Volts community thread #27
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David’s Notes
1. 🖕 This month’s big environmental FU is Trump’s repeal of the EPA’s "endangerment finding," its determination that greenhouse gases harm human health. For more on why the endangerment finding matters (it is the basis of all federal climate regulations), listen to my 2023 episode with Lissa Lynch of NRDC:
If you would like to hear me cursing freely about the death of the endangerment finding, I went on Public Notice to give my two f’ing cents about the legal reasoning and what might come next:
2. ☀️ A followup to the followup to November’s balcony solar episode: plug-in solar bills are now advancing through more than two dozen state legislatures. (Bookmark Bright Saver’s bill tracker to follow along.) Both Vermont and Virginia are halfway to passage.
In Arizona, however, utilities have successfully delayed (killed?) the effort. The AZ Mirror captures the flavor of the opposition in the relevant legislative committee:
“Am I forced to allow those or not?” Rep. Ralph Heap, R-Mesa, asked one of the advocates, posing a hypothetical where a landlord would not want to have portable solar generators on balconies for “aesthetic reasons.”
…
“I don’t have a problem with people using solar,” Rep. Pamela Carter, R-Scottsdale, said, adding that her problem is that the generators in apartment windows could be an “eyesore.”
Hey look, I found an eyesore in Arizona!
3. 🌵 To make matters worse for poor Arizona, according to the AZ Capitol Times, TurningPoint USA is pouring money into public utility board (PUC) elections in the state, purportedly to fight off the "green new deal." 🙄 (TPUSA, for those blessed enough to be unaware, is the billionaire-funded right-wing recruitment group run by Charlie Kirk’s widow.) I suspect Climate Cabinet will have something to say about this. (I interviewed Ylenia Aguilar, a candidate for AZ’s utility board, in 2024.)
In brighter PUC news, the Valdosta Daily Times reports:
A Republican incumbent on the Georgia Public Service Commission announced Tuesday that she will not stand for reelection, just months after two Democrats ejected two GOP incumbents with decisive electoral victories.
Tricia Pridemore, the incumbent in question, is said to be considering a run for Congress. Is Pridemore getting while the getting’s good? Is she worried an energy-affordability wave is coming? People are asking.
4. 🔌 In December I spoke with Brian Turner of Advanced Energy United and Kathleen Staks of Western Freedom about a larger, unified Western energy market. If you’d like to see the merits of such a market argued in detail, AEU just released a new report: "A pathway to a West-wide energy market."
5. ⚛️ Here’s an interesting thread on France’s nuclear power problem. It has too much and needs to rapidly electrify its economy to absorb more of it!
6. ✅ I confess I was a little worried about how the reactionary-centrism episode would land, but by and large, feedback has been positive and the comments section has been quite lively! Some comments of the month:
Remember, as a kid, playing “beetle,” where you’d have to call out every VW bug you saw? And when you played it, you started seeing them everywhere? That’s how Murc’s Law is. Once you start seeing it you realize it’s ubiquitous.
In his mind, this is Stephens’ job: he waits for Democrats to do something and then he tells them why it’s a mistake. All of DC is wired this way. That’s what DC punditry is for the most part.
I guess I just don’t fully understand why it’s the left’s job to defeat Trump and it’s everybody else’s job to tell them how and why they’re doing it wrong.
Totally agree. One of the most important things to understand about US politics is that Congress (and by extension the whole DC blob) consistently overestimates how conservative voters are. One of the most maddening things about watching the steady rise (and now total domination) of right-wing media is that even elected Democrats are so surrounded by it that they’re inclined to believe what it tells them about themselves, even over their own eyes.
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