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Ban Gas, Pay More.

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  Electricity prices across the US are, pardon the pun, rising at shocking rates. According to the Energy Information Administration, residential electricity prices in June were 5% higher than they were in June 2025 . The average price of electricity in American homes is now about 18.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. In 2016, that same amount of juice cost US residential consumers 12.5 cents. Thus, over the past decade, consumers have seen their home electricity costs jump by 46%. What’s driving the surge in power costs? According to a June report by Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy , the price increases “were driven primarily by investments in distribution and transmission networks, fuel volatility, routine maintenance, and policy mandates rather than load growth.” Of course, there are different theories for the jump in power costs, and price increases vary, a fact highlighted on a handy new website, bluestateshighrates.com . Regardless of what’s driving those higher prices, the...
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Wind Power Has Benefitted North Dakota. So Why Have Residents Soured on It?

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  George Wolff offered a cautious greeting through the window of my rented F-150. He was fresh from tending livestock, which explained the dried mud on his forehead and shirt. His boots and jeans were soiled with barnyard muck, his ballcap tipped back to cool his brow.  It was a warm, breezy May day in Wishek, North Dakota, with wind speeds hovering around 20 miles per hour, gusting to the low 30s. Angus cattle foraged on a hillside pasture behind Wolff’s barns. Two John Deere tractors sat idle off the driveway. Planting season was over, but a dry spring had slowed the arrival of this year’s wheat, corn, and soybeans.  “What can I do for you?” asked Wolff, a fourth-generation farmer. The answer was about a half mile behind him, rising above his land like an enormous pinwheel.  That 3-megawatt turbine, one of two on Wolff’s 3,500-acre property, is part of Badger Wind Farm. The 92-turbine, 250-MW project was brought online in January by the Danish energy giant Ørsted...
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Necessary Inventions

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  Sep 05, 2026   “Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.” – Richard Bach Among the most ironclad, stone-cold, lead-pipe-lock bets of history is that aggregate primary energy consumption is a curve that goes up and to the right . Longtime readers will be familiar with the physical foundations for why this is so: The human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy; one must harness primary energy to temporarily prevail in that struggle; one’s standard of living is thus measured by how much primary energy is on offer for the task; and all humans everywhere want a higher standard of living. Wars, famines, political crises, and pandemics come and go. Degrowth nutters and carbon-counters ebb and flow in their political influence. Social shaming to make do with less—an impulse that invariably emanates from do-gooders already flush with abundance—occasionally bends localized policy for short perio...
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New York’s Climate Law Flops in Court

  The progressive government raid on fossil-fuel producers hit a roadblock this week, with a federal judge striking down a New York law that would make companies pay reparations for their worldwide CO2 emissions. Sorry, climate change doesn’t let states ignore the Constitution. Democrats in Albany in 2024 passed a law that required fossil-fuel companies to cough up $75 billion to compensate for alleged damage from their CO2 emissions. “This landmark legislation shifts the cost of climate adaptation from everyday New Yorkers to the fossil fuel companies most responsible for the pollution,” Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said at the time. Under the law, the state apportions liability among three dozen or so companies that sold fossil fuels in the state based on their estimated contribution to global CO2 emissions dating to 2000. This amounted to a giant tax on the companies—many of which don’t operate in New York—their customers and shareholders. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, fossil-f...
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The Rich World’s Climate Distraction

  The past 75 years have brought the greatest improvement of human welfare in history. But over the past decade, much of that progress has stalled. This happened at the same time that the rich world shifted its attention to climate change. This isn’t a coincidence, and it has to change. Consider extreme poverty, long defined as living on less than $1 a day, adjusted for inflation and purchasing power. In 1950, more than half of humanity was that poor (using the 1985 dollar as the benchmark). Today the share is 7.6%, the lowest ever recorded. Average schooling has almost tripled, from 3.2 years to nearly nine. Electricity access has soared. Problems remain, but the gains have been spectacular. Yet that development has lately slowed to a crawl. After almost two centuries of declining poverty, the number of poor people in the world hasn’t budged since 2016. Global progress is at its slowest pace since 1950, according to the World Bank. There are many causes, but one stands out. In ...
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Judge strikes down New York’s climate superfund law

  The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York struck down the state’s Climate Change Superfund Act on Monday, ruling that the 2024 law is invalid under the federal Clean Air Act. The law set up a cost recovery scheme whereby fossil fuel companies would pay into a fund used to finance climate change adaptation-related infrastructure projects. The state’s argument rested in part on the Trump administration’s decision earlier this year to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, which gave the agency authority to regulate climate pollution. Judge Brenda K. Sannes dismissed that argument in her decision, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in American Electric Power v. Connecticut from 2011, which, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo put it , “established companies’ protection from federal public nuisance claims over greenhouse gas emissions. That decision sprang from the Court’s earlier 2007 decision that the Clean ...
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