President Biden is not speaking yet, but they started streaming an hour ago, so I think it should be soon.
Reader Interactions
185Comments
Comments are closed.
This post is in: Biden Administration in Action, Open Threads
President Biden is not speaking yet, but they started streaming an hour ago, so I think it should be soon.
Comments are closed.
Cermet
So, this truly bipartisan bill allocates over $1.2 trillion – that is a lot of infrastructure! So, President Biden gets his key-note Bill even if this is the only one that passes.
WaterGirl
I have been working today so I haven’t been able to follow much about this announcement.
Nancy Pelosi won’t pass it in the House until the rest of the infrastructure and climate stuff is passed through reconciliation, right?
Because otherwise we lose all our leverage.
WaterGirl
@Cermet: This better not be the only thing that passes or the climate people and others will rightfully feel betrayed.
Cacti
This is a big fuckin’ deal.
Cermet
@WaterGirl: No but even if it was, there is so much critical repairs/updates and desperately needed infrastructure that this is clearly a victory for the President. Of course, the House gets it cut at the Bill and then, reconciliation has to occur (and I have no idea what that entails.)
zhena gogolia
It’s Infrastructure Week! At last!
Jeffro
We are getting gobs of thunder here and barely a drop of rain…needs to be the other way around, please. (Although major props to my dog who is finally, FINALLY learning to chill out when there’s a bit of thunder popping off).
Cermet
So the Post explains what now has to happen.
After the House votes on their bill (the 3.5 $trillion) then :
Martin
@WaterGirl: This can’t pass the House without the Reconciliation part.
Pramila is chair of the House progressive caucus, Katie Porter Vice Chair, Ilhan Omar is Whip. That’s 100 dem votes that will not arrive without a MASSIVE climate change component in the reconciliation bill. When Nancy Smash says that they have to get both, it’s because of Pramila holding her caucus together. They know this is the only shot we have at getting serious climate legislation, and the IPCC report really put new urgency to the need to deliver.
Cermet
So, looks like the Dems and President Biden can eat their cake and have it too using reconciliation; assuming all Dems in the Senate are on board. My guess is no. That it will get trimmed back a good bit to win those last two Dems … who ever they are (hint: senators from WV and AZ are involved.)
sab
@Jeffro: Gobs of thunder last night and swamped with rain ( yay!) and my husband and the elderly deaf cocker slept through it all. So I was up holding one pitbull paw and numerous cat paws. So many whites of so many litle eyes. It was sad in a funny sort of way.
WaterGirl
They have started!
taumaturgo
@Cermet:
The GQP got what it wanted, to reduced or eliminate most social infrastructures benefits and increase the corrupt practice of privatization to benefit the donor class. As an added bonus, the 19 R’ that voted yes will claim credit for the bill and the “savings” from $2.6 trillion to a mere $550 billion with zero tax increases for the Bezos and other super-rich plutocrats. Long live Bipartisanship! Now the ball is bounced to Congress where the Liberal wing will (or must) insist on restoring the green climate change mitigation, housing, schools, and building projects, clean energy tax credits, reconnecting communities, and Home and community-based care among other Democratic priorities.
Martin
@Cermet: Probably not that much. The House would be likely to make changes to their version of the bill and then that get hashed out to get the Senate bill to match.
At this stage I don’t think Manchin/Sinema are that wedded to particular provisions in the bill. This is about positioning for them. They can brag about what they got in the original bill, and then quietly vote for the final bill with the House provisions.
emmyelle
Oh, man. I love this guy and so far I have only good or great things to say about him. Mostly I love that he has surrounded himself with people who give a fuck and want to do big things. But he’s showing his age. I still find him deeply impressive in almost any forum. But I worry.
schrodingers_ca
? is here I see to diss the Dems. So predictable. ?.
sab
Locust tree that I have hated for twenty years dropped a big branch on the house last night. No damage, but goodbye tree. How dare you threaten my family. Now the big fight over the replacement. My husband wants to transplant a shrubby thing that I have been protecting all these years as an alternative to the locust. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t capable of being a tree because it would have amounted to something over the last ten years. It’s still not much taller than me. I think he is protecting it because he think I like it. I only like it because it looks like a tree and isn’t the locust.
Crabapple? Seckle pear? I want it to flower and feed squirrels.
trollhattan
Considering the IPCC doomsday report dropped yesterday climate needs to be a big Biden part of the deal. We are on fire. Literally.
sab
@trollhattan: That’s up to you, western states. CA does its part, also WA and OR, but everyone else is a worst offender.
Fake Irishman
@Cermet:
There will be significant concessions, yes. But even if we can get half of the amount in the reconciliation bill alongside the infrastructure bill, it would be an absolutely jaw-dropping investment in social welfare and climate change mitigation. Getting two of the healthcare things ALONE would be monumental legislation.
BC in Illinois
President Biden, speaking with an attitude.
” . . . [and you rich freeloaders, who are going to have to start paying taxes*] . . .”
*(paraphrased)
Betty Cracker
@emmyelle: Me too.
taumaturgo
@schrodingers_ca: Seems you missed the long blogs about welcoming different voices to express their opinions here. So much for that friend.
Sure Lurkalot
@sab: Previous owner had planted a honey locust right next to a large deck. All those seed pods and seeds…I hated the thing and it created shade where it wasn’t useful or wanted. It lost 1/3 of its mass one winter but still did not expire. So as much as I hate cutting down trees, we finally had it removed.
emmyelle
You can actually see the stiffies in their pants when they think they are asking a gotcha question.
sab
@Sure Lurkalot: Good for you. There are trees and then there are trees.
gwangung
@taumaturgo: Heh. Just remember….you may be a dick, but you’re OUR dick.
sab
@taumaturgo: Toughen up. We are, after all, jackals.
Schrodingers cat has strong feelings. That is a big part of her charm.
Fake Irishman
@Cermet:
To be clear here, the reconciliation bill is entirely separate legislatively from the infrastructure bill that just passed the senate. What will happen if this works is that the house will vote on a reconciliation bill, which the senate will take up. Once the senate passes a version of that the house can live with, the house will pass both both the reconciliation budget bill and the infrastructure bill and send to Biden’s desk.
