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As Hurricane Helene devastates much of the Southeast, hitting hard a state whose governor (and government) has banned the words “climate change” from most official documents, some might be wondering when President Biden will pull out a sharpie and whether nuclear weapons are being discussed in the White House Situation Room.

For any failing to understand the reference, some reminders:

• #SharpieGate trended in 2019 when Trump edited the map projecting Hurricane Dorian’s path using a Sharpie pen. What really mattered here was that the editing was, well, simply wrong and thus provided — from the Oval Office — explicitly false information about a life-and-death issue. Worsening the situation were Trump operatives attacking National Weather Service professionals who sought to get correct information out to protect lives (and uphold their responsibilities). The egregious nature of Trump political appointees defending Trump’s actions led the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chief Scientist to take the incredibly unusual (and, well, courageous) action of issuing a public statement defending the NWS personnel.
  • What would a President Trump do in a hurricane in September 2025? What would he (and his team) do to any public servant audacious enough to put public safety and American lives before helping make Trump look better and avoiding any hint of Trump making mistakes?
  • How laughable is it to even reflect for a moment to think that President Biden would do anything so anti-science and stupid as Trump’s deploying that Sharpie? And, just as ridiculous is to suggest that President Harris would do anything like that or that a Harris Administration would act to suppress maliciously the work of civil servants working to protect Americans.
• When briefed on a hurricane, Trump queried about blowing it up with a nuclear weapon. Oh, btw, that happened multiple times.
  • First, let’s recognize that this is part of Trump’s lifelong fascination with nuclear weapons (and card-carrying membership in the Dr. Strangelove crowd of ‘why have ’em if we won’t use them’) along with Trump’s other looks to nuclear weapons during his White House occupation that concerned even his appointees. Putting aside that reckless dalliance considering nuclear weapons use against other countries, attempting to blow up hurricanes with nuclear weapons is, simply, a bad idea. Looking again to those scientists at NOAA who Team Trump attacked, this is an idiotic idea:

“aside from the fact that [using nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane] might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.”

Again, does any rational human being think that President Biden and Vice President Harris are asking why we haven’t blown up Hurricane Helene with nuclear weapons?

Consider Trump’s Project 2025 and climate

Despite continued GOP climate science denialism, Ron Desantis’ and Florida Republican legislature’s ‘don’t hear, don’t see, don’t speak’ approach to climate change, and Trump’s Project 2025 cohort celebrating fossil foolish pollution, the science is clear: burning fossil fuels has heated (and is heating) the planet and there are mounting risks for humanity (let along the rest of the earth’s ecosystem). Hurricanes like Helene are, honestly, best described as unnatural disasters. The damage that burning fossil fuels has done to the climate system has created conditions for worsened and stronger storms. Hurricane Helene’s storm surges across much of the Florida Gulf coast are, for example, the largest ever recorded. Additionally, sea level rise increased due to fossil fuel burning impacts on the climate have further worsened the storm surge. (As an example illustrating this impact, about $8B of Hurricane Sandy’s $45B in damage is attributable to human-caused increases in sea level.)

There is a painful reality that we must recognize: humanity has already done significant damage to the climate system and, no matter what we do going forward, the pain will worsen before the situation stabilizes and then, hopefully, improves.

A corollary reality: we have a very clear choice in the election about that future:

• If he again occupies the White House, Trump (and his Project 2025 cohort) will disregard science (including Project 2025’s agenda to dismantle NOAA) and glorify ignorant measures to accelerate the climate crisis while undermining paths to mitigate pollution and adapt to the increasingly significant climate impacts.
• The Harris-Walz Administration, in glaring contrast, will respect (and promote) scientific conclusions and experience, pursue measures to mitigate (reduce) climate-impacting (and, honestly, other) pollution, execute programs for greater resilience to climate emergencies, and develop paths for adaptation to the climate change impacts that cannot be mitigated.

