Climate and Environment

In response to news that Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) CEO Jeff Lyash issued a final decision to construct a new fossil gas plant and pipeline to replace an aging coal plant, Revolving Door Project Climate Research Director Dorothy Slater released the following statement:

We spent October highlighting the perpetual underfunding of most federal departments and agencies, and urging Congress and the Biden administration to use December’s omnibus bill to finally provide them with the money and resources they need. Sadly, while appropriations did increase for FY2023, budgets consistently fell short of what agencies requested. The most jarring example may be the Department of Housing and Development (HUD), whose budget is a whopping $16 billion shy of the requested $77.8 billion. Biden recently announced his goal to cut homelessness by 25 percent in the next two years, but it’s hard to see how even this meager goal will be achieved without a fully funded HUD.

Organizations from at least 20 states signed on, including  states which receive their power from the TVA, such as Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

In response to reports that the U.S. Senate confirmed six nominees to the Board of the Tennessee Valley Authority by voice vote Wednesday, Revolving Door Project Climate Research Director Dorothy Slater released the following statement:

The federally owned utility company could be leading the clean energy transition. Instead, it’s poisoning the countryside.

It’s been a bad few weeks for the sort of opinionated center-left pundit who prides themselves on data-driven, hyper-quantitative approaches to solving society’s intractable problems.

Both EA and popularism appeal to a desire for mathematical rigor and objective calculation, whether it’s calculating lives-saved-per-dollar or playing probabilities in politics.Both EA and popularism appeal to a desire for mathematical rigor and objective calculation, whether it’s calculating lives-saved-per-dollar or playing probabilities in politics.

Last November, President Biden signed the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The bill provides $1.2 trillion for infrastructure renovations nationwide, with $91 billion earmarked for various public transportation programs. At the time, Biden announced Mitch Landrieu would be the White House’s Senior Advisor and Infrastructure Coordinator in charge of implementing the landmark legislation, more colloquially known as the “Infrastructure Czar.” Landrieu now oversees a $1.2 trillion dollar bill, so he must be in constant communication with the administrators of key agencies to ensure it’s money well spent … right?

The rapid meltdown of FTX stands as one of the most gruesome chapters in the annals of investment fiascos: think of the false technological promises of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos grift combined with the evaporation of Bernie Madoff’s prestigious Ponzi fund. But the saga of FTX involves much more than either the vanity and hubris of Holmes’s fraud offensive or the deceptive practices of the Madoff scam. The rapid rise and fall of Bankman-Fried points up the delusional character of information-age capitalism; Far from standing as an outlying trend within the crypto investment world, Bankman-Fried’s scam was nestled at the very heart of its prevailing business model.

Last month, Jamie Rhome, the current Acting Director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC), effectively rejected settled climate science while discussing the then-potential severity and impact of Hurricane Ian. In that interview, Rhome said he would “caution against” linking the intensity of Hurricane Ian to climate change. To be clear, there is no question or ambiguity on this link. The worsening severity of extreme weather events as a result of climate change is something that has been firmly established, for years, by other federal agencies – like NASA – and also by international research bodies – like the National Academies – which makes Rhome’s refusal to do so all the more baffling. 

Today the Revolving Door Project released a petition calling on Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to remove Acting Director Jamie Rhome from his position running the National Hurricane Center (NHC) at the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA).