rjzimmerman

[rjzimmerman]

let's observe with mama

[rjzimmerman]

We live in the Chicago area. I found this guy crawling along in one of our parsley plants today. Over the past three days, I've noticed a black swallowtail butterfly flitting about the yard, including landing on the parsley and other herbs in the herb potting bench. So, I'm guessing that if all goes ok for this little guy, it will eventually turn into a black swallowtail butterfly. But right now, it's awesome looking, like it's wearing medieval armor! And what about that white belt?

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

Utility customers will pay the price — literally — if the Trump administration continues to unnecessarily force fossil-fueled power plants to stay open in the name of grid reliability, energy experts and regulators warn.

An April executive order from President Donald Trump tasks the Department of Energy with taking unilateral authority to obligate power plants to keep operating, even after utilities, states, and regional grid operators have spent years making sure they’re safe to close.

Last week, in response to the order, the DOE released a report that claims current power plant retirements and additions put the country at massive risk of blackouts by 2030. It calls for ​“decisive intervention” to prevent that outcome. The agency has already used emergency powers to halt the closure of the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan and the Eddystone oil- and gas-burning plant in Pennsylvania.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated in an opinion piece published by The Economist this week that the administration’s goal is ​“expanding our supply of reliable energy” and ​“delivering more secure energy to Americans more cheaply.”

But energy analysts say the report uses worst-case scenarios to reach its conclusions, mainly by ignoring the hundreds of gigawatts of new generation — almost all of it solar, batteries, and wind power — slated to come online in the near future. Meanwhile, state regulators and environmental and consumer groups have challenged the DOE’s stay-open orders, arguing it overstepped sound grid-planning policy and precedent to solve a grid ​“emergency” that it has manufactured.

Ordering aging fossil-fueled power plants to stay open would force utility customers to pay billions of dollars for some of the least efficient and least reliable power plants on the grid — not to mention those worst for the climate and the health of nearby communities.

Coal has shrunk from nearly half the country’s electricity generation in 2008 to only about 15% at the start of this year, a trend driven primarily by competition from cheaper fossil gas and renewables. A June report from think tank Energy Innovation found that coal power was 28% more expensive in 2024 than in 2021, meaning consumers spent about $6.2 billion more last year than they would have for the same amount of electricity three years prior.

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Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

An enormous array of over 750,000 solar panels blankets the prairie landscape in Pueblo, Colorado, providing clean energy to one of the largest electricity-based steel mills in the country.

The Rocky Mountain Steel mill, which opened in 1881, today uses electricity instead of coal to produce steel rails and pipes. In late 2021, it became the first and largest solar-powered steel plant in the United States — and possibly the world — when electricity began flowing from the 300-megawatt Bighorn Solar project next door, supplying roughly 90% of the power used by the facility’s electric arc furnace.

The storied steel mill recently marked a different kind of milestone. Atlas Holdings, a private-equity firm in Connecticut, said last month that it plans to acquire Evraz North America, which owns the facility in Pueblo as well as steelmaking operations in Portland, Oregon, and Western Canada. The sale is expected to close later this year.

“This [is] a major investment in creating a more vibrant domestic steel production industry right here in the United States and Canada,” Sam Astor, a partner at Atlas, said in a June 27 news release.

The deal, which could reach up to $500 million, arrives at a complex moment for U.S. steelmakers working to decarbonize their facilities.

Recent U.S. efforts to build cutting-edge, low-emissions ironmaking facilities that use green hydrogen — made with renewable power — have all but vanished due to challenging economics and shifting political tides. Building large clean-energy projects like Bighorn Solar to power industrial sites just got much harder to do under the megabill that President Donald Trump signed into law this month, which slashes incentives for and imposes restrictions on wind and solar.

At the same time, the nation’s steel industry is slowly getting cleaner as manufacturers invest in new capacity that relies on electricity and fossil gas, not coal. And Rocky Mountain Steel is no longer the country’s only solar-powered steel plant. U.S. Steel’s Big River Steel mill in Arkansas draws from the 250-MW Driver Solar project, while steelmaker Nucor Corp. has a deal to buy 250 MW of power from the Sebree Solar farm under construction in Kentucky.

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Excerpt from this story from Grist:

The Miccosukee Tribe in Florida joined environmental groups on Tuesday to sue the federal and state agencies that constructed an immigrant detention center known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” and located in the Everglades National Park. 

In a motion to join a lawsuit, as one of the first tribes to potentially sue against the detention center, the case argues that the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Miami-Dade County, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management did not seek an environmental review.

The filing alleges the center’s proximity to Miccosukee villages, ceremonial sites, and access to traditional hunting grounds, and “raises significant raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts.”

