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Wind and sun, things of that nature

A Russian nesting doll of spite and stupid.

This is straight up insane, which checks a box within-a-box within-a-box for the lobotomized party. So they’ll probably do it.

The tax provision, tucked inside the 940-page bill that the Senate made public just after midnight on Friday, stunned observers.

“This is how you kill an industry,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan group of business leaders and investors. “And at a time when electricity prices and demand are soaring.”

The bill would rapidly phase out existing federal tax subsidies for wind and solar power by 2027. Doing so, many companies say, could derail hundreds of projects under development and could jeopardize billions of dollars in manufacturing facilities that had been planned around the country with the subsidies in mind.

Those tax credits were at the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed in 2022 in an attempt to nudge the country away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is driving climate change. President Trump, who has mocked climate science, has instead promoted fossil fuels and demanded that Republicans in Congress unwind the law.

But the latest version of the Senate bill would go much further. It would impose a steep penalty on all new wind and solar farms that come online after 2027 — even if they didn’t receive federal subsidies — unless they follow complicated and potentially unworkable requirements to disentangle their supply chains from China. Since China dominates global supply chains, that measure could affect a large number of companies.

That’s from NYT on Sunday, and there are literally no benefits from doing this.

Not unrelated to the way ‘policymakers’ are making pawns of Chinese college students studying and doing research in the US. Always running behind will always do the wrong things. Ahead is right there. In front of you.

 

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Phosphorus edition

The Devil’s Element is a tale of folly, waste, greed, and excess, which Egan unspools with a light touch and a brisk pace. He opens the book with a police foot chase; the unfortunate suspect is eventually fished out of an algae-choked canal and hospitalized in Cape Coral, Florida. In its final pages he describes a pilot project to capture phosphorus from the pee of residents of Brattleboro, Vermont, and its use of an educational video featuring a talking drop of urine named Uri Nation. Along the way we meet Hennig Brand, an alchemist who first succeeded in isolating pure phosphorus from urine in 1669 while searching for the philosopher’s stone, the mythical substance that could turn lead to gold. Others quickly discovered that while the waxy, glowing stuff did not produce gold, it was poisonous, extremely unstable as a solid at room temperature, and prone to exploding. These properties earned it the moniker “the Devil’s element,” which in turn presaged its other modern application as an ingredient in some of the most horrendous weapons that humans use on one another. (Egan writes about a German beachcomber whose leg began to melt and char after a small orange rock he had collected exploded in his pants—a pebble-size legacy of the Allied firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 washed up on a Baltic shore.)

At the outset of the Industrial Revolution many nation-states figured out that they couldn’t feed their fast-growing populations without finding a lot more phosphorus than was available from manure and crop residues and naturally occurring in soils. Egan gives a grim global tour of the various predatory lengths to which imperial powers and modern multinational firms have gone to secure phosphorus. Soon after the Battle of Waterloo the British dug up their own fallen soldiers’ phosphorus-rich bones, shipped them home, then heated and ground them up as fertilizer to grow food for the living. In the middle of the nineteenth century, European and American farmers became reliant on imports of guano (bird poop) strip-mined from Peruvian islands by indentured Chinese laborers. When those reserves were exhausted in the 1890s, they turned elsewhere. Thus began the century-long ordeal of the Banaba Islanders, displaced from their Pacific homeland by the voracious English-owned, Australia-based Pacific Phosphate Company. After a company agent discovered vast reserves of phosphorus-laden rock on Banaba one day in 1900, the firm’s miners carved up the island chunk by chunk. The rocks were carried by conveyor belt to ships that ferried them onward to fertilize fields around the world. Banaba’s destruction helped Australia and New Zealand boost the productivity of their soils and become wealthy agricultural exporters. After the late 1970s Banaba’s phosphate reserves were largely depleted—by that point, mining firms had stripped 90 percent of the island’s land surface and removed 22 million tons of material. In the process, they also ruined many of the sacred caves where the islanders had collected water to survive periods of drought.

From Planet Ooze by Jonathan Mingle in the April 10, 2025 issue of the New York Review of Books

As always, support and invest in physical media. Subscribe to print journalism, buy books and records, experience the thrill.