The choice is ours to make.

I pride myself on striving to think systems-of-systems, seeking to understand co-benefits and multi-solving along with potential negative impacts. Sometimes, however, I find myself strikingly (and, even, pleasantly) surprised when I fail to do so as was the case when first reading of induction stove-tops with built-in battery systems (about Impulse Labs‘ stovetop). Honestly, as written in a comment there, I found this “quite interesting and innovative” but wondered about the cubic space implications in high-value kitchen real estate (thinking of that very high traffic utensil drawer under my induction stove-top) and the complications of integrating the stove’s battery into a household and, more broadly, into grid and grid services. Legit “systems-of-systems” questions but, even with the evidence staring me in the face, I missed some of the really intriguing reasons why this is a power systems-of-systems approach.

In a Volts interview, Channing Street Copper Company‘s chief scientist, Sam Calisch, spoke of how having the battery made their induction stove and oven a plug-and-play into any 110 outlet without a requirement for an electrician for wiring a 220 plug (and, likely, do electrical panel work). One of the core principles of Energy Smart action is “make the better option the easier option”. Even without considering the reality that electricians are seemingly in short supply in every community across the country, removing rewiring from the path toward kitchen electrification is one less barrier to going with an induction stovetop. That this could save $1,000s isn’t insignificant either. And, speaking dollars and cents, that battery is eligible for tax credits above and beyond those the IRA offers for induction stovetops.

Calish highlighted how the ease of installation is playing out in the commercial market. Channing Street, in its initial sales, is selling their stove-top/oven for $6000 (final cost $4200 after battery tax credit + $780 if switching from a gas stove + additional benefits if income qualified). DC’s housing authority has, according to Calish, told them that these — in a systems-of-systems cost analysis — will be price competitive if they can be delivered for $5000 (not sure before or after potential IRA benefits). In other words, for the same price as other options, residents of those units would get a quality induction stove-top along with a four kilowatt hour battery.

That battery is critical to enabling the 110, rather than higher power, plug-in as the battery will supply power for peak loads (such as the few minutes to bring water to a boil or multiple burners on high power at once). That battery will also allow (limited?) cooking amid power outages and, with an outlet on it, allow plugging in other devices (phone/computer charging, lighting, …) during the outage.

In my inbox this morning, an email from The Climate Capitalist promoting a debunking post The Six Great Climate Fictions. Putting aside whether these are the right “six great”, this otherwise thoughtful post is yet another example where reality-based thinkers, seeking to support accelerated moves to climate action, think like a scientist (rather than following Randy Olsen‘s advice to Don’t Be Such a Scientist) and approach debunking erroneous arguments in a counter-productive manner.

Making clear that myths are myths with factual arguments is, in many ways, quite straightforward. Someone claims the earth is flat. Using satellite images (including live feeds from the International Space Station), our own senses of how we see things over the horizon (top appears first) and the nature of lunar eclipses, astronomical observations (even, again, with our own eyes), and otherwise, the evidence has been beyond overwhelming for millennia that the earth is spherical, not flat. All well and good and pretty compelling it might seem for left-brained analytical thinkers. However, that isn’t reality as regurgitating facts to debunk myths, especially well-established myths, only goes so far. And, the 21st century, that isn’t so far as cognitive science has made abundantly clear that “facts don’t change minds“.

Thus, to boost effectiveness, myth busting requires a deliberative approach. One good place to start: The Debunking Handbook. Just six pages of text, straightforward, with clear and direct advice. One of the core points: emphasize truth, not the myth. This includes sandwiching myths with truth and avoiding other ways of overly calling attention to the myth (such as putting the myth in bold characters).

There has been quite a furor over gas stoves (how they worsen human health along with cooking (far) less efficiently and safely than magnetic induction stove tops) over the past few months. During cold winter snaps, one can see and smell the signs of yet another indoor air quality disaster: wood-burning fireplaces.