“We are going to make sure that we fight this facility on whatever front is available to us,” said William “Popeye” James Osecola, who is the secretary of the Miccosukee tribal council. He hopes the lawsuit will “signify that the tribe will continue fighting to do what it’s always done, which is protect the land and save the land that saved us.”

According to Osecola, since the facility’s operation began, tribal members have been restricted from gathering plants and roots for uses such as medicine. “Obviously, that’s not an option for us right now,” he said. “At the moment, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen gates like that there, so it’s very jarring for us.” 

Nearby the facility, 15 active tribal villages reside inside Big Cypress National Preserve, located within the Everglades. 

During the 19th century, the Seminole Wars, which the Seminole Nation and Miccosukee Nation view as one continuous conflict against the U.S., many members fled into the wetlands and used their natural environment as refuge. 

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Wright: U.S. could ‘withdraw’ from IEA over perceived renewable energy bias (Heatmap AM)

[Reminds me of a snotty kid who doesn't like his playmates and takes his basketball and goes home. Equally applies to trump. Assholes.]

The United States will either “reform” the International Energy Agency or “withdraw,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg Tuesday during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University. The IEA, which was originally established to focus on oil security during the 1970s, has been characterized by Republicans as becoming a “cheerleader” for the renewable energy transition, in the recent words of Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. Wright echoed those concerns in his conversation with Bloomberg, telling the publication that the IEA’s projections that oil demand will plateau this decade are “total nonsense.” Despite the threats, Wright stressed that his “strong preference” for handling the IEA is “to reform it.”

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Here’s how much money the IRA actually spent (Heatmap AM)

It has long been a “big mystery” how much grant funding from the Inflation Reduction Act the Biden administration ultimately got out the door before leaving the White House. Previously, the administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants. Still, it wasn’t until Republicans in Congress began their rescissions of the bill’s unobligated funds that a fuller picture began to emerge.

According to reporting by my colleague Emily Pontecorvo, the Biden administration spent or otherwise obligated about $61.7 billion before leaving office, with President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill clawing back $31.7 billion from 47 IRA programs. Programs that had the greatest proportion of their funding obligated include:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (99.9%)

EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (98.2%)

Interior’s National Parks and Public Lands Conservation and Ecosystem Restoration (98%)

Interior’s National Parks and Public Lands Conservation and Resilience (97.2%)

Interior’s Endangered Species Act Recovery Plans (93.6%)

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Excerpt from this Chicago Tribune story:

Reports of fewer fireflies in recent years have sparked worry for the future of the insect’s population. However, increased sightings this summer have boosted hopes for the survival of the insect. On the Friday night hike, wind and an impending thunderstorm did not prevent swarms of fireflies from darting among open grasses and shimmering between trees in the forest.

According to researchers, climate change and other factors like development, light pollution and pesticides are threatening firefly populations.

Because most data is anecdotal, scientists cannot easily determine whether fireflies are declining or increasing in different areas, said Richard Joyce, endangered species conservation biologist and coordinator of the Firefly Atlas, a tracking project by the conservation group Xerces Society.

With an estimated 179 species of fireflies in the U.S., different species require varying habitats, which affects how threatened they are, Joyce said. Firefly species that live in wetlands, for example, might be facing a population decline as their habitat is diminished by development.

“I do think it is safe to say that many species of fireflies, their population have declined in the past few decades, just based on habitat loss, because that’s kind of a good proxy for firefly populations, in lieu of actually having data from people trapping or or counting fireflies out in the field,” Joyce said.

While also hard to track, the 26 firefly species found in Illinois may not be in immediate danger, according to the Firefly Atlas. However, the cypress firefly species is listed as vulnerable as of 2020 and six other species are listed as data deficient on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species.

“(Data deficient) means that we don’t have a very good sense at all how they’re doing as a species,” Joyce said. “Maybe they’re doing fine. Maybe they’re even increasing, or maybe they’re on the brink of extinction, but we just have so little data, and that’s a very common thing for insects.”

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Nation of Change:

Assume you are an existing JP Morgan (JPM) customer, or you are interested in the bank’s sustainable-investment strategy. Googling the words “sustainable” and “JP Morgan” will bring up a number of blog posts from the JPM website, along with others on specialized media outlets that relay the company’s press releases.

One article published on the company’s website in October 2020 is titled “JPMorgan Chase Adopts Paris-Aligned Financing Commitment.”

The investment firm declared that it would align not only its investments but also its operational footprint with the Paris Climate Agreement. “We are focused on doing our part to support the transition by helping our clients achieve their net zero objectives,” the article explained. “Net zero” means eliminating all greenhouse-gas emissions by reducing and offsetting them.

In 2021, the year that the European Regulation on Sustainable Finance (SFDR) came into force, JP Morgan Asset Management, a branch of JPM Chase, became one of the inaugural members of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. In May of that year, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, wrote a post on the LinkedIn social platform. He said: “We must all remain committed to addressing climate change; it continues to be one of the most critical issues of our time.”

