindy Taff] sees a broad range of fossil fuel workers, from drillers to geologists, who will fit right into the renewables sector, arguing that the same industry that evolved from simple land wells to offshore operations in water thousands of feet deep has a vast pool of technical expertise.
It's high time to go solar