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On the Rube Goldberg machine of fossil fuel production
This newsletter from Bill McKibben, from a few months ago (shortly after the US began its illegal war on Iran) makes such a good point. Rube Goldberg’s machines were comically silly, but the tremendous complexity, expense, and risks of the real-world fossil fuel extraction, delivery, and usage systems are deadly serious.
I’ll quote a chunk of it here, but the full details are well worth a few minutes of your time.
If you want a gallon of gas for your car, someone first needs to have drilled for oil—in a few places (Saudi Arabia) this is still relatively easy, but increasingly it means figuring out how to go a mile beneath the surface of the sea, or frack the subsurface geology, which is to say blow it apart. Once you’ve collected your crude, you need to carry it to a port, often through a pipeline that must cross mountain and desert, and there load it on to a giant ship, which must sail the seas. Upon arrival somewhere, it needs to be piped to a refinery, which is among the most complicated pieces of machinery known to man. There it must be separated by heating in a distillation column, so that the light products—gasoline—rise to the top, and heavy products—say, asphalt—sink to the bottom. You use heat and pressure and chemical catalysts to “crack” some of the heavier molecules into lighter, more valuable products, and then you treat what you’ve got to remove impurities like sulfur. You pipe it part of the way to its final destination, and load it into trucks for delivery to gas stations, where it is stored in underground tanks, until someone appears with a credit card to pump it into his vehicle. In the engine of the car it is mixed with air inside a cylinder and compressed; a spark plug fires, forcing a piston to move; this linear motion is converted by a crankshaft into rotational energy to move the car; meanwhile the piston pushes out the burned gases.
The point is that continuing to depend on that dirty, dangerous way of powering our lives, when we can literally get energy freely, cleanly, and quickly from sunlight (and wind) just about anywhere on the planet, is crazy.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The Hill: Reconciliation bill subsidizes fossil fuels by $3.5B each year, Democratic report finds
The report only looks at provisions that specifically help the fossil fuel industry and does not include general corporate tax cuts that are likely to bolster those firms as well as others
It's high time to go solar