Image: Decades of phosphate mining has left the surface of Banaba Island a moonscape of coral pinnacles. Photo by Janice Cantieri. National Geographic

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The Solar Glut

Drafting on last week’s post, what if the news the way news is presented was reversed?

Europe’s solar energy season is getting longer and more intense, threatening to disrupt markets and overwhelm grids with a glut of cheap power.

Solar energy production surges in April as longer days combine with sunnier weather, while the warmer conditions also curb household heating demand. Swaths of new solar capacity are generating a flood of electricity that can drive power prices below zero, eating into the profits of renewable-energy producers and scaring off some investors.

Not artificially reversed, only mindful that this happening, too.  Of course Bloomberg (only the messenger) frames this in a grave ‘We Must Do Something About This Immediately’ context, as though strong solar production paired with milder temperatures is a disruptive problem.
Which it could be, but not for the planet. And there are all manner of gluts – sun, solar power, solar panels themselves. One man’s glut is another man’s boom.
Image: raise your hand if you remember this band
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Dollar amounts to muddy waters on global warming

As massive storms cause catastrophic – and catastrophically expensive – damage to the built infrastructure, a weird and unnecessary thing happens. Actually, it doesn’t just happen. People make it happen and then make it worse, kind of like global warming:

Although traditional statistical methods cannot quantify the influence of greenhouse gases on rising disaster costs, many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.

“A lot of these extremes are really ramped up,” said Adam Smith, the NOAA climatologist who has led the billion-dollar disaster project for more than a decade. “If you want to act like nothing’s happening or it’s minimal, that’s just not the case in what we’ve seen in these extreme events in the United States.”

In September, Smith experienced a billion-dollar disaster firsthand when Hurricane Helene’s record rainfall overflowed the rivers that run through Asheville, N.C., where NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information is located. Smith and the other NCEI employees survived the floods, but the agency’s trove of meteorological data, including the billion-dollar disaster website, was knocked offline and remained inaccessible for weeks.

…

As the billion-dollar disaster tally climbs, the question grows more urgent: Is global warming to blame?

To answer that, it helps to first ask another question: What do scientists really mean when they say that global warming is causing a trend? For that matter, how does scientific knowledge get created in the first place? In the case of the billion-dollar disaster dataset, the answer begins with two self-described weather nerds at NOAA’s office in Asheville.

Come on people. There is no need to use one thing to confuse another. Unless you are trying to do that deliberately, in which case, not okay then.

The point becomes moot in the context of decades-earlier debates on whether it would be too expensive to do anything about global warming, and especially whether those amounts were alarmist. . As these get eclipsed by economic data adjustments and comparisons, the murky, cause-effect-correlation confusion sets in. It seems like a reasonable question to raise. But no more-perfect distraction has been designed than the billion-dollar disaster data set, other than the caveat farm itself where this story was harvested.

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Thoreau’s environmental philosophy of nature

Superb recent* (easy to get an issue or two behind) reflection by John Banville in the NYRB on a new book about how Emerson, Thoreau and William James dealt with loss early in their lives. Note this representative digression on Thoreau that has particular relevance today but also reminds us of one thing more:

Thoreau, too, following his brother’s painful and untimely death, embarked on the program of becoming what he was determined to be. These were hard times in Concord. Eleven days after the loss of John, Thoreau developed symptoms of lockjaw himself, though it soon became apparent that it was only—only!—a sympathetic reaction. This was five days before little Waldo Emerson succumbed to scarlet fever, a disease for which there was no cure at the time. It must have seemed as if the angel of death had pitched his tent in that small New England town and meant to stay.

But for Thoreau there was life still, which behooves us to live it, and live it to its fullest, as Lambert Strether insisted. Who can say what torments of sorrow and bereavement Thoreau had to endure in order to come through to the other side? But come through he did. In March 1842, after that terrible January in which his brother and the Emersons’ child perished, Thoreau, in journal entries and a long letter to Emerson’s sister-in-law Lucy Jackson Brown, set about hauling himself up from the abyss of despair.

