The Ledger, every show

“An investigation from the Miami Herald and Orlando Sentinel found that FPNL, Florida's biggest utility, sent millions of dollars to Matrix to prop up fake candidates in local races. Those so-called ghost candidates siphoned votes away from candidates who the u…”

“The floodlight team found direct financial links between six local news outlets, Matrix, FPNL, and Alabama Power. Matrix used utility money to fund political websites with names like Alabama Today, Florida Politics, and The Capitalist, and buy favorable covera…”

“Musk also laid off the entire supercharger team, and now he's putting all his attention on an autonomous robo-taxi.”

“The Inflation Reduction Act allocated seven and a half billion dollars to building out a national EV charger network in this country, and two billion of those funds have been allocated to states, but there have been zero chargers built as part of those funds, …”

“More than half of the incentives are actually being in on the manufacturing side are being taken and Advantage of by firms outside the US.”

“Back in February, we made an episode about how 99% of coal plants in America are more expensive to operate than new renewables.”

“According to the Financial Times, Republican-held congressional districts are getting five times more funding for clean energy projects, including new manufacturing plants, than ones controlled by Democrats through this IRA legislation.”

“At the time she was setting up Citizens for Responsible Solar, Ralston's firm pulled in 300,000 dollars from the Paul Singer Foundation,”

“Florida Power and Light has one of the biggest renewable energy development arms in the country, but they want to own it, and, ah, any policies that promote customer empowerment are potentially a threat to the utility”

“And even with windfall profits, clean energy only accounts for five percent of oil company capital expenditures globally.”

“Tesla was facing a criminal probe from the Department of Justice for inflating autopilot capabilities, and a handful of startups were facing cash flow crunches.”

“A study just published in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at a 115 companies with science-based targets. These are targets modeled after the Paris Climate Accord, and researchers found that 42% of planned emissions cuts from those companies will quote…”

“In the fall of last year, there was some investigative reporting about what was happening to the grid under Luma, and one of the stats that grabbed me was that outage times have actually doubled under Luma. It's taking them longer to repair service than it did…”

“Is that it has no way of calculating the cost of climate change to the economy.”

“And if you want to trade that Bitcoin or use it to buy something, no matter how small, that single transaction could use enough energy to power an American home for six weeks.”

“What Brian saw in Lake Seneca is unfolding across the U.S. Coal and gas power plants that are under pressure in Ohio, Montana, Pennsylvania, and even elsewhere in New York are now getting an economic lifeline thanks to partnerships with Bitcoin miners.”

“There's a real serious consideration inside the Biden administration to use wartime powers to boost heat pump production and then to send those heat pumps over to Europe to for heating to reduce natural gas consumption.”

“And so Mark dug into the history of the term, and he soon found that this popular framing wasn't grounded in science or academia. It was the direct result of a public relations campaign. It was a story made up by a multinational oil company.”

“Since 1988, only a hundred companies have been the source of 70% of the world's heat-trapping gases, and BP's campaign did a miraculously good job of deflecting that blame for nearly two decades”

“Again, it was non-binding, but it scared the local investor-owned utility Tampa Electric, also known as TECO. So TECO did what a lot of other gas utilities are doing. It used its lobbying power and money to launch a more aggressive counter-strike.”

“The bills passed, and in June, Governor Ron DeSantis signed them into law. One would preempt any bans on gasoline refueling stations, and another would prevent all local governments across Florida from restricting any source of energy from utilities.”

“It's contradictory to this idea of energy abundance, and so there's, like, very little strategic thought to these actions, and I think it could be extremely detrimental to bringing in investment for the set of technologies that this administration does want.”

“So in the UK and the US alone, we're talking about a half a terawatt of capacity, distributed resource capacity, getting installed very quickly here in the next couple of years.”

“According to the Department of Energy, we're going to need new resources to meet this amount of peak demand by 2030 because of new load, like data centers electric vehicles, broader electrification, manufacturing facilities, and then also retiring coal plants.…”

“10 to 20 gigawatts of peak load to the system, requiring 12 to 18 gigawatts of renewable capacity.”

“What they found was that these AI-driven time series models could improve accuracy by 30 to 50%.”

“And not only are we seeing an increase, a massive increase in investment, but that that's the only piece of the clean energy transition that's on track for a net zero scenario. So we're actually ahead of schedule in supply chain investments, particularly in so…”

“It doesn't mean that fossil fuel extraction or consumption is going to decline precipitously. It just means that we've reached the peak and that we hopefully will see a steep decline, but we're more likely going to see a Gradual decline past 2030.”

“Almost nobody would disagree that we have about 80% of the technologies today across the electricity sector, industry, and transportation to decarbonize and decarbonize fast if we were really putting our shoulders into it.”

“Meeting that demand is going to require tens of billions of dollars in new transmission, but transmission investments among investor-owned utilities have actually declined in the last few years, and so that's causing this massive backlog of renewables and batt…”

“Now, Wood Mac expects about 370 gigawatts yearly by then.”

“Princeton University has estimated that we're gonna, ah, light duty vehicles, ah, are gonna use 3000% more electricity by 20 35 than they do today.”

“The EIA's Winter Fuels Outlook... Showing that because of the decline in gas prices, homeowners who heat with fossil gas will on average see 40% lower bills than those that heat with electricity”

“Just today, right before we started recording, the Danish developer Orsted said it would ditch two offshore wind farms off the coast of New Jersey because of rising financing and construction costs, and it'll take maybe a five and a half billion dollar write d…”

“It's sort of a subcategory where you're going to see a lot of AI integration into existing products, but there's not going to be this like AI only category and climate tech. It's going to be a part of many of the other existing climate tech categories”

“The industrial sector is set to overtake power generation and transportation as the biggest source of planet warming emissions in the U.S. By twenty-thirty-five.”

“Only four percent Of projects, of green hydrogen projects hydrogen made by electrolyzers are, that have been announced in the last couple of years are actually under construction or have reached final investment stage”

“And then suddenly you have this finding that rooftop solar can shave enough demand to shut down the region's third biggest fossil power plant.”

“And now most serious people who are studying this say we can handle on a lot of grids, 80% renewable energy.”

“Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government, but undeterred, they were ready to run another test, and a few weeks ago, they launched some more balloons just outside of Reno, N…”

“It's this free market think tank supported by the Kochs that is bankrolling opposition to offshore wind, and that quickly brought him to Facebook.”

“Earlier this year, FPNL's CEO stepped down amidst a swirl of scandal at the company, including campaign finance violations, journalist surveillance, and media manipulation.”

“Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government, but undeterred, they were ready to run another test, and a few weeks ago, they launched some more balloons just outside of Reno, N…”

“Just a couple of days before we are having this conversation, a financial analysis was released looking at this anti-ESG bill in Indiana, and so there's this GOP push across the country to, you know, pull public pensions out of ESG Investing. And in Indiana, t…”

“Combined, the top oil majors brought in nearly two hundred billion dollars in profits last year.”

“The gas industry has paid experts to testify at regulatory hearings, paid influencers to promote the use of gas stoves over electric ones, Even made corny music videos hammering the message home.”

“He made the comments to Bloomberg in response to new peer-reviewed research, which builds on many studies from the last few years, showing that gas stoves are terrible for your health, and they directly contribute to 12% of childhood asthma cases.”

“And new research shows Western Europe is seeing a three to four times increase in heat waves compared to anywhere else in the northern mid-latitudes.”