• Hill Heat
  • Posts
  • Climate Crisis, Carbon Crimes, and Crypto Cash

Climate Crisis, Carbon Crimes, and Crypto Cash

The costs are rising.

Author

Brad Johnson
May 20, 2025

The daily decisions in DC will shape the world for the rest of our lives. Help keep this critical coverage available to the public by becoming a paid subscriber:

PRESENTED BY THE PYGMY NUTHATCH OF CARMEL

In February, Trump declared the cost of carbon pollution to be zero and started firing the nation’s weather forecasters. Over the weekend, fossil-fueled storms killed 28 people in Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia, knocking out power for hundreds of thousands, as understaffed National Weather Service offices scrambled to stay open. By executive order, the lives lost had no value.

Trump is trundling over to the U.S. Capitol to wrangle votes with House Republicans for his Big Brutal Bill, with the Rules Committee markup scheduled for 1 am.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) after talking a good game about how important parliamentary rules were to him, will blow up the rule of law on behalf of Big Oil this week. He’s announced that Republicans will illegally use the Congressional Review Act to kill California’s electric cars mandates. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) notes this is a thermonuclear grade event, as it would “be the first time in Senate history that a majority overruled the Parliamentarian to pass a bill by a majority vote".”

Environmental Protection Agency hatchetman Lee Zeldin, Sicario cosplayer Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Interior figurehead Doug Burgum are testifying before Congress this morning, selling the Trump agenda of poisoning Americans, killing off FEMA, making war on peace, and eliminating most of our national parks.

Zeldin is in a bit of trouble with the courts for freezing climate grants. As an appellate judge said yesterday, “The facts here are not great for the government.”

i'm generation lead/generation microplastics cusp

— radical lisa loebotomy (@nfornihilism.net)2025-05-19T12:49:05.606Z

Hill Heat contributor Jordan Haedtler calls for states like California to establish public catastrophe models to guide insurance policies for climate disasters like wildfires and storms.

Apparently credit risk assessors are obsessed by alliteration, with the mantra of “character, capacity, capital, condition and collateral.” First Street wrote a big-ass report to justify adding “climate” to the list, saying “traditional credit models that ignore physical climate hazards are underestimating risk at a systemic level” because credit losses alone from fossil-fueled weather could rise “sharply to $5.4 billion by 2035.” Translated by CBS’s Mary Cunningham, “Extreme weather linked to climate change could spell financial ruin for many American homeowners and lead to billions in losses for lenders.” First Street is hosting a webinar on the report on Thursday morning.

The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, headed by world-renowned climate scientists including Jim Hansen and now Gavin Schmidt, has been DOGEd, and is shutting down at the end of the month. The Trump regime broke a lease on its building that goes to 2031.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is mad at Mark Zuckerburg. Meta is building a behemoth AI data center in Louisiana with a custom fracked-gas power plant.

On the other hand, Democratic Sens. Angela Alsobrooks (Md.), Lisa Blunt Rochester (Del.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), John Fetterman (Pa.), Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Ben Ray Luján (N.M.), Jon Ossoff (Ga.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), Jacky Rosen (Nev.), Adam Schiff (Calif.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.) and Mark Warner (Va.) love them the data centers and the crypto cash they carry for campaign coffers, breaking the filibuster yesterday on the crypto-scam-industry GENIUS Act, named to honor Mark Twain’s famous poem, Genius.

• AI’s electricity needs have limited and highly uncertain growth prospects, and even if large, are a much smaller part of potential total national or global electricity growth than of its public and private financial risks, especially near data hubs; and

• AI data centers are best paired with renewables—especially quick-to-scale solar power, which has proven quick, reliable, secure, competitive, and effective; but

• AI is being hyped and officially posited to justify more gas, coal, and nuclear power —all unneeded, uncompetitive, and likely to raise everyone’s costs and risks.

A giant wind project off the shores of New York was on the Trump chopping block but yesterday got the green light to continue after Trump chickened out from fighting with Norway.

The forever chemicals are still flowing from the Chemours Washington Works plant in West Virginia, poisoning water supplies as far away as Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Tuesday’s legislative hearings include witnesses testifying on:

Not much luck for us with Warblers this migration, but we did get a good look at this Hooded Warbler.

Forrest Wickman believes the bird in Charlie’s Angels is the wrongest bird in the history of cinema.

Hearings on the Hill:

Climate Action Today:

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

Hill Heat isn’t powered by fossil-fuel greenwashing cash. It’s powered by readers like you:

Reply

or to participate.