I'm a day late. Instead of "yesterday," let's say April 5.
A goose nested in Wrigley Field, stealing the hearts of Cubs fans. (Washington Post)
Excerpt from this Washington Post story:
A Canada goose won the hearts of Chicago Cubs fans over the weekend after building a nest at Wrigley Field, causing a section of bleachers to be closed. But the bird may no longer call the iconic ivy-covered stadium home.
The unnamed goose was sitting on her nest in a planter in the center field bleachers Friday afternoon when more than 40,000 fans showed up for the Cubs’ home opener against the San Diego Padres. The goose and her apparent mate stayed through the weekend, aided by ballpark attendants who blocked off the section to protect them.
But they were gone Monday, said Cubs spokeswoman Jennifer Martinez.
Cubs staffers had seen some geese near the ballpark Monday but couldn’t tell if they were the ones who’d made the center field bleachers their home, Martinez said.
She had said Sunday that the team welcomed its new around-the-clock fans and was working with a wildlife organization “to manage the situation safely and responsibly.”
Excerpt from this Washington Post story:
As California continues to recover from devastating January wildfires and extreme dryness that reached deep into winter, there are early signs that the state and surrounding region could face a troubling fire season in the months ahead.
The rainy season in the West is winding down, but much of the region remains well behind on rainfall. The Southwest is in deep drought after largely missing out on storms this winter. Much of the broader West is forecast to have unusually hot and dry weather in the coming weeks and months. And that heat — along with the recent proliferation of additional fire-fueling vegetation — could accelerate the turnaround into yet another wildfire season, with high risks of concerning conflagrations even for areas that had adequate rain and snow this winter.
California’s fire season typically starts up in May as grasses dry out, and this year could see heightened wildfire risk by June that becomes widespread in July, according to outlooks released at the beginning of this month.
“I expect it to be a big fire season,” said Matt Shameson, a meteorologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Riverside. “We have a lot of fuels out there in every category.”
And conditions are already emerging that could speed up that process. A heat wave is building this week, with record-breaking temperatures possible in parts of California and the Southwest.
How heat and dry conditions spell trouble for fires
Recent seasonal outlooks show abnormally warm and dry conditions centered over the Southwest this spring and expanding over much of the West into the summer.
There are several ingredients at play, including lingering impacts from a weakening La Niña, which typically promotes dry conditions for Southern California and the Southwest. When drought conditions are prominent, they can also supercharge heat waves — a result of positive feedback with the dry land surface. Long-term warming trends have also made scorching heat more likely.
The warmth could trigger rapid snowmelt along with earlier or more intense wildfires.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
Over the last few months, Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has made explosive accusations against the Biden administration, accusing it of “insane” malfeasance in its handling of $20 billion in climate grants.
Now, as a legal battle ensues over those funds, many of Mr. Zeldin’s claims remain unsupported, and some are flat-out false.
Mr. Zeldin has said that the program, which Congress approved as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, was vulnerable to “waste, fraud, and abuse.” If that claim was substantiated, it would allow the E.P.A. to take back the $20 billion, which was awarded to eight nonprofit groups. The money was to be used to finance projects across the country such as solar panels on community centers and geothermal systems to heat and cool subsidized housing.
But so far, the Trump administration has failed to provide evidence of wrongdoing. The E.P.A., which has worked to block the nonprofits from accessing the money, is now being sued by several of the organizations for breach of contract.
On Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia noted that the E.P.A. has offered “different positions” to justify its actions but not presented evidence of waste, fraud or abuse.
“Here we are, weeks in, and you’re still unable to proffer me any evidence with regard to malfeasance,” she told Justice Department lawyers during a hearing on the case.
Legal experts said the agency’s arguments increasingly appear thin.
“It’s just nonsense,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard University.
He said when he first heard about Mr. Zeldin’s accusations about the $20 billion grant program, he was shocked. Then he read the Trump administration’s recent filings in federal court, which were supposed to provide evidence for its claims of fraud and abuse.
“They come in with huge press releases claiming all kinds of things, criminal misconduct, corruption, and then the documents that are filed in court don’t match that rhetoric,” Mr. Lazarus said. “It’s completely and utterly irresponsible.”
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
Republicans in Congress cannot use an obscure legislative maneuver to stop California’s ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, the Senate parliamentarian ruled on Friday.
The decision dealt a blow to efforts by the Trump administration to quickly kill policies that promote electric vehicles.