Long way to go, but we’re making rapid progress, and we’ve got a clear plan with clear goals.
and we already got one huge bill through this year, so we know this is at least possible.
Roger Moore
I think this bill shows what was really lacking under Trump: patience and effort. Trump believed he could show up on Monday, declare infrastructure week, and have a bill ready to sign on Friday. When that didn’t happen, he would give up on it until the next time he felt the need to distract people. What it actually took was months of wrangling, compromising, and generally putting in the effort to make it happen.
sab
@Sure Lurkalot: Ours is a black locust ( tiny seed pods) but I srill hate it. It’s a dirty tree.
Steeplejack (phone)
@taumaturgo:
Way to see the silver lining! ?
By the way, the Senate is part of Congress.
Fake Irishman
@WaterGirl:
I agree with your take.
But don’t discount the environmental stuff in the infrastructure bill: large investments in mass transit and transportation electrification, as well as a lot of money to clean up polluted sites — a considerable amount of which i suspect will be capping old wells to prevent methane leaks. Those items help quite a bit at the margins. The Obama stimulus was underpowered, but it did give a shot in the arm to the power sector’s transition away from coal and gas.
Fake Irishman
@Roger Moore:
… and we managed to stumble into nominating a guy who was really good at that sort of patient negotiating and slow boring of hard boards
Nicole
@emmyelle:
@Betty Cracker:
If it’s any comfort, I wasn’t anxious. He didn’t look to me like he was showing age-related slowness so much as he was giving himself time to think out what his responses would be. Obama would say, “Um” to fill in the gaps while he was thinking on his feet, Trump would have his bigly word salads (I can’t call what happens inside his brain thinking, but he had his verbal habits, too); Biden is quiet. It may be a strategy to deal with his stutter; I don’t know. But what I saw was someone taking time to think his responses through before he said them out loud.
sab
@Fake Irishman: I just wish First Energy in my state had noticed, but you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it think.
taumaturgo
Martin
@Nicole: It’s apparent that Biden isn’t able to so easily glide through his stutter as he used to be. I had a coworker like that – had a stutter growing up, was able to pretty easily manage it through most of his life but as he got older it became more of an active task – more pauses in his speech, you can see him searching harder for alternate words, etc. Speech moving more front-of-brain.
taumaturgo
Would that make you the part that the dick penetrates?
WhatsMyNym
@Sure Lurkalot: My parents planted what it I think was Shademaster Honey Locust on the south side of their lawn over 50 years ago. Gorgeous trees, no fuss, no mess. Seems to be still there, parents sold the house years ago.
sab
@taumaturgo: //
Fake Irishman
@sab:
I grew up in your neck of the woods and agree that First Energy might be the single worst power company in the United States.
sab
@Fake Irishman: Agree, even having lived with PG & E.
Unfortunately, in my tiny city, it is one of the biggest employers, so nobody who knows says nuthin.
WhatsMyNym
@Fake Irishman:
From 1983…
zhena gogolia
@Nicole: Yes, good description of what he does.
sab
@taumaturgo: He defends you and you stomp on his…
Just sad.
trollhattan
@sab: Worse than PG&E? Yoikes.
Fake Irishman
@sab:
Hey, at least you all glowing in the dark cuts down on the need for street lights right? (Do I have the town right?) incidentally I used to run a newspaper in a upstate New York town with a nuclear plant. It was astonishing how much of the local tax base it made up.
Cermet
@taumaturgo: And you expect the GQP to vote for a Dem dream bill – of course not. So I accept the ‘poison pills’ in the form of what the GQP wanted because it has a lot more of what Dems need and want. It also gets the ball rolling on the bills.
sab
@trollhattan: Sort of yoikes. Our power delivery is better (except for that time we shut down everything east of the mississippi for three days) but our accounting and management sytems are vastly worse. And in defense of PG&E they have lived in a much rougher environment as far as corporate raiders and also as far as difficult natural environment. First Energy fucks up all on its lonesome, without the help of outside bad actors.
Cermet
@Fake Irishman: Agree and that is how one gets sausage made – everyone gets a nice breakfast but no one wants to see what’s in it..
WaterGirl
@trollhattan:
YES.
I haven’t read it, but they talked about it last night on Pod Save America. Apparently there is no wiggle room, we are already smoldering but if we are smart we can keep it from getting worse.
That was my takeaway from what I heard.
sab
@Fake Irishman: We don’t glow in the dark. Akron. We are lucky to have night lighting at all. Glowing in the dark is up by the Lake (Erie) where they are still allowed to run nuke plants.
JR
@sab: Serviceberry? Viburnum?
Hoodie
@Martin: That may be true, but I also sense that Biden is consciously resisting the urge to be the smartest guy in the room by pulling the trigger on a complex stream of thinking that a lot of people won’t understand. The pauses indicate he’s thinking about what he’s saying, or at least making it look that way. I think he’s discovered the value of being the wise old guy who isn’t in a hurry to make himself important.
sab
@JR: We had a serviceberry that had a sad accidental end. I loved that tree.
EtA I think it got squashed in a blizzard
It was very young. The squirrels planted it, in a bad location.
WhatsMyNym
I’m amazed that PG&E even offers services to the rural areas, the costs are high to do it properly. My sibling has to go through a local rural coop in MO. My county in WA bought out the power system from PSE (Puget Sound Energy) to get better service and bring the jobs back into the county, but costs are higher.
WaterGirl
@Martin: I would guess that what you are describing is because Biden is tired. He’s working his ass off. I hope that once we get the infrastructure/climate and more bill passed with reconciliation that he can get some more rest.
I know there will always be something, but this infrastructure bill and what will (hopefully) get passed with reconciliation is really the key to everything we can hope for while we still have all 3 branches of government.
We have to work our asses off to try to keep all 3, but the odds are not in our favor. So this really is the Dem action and legacy that we can count on.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WaterGirl: Eh, we also need to pass voting rights.
Geminid
@sab: Locust is excellent fire wood. If you can find someone who heats with wood you can probably get the branch and the rest of the tree taken away at no cost. Locust is good rot-resistant building material. It’s hardly ever milled, though, because before they get very big the trees hollow out and fall apart. As you’ve noticed.