Based on these statements and its marketing of funds with names such as “US Research Enhanced Index Eq ESG” and “Global Income Sustainable” funds, it is tempting to see JPM’s commitment to the Paris Agreement as genuine and consistent. 

However, our data tell a different story. 

As of March 2025, JPM Chase subsidiary JP Morgan Asset Management was investing more than $4 billion (around €3.5 billion) in the fossil majors through European-regulated “green” investments. This figure has increased in recent years. However, since May 2025, it has had to remove the words “ESG” and “sustainable” from the names of several funds, such as those mentioned previously. New guidelines ban such terms in the nomenclature of funds that invest in fossil fuels. Nevertheless, JPM is allowed to continue claiming to use terms such as “ESG” and “sustainable” on its website and in its prospectuses. The European Securities and Markets Authority’s guidelines only focus on the naming of the fund rather than their description or objectives.

Scope 1 and 2 emissions cover what a company emits directly, such as from its own operations and the power it purchased. For oil and gas firms, Scope 3 means indirect emissions, which includes those of suppliers. This may mean equipment manufacture, oilfield services, and refining, as well as the pollution caused by customers burning the oil company’s product in cars, planes, or power plants. Scope 3 emissions can represent over 90 percent of a company’s total.

According to data from the London Stock Exchange Data & Analytics, JP Morgan has in fact increased its investments in fossil fuels through green funds in recent years, from $3.3 billion in 2023 to $4 billion at the start of 2025. The fossil majors attracting the largest proportion of green investments from the US investment firm are ExxonMobil ($1.1 billion), Shell ($515 million), ConocoPhillips ($460 million), EOG Resources ($447 million), Chevron ($307 million), TotalEnergies ($218 million) and BP ($159 million).

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt for the five years I lived in Nashville, Tennessee, I have lived in Chicago or the Chicago area my whole life. Politics has been a yawner here.......crooked people manipulate other crooked people to get power or money, and the votes are sought (and sometimes bought) and accumulated on an ethnic or racial basis. That's the way it's been. Until recently, I observed and sometimes growled and sometimes laughed at the chaos. With the Daley family, one just watched and hoped for the best. But I really really really cannot stand the current mayor. He is an amateur in the strongest sense of that word, has no idea how to govern, plays his favorites so obviously it's putrid, and is generally worthless. I don't think his "left-wing agenda" has been nearly as damaging as his helter-skelter, amateurish manner of governing.

Excerpt from this story from The American Prospect:

Zohran Mamdani’s shocking win in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary calls to mind past progressive victories. And in one instance, it could be a cautionary tale.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson shocked Chicago politics in 2023 when he obtained a place in a two-person runoff, denying incumbent Lori Lightfoot a spot. He then narrowly beat his more conservative opponent thanks to a boost in young voter turnout and a combination of strong performances in Black and progressive wards, along with enough support in Latino ones.

But two years into Johnson’s administration, his approval rating in his best polls is still below 30 percent, and some polling has been substantially lower. Despite progress on issues like labor, crime, and housing, progressive allies on the city council are vocally criticizing him, and opponents are already gearing up to oust him in 2027.

“He’s a newcomer,” said Jaime Dominguez, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, referencing Johnson’s scant experience in city government before his election. Johnson previously was a commissioner in Cook County, which houses Chicago, but just for four years. “It’s just kind of new terrain. And he’s learning, and of course making mistakes along the way.”

His struggles have been preyed upon by national media. The Wall Street Journal’s famously conservative editorial board calls Johnson “America’s Worst Mayor.” The New York Times’ board, in their column regarding New York City’s mayoral primary, implied Johnson is contributing to his city’s decline, while encouraging Democrats not to place Mamdani on their ranked-choice ballots.

Mamdani still has to win a general election in November, though he is the favorite. If he does, some observers have advice for him: Don’t govern like Chicago’s Johnson.

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Scary storm photos (National Geographic)

A tornado touches down in the grasslands as a glowing supercell swirls above Laramie, Wyoming in 2018. PHOTOGRAPH BY KEITH LADZINSKI, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION

A mesocyclone moves across the evening sky in Elk City, Oklahoma. Tornadoes are capable of causing extreme destruction. PHOTOGRAPH BY KEITH LADZINSKI, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION

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A juvenile great white shark, about 10 feet long, swims beneath the surface about 15 miles off the coast of Harpswell, Maine. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN SKERRY

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From National Geographic:

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Three words: "dumb fuck republicans."

Excerpt from this Mother Jones story:

A group of Republican lawmakers has complained that smoke from Canadian wildfires is ruining summer for Americans, just days after voting for a major bill that will cause more of the planet-heating pollution that is worsening wildfires.