California had received a federal waiver under the 1970 Clean Air Act from the Biden administration to impose a stricter automobile emissions standard than the one set by the federal government. Under that waiver, it enacted a plan to require all new cars sold in the state by 2035 be free of emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, the primary contributor to climate change.
It’s one of the most ambitious climate policies in the United States, designed to shift the auto industry toward electric cars. That has made it a top target for elimination by the Trump administration.
According to three Senate Democrats, however, the parliamentarian on Friday said the waiver granted to California was not subject to the Congressional Review Act, which permits lawmakers to reverse recently-adopted regulations with a simple majority vote.
California’s two Democratic senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, announced the decision but declined to release the text of the ruling.
All three described it as a victory for climate policies.
“In passing the Clean Air Act on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, Congress explicitly granted California the ability to set more stringent vehicle emissions standards to protect public health from California’s unique air quality challenges,” Mr. Padilla said.
“This latest stunt from Trump’s E.P.A. was a clearly bogus attempt to undercut California’s climate leadership, and it failed,” he said.
The Trump administration submitted the automobile waiver to Congress along with two other California waivers approved by the Environmental Protection Agency last year. One requires that half of all new heavy-duty vehicles sold in the state be electric by 2035 and the other places limits on nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter emissions from cars and trucks.
The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is a civil servant who acts as the arbiter and enforcer of the Senate’s rules. She decided that the rules would not allow Republicans to fast-track the repeal of the waiver.
Mr. Schiff noted that the parliamentarian is “nonpartisan and independent,” and added that California “has been the gold standard for fighting harmful air pollution, and today’s ruling allows that fight to continue.”
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
A jury in Louisiana has ruled that Chevron must pay a parish government about $745 million to help restore wetlands that the jury said the energy company had harmed for decades.
The verdict, which was reached on Friday, is likely to influence similar lawsuits filed by other parishes, or counties, in the state against other energy giants and their possible settlement negotiations.
The lawsuit, filed by Plaquemines Parish, is one of at least 40 that coastal parishes have filed against fossil fuel companies since 2013.
The lawsuit contended that Texaco — which Chevron bought in 2000 — violated state law for decades by failing to apply for coastal permits, and by not removing oil and gas equipment when it stopped using an oil field in Breton Sound, which is southeast of New Orleans.
A state regulation in 1980 required companies operating in wetlands to restore “as near as practicable to their original condition” any canals that they dredged, wells that they drilled or wastewater that they dumped into marshes.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
President Trump has promised to usher in an era of “energy dominance” and cut energy costs in half for consumers in his first 18 months in office. But his latest round of tariffs, announced Wednesday, have rattled energy markets and threatened to scramble global supply chains.
The upshot: neither fossil fuel companies nor renewable energy companies are thrilled about the announcement. Higher costs for U.S. energy producers, including more expensive materials, could throw cold water on the “drill, baby, drill” philosophy Trump has championed. And the effect of the new levies could stymie efforts to expand renewables domestically.
“It’s always tempting to say these tariffs are good for fossil fuels, bad for clean energy,” Antoine Vagneur-Jones, a researcher for BloombergNEF, told Brad Plumer. “But I think it’s just bad for everyone.”
Trump’s latest tariffs
President Trump announced a series of new tariffs on Wednesday that were far higher than many economists had expected, and U.S. stocks plunged significantly on Thursday. The changes, as Patricia Cohen wrote, cut directly against the “global economic system that the United States has shaped and steered for more than three-quarters of a century. “
Trump announced a 10 percent tariff on all imports to the U.S., with higher rates for certain nations. Imports from the European Union, a key trading partner and importer of U.S. energy, will face a new 20 percent tariff, and Chinese goods will be subjected to a new 34 percent tariff on top of existing charges.
It’s possible these numbers will change. In the first months of his term, Trump delayed some tariffs and reduced rates following negotiations with trading partners.
The tariffs’ precise impacts on the global transition away from fossil fuels have not yet come into focus. They may encourage new alliances that intentionally exclude the U.S. — say, by accelerating sales of Chinese renewables in Pakistan and Brazil, for example.
But they could just as easily snarl global supply chains and push up prices across many sectors.
Tariffs could make it pricier to ‘drill, baby, drill’
President Trump’s tariff announcement excluded certain energy products including oil and natural gas.
Trump’s tariff plans had drawn the ire of oil and gas companies ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. In a recent industry survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, respondents from Texas, Louisiana and the Southwest complained that 25 percent levies on steel imports were already pushing up the costs of necessary piping equipment.