Crepe myrtles are more viable in the north now, due to breeding and climate change. Those are pretty, small trees with summer blooms.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Totally agree. I see voting rights in a different category of bills. I nearly mentioned that, but I was too lazy.
JoyceH
On the topic of energy, I learned something interesting the other day. We have a coal fired power plant in the county, and I don’t follow local news enough, so I didn’t realize it had closed down earlier in the year. But just yesterday I learned that the site is being converted to a solar and energy storage facility! They’ll use the transmission lines that are already there.
That’s so cool, because this is a very red county. Bring the renewable jobs to the red areas, hire people and give them an economic incentive to be pro-renewable and anti-fossil fuels!
Roger Moore
@WhatsMyNym:
They are able to manage by doing it improperly. That’s why they’re regularly getting in trouble for having their equipment start wildfires.
sab
@JoyceH: I forget where you are. What state?
trollhattan
@WhatsMyNym:
IIUC the PUC requires them to do so, otherwise they’d probably go “see ya, suckers” and pull out.
Interestingly, when Yolo (actual name) County held a referendum to opt out of PG&E and join the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD, also actual name) PG&E freaked the fuck right out and spent tens of millions successfully fighting off the vote. They subsequently tried via ballot measure to make any future such efforts against state law. That did not pass.
It will be no surprise that PG&E rates are higher than SMUD’s.
Emmyelle
@Nicole: yes, definitely. And he presents as mentally sharp the vast majority of the time, just slow. I just want him to be around for a good while. That’s all.
trollhattan
@Geminid:
Have two crepe myrtles. They’re heat-tolerant and don’t require lots of water once established. They do attract aphids that make a very sticky mess and need heavy pruning every winter. Love the papery bark when the leaves are off.
Some grow pretty big but mine have not for whatever reason.
Ken
This CUOMO is RESIGNS good CUOMO news RESIGNS about CUOMO the RESIGNS infra CUOMO structure RESIGNS bill CUOMO and RESIGNS I CUOMO hope RESIGNS people CUOMO hear RESIGNS about CUOMO it RESIGNS.
Spanky
@WaterGirl:
All righty then. We’re doomed.
JoyceH
@sab: I’m in Virginia. VA is fairly blue now, but that’s thanks to the DC suburbs of NoVa. I’m in the rural red area. (Just a lonely little petunia in an onion patch…)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So major legistative accomplement in a batshit nuts congress so as per standard protocals; Biden has sold us out?
This should be something shove in the MAGA hats face’s “Biden succeed were Trump failed.”
Ken
@Spanky: Don’t think of it as doomed. Think of it as transitioning to an ecosystem with no niches for large mammals.
sab
@Ken: Thank God my dog cannot read your cheery news.
WaterGirl
@Spanky: You may think we are doomed, but I didn’t say that. But we are apparently further along in the wrong direction than we thought we were, so there is truly no time to waste.
Next year or 5 years from now is not good enough.
H.E.Wolf
It’s interesting that the visiting friend in this comment section chose to pick on people of color, in particular.
Rather than, for instance, donating some money to the community organizers – also of color – for whom we’re doing a fundraiser in the first half of August.
(It’s not too late to contribute! There’s going to be another matching-funds post any time now, thanks to Jackal Generosity!)
catclub
jellyfish world.
rikyrah
@sab:
Just make sure that it’s not a willow..LOL
Martin
@trollhattan: Despite PG&Es many sins, which are many, they are only 15% fossil fuel. That’s not outstanding for CA, but even CAs worst energy company is fucking decades ahead of those from any other state. First Energy I think is 97% fossil fuel.
debbie
@Nicole:
Seconded. Good fucking grief. I can’t imagine the exhaustion that comes with the office.
sab
@H.E.Wolf: SC is POC but I’m very white.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl:
We’re on a glide path to 2.5 degrees C. We might be able to get it to 2 degrees–not great, but not a doomsday scenario. The world is not going to end.
If we’re smart, we’ll invest in nuclear, and especially sequestration, before some billionaire decides to just cause a massive algae bloom in the ocean because nobody else is sequestering. The market forces are already self-sustaining for ditching coal and building renewables (which is not to say we shouldn’t continue to invest in those too).
Kay
@WhatsMyNym:
I like having a municipal electric service. We got a big solar field out of the 2009 stimulus. We’re public so we apply for all the freebies :)
Just One More Canuck
@sab: We had two large, mature crabapple trees at our old house. They drop a LOT of fruit – more than you can ever pick/use. You’ll need a snow shovel to pick them all up and visits from every wasp within 50 miles
sab
@rikyrah: Lol. I want a willow down by the creek to keep the blackberries in line. Goat lady won’t come because blackberries too thick to install the electric fence. Deer this year ate all the berries but left the plants intact.
sab
@Just One More Canuck: So serviceberry it will be.
Geminid
@JoyceH: I am also in a red rural area of Virginia (Greene County). This does not bother me though, since the state has turned blue. And Greene votes only 60-40 Republican anyway, so there are still plenty of Democratic neighbors.
Bupalos
@Fake Irishman: from someone who has now spent close to a decade in near daily anti-fracking activism… The problem with this well capping money is that it’s probably going through the oil and gas ompanies. Basically giving them money and saying pretty-please do the right thing that you already were obligated to do but we had no way to make you do. I can very much see how this might be the kind of “environmental concessions” that R’s were willing to make.
Though I don’t pretend to have read the language of the bill, it’s fully what I expect. And I expect it to mostly displace current plugging activities and the $ to be pocketed and make the companies stronger.
Martin
@WhatsMyNym: This is why I go slightly easy on PG&E. They’re serving a pretty difficult community. There’s no fucking way those rural customers will ever pay for the cost of burying the lines that support them – especially when so many of them are crossing federal lands.
Burying power lines really needs to be a statewide effort paid for by all utility customers. We have it really easy down here with SCE.
Spanky
@WaterGirl: You said
Ergo we are doomed. Said as snark, actually. Sorry for the confusion.
germy
WaterGirl
@Spanky: Oh, sorry, I missed what you were saying.
NotMax
@Sure Lurkalot
Honey locust don’t care.
;)
smith
@sab: I love serviceberries — they’re my favorite small tree. My second favorite, that you might want to consider, is the fringe tree. It has abundant and very striking flowers and a nice compact shape. The only downside is that if you want berries you need to plant both male and female trees. Another possibility is a Kousa dogwood, which makes fruit that birds love.
