TV News LIES

A decision by regulators to extend the life of two of the oldest reactors in the US decades beyond their original permits has elevated the risk of a nuclear disaster in heavily populated south Florida, environmental groups are warning.

The Miami Waterkeeper says the ageing Turkey Point facility in south Miami-Dade county, which was built in 1967 and generates power for a metropolitan area covering about 3 million people, is especially vulnerable to flooding and excessive heat from the climate emergency, in part because of its low-lying position and coastal exposure to a major hurricane.

The US Senate on Monday confirmed Chris Wright, a fracking executive, to be Donald Trump’s energy secretary.

The vote was 59-38.

Wright, 60, the CEO of Liberty Energy since 2011 has said he will step down from the company once confirmed. He wrote in a Liberty report last year that he believes human-caused climate change is real, but that its hazards are “distant and uncertain”. He has also said that top-down governmental policies to curb it are destined to fail.

However, Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.

“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile in 2023.

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The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

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Solar power shines bright in California, and wholesale energy prices prove it. Last winter and early spring’s dependence on solar drove wholesale energy prices to negative prices, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Solar power in the California Independent System Operator accounted for nearly 40% of net grid power for three hours on March 11, 2017, the administration reports —a major first.

These figures don’t translate for the consumer into retail prices, which are based on averages. But the move will likely cause energy companies to pay more attention to green energy options.

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