Just as worrisome to survey respondents was the feeling of whiplash.
Without clarity about long-term trade policies, operators said, it’s difficult to invest in facilities that may not be operational for years to come. “The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry,” wrote one respondent from an exploration and production firm. “Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn’t have a clear goal. We want more stability.”
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The insurance crisis spreading across the United States arrived at Richard D. Zimmel’s door last week in the form of a letter.
Mr. Zimmel, who lives in the increasingly fire-prone hills outside Silver City, N.M., had done everything right. He trimmed the trees away from his house, and covered his yard in gravel to stop flames rushing in from the forest near his property. In case that buffer zone failed, he sheathed his house in fire-resistant stucco, and topped it with a noncombustible steel roof.
None of it mattered. His insurance company, Homesite Insurance, dumped him. “Property is located in a brushfire or wildfire area that no longer meets Homesite’s minimum standard for wildfire risk,” the letter read. (Homesite did not respond to a request for comment.)
Mr. Zimmel has company. Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday.
As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life.
The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.
Now, for the first time, the scale of that pullback is becoming public. Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee demanded the country’s largest insurance companies provide the number of nonrenewals by county and year. The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
More than 80,000 homes on Staten Island, in southeast Queens and in the suburbs east of New York City could be lost to floods over the next 15 years, according to a new report that serves as a warning of how climate change could make the housing crisis even worse.
The report, released Monday by the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit civic organization, said that swaths of land in every borough were likely to become impossible to develop, helping push the area’s housing shortage to a staggering 1.2 million homes.
“You’re going to need to build more housing to just replace what is lost in your own municipality,” said Moses Gates, the association’s vice president for housing and neighborhood planning and an author of the report.
The report is the latest to underscore how the dual threats of climate change and a lack of housing are looming over coastal cities around the world.
New York City and its suburbs have not built enough homes to meet demand over the past few decades, helping to drive up rents and home prices. At the same time, the metropolitan area is struggling to adapt to increased flooding and other extreme weather caused by global warming.
“The sooner we decide as a city to invest in resilience measures to help neighborhoods adapt — whether it’s to fortify or to move — the faster we avert leaving an even bigger crisis for the next generation,” said Amy Chester, the managing director of Rebuild by Design, a nonprofit that works to make infrastructure better able to withstand storms and climate change.
The report did not single out specific neighborhoods as at risk for flooding. But of the 82,000 homes that could be lost by 2040, more than half were projected to be on Long Island, with some Atlantic Ocean-facing towns like Babylon and Islip bearing the brunt.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The nation’s most polluting coal-burning power plant has asked President Trump to exempt it from stricter limits on hazardous air pollution after the administration recently invited companies to apply for presidential pollution waivers by email.
The aging Colstrip power plant in Colstrip, Mont., emits more harmful fine particulate matter pollution, or soot, than any other power plant in the nation, Environmental Protection Agency figures show. A new rule adopted by the Biden administration in 2023 would have compelled the facility — the only coal plant in the country to lack modern pollution controls — to install new equipment.
Now, the Colstrip plant has applied for a two-year exemption to those rules, according to Montana’s congressional delegation, which backed the request.
The new pollution standard “endangers the economic viability of the plant, which if closed, would undermine the region’s electric grid,” Senator Steve Daines and other members of the delegation wrote in a letter sent on Monday to the E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin. “Without Colstrip, consumers would bear the burden of higher energy costs and grid unreliability, and its closure would stymie economic development in the region.”
Health experts noted that the letter didn’t address the health effects of the fine pollution particles. Numerous studies have shown the particles are small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, where they can travel to the heart and other organs, increasing mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
A 2023 study showed that coal-burning power stations, in particular, emit fine particulates containing sulfur dioxide linked with higher mortality than other types of pollution.
This pollution “can be very damaging to young kids in particular, who have developing lungs,” said Robert Merchant, a pulmonologist in Billings, Mont. The delegation’s letter, he said, shows “a complete indifference to the health harms.”
The Colstrip plant’s request for an exemption from stricter pollution rules came after the E.P.A. told companies last month that they could apply for waivers to major clean-air rules by emailing the agency. The E.P.A. pointed to a section of the Clean Air Act that enables the president to temporarily exempt industrial facilities from new rules if the technology required to meet those rules isn’t available, and if it’s in the interest of national security.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The sweeping tariffs that President Trump announced on Wednesday could hobble the use of giant batteries that energy companies are increasingly installing to help them tap more wind and solar power and make the broader electric grid more reliable.