Fake Irishman
@sab:
Ah! I’m from the east suburbs of Cleveland. One of the unfashionable ones that wasn’t mentioned in “Little Fires Everywhere” but very close by. I know the book was really serious, but it felt like I was home while reading it. (Graduated from high school the year before the setting of the novel)
PJ
I’ve had enough with the hand-wringing. This is a big Biden deal. There may be some trimming at the edges, but Pelosi and Schumer know what they are doing, and I would not be surprised is we see the biggest expansion in social spending since LBJ, or even FDR.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Nuclear is a non-starter in the US. These concentrated projects fail at a massive rate, and the lifespan of resulting plants is only about 3x the length of time to build it. Financing is a nightmare, there’s nowhere near enough qualified contractors to build such complex sites at the pace needed, and the decade you spend building the plant nets you zero carbon progress, and substantial negative progress due to the emissions from the sheer volume of concrete and work equipment.
But you can build solar+battery or wind+battery at lower cost and in a distributed manner. You can get solar online in weeks or months, and wind in 1-2 years. You start reaping benefits much faster. There are more qualified contractors, and the projects are much less likely to fail due to funding challenges midway through the project due to some partner going out of business or a change of politics threatening the regulatory approvals or funding.
You want to address climate change, build fast. And CA has been increasing renewable generation without nuclear.
More important is to decouple the energy markets in other states so that conservation can start to be a revenue generator. If the other 49 states conserved like CA does, it’d cut generation demand by 40%. That’s enough to close every coal plant in the country with no need for replacement.
Federal ban on 2 stroke engines needs to happen immediately. Give them 12 months to get new products developed.
Just One More Canuck
@sab: The best part about the trees was that our neighbour loved making crabapple jam, so she would pick as much as she could handle and would give us a lot of it – it was delicious
Fake Irishman
@Bupalos:
the devil is always in the details, right? I guess we all will be writing with suggestions and comments on the regulatory language that governs dispersement of the funds, assuming this passes.
trollhattan
@Martin:
Have not heard how they plan to offset closing Diablo Canyon, which is 27% of their portfolio.
eclare
@debbie: Thirded. All you have to do is look at the change in Obama’s hair color over the years.
I hope he and Dr Jill have a nice celebratory dinner tonight.
sab
@Fake Irishman: I haven’t read that yet. I should and I will. Thanks.
Sure Lurkalot
@Martin: I see that change too but I really think Joe lands on the right word more times than not. Or at least than I would expect. Of him or myself. In short, I find Joe Biden quite lucid and his tone pitch perfect most of the time. I like that he’s short and indignant when he needs to be.
sab
@smith: Re Fringe tree. Aren’t I too far north in NE Ohio? We still occassionally have brutal winters.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: Germany de-nuked after Fukushima and their emissions spiked, with a body count in the tens of thousands and counting, since they replaced them with coal.
The trouble with our political inability to build nukes is that it is rivaled by our political inability to build a renewable grid that’s resilient against predictable failure modes.
The infrastructure bill has $6 billion to keep some plants open at least.
Fake Irishman
@sab:
it’s a beautiful book full of flawed characters that you somehow like. I swear I knew some of the teenagers she portrayed — and I would have hated many of them in high school. But Ng just helps you emphasize with all of them. She’s a brilliant writer.
Sure Lurkalot
@WhatsMyNym: I can’t disagree about their beauty but ours was a hot mess, twice a year. Especially between the wood plank boards.
We have a pine tree that was planted in a strip bed between 2 duplexes in the 80’s. IT IS NOW 30 FEET TALL AND TOO CLOSE TO THE HOUSE, besides the poor soil condition it creates for everything else. I haven’t won the battle for its removal but I’m gaining ground.
sab
@eclare: He has been an Energizer Bunny for 40+ years, including 8 with Obama. He seems to know how to pace himself.
WaterGirl
Double-double match post is up. frosty is today’s $1,000 matcher.
smith
@sab: Morton Arboretum says zone 4, so you should be fine. I’m in Chicago and mine is doing well. This is the North American species, not the Chinese, but that one is supposedly zone 5.
Martin
@trollhattan: I don’t know either. They’re so extended on fire damages and burying power lines, I have no idea how they build out capacity to offset it.
planetjanet
@smith:
I HATE the fringe tree that my condo planted by my house. It puts out 1000s of little seeds that sprout in my mulch bed that I have to spend hours weeding. It’s limbs cross each other and chokes other limbs.
Cermet
@Major Major Major Major:
I agree that nuclear is a possible course but as others point out, not the standard amerikan light water boiling reactor: that costs more than half a dozen gas power plants if it even gets finished. As for sequestration, one years production of just US CO2 would fill every single possible under ground storage site (all existing old oil fields.)
The way to go is fast neutron liquid salt reactors that burn the waste nuclear fuel other power plants keep in cooling pools. That has enough energy to power all US electrical needs for 100 years (at current use.) These plants are simple in design, are utterly safe and incapable of melting down, require zero personnel to operate and can be built small (10 mega-watts) so lots of high voltage power lines and right of ways are not needed.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I think there is substantial money in the imfrastructure bill that is directed towards upgrading the electrical grid. I need to unpack the bill’s parts. I will google renewable energy; there will be a lot of reporting on the energy component of this infrastrucure package.
sab
@Fake Irishman: Interesting. Barnes and Noble (I have a Nook) has been trying to sell me her books for years. I will be more receptive now. Thanks.
Spanky
The marketplace is already putting the screws to 2-strokes. Improved battery technology means electric is cleaner, safer, lower maintenance, and now sufficient power to do what most 2-strokes do. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the big Stiel chainsaws have serious competition.
Sure Lurkalot
@WaterGirl: Thanks for the heads up, I didn’t miss it this time. Thanks Frosty!
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
How come the French can get 70% of their electricity from nuclear, and it’s affordable, and they don’t seem to have the problems with it that we do?
Not expecting you to know the answer off the top of your head, but it’s something I’ve wondered for a while now. Just seems that if they can do it, we should be able to do it too, if by no other means than hiring the contractors that built their plants.