ACTION ITEM NOTE: Open wood fireplace dampers are an energy inefficiency disaster. When not using the fireplace, seal the flu either with a DIY plug or buy something like a Fireplace Draftstopper. You’ll save money and have a more comfortable home.

The Washington Post‘s Allyson Chiu, amid the WashPost’s ramp-up of its climate coverage, wrote an article about fireplace issues and how to address them that appeared in the January 3rd Health & Science section as “How to light a greener blaze in the fireplace” (online 23 Dec). Amid a generally good laydown of issues with chimneys and fireplaces along with ameliorative options to those problems, this opening paragraph on “wood-burning fireplaces” go so much right and something quite fundamental wrong by implication:

A traditional open wood-burning fireplace “emits the greatest amount of pollution and is typically the least efficient,” according to a spokesperson with the Environmental Protection Agency. Most of the heat goes out through the chimney, making it a poor way to warm a home.

What is so right there?

• Wood-burning increases, significantly, indoor air pollution (with significant health impacts) and is a major contributor to outdoor pollution in many places.
• And, they are highly inefficient. When being used, a very good open wood fireplace might hit 25% efficiently but more often is 10 percent or less.

As to what is fundamentally wrong? Any implication that wood fireplaces actually contribute to warming a home.  Traditional fireplaces are actually disastrous as home heating systems

In seeking to understand climate risks, modeling of worst-case “business as usual” paths put the world on a path to 5C (five degrees celsius) / 9F (nine degrees fahrenheit), or more, warming within the lifetimes of people on earth today. Well, their lifetimes if they survived the enormity of climate catastrophes and disruptions that warming would create. Primarily due to the renewables (and efficiency and …) revolution, those worst-case scenarios have become increasingly unrealistic and even unhelpful. The high-end scenarios are more in range of 3C (<5F) and, more realistic extrapolations of technology progress lead to <2.5C (without additional, significant policy initiatives). Good — even if inadequate — news that warming won’t be nearly as bad as quality analysis. And, good news that it has been human actions that have made these changes. (E.g., after creating the problem we, humanity, actually have agency to address the problems we’ve created.)

However, despite that good news, the reality is that humanity has changed the climate through (primarily) fossil-fuel burning and, no matter the efforts to reduce and reverse the carbon pollution, humanity is already facing climate catastrophes that will worsen in the years and decades to come. And, at the same time modeling is showing less drastic temperature increases in the century to come, improved scientific knowledge and understanding (due, in part, to real-world events) makes clear that the impacts of lower temperature increases will be more significant and dangerous than what was modeled just a few years ago.

The Washington Post‘s Scott Dance’s A new climate reality: Less warming, but worse impacts on the planet provides an excellent half-page discussion of this.

Accelerating solar and wind energy adoption means global warming probably will not reach the extremes once feared, climate scientists say.

[Editorial note: “Scientists say …” is a horrible journalistic editorial practice. While, perhaps, true this really isn’t truthful. “Say” is a rather soft word that, often, in common parlance is used to question implicitly and/or undermine statements. (“He said, she said …”) Like writing “scientists believe” rather than “scientists conclude”, writing “scientists say” moves this away from conclusions based on research and analysis into a softer conceptual world.)

At the same time, recent heat, storms and ecological disasters prove, they say, that climate change impacts could be more severe than predicted even with less warming.

The Optimistic-Pessimist that I am: Optimism driven by clean tech fostering less severe temperature increases tempered by pessimism about the impacts of any temperature increases.

Researchers are increasingly worried about the degree to which even less-than-extreme increases in global temperatures will intensify heat and storms, irreversibly destabilize natural systems and overwhelm even highly developed societies. Extremes considered virtually impossible not long ago are already occurring.

Scientists pointed to recent signs of societies’ fragility: drought contributing to the Arab Spring uprisings; California narrowly avoiding widespread blackouts amid record-high temperatures; heat waves killing tens of thousands of people each year, including in Europe, the planet’s most developed continent.