Over the past five years, grid batteries have become one of the biggest growth industries in the U.S. energy sector. In states like Texas and Arizona, companies have been installing stacks of lithium-ion cells the size of shipping containers. They can soak up excess wind and solar energy and save it for when it’s needed. In California, the use of batteries to store solar power for the evening hours has helped utilities reduce the amount of natural gas that is burned.
Yet the majority of America’s lithium-ion batteries are still imported, and 69 percent of those imports came from China in 2024, according to BloombergNEF. Mr. Trump’s latest round of tariffs, when combined with earlier trade moves, will impose a 64.5 percent tax on grid batteries from China, and that rate would rise to 82 percent next year.
“This will throttle U.S. energy storage deployment,” Jason Burwen, vice president of policy and strategy at the battery developer GridStor, wrote in a social media post. “Bad for business, bad for grid reliability.”
Energy companies were expected to install a record 18,200 megawatts of grid battery capacity this year, enough to store the entire output from 18 large nuclear reactors for a few hours, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Together, batteries, wind and solar power were expected to make up 93 percent of capacity added to the grid.
Those batteries help address renewable energy’s biggest weakness: the fact that the wind and sun aren’t always available. In states that rely heavily on solar power like California and Texas, a boom in battery installations has helped reduce the risk of blackouts during the hot summer months by working together with gas plants to provide power when demand spikes.
But batteries aren’t just useful for adding more renewables: Utilities also use them to smooth out small disruptions in the flow of electricity, say, if a power plant unexpectedly tripped offline. Or, they can be used to reduce congestion on transmission lines.
Companies have largely been installing grid batteries because the price of lithium-ion technology has plummeted (the batteries are similar to those found in electric cars). Tariffs could reverse that trend.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
Two chemical industry groups are asking President Trump for a complete exemption to free their factories from new limits on hazardous air pollution.
Under a new rule finalized by the Biden administration last year, chemical plants would soon be required to monitor and reduce emissions of toxic pollutants, like ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing ingredient used in antifreeze and plastics.
Now the two groups, the American Chemistry Council and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, which represent the nation’s major chemical companies, are seeking a temporary presidential waiver for all polluters to the rule.
The new requirements burden their member corporations with “significantly costly requirements on an unworkable timeline,” the groups wrote in a letter dated March 31 that was obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental advocacy group.
In the letter addressed to Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the groups said that the cost to companies of meeting even parts of the new rule would exceed $50 billion, significantly more than the agency’s estimate of $1.8 billion.
The request came after the E.P.A. told companies last month that they could apply for waivers to major clean-air rules by emailing the agency. The E.P.A. pointed to a section of the Clean Air Act that enables the president to temporarily exempt industrial facilities from new rules if the technology required to meet those rules isn’t available, and if it’s in the interest of national security.
Under Mr. Trump, the E.P.A. has moved to roll back many of the same rules. That could mean that companies granted a temporary exemption now would ultimately never have to comply with the new rules.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that she would “not get ahead of the president, but we can confirm President Trump’s commitment to unleashing American energy, protecting our national security interests and ensuring environmental stewardship.”
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
First came President Trump’s freezing of federal support for many renewable energy projects, coupled with cries of “drill, baby, drill.”
Then came the tariffs.
The president’s trade war is expected to drive up the costs of nearly every component of clean-energy production in the United States, from the steel in wind turbines to the batteries in electric vehicles.
Many of those building blocks are imported from the European Union, China and Southeast Asia, where some of the highest tariff rates were assigned.
How that affects the energy mix inside the United States is complicated, experts say. After all, rising costs for these and other materials won’t affect only renewable energy. Many of Mr. Trump’s trade policies, including tariffs on steel and aluminum, will also hit fossil fuels, making it more expensive to build natural-gas export terminals and drill oil wells, despite the president’s pledge to make oil and gas cheaper and more plentiful.
Yet the renewable energy industry is bracing for particularly large effects.
Vanessa Sciarra, vice president of trade and international competitiveness for the American Clean Power Association, a renewable energy trade group, said that “policy whiplash” was endangering Americans’ access to affordable and reliable energy by severing supply chains.
The tariffs are widely expected to reorder the energy landscape far beyond U.S. borders, too.