JanieM
@Fake Irishman: Little Fires is wonderful, one of my favorite books. Heard Ng speak at a book signing in Cambridge MA a few years ago. Also watched the mini-series after reading the book 2 or 3 times. She was involved in that, too.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Germany’s emissions have plummeted the last 2 years and almost all of the energy emissions benefits have come from reduced coal burning.
I’m not saying Germany got their timing right, but the spike was very short lived as other initiatives came online. I agree we should keep nuclear running as long as we can, but new nuclear was a great idea 20 years ago, and now it’s just too late.
Cermet
@Martin: Few states have the super sunny areas near year round as southern CA; also, till batteries really change (here’s hoping the new iron/oxygen battery is a success), solar and wind can’t be used for general power – ever.
Nuclear I agree as built are not a good answer (though, with a large effort AND common single design could work) but I know the fast neutron liquid salt reactor is the answer we seek.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: it’s in there but I’m not very confident in how far it’ll go considering our insane infrastructure costs.
@Cermet:
I wasn’t joking about algae!
Cermet
@lowtechcyclist: They use fast neutron reactors BUT these are breeders and very dangerous; they use a single common design and build ONLY those. Mass production (so to speak), a single company so parts and design never change. It is a logical approach but has a nightmare fuel cycling problem and vast waste storage issues.
Cermet
@Major Major Major Major: Ok; maybe someday but currently, we don’t have that developed in a reliable way – but it does have the potential (and needs lots of water and vast amounts of sun light.)
Major Major Major Major
@lowtechcyclist: plenty of countries use this safe and clean energy source powered by magic rocks, and we have several generations of improved designs to choose from. The barriers are not scientific in nature.
Frank Wilhoit
@Ken: That word “subliminal” — I do not think it means what you think it means.
Major Major Major Major
@Cermet: yeah I’m basically imagining a mad sequestration dash in like 2038.
debbie
@schrodingers_ca:
Did you mean to lose your “t”? ?
Cermet
@Major Major Major Major: Interesting; the MIT report (circa 1973) predicts the world starts to go to hell about 2040. Coincidence? I think not! Are you in league with the Secret Cabal?
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: France started 50 years ago. Part of their motivation was to power their high speed rail. But there’s a lot of things that are different:
In order for the US to repeat what France did, we’d need to nationalize at least in part, the nations energy production. And at that point, why would you settle on nuclear when you can get substantial geothermal out of various parts of the US, you can get offshore wind enough to power the entire east and west coasts, you can build out solar+battery across most of the south (and at no capital outlay for new building construction). As soon as you replicate the conditions for nuclear to work, you’ve replicated the conditions for everything else to work as well, with less risk and less safety concern, and better distribution of manpower.
lowtechcyclist
@Cermet:
I’ll read up on your fast neutron liquid salt reactors, since I know absolutely zero about them.
Being ignorant about them, my general thought about nuclear power has been: OK, there’s a serious nuclear waste issue. But if having dozens of horrible nuclear waste sites was what it took to forestall out-of-control global warming, well, you can avoid several dozen nuclear waste sites. They wouldn’t be a trivial problem by any means, but they’d be limited compared to a total climate disaster.
ETA: Also, how’s France dealing with the waste issue? They’re not a tiny country, but France is way smaller than the U.S., and they don’t have the luxury of thousands of square miles of all-but-empty land the way we do. So they must have some way of dealing with the waste that hasn’t ruined their country.
JoyceH
@Cermet:
Dunno about wind, but solar power can be stored for hours after sundown, not in batteries as electricity, but in insulated storage as heat.
Geminid
@Martin: A lot of Germany’s reduction of CO2 emissions have come from greater energy efficiency. Economist Robert Pollin* estimates that that the U.S. could eliminate 40-50% of our carbon footprint through efficiency and conservation.
* Robert Pollin, “We Need a Better New Green Deal,” The Journal of the Atomic Scientists, March 2019.
karen marie
@Jeffro: My dog is absolutely HYSTERICAL when it thunders at night, shrugs when it thunders during the day. Her nighttime fear of thunder has become so great that when the sun sets, even absent a single cloud in the sky, she starts to shake. I have to drag her outside to pee before bed.
karen marie
@sab: I’d go for the Seckle pear because the fruit is edible, where crabapple is much more limited in its edibility.
PaulWartenberg
@zhena gogolia:
No, I can’t believe it, it’s not possible! Not after all these years!!!
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I think it’s less about SCE and more about the terrain and patterns of land ownership. The transition between city and not city in Southern California is incredibly abrupt. In my area, the boundary between dense subdivision and undeveloped National Forest is someone’s backyard fence. That means our power grid just doesn’t go through as much fire-prone wild land as in Northern California, so there isn’t a comparable risk of electrically started fires.
Martin
@Cermet: There are no at scale designs for thorium reactors – only test reactors. The earliest is planned in China to start construction in 2030+. If they really haul ass, you might see the first such reactor running in 15 years.
Look, we need an urgent plan to decarbonize within a decade. Once we hit steady state we can consider stuff like this for down the road, but you can’t count on it to decarbonize. It’s too slow, too expensive, and too late.
The first, easiest, and cheapest solution is to decouple the energy markets and conserve. You get a 40% reduction simply by not using power. Mandate solar on all new construction – it pays for itself inside the decoupled market – no new capital outlay. Both of these are free. And you can do them through policy.
Understand, CA is not that far from the goal in terms of energy generation. There’s a formula that can work, if only people were willing to follow it.
Where CA is kind of fucked is on transportation. We really don’t have a solution there.
Kay
@sab:
Eastern Redbud is a great smaller tree. The bark is almost black – it blooms early – almost nothing else is in leaf, so it’s pinky-purple against black. It doesn’t have the poofy crown of a hybrid crabapple – it’s shaped like a larger tree, a maple, but just reduced by 1/3.
Martin
@Roger Moore: No, that’s my point. SCE has it easy by not having to operate over heavily forested federal land to serve a lot of far-flung customers. But because we have it easy, we can and should be mined for the revenue to pay for the power line burial everywhere. I don’t see how PG&E does this without bankrupting those already struggling communities.
