On Navajo land in Arizona, a coal plant and coal mine that have devastated the environment are being replaced by solar–with both enormous benefits and local drawbacks that can serve as a lesson for how the rest of the country will need to manage the transition to renewables.

In the desert near Arizona’s border with Utah on the Navajo Nation, a massive solar array built in 2017 now provides power for around 18,000 Navajo homes. Nearby, construction will begin later this year on a second solar plant. And on another corner of Navajo land, the largest coal plant west of the Mississippi River is preparing to close 25 years ahead of schedule, despite some last-minute attempts to save it.

“Those two [solar] plants really are the beginning of an economic transition,” says Amanda Ormond, managing director of the Western Grid Group, an organization that promotes clean energy.

The coal plant, called the Navajo Generating Station, was built in the 1970s to provide power to growing populations in Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada. A nearby coal mine supplies the power plant with coal. As recently as 2014, the coal plant wasn’t expected to close until 2044–a date negotiated with the EPA to reduce air pollution. But reduced demand for coal, driven both by economics and climate action, means that the plant is scheduled to close in 2019 instead. The coal mine, run by Peabody Energy, will be forced to follow.

In 2016, Los Angeles, which owned a 21% share in the plant, completed a sale of its share to reduce city emissions. In 2017, the remaining owners announced that they would close the plant because coal power is no longer economically competitive. The plant’s largest customer, the Central Arizona Project, calculated that if it had purchased electricity from other sources in 2016, it could have saved $38.5 million.


Much more: https://www.fastcompany.com/40577931/solar-is-starting-to-replace-the-largest-coal-plant-in-the-western-u-s?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=&position=7&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=05302018

Fox News pundits find it impossible to defend Roseanne Barr's racist tweet directed at Valerie Jarrett, and the fallen sitcom star blames the incident on Ambien.




France's Migrant Hero - Between the Scenes



Trevor applauds the migrant hero, Mamoudou Gassama, who saved a child dangling from a balcony in France, but is a bit suspicious of the neighbor.

US president Donald Trump doesn’t give up a fight easily, especially if it involves one of his many properties. One such fight happened in Scotland, where the Trump Organization owns a golf course and tried to block the building of a wind farm that would be visible from the course. The company’s legal challenges were overthrown in 2015 and, on Saturday (May 26), the last of the turbines were installed completing the offshore wind farm.

Trump himself expressed concern about the 2003 plans to build the offshore wind farm, just after he had bought a seaside estate near the town of Balmedie in Aberdeenshire in 2006. “I am not thrilled,” Trump said then. “I want to see the ocean, I do not want to see windmills.” Then in 2011, after formal construction plans were submitted, Trump filed a complaint to the Scottish government against the “the horrible idea of building ugly wind turbines directly off Aberdeen’s beautiful coastline.” Trump’s golf course opened in 2012.

When the government approved the construction of the wind farm in 2013, Trump filed a lawsuit and vowed to “spend whatever monies are necessary to see to it that these huge and unsightly industrial wind turbines are never constructed.” Trump’s case suffered a series of defeats, with the final blow in the UK’s supreme court in 2015.

The construction of the wind farm, which consists of 11 turbines, has continued without interruption since then. Vattenfall, the company behind the wind farm, says the 90 MW power plant will produce the equivalent of 70% of Aberdeen’s domestic electricity demand, preventing more than 130,000 metric tons of carbon emissions.


More: https://qz.com/1291269/the-scottish-wind-farm-donald-trump-tried-to-block-is-now-complete/


Time-lapse installation of turbine at Vattenfall’s EOWDC wind farm



Time-lapse footage of wind turbine installation at Vattenfall’s European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre located just off the north east coast of Scotland in Aberdeen Bay.

Starbucks closes over 8,000 stores for a day of racial bias training, and Roy Wood Jr. offers tips on how the coffee chain's employees can make black customers feel welcome.

President Xi of China is a 'world-class poker player' while Trump seems to be just figuring out Go Fish.

ABC today decided to cancel their highest rated show following a controversial tweet in which Roseanne Barr compared an African-American woman, a former advisor to President Obama, to an ape. This did not sit well with ABC management, or anyone with a brain, and they announced that the show’s first season would also be its last. “Roseanne” was a very big hit for ABC, but just because Roseanne is gone, that doesn’t mean the show has to. The show must go on and with that said, Jimmy has an idea that could make this work for everyone.

After Donald Trump won the presidential election, hundreds of volunteers around the U.S. came together to “rescue” federal data on climate change, thought to be at risk under the new administration. “Guerilla archivists,” including ourselves, gathered to archive federal websites and preserve scientific data.