It’s an indication that — even with successful efforts to reduce emissions and limit global warming — these dramatic swings could devastate many stable societies sooner, and more often, than previously expected.

Dance continues with some good discussions of, for example, the risks of weather extremes’ impacts even in a less (horrifically) extremely heated world climate.

While, in many ways, a good article there is a significant and glaring gap that is all too often glossed over in discussions about climate change. No matter what humanity does related to emissions, even a magical net zero tomorrow and achieving a net-negative global society by the day after tomorrow, we face inexorable — and accelerating — sea-level rise for the coming decades (and, sadly, likely centuries). And, counter to human action and increased knowledge and improved modeling reducing the forecasted future temperature increases, improved understanding is increasing the likely (and, for planning purposes as nearly as important, potential high-end) sea-level rise that humanity will face within the coming decades and century (within the timeframe of things already and being built today).

As John Englander of the Rising Seas Institute has laid out clearly in High Tide on Main Street and, more recently, Moving To Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward, the IPCC projection of three feet of sea-level rise by 2100, as a worst case, was/is simply unrealistic and derives, in no small part, in explicit leaving out of key sea-level risks from the forecasting due to modeling difficulty. (The “Antarctica Asterix”: potential sea-level rise from Antarctic ice sheet melting is simply left out due to uncertainty about how to model this.) Rather than three feet by 2100, that three feet is quite possible (maybe even probably) by perhaps 2060 and 7-10 feet likely by 2100 with a viable worst 2100 case perhaps more in the range of 20 feet than 3.

The rising seas, as John eloquently discusses, will have significant impacts on geography, human geography, and human civilizations. There is a useful adage about climate change: humanity faces three choices: address (mitigate by reducing emissions), adapt (invest to deal with the changes), and suffer (the consequences). Investing in the first is cheaper, more effective and the need for the second which is critically for reducing the extent and nature of the third. Reality is that all three will occur, the question has been the balance between the three (and decades of delayed and inadequate efforts to address climate change have driven increased need for adaptation and worsened today’s and tomorrow’s suffering). When it comes to the Rising Seas, the reality is that while mitigation of emissions is critical for where sea level rise will peak a century or centuries into the future, the key issue is our choices and actions between adaptation and suffering in the decades (and centuries to come).

Regrettably, around the world, there continues to be massive investments in threatened area that either seems utterly oblivious to the inevitability of sea-level rise or, nearly as bad, incorporates unrealistically optimistic (or, perhaps, not nearly pessimistic enough) projections of future sea-level rise.

Every day that passes with infrastructure investments in at-risk areas without adequate addressing sea-level risks worsens the suffering to come. While there are numerous reasons this occurs, one key one is the near absence from public understanding and discussions that [to paraphrase auto advertising] ‘tomorrow’s sea level isn’t our father’s sea level’. The seas are rising … no matter what we do. Until, and unless, we understand this and incorporate it into society’s planning and investments, tomorrow’s suffering will be (far) worse than it needs to be.

Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico’s power system hard enough that, for awhile, 100% of grid power services were cut off. Not a single utility customer was receiving power from the grid. That bleak reality doesn’t mean that 100 percent of Puerto Ricans (or, well, crypto buds avoiding taxes by residing in Puerto Rico) were without power. Many — individuals, businesses, and communities (community centers) — have generators, chugging away to provide electricity in the face of horrid normal service outages and in the face of major disasters. Those generators rely, of course, on diesel which is difficult to get amid and after a disaster (with shortages already reported in Puerto Rico post Fiona).

Increasingly, however, renewable energy has been making its mark. Renewables, of course, don’t eat up logistics and don’t, amid an emergency, require shelling out desperately needed cash to fuel them. While, regrettably, distributed renewables were made the centerpiece of Federal assistance post-Maria and haven’t had strong support from PR’s electric utility (which continues to push for large gas-fired plants).