Martin
@Geminid: CA has already cut consumption by 40% relative to the rest of the nation. We don’t even need to invent anything new – just implement the decoupled market that CA has where regulators allow rates to go up only when consumers save energy, and have those savings be split. So consumer bills go down and producer profits go up.
Right now utilities in 49 states are incentivized when their customers use more energy. In CA it’s the opposite.
Roger Moore
@Spanky:
Great. Can we get some money to replace every two-stroke leafblower with an electric model? The savings in noise would be worth the price completely apart from the pollution benefits.
CCL
@Kay: We planted three eastern redbuds this spring – they are too young to bloom next year, but I already love the shape of their leaves.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@sab: @karen marie: If your intent with a fruit tree is to eat the fruit, then go with the Seckle pear. If your intent is to drink the fruit (by making hard cider), the crab apple is a fine choice.
Kay
@CCL:
Love them. My back lot neighbor has a mature redbud and it’s framed in my (big) kitchen window. I don’t even have the tree and I get one.
Martin
So ¼ of the bipartisan bill is being paid for by unused Covid and unemployment benefits from red states.
Ok. CA has the largest electric bus maker in the US, so, uh, thanks for the jobs Texas.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
Transportation is at least theoretically solvable. Transition as rapidly as possible to electric cars and buses, and build more public transit.
Here in Southern California, at least, there are still plenty of boulevards with extra-wide medians where the Red Cars used to run. Rebuilding that network would be a great starting point. The right of way is already there, and a huge amount of our development has followed the old Red Car lines, so they’d be right where we need them. It’s mostly a matter of money and willpower.
sab
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I just planted a seckle at the back of the lot this year. I will probably plant another back there next year. So I think I will go with serviceberries in front.
Ruckus
@emmyelle:
He’s had a bit of a tough life but not the same as the constant stress of a lot of jobs that many of us here do/did regularly. I work as a machinist but most of my work has been high precision to very high precision so a lot of stress to get things close to perfect. Others also have stressful jobs that they do for a lot of hours a year and that adds up a lot more than many imagine. And yes I understand that his job is stressful, how could it not be, but he has a lot of help getting from the start to finish line. Many of us really don’t have that. Over the last 6 yrs I’ve lost 14 friends, all but one younger than me so don’t think I don’t understand your point but still I also know a lot of people much older than me. There are 1.9 million people in the US over 90. I know one woman of 95, was hospitalized with Covid, she’s still around, lives in the same complex as me.
Brachiator
@sab:
I love the original witticism attributed to Dorothy Parker.
Can you use the word “horticulture” in a sentence?
You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.
Annie
@Fake Irishman:
I think PG&E is stiff competition having been responsible for at least 2 huge fires in California.
debbie
@CCL:
I’ve never even noticed their leaves. Those flowering branches though! ?
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
We who have lived under their lack of reasonable, well anything, service, monetary BS, lack of upkeep, often seemingly complete fucking stupidity, etc often think they are the worst. but other places have worse problems, hard as it is to believe.
Ruckus
@JoyceH:
One of the states in the running for most solar power is, wait for it Texas. Lots of land, lots of sun, a concept of power generation from 2 generations ago lends itself to people being more willing to figure out how to do things more on their own.
Geminid
@Brachiator: There is a story that Dorothy Parker and Claire Booth Luce were in a small group going to some swanky New York restaurent. As they approached the front door, Luce waved Parker in, saying,”Age before Beauty.” “Pearls before Swine,” Parker replied as she walked in ahead of Luce.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
The Metro train system runs partially on the old tracks in some areas. Or at least I should say it runs where the tracks were at one time and as far as I understand the original lines use right of way that have been RR right of way for decades. I’m not sure about the new lines running to LAX. Except for the subways, those have been dug/are being dug as I type.
The Metrolink system runs 534 miles all over the socal area. Now for sure they miss more than a few places because it’s rail but still you can get a lot of places using it. I’m only 3 blocks from the LA-Riverside line, have used it a number of times into downtown and getting to WLA and I’ve had to wait on freight trains on Metrolink before
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
RE: Where CA is kind of fucked is on transportation. We really don’t have a solution there.
Los Angeles county is going to be a very tough problem to solve. There are transit agencies with buses that use compressed natural gas and of course the Metro Rail system, so there is already a shift to alternative energy.
But in June, partly as a response to the pandemic and decreased ridership and revenues, there was a massive reduction in service. Routes were reduced or eliminated outright, due to claims of lower ridership. Even if the economy recovers and there is increased demand, it will be extremely difficult to add service. It is just the nature of the beast.
Not entirely true. Wilshire Boulevard is one of the widest corridors. But Wilshire and adjacent streets are still massively congested during peak hours and the line 720 Rapid Bus along Wilshire and similar service along Venice puts barely a dent in traffic.
Ironically, Metro is cutting back on feeder lines to the rail service and also reducing the rapid bus service.
Also, Metro stopped collecting fares on buses during the lockdown and slowdown. In theory, they should be collecting fares now, but there is an unofficial policy to just let riders on. This does not apply to rail. But this kicks the crap out of the budget. I note, however, that there is a proposal to abolish fares. How this would work and still allow for expansion is a huge question.
You would need to massively increase housing density along these routes and add tons of new housing. This is not going to happen.
The old Red Car lines were money losers and no longer match how the county has expanded. It is strange that the rapid line system appeared to help, but has been cut back. I am not sure what transit officials are thinking.
James E Powell
@Geminid:
I’ve read the story with several different pairs of sharp-tongued women from the 30s through the 50s. I wonder if it ever really happened with any of them.
Another Scott
@Fake Irishman: +1
It won’t be everything we want. It won’t be everything we need. But it’s a big and important step.
We’re in month 7 of the Biden-Harris Administration. Even if things take a turn in January 2023 (which I do not expect), that still gives time for more reconciliation bills with even more progress next fiscal year.
Take the win and build on it.
Cheers,
Scott.
topclimber
@PJ: Glad you commented here. I just wanted to respond to your reply about GIllibrand in the Cuomo resignation thread.
As a general proposition, you may be right that I am out of my mind. But your comment did not at all address my point that Gillibrand can be governor if she wants it. You only claim, with no evidence, that no way does she. I personally don’t know, but your certainty that she doesn’t sure seems light on proof.