U.S. oil and gas exports have surged over the past decade, but longer-term prospects for growth abroad were already shaky, with buyers in Europe and Asia trying to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels as part of their pledges to cut emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The possibility that China or the European Union could impose retaliatory tariffs on American fossil fuels might put a further dent in those exports, analysts said.
Globally, a huge shift toward using renewable energy in electricity production is already underway, largely thanks to China’s growing ability to produce cheap, high-quality solar panels, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries on an enormous scale. The United States imports many of its solar-panel components from Chinese companies operating in Southeast Asian countries. And the majority of lithium-ion batteries that the United States imports for use in power grids and electric vehicles come from China itself.
Some analysts pointed to India as a relative beneficiary of the shifting landscape. India is currently ramping up its own domestic solar and battery manufacturing, and was hit with lower tariff rates than China or some countries in Southeast Asia that are major clean-tech producers, said Antoine Vagneur-Jones, head of trade and supply chains at BloombergNEF.
A 6-month-old wolf pup is one of three that carry dire-wolf genes, including genes for a white coat and a large body. The three animals, bred by scientists at Colossal Biosciences, live in captivity in the northern United States. Credit...Colossal Biosciences
A researcher holds Romulus and Remus, two wolf pups with dire wolf genes. Credit...Colossal Biosciences
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
For more than a decade, scientists have chased the idea of reviving extinct species, a process sometimes called de-extinction. Now, a company called Colossal Biosciences appears to have done it, or something close, with the dire wolf, a giant, extinct species made famous by the television series “Game of Thrones.”
In 2021, a separate team of scientists managed to retrieve DNA from the fossils of dire wolves, which went extinct about 13,000 years ago. With the discovery of additional DNA, the Colossal researchers have now edited 20 genes of gray wolves to imbue the animals with key features of dire wolves. They then created embryos from the edited gray-wolf cells, implanted them in surrogate dog mothers and waited for them to give birth.
The result is three healthy wolves — two males that are 6 months old and one female that is 2 months old, named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi — that have some traits of dire wolves.
They are big, for one thing, and have dense, pale coats not found in gray wolves. Colossal, which was valued at $10 billion in January, is keeping the wolves on a private 2,000-acre facility at an undisclosed location in the northern United States.
The animals will remain in captivity. But the technology that the company has developed could potentially help conserve species that have not yet gone extinct, such as the critically endangered red wolf, which is largely limited to North Carolina.
In 2022, red wolf-coyote hybrids were discovered in Texas and Louisiana. On Monday, Colossal also announced that it had produced four clones from the hybrids. Hypothetically, introducing these clones to North Carolina could improve the genetic diversity of the red wolf population there and help the species avoid extinction.
There's hope. trump is opposed and threatens veto. Maybe more Senate republicans will get on board in numbers to override a veto. At a minimum, we get another DC soap opera.
This story, from The Hill:
Seven Republican senators, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the Senate’s president pro tempore, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the former Senate Republican leader, have signed on to a bipartisan bill that would require Congress to approve President Trump’s steep tariffs on trading partners.
Grassley and McConnell have joined five other Republicans — Sens. Jerry Moran (Kan.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Todd Young (Ind.) and Susan Collins (Maine) — in supporting the Trade Review Act of 2025.
The legislation would limit Trump’s ability to impose unilateral tariffs without the approval of Congress.
It would require the president to notify Congress of the imposition of new tariffs and increased tariffs within 48 hours and provide an explanation of the reasoning for the action.
It would also require the administration to provide an assessment of the potential impact of imposing or increasing the duty on U.S. businesses and consumers.
More critically, it would require that new tariffs sunset after 60 days unless Congress passes a joint resolution approving them.
And it provides a pathway for Congress to cancel tariffs before the 60-day period expires by passing a joint resolution of disapproval.
Trump has already threatened to veto the bill.
Grassley, the lead co-sponsor, said it’s time for Congress to reassert its authority on trade and tariffs.
“For too long, Congress has delegated its clear authority to regulate interstate and foreign commerce to the executive branch. Building on my previous efforts as Finance Committee Chairman, I’m joining Sen. Cantwell to introduce the bipartisan Trade Review Act of 2025 to reassert Congress’ constitutional role and ensure Congress has a voice in trade policy,” Grassley said in a statement, referring to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.).
The Democratic co-sponsors of the bill are Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Mark Warner (Va.), Michael Bennet (Colo.), Peter Welch (Vt.), Chris Coons (Del.) and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.).