“What right have I to grieve,” he writes, “who have not ceased to wonder?” The world—nature—simply will not have it that we should give up our vivacity because others die, have died, will die. “Soon the ice will melt,” he declares, and the blackbird will be singing again along the river where his brother used to walk. “When we look over the fields we are not saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will wither—for their death is the law of new life.” As Richardson parses these sentiments, “Individuals die; nature lives on.”

Thoreau’s essential insight, Richardson writes, “is that we need an anti-anthropomorphic, nature-centred vision of how things are.”

Richardson sees this, along with two other crucial realizations—that “our intellectual connections and our friendships actually matter more than family,” and that despite the deaths of individuals “the natural world as a whole…is fundamentally healthy”—as marking “the sudden emergence of the greatest American voice yet for the natural world, a world including—but not centered on—us.”

Image: author photo, vicinity Alte Elbe Kathewitz

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The Green Revolution

No, not that one. This one:

The Green Revolution refers to a transformative 20th-century agricultural project that utilized plant genetics, modern irrigation systems, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides to increase food production and reduce poverty and hunger in developing countries. The Green Revolution began in Mexico, where scientists developed a hybrid wheat variety that dramatically expanded yields. Following its introduction, hunger and malnutrition there dropped significantly.

The model was subsequently extended to Asia, Latin America, and later Africa to increase food production for growing populations without consuming significantly more land. Over time, however, the techniques and policies of the Green Revolution were questioned as they led to inequality and environmental degradation.

Ahem. Such language. But being mindful of these transformations is important, especially as we seem to be on the verge of several others happening simultaneously and at terrific speed. For instance, which kind of battery will follow lithium-ion? In early 2023, we heard about iron-air batteries that use a water-based electrolyte and store energy using reverse rusting. Now, that’s the sexy tech we need. Companies are being funded and manufacturing facilities built. The storage needs changing, not to mention the problematic issues around mining lithium, are driving this ongoing series of shifts. Like the earlier Green revolution, it’s less important to cheer these development as good or bad but rather to see them in a kind of continuum and consider how each new standard performs under these changing market conditions. Yes, market – the economics as well as the social and physical constraints.

Climate tech is on-again, off-again as we get jaded accustomed to shiny new things, seek improvements and various strategies win out. But as the pressure continues to push costs down and use up, the newer green revolution can usher in a more stable form of societal improvements for everyone.

That, we should expect.

Video: the great Arthur Blythe (Thanks D!), with Bob Stewart on Tuba, doncha know.

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Making Whether

This Bloomberg Cleaner Tech (!) article about whether humans can control forces beyond our control (the weather) accidentally highlights the ways we ignore the choices and actions well-within our grasp:

In an effort to control future rainstorms, scientists in Japan are working on an ambitious government-backed project involving everything from giant curtains floating on the sea to fields of wind turbines to protect the island nation. Their goal, they say, is to turn extreme weather into “a blessing” — if it works.

The effort feels ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, but it’s attracted dozens of researchers across Japan. The team, led by Kosei Yamaguchi, an associate professor at Kyoto University, is focused on reducing so-called “guerrilla” rainstorms that can bring large quantities of rainfall within a short period of time. Their goal is to develop an array of weather control technologies that can reduce deluges to manageable rain and roll them out by 2050.

It’s the shiny-object school of journalism – the very next words in that article are the subhead ‘Dams in the air’ – we need something new/fresh/exciting/risky/improbable/easy to attract eyeballs and viewers and clicks. What actually happens even when this works – and let’s not consider whether it’s the true function (whoopsie!) – is that people simply move on.

That’ simply moving on’ repeated over and over into perfection becomes its own feedback loop. Not sure ‘soothing’ is the right word, but numbness definitely follows. An ensuing restlessness opens the door to helplessness, what can I do, what does any of it matter? At the bottom of that fountain (l’eau impotable) lies despair. And adding in the crucial context for a business publication, of course Billions are at Stake. And they certainly are. But which billions, other billions, are left unconsidered.

Image: cloud seeding rocket (Photographer: Zhang Haiqiang/VCG/Getty Images)

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In as much as especially concerning

the future, a significant amount of energy and attention continues to be paid to pointless distractions – and this is certainly not referring to Barbie, good grief, which is entirely legitimate cultural production compared to

Influencers Built This Wellness Startup

Anything related to hyper loops or one-way tunnels, ‘crazy golf’, or fiat money. Hardly an exhaustive list, play along at home.

