Clean energy dollars are gushing to red states. Now GOP senators are in a bind.: The Trump tax bill passed by the House would wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars for solar, wind and other projects in Republican districts. - "The measure, according to a group of Princeton University researchers called the REPEAT Project, would drain more than $1 trillion from the U.S. economy in less than a decade, when factoring in private investment and spin-off spending the subsidies drive. The average annual household electricity bill would be pushed up more than $270 after 10 years, the group found.
"The Trump administration has argued that curbing renewable energy to unleash more fossil fuels will lower utility rates, but many industry analysts warn otherwise. Plans for new gas plants have been beset by long delays and soaring costs amid shortages of materials and supply chain challenges. More than 80 percent of the new electricity added to the power grid in 2024 came from solar panels and industrial batteries that store the energy they capture, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a federal agency."
In Australia, everyone has a hot take about the mushroom murder trial: Mycology and forensics are the subject of conversation across Australia as Erin Patterson stands trial, accused of murdering three relatives with a beef Wellington. - "Prosecutors have said the poisoning was deliberate and have put forward as evidence that Patterson traveled to known death cap mushroom locations before the lunch; that she disposed of a food processor used to prepare the mushrooms; and that she reset her phone afterward. They also say Patterson told a number of lies, from the false cancer diagnosis she allegedly used to lure people to the lunch to the origin of the mushrooms she served."
Trump Is Crushing the Netanyahu Myth: The Israeli leader and his allies bet everything on Trump. But he’s just not that into them. - "The third-rate pro-government propagandists on Channel 14 might not have seen this coming, but Netanyahu should have. His dark worldview is premised on the pessimistic presumption that the world will turn on the Jews if given the chance, which is why the Israeli leader has long prized hard power over diplomatic understandings. Even if Trump wasn't such an unreliable figure, trusting him should have gone against all of Netanyahu's instincts."
The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk: The Tesla innovator becomes the latest government employee to lose his job. - "Ayushi Roy, a former technologist at the General Services Administration who now teaches digital government at Harvard Kennedy School, told us that Musk has achieved at least some of his goals: cutting the federal workforce and traumatizing the employees who remain. But, she said, he has largely failed to build anything that's made government more efficient."
What Trump Got Right in the Middle East: He put business front and center and politics to the side. - "Trump may well understand that with the Democratic Party likely divided on Israel for the next generation, his Jewish and evangelical-Christian supporters have nowhere else to go. This puts him in a position of power relative to the Israeli prime minister one that must surely make Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders very uncomfortable. Making them still more uncomfortable will be the fact that everyone who mattered seemed to be in those meetings in the Gulf. Everyone, that is, except them.
...
"Historically, America has attracted capital because it can be counted on to follow the rule of law, crack down on public corruption, and support the kinds of independent and quasi-independent regulatory bodies that give investors peace of mind. Trump and his administration have been working hard to weaken all of this. For a president who claims to understand the private sector as well as he does, seeking deals while simultaneously undermining the conditions that make America a great investment will be counterproductive in the end." [lol duh]
The Democrats Are Having a False Reckoning Over Joe Biden: Party elites are considerably more responsible for their woeful state of affairs than the former president. - "Prominent Democrats speaking out about all this a year ago would have been meaningful. Today, it means nothing. Denouncing Biden’s run now that he’s a political nonentity—out of office and perhaps very near death—isn’t taking a brave stand against the internal culture of the Democratic Party. It’s a reflection of it: a wholly cost-free and substantively empty way for opportunists to perform independence from the party now that the coast is clear and there are no toes of consequence to step on. Biden ran again, and is being condemned for running again, for the very same reasons.
...
"Party hopefuls looking for ways to mark themselves as different from the rest of the pack today have other, better options. The best way to demonstrate a measure of real independence from the Democratic Party is to tell the truth about what really ails it: wealthy, clueless donors; an approach to public policy incommensurate with the scale of the challenges the country faces; a quasi-religious faith in the virtues of bipartisanship; a related and willful blindness to the depths of the Republican rot beyond Donald Trump; and a blindness, just as consequential, to the structural features of our federal system that will continue pulling governance to the right. All are much deeper problems than Joe Biden’s ego and those who chose to flatter it. All will be much more difficult to resolve. But if Democrats are looking for a reckoning, there are quite a few to be had in that mix."