Why would a woman senator want to stand out from a crowded field of Senatorial candidates running for president by also having executive experience in what may be the most diverse state in the USA? Beats me.
Why would a woman with parents in an Albany suburb and two teenage kids prefer living in the executive mansion, a three hour door-to-door by Amtrak trip for her husband who works in NYC? Beats me why she wouldn’t prefer splitting her time between her NY home and DC.
Why would you bother to respond to what I said rather than what YOU want to say? Beats me, because at this point I have no reason to think you are dumb–just a bad reader.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
In some areas. IIRC, the Gold Line in my area runs on the old Santa Fe RR right of way. But anywhere in the LA area where you see a boulevard with an extra-wide media, the chances are good it’s an old Red Car right of way. In my area I know that’s true at least of Huntington Drive and Sierra Madre Boulevard, and I think it’s true of Santa Anita Avenue, too.
It makes total sense. Cities grew up around the Red Car lines, which makes sense given the Red Car was created by Henry Huntington as part of his real estate development plans. When cars became popular, it made sense to put major roads adjacent to the tracks, because those were already major commuting routes. When the Red Cars were replaced, they didn’t need the tracks, but in many cases the streets were already big enough, so there wasn’t a need to turn the right of way into more traffic lanes. Instead, they turned them into extra-wide medians. We could easily reverse the process now if we wanted to.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
For stupid political reasons, Metro rail was prevented from running directly to LAX. You could use a bus shuttle to connect to the Green Line, but this was used far more by LAX employees than by tourists and others.
For political and racist reasons, the rail service did not run directly to the beach. Some of this is finally changing. But reaction to the pandemic is leading to plans to reduce service.
Metrolink development has been massively hurt by payments related to that big derailment a few years ago where an engineer was at fault. Also, freight has priority. This is not going to change.
Another Scott
@JoyceH: +1
That makes a lot of sense.
There’s an old coal-fired power plant on the Potomac River in Alexandria VA. It was dropping fine soot on local neighborhoods for decades, and was finally shut down in 2012. It’s in some long-term remediation/cleanup now. Converting it to power storage, retransmission, etc., facility would have made a lot of sense, but it looks like they have decided to make it a mixed use/Innovation District.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Ruckus: Texas has a lot of wind generation already. A couple years ago I drove I-20 across the state. A hundred miles west of Fort Worth I started seeing wind generators, and they were common all the way to New Mexico. It was kind of funny to see rows of wind mills on ridges overlooking oil pumps, with cattle grazing among them.
There were hardly any windmills once I got to New Mexico. That is probably changing now. Democrat Michelle Lujan Griffen ran for Governor on a clean energy platform in 2018, and won. The legislature passed a clean power package the next year. The plan is to replace the huge Four Corners coal plant with wind and solar. The plant is still not slated to close until 2030, but maybe that can be speeded up. Back in the 1960’s, the smoke plume from the Four Corners plant was easily seen by astronauts orbiting Earth.
topclimber
@lowtechcyclist: Standardized designs and national rather than public utility structure? (Not sure of either, but hey, this is BJ).
CCL
@Kay: Your neighbor’s redbud – the folks on the British show Gardeners’ World would call that a “Borrowed Landscape.”
@sab: I probably planted them where they won’t get enough sun – part day shade – but I am still hopeful and a little excited to see what happens next spring.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I have definitely been paying attention to the service changes. There used to be two lines going from the major intersection closest to my house to the nearest Metro station, but they’ve both been eliminated in favor of “Metro Micro” service. Metro Micro seems like a reasonable idea, but they needed to do a whole lot more than they did to convince people to use it.
I think I understand the basic idea of what Metro is trying to do with their bus service. The idea is to have fewer lines but better service on the lines they keep. If you can upgrade from once every 30-60 minutes to once every 10-15 minutes, it makes a qualitative difference in the way people use the service. Instead of having to plan their trip to make sure they can catch the bus, people can just show up and not have to worry about the schedule. But with given budget constraints, you can only do that by consolidating routes.
At the same time, they’re trying to deal with the feeder problem for rail by moving to Metro Micro, which is a shared van service. The idea is that you can get a van ride within a fairly small service area for a relatively low fare and again without having to deal with scheduled service. You just call the van when you need it. I think it makes sense as a solution to providing public transit in an area that isn’t quite dense enough to justify regular bus service.
I do wonder, though, how much of this is being driven by the threat of SB 50 or similar legislation. SB 50 was supposed to effectively rezone everything close to a busy bus route to allow much denser construction. The goal was to encourage transit-oriented development, but that means people who opposed new development would also have a reason to oppose public transit.
Emmyelle
@Ruckus: <3
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Nuclear still has big problems.
It’s too expensive, all in. There’s still no consensus about what to do with the waste. It still depends on fuel from the nuclear weapons complex – something that we should be winding down. And the magical “intrinsically safe” or “proliferation free” designs still aren’t proven on a market-scale, so we’d have to be using building lots more plants with designs mostly developed in the ’50s.
Wired:
Yeah, magnitude 9 earthquakes and tsnuamis are rare. But it’s another thing that has to be considered in places like the west coast (and they have happened in Virginia in the not too distant past).
We need to be doing:
1) Increasing efficiency and reducing waste.
2) Fixing gas pipeline and oil and gas well leaks.
3) Planting trees (for shade, and for sucking up (at least temporarily) CO2).
4) Making transportation fully electric as soon as possible, and modernizing the power grid to deal with it.
5) Putting solar panels on every available flat surface (and figuring out how to do it on farm land in ways that makes sense).
6) etc.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist:
FTFNYT (from June 14):
I believe Cheryl had a thread here about this as well.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Cermet: And yet they’ve been worked on liquid metal reactors since the 1960s and they still aren’t ready. All isn’t sweetness and light with gee-whiz technology – e.g. a lot of practical materials-science problems need to be addressed in new reactor designs (228 page .pdf).
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@Bupalos:
Here in W Va we don’t even know where the abandoned oil and gas wells actually are… There are a ton in our neighborhood, where drilling started in about 1915, over a century ago.
So naturally, no regulations, no surveyors able to locate a well from observation, just holes in the ground leaking methane into the atmosphere.
So SAD.
LadySuzy
@zhena gogolia: I agree. In many instances, it looks like he becomes extremely self-conscious because the words of a president are scrutinized ad nauseam.