If the whole artifice rests on ‘there is only so much attention’ (bandwidth in the common parl) then lettuce take that idea to heart. Frivolous at this point is tantamount to dangerous and irresponsible. Concern about not bumming people out in proximity to the imminent collapse of the Gulf Stream leads to, let’s say, an incoherent narrative.

Priority has never been our muse, with one or two exceptions, but let’s get organized. At least theoretically imagining the painful stuff first – what would you be willing to give up? Just go ahead and get it out of the way, at least mentally, because that seems to be what frightens people the most. So, pop the bubble: imagine a world without cruises – no, go deeper – cars! Ouch. But see – that’s where to start.

Even the intention could begin to help (us) re-organize how we think about what we think about. Envision liberation, rather than ignore the possibility of collapse.

Image: Peace. Solemnity. Liberation by Aristarkh Lentulov (1917)

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Weather or not…

That orange dot was Wednesday July 5.

You want to believe the reports or your lying eyes, it’s getting more and more difficult to hydrate climate denial. Yes, people are still getting rich doing so, with full employment for lobbyists who still help companies muddle the puddles. But that’s basically what they are now and we are full on in our incoherence meltdown. Slow moving isn’t slow enough for the summer news cycle, and though they are always looks for way to spice things up, there’s not a lot of chase left to cut to:

The past three days were quite likely the hottest in Earth’s modern history, scientists said on Thursday, as an astonishing surge of heat across the globe continued to shatter temperature records from North America to Antarctica.

The spike comes as forecasters warn that the Earth could be entering a multiyear period of exceptional warmth driven by two main factors: continued emissions of heat-trapping gases, mainly caused by humans burning oil, gas and coal; and the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern.

…

The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.

“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”

On Tuesday, global average temperatures climbed to 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17 Celsius, making it the hottest day Earth has experienced since at least 1940, when records began, and very likely before that, according to an analysis by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Up next: stuck weather patterns, wavy flow, amplified troughs and ridges – and that’s just for the mid-latitudes. Get wise to the flimflammery.

Image: By Elena Shao/The New York Times

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Super trees, smh

Not to pick on MIT Tech Review – though kicking Silicon Valley is another story and actually fine – but this story reads quite a bit like VCs trying to re-invent the bus:

At Living Carbon, Mellor is trying to design trees that grow faster and grab more carbon than their natural peers, as well as trees that resist rot, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere. In February, less than four years after he co-founded it, the company made headlines by planting its first “photosynthesis-enhanced” poplar trees in a strip of bottomland forests in Georgia.

This is a breakthrough, clearly: it’s the first forest in the United States that contains genetically engineered trees. But there’s still much we don’t know. How will these trees affect the rest of the forest? How far will their genes spread? And how good are they, really, at pulling more carbon from the atmosphere?

Living Carbon has already sold carbon credits for its new forest to individual consumers interested in paying to offset some of their own greenhouse gas emissions. They’re working with larger companies, to which they plan to deliver credits in the coming years. But academics who study forest health and tree photosynthesis question whether the trees will be able to absorb as much carbon as advertised.

Even Steve Strauss, a prominent tree geneticist at Oregon State University who briefly served on Living Carbon’s scientific advisory board and is conducting field trials for the company, told me in the days before the first planting that the trees might not grow as well as natural poplars. “I’m kind of a little conflicted,” he said, “that they’re going ahead with this—all the public relations and the financing—on something that we don’t know if it works.”

Re-engineering trees, okay. Super-charged trees. His misgivings are right there, as are the preconditions of going ahead with this:  ‘headlines’, ‘public relations and financing.’ Like they just came out of nowhere.

I, too, want super trees to be a thing. But c’mon. Strauss is actually quoted in the article saying, “There could be a negative. We don’t know”

The point is that Climate Solutions Hype (patent pending) continues to outstrip existing effective solutions that we just don’t like, are bored with or wish were sexier and have become one more dynamic with which the Earth must contend. Along with irony.

Image: Regular Lombardy Poplar tree (also quite super).