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This is the Feb. 18, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
As a deadly winter storm plunged millions of Texans into darkness this week, politicians skeptical of climate change and loyal to the oil and gas industry did what they do best: They blamed renewable energy.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the power grid emergency “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert tweeted that the Green New Deal “was just proven unsustainable as renewables are clearly unreliable.”
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This is the Jan. 21, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
The last story I wrote before Donald Trump was elected president, four years and two months ago, was about the Obama administration’s claim that it had approved 60 renewable energy projects on public lands, capable of powering up to 5 million homes. I scrutinized those numbers, finding they dramatically overestimated the outgoing president’s accomplishments.
When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton a few days after the story published, I started to wonder if I had wasted my time.
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This is the Jan. 14, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
As rooftop solar power has gotten cheaper and more useful a topic I wrote about last week a powerful industry has pushed back. I’m talking about utilities, the state-sanctioned monopolies that build poles and wires and sell us electricity from centralized power plants, earning large guaranteed profits in the process.
Jonathan Scott is no fan of that industry.
If you haven’t spent much time watching HGTV and full disclosure, I have not Scott co-hosts “Property Brothers,” which features him and his twin brother, Drew, buying and renovating houses on a budget. He’s also a Las Vegas resident who put solar panels on his home and got pretty pissed when state officials allowed a monopoly utility owned by Warren Buffett to gut its “net metering” program, which compensates s
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01/06/2021 09:23 AM EST
THE BUZZ: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pandemic management has fed a backlash from Californians who want to reopen their businesses, dine out, join their families for holidays and send their kids back to school. But it’s church closures that have fueled the highest-dollar blow against Newsom so far.
This is the Dec. 31, 2020, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
One of the best road trips I’ve ever taken was a sightseeing tour of the Colorado River, where it straddles the California-Arizona state line. I stood at the edge of Imperial Dam near the Mexican border, which diverts water to the farm fields of the Imperial Valley, then drove north to Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, home to lots of birds. I walked along the river in Laughlin, Nev., where there’s a hotel called the Colorado Belle that looks like a boat, and in Needles, Calif., where Snoopy’s brother Spike lives.