Even without that support, there are over 40,000 distributed solar systems are connected to the grid, up over 8x since before Hurricane Maria, and there are untold additional set-ups that aren’t grid connected. Per a recent IEEFA report, “Households have installed more than 250 megawatts (MW) of distributed rooftop solar since September 2017.” These are providing near 4% of Puerto Rico’s electrical generation–more than utility-scale solar.

Increasingly, these aren’t just solar panels but also have storage and power management to foster reduced power usages in the face of grid collapse (such as amid Fiona) and failures (which, sigh, has been happening all too often even amid nice weather).

And, these systems have been working.

In the southeastern coastal city of Salinas, which was in the center of Fiona’s path and likely saw some of the storm’s worst damage, environmental attorney Ruth Santiago said her solar system also kept her lights on throughout the storm. “That’s why I’m charging my phone and making lunch and that kind of thing, but no one else has power,” she told me, apologizing as the beep of a timer chirped in the background. 

“Sorry,” she said, “that was just my oven going off.”

The same goes for a gas station in Utuado, a pharmacy in Patillas and a community center in Arecibo. All of them had installed solar panels and battery storage this summer and none lost power during the storm

And, quite literally saving lives. Consider this fire station:

 in the coastal city of Guánica, the local fire station managed to keep its lights and critical communications systems running during the storm thanks to a system of 52 solar panels and four Tesla Powerwall batteries. …

the Guánica fire department had been able to receive four emergency calls as Fiona lashed the island’s southern coast. During previous events such as Hurricane Maria and a 2020 earthquake — before the fire station had its solar-plus-battery system — firefighters were unable to receive calls over the radio during outages and instead had to rely on people yelling for help.

“The solar system is working beautifully! We did not lose power all throughout the hurricane.”

What a contrast that is to grid-connected facilities and to those reliant on expensive to run, loud, and fuel logistics dependent generators.

Now, the reality that solar is keeping the lights on for 100,000s of Puerto RIcans is a reality that too few of their fellow citizens around the country are aware of. This CBS story is a rare exception where (roughly at 5:45 in the video) solar power is discussed in terms of not just how it can but how it is delivering clean, affordable, reliable and resilient power for Puerto Ricans today and how it can do so for even more tomorrow.

Puerto Ricans support solar and other moves toward greater resiliency. It is past time for their fellow citizens, notably the Federal government (and, especially, FEMA), to help them achieve this.

Related: Hurricane Fiona and the imperative of Disaster 4R principles for Puerto Rico (and beyond).

When it comes to climate action, the focus is all too often on physical actions (put solar on roof, eat less meat, and so on). These actions are, quite legitimately, examples of what we all can and should be doing but aren’t necessarily the most critical individual action. After voting (at all levels and opportunities) like climate change matters, perhaps the most important individual action is to talk about climate change and about the necessity for serious action to address the climate crisis.

As recently published in Nature Communications, a study laid out how and why “just talk about it” really matters. While a super majority of Americans (66-80%) support climate action, the super-super majority (90%) don’t realize that and significantly underestimate public support for action, thinking that a minority (about 40%) support climate action. Just a few hours after reading this study, at a(n outdoor) dinner party at my house, a passionate grass-roots political activist who has placed climate as core to his engagement made clear that that 90% includes even seemingly well-informed people when he made a comment along the lines of “only half of Americans” support climate action, discounting entirely that even roughly half of self-identified Republicans support (at least somewhat serious) moves to address climate.

So, if you understand the criticality of the climate crisis and the necessity for action to address it, there is a simple rule to follow: Just talk about it!

Five years after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the island is dark.

Five years after Hurricane Maria and, despite billions spent (hard to write “invested”), the grid is devastated.

This did not have to be. It should not have been.