In a letter sent to Canada’s ambassador to the US, six Republican members of Congress wrote that wildfire smoke from Canada had been an issue for several years and recently their voters “have had to deal with suffocating Canadian wildfire smoke filling the air to begin the summer.”

“Our constituents have been limited in their ability to go outside and safely breathe due to the dangerous air quality the wildfire smoke has created,” the group of House of Representative members from Wisconsin and Minnesota wrote on July 7. “In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.”

The lawmakers urged Canada to take “proper action” to reduce the smoke and noted the historic friendship between Canada and America, without mentioning Donald Trump’s repeated demands for Canada to be annexed and become the 51st state of the US.

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I would love to see articles of impeachment filed in the House against Chief Justice Roberts. For what? Be creative........failure to enforce ethics laws and rules against members of the Supreme Court, for example. Will it prevail? Nope, but it will ruin his "legacy," whatever that's worth. Maybe "leak" the plan to the press ahead of time, to make him think about his failure. Excerpt from this Mother Jones story:

To justify their brazen effort to redraw US House districts in Texas ahead of the 2026 midterms, state Republicans cited a Department of Justice letter alleging that four districts—all represented by Black or Latino Democrats—were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

But on Tuesday, President Trump said the quiet part out loud, admitting that a “very simple redrawing” of the congressional map would allow Republicans to “pick up five seats,” thereby making it much harder for Democrats to reclaim the US House.

Normally, a president directly undermining the constitutional argument of his Justice Department with a blatantly partisan justification would jeopardize the legality of any resulting map. But the GOP has a potential escape hatch: the conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court.

In the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts could not review, let alone strike down, claims of partisan gerrymandering. That decision upheld an overtly gerrymandered map in North Carolina. And, nationwide, it meant that politicians were free to draw skewed redistricting maps as long as they did so for political reasons—like Trump’s plans for Texas.

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Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

In the aftermath of the catastrophic flooding in Texas last week, government officials from President Donald Trump to the governor of Texas to county representatives have sought to deflect blame and shift public focus away from questions of responsibility. 

The White House press secretary called the flooding “an act of God”: “It’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did,” Karoline Leavitt said. Gov. Greg Abbott said that asking about blame was for “losers.” And Trump himself told the media that “nobody expected it, nobody saw it.”

To understand more about how governments communicate with the public in the wake of a tragic loss of life, and how to interpret the Trump administration’s messaging on Texas, Inside Climate News spoke to Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist and the author of the book “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.”

“Heat Wave” investigates the government response during and after the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave—the 30th anniversary of which begins Saturday—and the social, political and institutional causes that ultimately led to more than 700 deaths. Klinenberg catalogs the typical strategies used by governments when they are seeking to evade accountability, from euphemism and denial to silencing experts and trying to paint an event as uniquely unprecedented. He used this framework to analyze the way that Mayor Richard Daley and his staff talked about the heat wave and its victims. 

Today, Daley’s comments sound eerily similar to Trump’s: “Let’s be realistic,” Daley said at a press conference as the death toll rose. “No one realized the deaths of that high an occurrence would take place.” A Chicago health department official said that “government can’t guarantee that there won’t be a heat wave.” Later, the heat wave was officially described as a “unique meteorological event.”

“This kind of rhetoric promotes complacency, since it signals there’s nothing anyone could do to make a difference,” Klinenberg said. 

When it comes to what happened in Texas and in Chicago, he said, we know that’s not true.

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Excerpt from this story from Mother Jones:

The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation,” the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview on Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by the burning of fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”

Whitehouse is among the most outspoken climate champions on Capitol Hill, and on Wednesday evening he delivered his 300th Time to Wake Up climate speech on the floor of the Senate.

He began giving these speeches in 2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term, and has consistently criticized both political parties for their lackluster response to the climate emergency. The Obama White House, he complained, for years would not even “use the word ‘climate’ and ‘change’ in the same paragraph.”

While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil,” he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts—if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.”

The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s trade association, says on its website that “API and its members commit to delivering solutions that reduce the risks of climate change while meeting society’s growing energy needs.”

Long before Donald Trump reportedly told oil company CEOs he would repeal Joe Biden’s climate policies if they contributed $1 billion to his 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans went silent on climate change in return for oil industry money, Whitehouse asserted. The key shift came after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on campaign spending. Before that, some GOP senators had sponsored climate bills, and John McCain urged climate action during his 2008 presidential campaign.

But Citizens United, Whitehouse said, “told the fossil fuel industry: ‘The door’s wide open—spend any money you want in our elections.’” The industry, he said, promised the Republican party “unlimited amounts of money” in return for stepping away from bipartisan climate action: “And since 2010, there has not been a single serious bipartisan measure in the Senate.”