I’m not saying it’s impossible that with age the stutter is a little more difficult to control. What I’m saying is that we should be careful to interpret every pause as age related.
Let’s remember how S.L.O.W.L.Y President Obama often delivered his responses in press conferences … He certainly was not fluid; he was parsing his words constantly.
It’s interesting to see how President Biden communicates. Sometimes he is right to the point and dares being direct and not politically correct. Other times he gives me the impression that he would like to explain in detail, give a lot of info… and realizes that his responses are getting too long for the media who’s easily bored, so he cuts short.
Mr. Kite
@Major Major Major Major:
Why do you insist on nuclear? We can’t wait ANOTHER 20 years for that to come online. If you think the reason we’re not building nuclear power is only political, why didn’t the latest 12 years of Republican administrations do anything about it either?
At this point the wingnutty engineers who usually push this line start blaming the supremely powerful greenies and I laugh in their face. Not saying you are one.
Nuclear is not economically competitive any more. There is a decades long time before the capital sunk into a plant will provide any ROI. Renewables start earning within months or couple years, without the huge complexity.
JoyceH
@Another Scott:
There’s an art center in Alexandria that has all these art studios and galleries, etc – you can go in and watch various types of artists at their work, take classes, find things to buy. It’s called the Torpedo Factory because, well, it used to be a torpedo factory.
Roger Moore
@Mr. Kite:
Nuclear power has real advantages over renewable energy. In particular, it gives you a lot of power from a relatively small plant and it produces constant power without being disrupted when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. Those are real benefits that we would like to have in our power system, and nuclear is the only realistic source that can provide them carbon-free.
Now I agree that those advantages come with very serious problems in terms of cost, safety, waste disposal, and long lead times. But I think a lot of the problems with safety can be at least reduced with more modern designs, and some of the problems with cost and long lead times (obviously related) could be reduced by switching to standardized designs.
The political problem is a deep one. It’s not just about one political party or the other opposing nuclear power. It’s about the public in general distrusting it so that nobody wants to deal with it. I don’t know if that’s a solvable problem at this point.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Let me first note that I used to be a huge commuter and applauded some of the changes. So I have no innate opposition to change or have any attachment to the way things used to be.
Now, I think your fundamental assessment is incorrect. The “on paper” increase in frequency of service doesn’t work in reality. Real world travel time increases.
Real world Pasadena example. Old route: a rider could take Line 180 to the Gold Line Station. New route: you have to transfer to Foothill Line 187. Maybe you now have to stand. Line 187 does not go inside the Gold Line station. So you have to walk down and possibly miss the next available train.
Situation 2. People used to park inside the Gold Line station and take Line 268 to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Line 268 has been eliminated. You still have to come to the Gold Line station to call for a Metro Micro bus. Good luck coordinating that so that you get to work on time.
I have personally tried the Micro service. The bus was late and you have to wear seatbelts. There is a special $1 introductory fare. No one knows what the standard fare might be. You cannot use the monthly pass to pay.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
Wait !!!
You have to wear SEATBELTS?!?!?!
That’s despicable… what if you have to bail out of the vehicle to survive? Seatbelts will keep you inside the inferno when the bus/train explodes~!!~
I thought wearing seatbelts on school buses was worse than Radioactive Sants!?!?!!!! But since then I hear that seatbelts on school buses is a really good thing, not a horrible Democratic imposition… because kids don’t die from the impact!
schrodingers_cat
@debbie: Nah, it was a typo.
Brachiator
@J R in WV:
Seatbelts are not required on buses or trains because, generally those vehicles are bigger and win in any collision.
The seatbelt thing was a minor issue. It wasn’t mentioned in the brochures and I had previously had minor surgery which made the seatbelt uncomfortable. Had I known I would have been able to make adjustments more easily.
I have previously had to ride in shuttle vans requiring the use of seatbelts. It is not a big deal.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
It’s strange. There are parking lots, empty spaces and old and abandoned buildings in Chinatown near the Gold Line station there, but no residential or retail development. The old Avon building in Pasadena near a Gold Line station should have made way for affordable housing, but the city clearly wants to keep more of the city upper middle class and higher.
There are places along the Blue Line that should be ripe for development. But nothing. This is before you get to other richer areas that fight off development.
The other problem is that some insist on trying to make public transportation a moral good which people are obligated to use. The LA Times architecture critic once wrote that people in Los Angeles should be “forced” to live in densely packed housing like that had on the East Coast in the 19th century, for the sake of the environment and so that the hills and forests could be reserved for the sweet wildlife.
But everyone is not headed to the same factory job in the industrial park and coming back home at the same time. And people don’t want to live on top of each other.
Mr. Kite
@Roger Moore:
Nobody wants to fund nuclear. There’s no ROI. Only way would be a government program with a standard design, like France. Write your congressperson to get started on that now, so in 20 years that capacity can be used to replace any remaining fossil sources.
More likely such program would be used as an excuse for not taking any other action. I don’t think this is too cynical. Remember “Green Coal” loved by Bush and Obama.
Energy storage for when the sun don’t shine – which people always bring up as a strangely insurmountable problem – is an easy one. There’s just not much demand for it yet. Pump water up the hill or build as many water towers as you can fit in an area of a nuclear reactor complex. Big battery farms are also already in production and being built, including in California.
Mr. Kite
There are traits I’ve noticed about people who push nuclear in any discussion about decarbonization. 1. people who haven’t updated their priors about changes in prices and technology of wind and solar even in the last decade, 2. people with nostalgia for boyhood (yes) fantasies of “the atomic age” 3. people who think crushing atoms is active and manly (meaning good and proper) pursuit unlike passively soaking up rays, 4. people who will themselves be dead by the time those nukes built starting today would come online, 5. shills.
This is not personal for anyone here.
EM
@Cermet: It’s both or none. The good thing is they don’t need a single Repub vote now, for either bill.
Brachiator
@Mr. Kite:
Oooh. Haven’t seen a good ad hominem attack in a while. Thanks.
tam1MI
@topclimber: Gillibrand can be governor if she wants it.
If New Yorkers are dumb enough to elect Cuomo-with-ovaries after just getting rid of Cuomo, they deserve Republican rule.