Between Trump grandstanding (paper towels anyone?), profiteering and corruption, (racist) indifference, incompetence, misguided thinking and planning, and a myriad of other issues, there has been a near-utter failure to leverage Maria’s devastation as an opportunity to build a cleaner, less expensive, and more resilient Puerto Rican power system. The Biden Administration has a chance to flip the equation and, through the application of a basic principle, change the game in Puerto Rico and across the United States (and, yes, globally) as to how to leverage disaster response to lessen the future necessity for and costs of disaster relief. That principle:

Disaster 4Rs

Disaster 4Rs calls for integrating responsiveness investments and actions across the three phases post-disaster (relief, recovery, and reconstruction) with a guiding principle throughout those phases: resiliency.

When it comes to the post disaster space, a core lesson from hundreds of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations is that effectiveness (saving lives, reducing future risks, efficient resource use) requires coordination across organizations and coordination across phases.

By ‘phases’, these can be summarized as the Three Rs:

• Relief: Life saving and getting minimal functions going for preserving life and reducing damage risks.
• Recovery: Help society move into a functioning stage so that people don’t need to leave and outside assistance can be reduced.
• Reconstruction: Measures to boost economic and social strength to pre-disaster (or better) levels.

In terms of efficient resource use and increasing the odds for a successful outcome (which includes a lesser likelihood of having to do another relief operation tomorrow), integrating across these phases as much as (reasonably) possible is key.  If one can do something in the “relief” phase that  contributes to “recovery” and is lays foundations for “reconstruction”, to use a baseball analogy, it is like hitting a triple.

For example, think housing. Whether earthquake, war, or a hurricane, disasters often devastate housing stock and displace people. Tarps and tents are great for immediate shelter and are (relatively) low cost and easy to deploy. While fantastic for relief, tents are marginal for recovery, and perhaps even negative for reconstruction. Instead of tents, deploying container-housing unit, like the US and allied militaries have used in places like Bosnia-i-Herzegovina and Iraq, blends from relief (quickly on site, quick to install) into recovery (housing elements that can stay around awhile).

Now, a container is more expensive than a tent — but that is a lasting investment rather than a (hopefully very) temporary path to the problem. A less expensive option comes from leveraging disaster-focused architectural options that can put local labor to work and leverage local materials to have permanent structures up in a day with about the same amount of transported in materials and total financial cost as occurs with a tent (and far less than a container). 

That lead to a fourth R: Resiliency: if that measure helps contributes to the potential for reducing future risks, investment returns are truly hitting a grand slam. Staying with housing, deploying container units and building locally with plans and ways to incorporate these into rebuilt infrastructure with high-wind and earthquake resistance makes that ‘shelter’ investment into a grand slam home-run solution. .

Distributed renewable energy is the blaring example of how to integrate across Disaster’s 4Rs  As the grid gets knocked down, in places around the world, the diesel generators kick in and disaster relief organizations send in even more generators. That translates into high-cost and high-pollution demand for diesel fuel — which, by the way, undermines the Three Rs through resource demands (transportation of that diesel fuel that conflicts with other demands on the logistics’ system and, of course, the cost of fuel strains limited financial resources).  With the price revolution in renewables (especially, in this context, solar photovoltaics (pv) and associated systems), the costs of going ‘green’ across phases, rather than using polluting diesel generators, is significantly advantaged to the clean energy option.

And, unlike the diesel generator, it is quite straightforward to integrate a solar system across the 4Rs. Deploying distributed systems that have the ability to grid-connect become, as the grid reestablishes itself, part of the grid system – generating electricity throughout all phases and providing assurance of (at least limited) electrical services in the face of the next disaster.

And, also unlike the diesel generators, such renewable energy systems boost economic prospects in the recovery and reconstruction phases: free electrons from the sun not only save money compared to imported diesel, they also don’t contribute to transportation bottlenecks and lessen resource requirements in grid investements.