But what has happened since? Did the data vanish?

As of one year later, there has been no great purge. Federal data sets related to environmental and climate science are still accessible in the same ways they were before Trump took office.

However, in many other instances, federal agencies have tampered with information about climate change. Across agency websites, documents have disappeared, web pages have vanished and language has shifted in ways that appear to reflect the policies of the new administration.

Two groups have been keeping a watchful eye on developments. We both belong to the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, the organization behind the data rescue events. The initiative now monitors tens of thousands of federal websites with the help of specialized tracking software. In January, the group published a report that describes sweeping changes to federal web resources.

Meanwhile, Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker documents news stories about climate scientists who have been discouraged from conducting, publishing or otherwise communicating scientific research.

These groups have documented four ways that climate-related information has become less accessible since Trump took office.


Much more: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/28/4-ways-us-government-climate-information-has-changed-since-trump-took-office/

"Longtime Trump associate and Evil Elton John, Roger Stone."

Unfortunately for this president, Twitter seems more important than protecting his own secrets—and the nation’s.

Earlier this week, Politico broke the news that President Donald Trump refuses to give up using off-the-shelf mobile phones, the imposition of better security being considered “too inconvenient.” While it would be difficult to hack these phones, it can be done, and there are few targets of a higher priority to potential hackers than the president of the United States.

According to the Politico report, Trump uses two phones: one that allows access only to Twitter and a small number of news outlets, and one for making phone calls. Both phones are periodically inspected and replaced, although the exact length of time that Trump keeps each phone is unclear. Politico reports that the president has gone as long as five months without having one of the phones reviewed by security personnel. In comparison, President Barack Obama’s secured mobile devices were inspected every 30 days.

Trump’s use of these phones, on this schedule, does keep things convenient for the president, but also carries significant security risks. Despite efforts by White House security staff to prevent or detect compromises, the phones could still be hacked. Fear of the political fallout if efforts are detected might deter attackers more than anything that could be done to secure the phones themselves, but not every attacker worries so much about that as to forgo possible direct access to the communications of the president of the United States.

Of the two devices, Trump’s Twitter-and-news phone is the easier to target. It is not clear if the pre-loaded news outlets are accessed through apps or bookmarked sites, but it doesn’t really matter which is the case. The goal for an attacker would likely be to get Trump to open a specific page in a browser that could deliver an exploit. If the president had already opened his browser, that makes things a little easier, but Twitter and news apps have in-app browsers and content that is only viewable on them. These links could be made to look like a trusted site, or even be on a news outlet favored by Trump that had itself been hacked.


More: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-phone-is-a-hackers-dream

When U.S. families fuel up for the first road trips of the summer this Memorial Day weekend, they will be paying close to $3 per gallon across much of the country—a 50 cent per gallon jump from just a year ago.

These recent increases in U.S. gasoline prices are primarily the result of changes in the global oil market. Since January 2017, oil prices have surged from $52 per barrel to more than $71 per barrel. The International Energy Agency attributes these price increases to rising demand for oil, production declines in Venezuela, and uncertainty about how renewed U.S. sanctions will affect Iranian oil exports, among other factors.

Although the power of any U.S. president to control domestic gasoline prices is limited, the Trump administration shares considerable responsibility for worsening the pain at the pump that U.S. consumers are currently experiencing, as well as for increasing the likelihood that families in America will be paying more for fuel for years to come. The Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions have not only contributed to recent spikes in global oil prices, but its so-called energy dominance agenda is increasing fuel costs for drivers, giving oil companies too much power over taxpayer-owned energy reserves, and making the U.S. economy more vulnerable to oil price volatility.

Here are five things to know about how and why the Trump administration’s energy policies are contributing to higher gasoline bills for U.S. families.

1. President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States is withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear agreement drove up global oil prices, contributing to an immediate jump in U.S. gas prices. On May 8, President Trump formally announced that he will reimpose economic sanctions on Iran, which will restrict Iran’s ability to sell its oil on the world market and reduce available global oil supplies. Global oil prices rose approximately $7 per barrel and U.S. gas prices climbed 15 cents per gallon in the five weeks leading up to the announcement as traders saw Trump intensify his criticism of the Iran agreement on Twitter and appointed John Bolton, a vocal critic of the Iran agreement, as his national security adviser. “Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal will support higher oil prices,” one oil industry CEO told CNN after Trump’s announcement.


Much more: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2018/05/23/451163/trump-administration-adding-pain-pump/