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- Will a Proposed Law Let Trump Handcuff His Successors to Fossil Fuels?
After Election Day, when Congress returns for its post-election session, the Senate will consider a sweeping bipartisan bill to ease regulatory constraints on energy projects. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA, supercharges clean-energy development by cutting red tape and curbing utilities’ ability to block competition, but it would also make it easier to build fossil fuel infrastructure and weaken longstanding environmental protections. That trade-off has divided Democrats and the environmental community. Some see the bill as a rare opportunity to accelerate the clean energy transition; others fear it would give President Donald Trump license to harm the environment in the remaining two years of his term. The controversy largely centers on one section, “Project Certainty,” which limits presidential administrations from using the federal permitting process to fight energy sources they dislike. Democratic Senate negotiators Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich backed the provisions, wanting to guard against future GOP attempts to sabotage clean energy projects, as the Trump administration has done with offshore wind. But a number of environmental groups warn that this part of the bill could backfire by locking in an unsustainable rate of fossil fuel development in perpetuity. If that happens, they argue, BAAJA would be a climate disaster no matter how much it boosts clean energy. BAAJA could indeed make it harder for future administrations to reverse environmentally damaging projects. But sweeping claims that the bill could lock in “fossil fuel dominance” rest on dubious interpretations of the legislative text and flawed assumptions about how energy companies operate. Market conditions constrain oil, gas, and coal production far more than federal permits. Clean energy developers, by contrast, enjoy enormous demand for their power but face maddening permitting delays and grid bottlenecks that prevent them from meeting it. That makes it difficult to argue that passing BAAJA—which Congress could do during the lame-duck session beginning November 9—would be worse for the climate than rejecting it. The Nightmare Scenario BAAJA’s “Project Certainty” section contains two key provisions. The first bars federal agencies from rescinding, terminating, or altering permits granted to energy projects—with limited exceptions, such as when a court finds a permit was issued illegally. Some critics fear this could allow Trump to crank out “forever permits” for dirty energy that a Democratic administration couldn’t undo. “There’s an incentive for developers to come up with any idea they can, and get it rubber-stamped before Trump leaves… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - AI Needs a Grange
One block from the White House stands a 12-story building, the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, erected in 1960—long the lone private holdout on a block of executive branch offices. The Grange isn’t the political force it once was. Still, its presence so close to the president reminds us that one of America’s most consequential community movements understood that local grievances sometimes require national attention, even when they resist entirely national solutions. The Grangers are often misremembered as a populist farmers’ movement that protested the power of the railroads and big business generally. This isn’t quite true: Nearly everyone in the Grange wanted railroads, supported freer trade, and pursued international markets. In many ways, its worldview was more cosmopolitan than the Gilded Age’s big businesses, which largely favored protectionist tariffs. What got Grangers engaged wasn’t the technology or big business itself, but decisions with vast, sometimes existential, consequences for their communities being made without them. Railroads were American big business and the most pervasive technology of the Second Industrial Revolution; their choices about everything from routing to rates to timetables could determine a community’s fate, without anyone asking the community. Granges’ agitation ultimately helped set in motion the Interstate Commerce Commission, uniform national standards for railroads, and, over time, rate regulation—which addressed real problems. The Grange movement should inform the current debate over AI, especially its belief that decisions belong near the people who live with them, and that they cannot decide well without honest information. The two of us—one an executive at a nonpartisan national foundation, the other president of a right-of-center think tank—arrive at that same conviction from different directions and don’t agree on every remedy. To a family weighing a new data center, artificial intelligence isn’t just an abstraction. It is whether the water table drops, whether the power bill climbs (or falls), whether new jobs are the jobs that were promised. Surveys find ordinary people are more skeptical of AI’s benefits than the experts and executives building it. And it’s obvious why. Such decisions affect the most elemental things a community has—its land, its water, its work, its sense of itself. That may explain the bipartisan, highly emotional reaction to data centers. Even when the industry answers one of these concerns—new data centers almost all have “closed loop” water systems that won’t touch aquifers—new ones arise. Isaiah Berlin argued that many of humanity’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Older Voters Dominate Elections to an Alarming Degree
One half of America’s “gerontocracy problem” is quite well known. Our last two presidents have turned 80 while in office. The median age of the U.S. Senate is 65, the age when Americans are eligible for Medicare. For House members, the median age is 58. The median age for governors is 62. And for the 7,386 elected state legislators, a 2024 study by Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics put their average age in the mid-50s—with more state legislators older than 80 than under 30. Far less discussed is the other half of America’s gerontocracy problem. It’s the age of those voting. Fewer than one in four eligible citizens cast ballots during the 2026 primary election cycle, in which voters selected Democratic and Republican nominees for more than 6,000 federal, statewide, and state legislative offices. Once all states’ voting files are available, the median age of 2026’s primary electorate will likely be like what a national study of the 2024 state primary cycle revealed: Roughly 65 years old. Since the nomination cycle began in early March, I’ve tracked primary election vote totals and official state voter registration figures for all 50 states. A collaboration with data analysis firm HaystaqDNA and L2, a national list vendor, has also allowed me access to official age-based primary election voter files for more than two dozen states. Here are some of the most important takeaways: Just 55 million voters—of the nation’s 215 million registered voters—cast primary ballots in 2026. That’s just a 25 percent turnout of registered voters. Use as the denominator all 245 million of America’s eligible citizens—registered or not—and the “no-show” rate is closer to 80 percent. For the roughly two dozen state primary elections with age-based voting data currently available, turnout among registered voters aged 65 and older is 46 percent—nearly quadruple the 13 percent rate among voters aged 18-34. While older voters dominate both major parties’ primaries, the “geriatric skew” in some key states was significantly more pronounced among Republican voters. In Pennsylvania—one of 30 states where voters formally affiliate with political parties—the median age of registered Democrats casting ballots was 65. Pennsylvania’s Republican voters were even grayer, with a median age of 70. Michigan doesn’t officially register voters by party. But among voters who decided to weigh in on the Republican side, the median age was 68, compared to 60 for… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Popular Australian children’s author jailed over child exploitation offenc...
The author of Jasper Jones and Runt pleaded guilty in May after police raided his home months earlier. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Binance users withdraw billions after record crypto hackThe exchange froze transactions in the wake of the incident, which impacted $6.3bn worth of digital assets. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
- Armed police start patrols in Sydney after Bondi Beach attackThe new police unit is a security measure in response to last year's deadly shooting attack at a Hanukkah festival. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
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