Hurricane Fiona has shut down the Puerto Rican electrical system. Almost certainly, generators and diesel fuel for generators will be a major element of early relief deliveries.  Solar panels should be a major element in US government relief efforts.

Just as with Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Fiona’s impact on Puerto Rico is hard to fathom – there is likely not a single sector, not a single community without major (even crippling) damage.  Energy is critical to the 3Rs across all these sectors. Looking at Puerto Rico’s electricity situation, any honest analysis would conclude (differing, of course, as to specifics designs, how much, ..) that a rapid deployment of micro-grid solar would prove a Disaster 4Rs grand slam.

President Biden’s team — leveraging resources already legislated in the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Act bills along with disaster relief resources — should put together a (large) package for making distributed renewable energy (including storage) core to Fiona disaster relief. A relatively modest, in the face of the travesty of Puerto Rico’s power system and Maria’s/Fiona’s damage, $200 million program over 18 months would drive roughly 200 megawatts of solar capacity along with significant amounts of battery storage. Done right, this program would create well-compensated employment while boosting Puerto Rico’s capacity for additional distributed energy deployment while reducing the island’s cost of and pollution from generating electricity while enhancing resiliency against and reduce damage from future climate-crisis enhanced hurricanes.

Disaster 4Rs isn’t just for Puerto Rico

For US disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) needs to update its approaches — clean energy systems need to be a growing part of the ‘fly away’ kit for helping get emergency power to communities blacked-out by disasters (like New York/New Jersey post Sandy and New Orleans post Ida).  And, the US government requires an integrated approach to this so the ‘fly-away’ solar is done in a way that enables rapid creation of renewable-powered micro-grids, ready to be hooked into a reestablished grid, to address relief that facilities recovery and contributes to reconstruction.   And, the installations should proceed down a path so that the next time a climate-enhanced disaster hits the community, the solar keeps the lights on and lowers the costs/challenges of that next disaster’s 3Rs … truly a grand slam payoff.

“What was your solar installation’s ROI?”

This was a question recently posed to me packaged with context issues (is solar financially sensible, discussing Chinese panels, solar panel production pollution (without mention of coal’s pollution), and otherwise). When I began to a typically geekish ‘it all depends’, the interjection: no, what was YOUR solar system’s return on investment. The quick answer: about (under) three years.

In other words, an over 20 percent per annum, year-in, year-out return. This is an extremely high ROI for a (mainly) low-risk investment. And, that is an after-tax ROI.

Upfront, that ROI is unusually good and not replicable in most circumstances today even though solar on the rooftop remains a good to excellent low-risk investment for most people in most circumstances.

However, the quick “about three years” answer obscures complexities and provides a distorted window to support 2022 decision-making about solar installations. Join me, after the fold, for a quick exploration of some of those complexities. (Though, to be clear, not all will be discussed. For example, there are many complexities re taxes (both decreasing and increasing taxes) that are a labyrinth not to be lost in.)

From Tuesday’s Texas primary, the Republican primary for Texas Railroad Commissioner (TRC) has led to a runoff that might be the raciest election campaign of 2022.

An editorial note, first and foremost, 
SUPPORT LUKE WARFORD,
the D candidate
even while watching  the R runoff (with one candidate clearly better (or, well, not as bad)).
As to Luke, here is his campaign kickoff ad

As quick background, the Railroad Commission of Texas (RCT also known as TRC) is one of the more (most) important energy and environmental bodies (certainly at state level) in the United States (and hasn’t had any regulatory authority over railroads since 2005). The RRC, essentially, runs energy issues — outside electricity — in Texas with, critically for climate-change issues, the power to regulate and enforce regulations as to methane (“natural gas”) wells (including purposeful dumping of methane and leakage from production).  To say that they have been underwhelming in protecting the public and addressing climate change issues in their duties is a gross understatement of the problems.  This year’s RRC election and whether the Republican incumbent remains in office could have a major impact on this in the coming years.