The U.S. needs more dispatchable electricity—and we need it immediately. Power demand is exploding across the country at the very moment the nation’s grid reliability is teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
The reshoring of heavy industry and the unprecedented AI-driven data center boom have collided the with the Biden administration’s effort to wipe out the coal fleet and make it impossible to build new baseload coal and natural gas plants.
President Trump is already tackling this crisis. On his first day in office, he declared an energy emergency, issued an “Unleashing American Energy” executive order and has since established the National Energy Dominance Council to refocus the nation’s energy policy. Reliability and affordability have once again taken center stage.
But the challenge facing the administration is enormous. U.S. electricity demand is projected to fully double by 2050 with a remarkable jump in demand already underway. A recent forecast sees demand rising 128 gigawatts (GW) over just the next five years—equivalent to adding 80 million homes to our already overstretched and under-supplied grid.
As the administration looks for reliable, immediately available generating capacity, the underutilized coal fleet is the answer hiding in plain sight.
Battered by an unrelenting regulatory agenda and unfair competition from heavily subsidized power sources, the coal fleet’s capacity factor – a measure of how often it’s providing power to the grid – rests at just 40%. The fleet is capable of much more. It is our strategic electricity reserve waiting for its moment. And that moment is now.
How much more power can the fleet provide? Consider its performance in critical, high-demand weeks and months. The coal fleet regularly ramps up generation, often reaching capacity factors above 60%. As recently as 2021, there were several months when the fleet had a capacity factor above 65%.
With months of fuel on site and the world’s largest coal reserves, the coal fleet is the nation’s ace in the hole to underpin reliability and dispatchable fuel diversity.
As power demand growth laps efforts to build new generating capacity and energy infrastructure, driving up electricity prices and threatening the economy, greater utilization of what we already have in place is the clear answer.
The Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA) – representing manufacturers with over 12,000 facilities nationwide and more than 1.9 million employees – have already warned “the manufacturing sector’s economic growth has never before faced such a growing crisis as we are faced with today, due to inadequate natural gas pipeline capacity.”
IECA told Congress gas supply on the East Coast is already so constrained it’s all but impossible for manufacturers to consider expansion of existing operations or investment in new facilities.
Semiconductor and battery plants, and even data centers with the energy needs of cities, simply won’t be built if they can’t find affordable energy, leaving untold jobs and tax revenue just sitting on the table.
While reducing barriers and timelines to adding new energy infrastructure is an important piece of the answer, IECA has asked for one critical, difference-making action: “to not prematurely shut down coal-fired electric generating units.”
Utilities are already answering the call, cancelling planned coal plant retirements across the country from Georgia to Indiana to Utah and Wyoming. But federal action to not only preserve the fleet but make greater use of it is what is needed in this energy emergency.
Energy abundance is the key to winning today’s global industrial arms race. The world is using more coal than ever before. It is past time the U.S. recognizes its coal fleet and coal mining industry not as problems to solve but as answers to today’s most pressing challenges. The coal fleet can and should underpin the administration’s energy abundance agenda.
Rich Nolan is President and CEO of the National Mining Association
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
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Budget-Busting Climate Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act Must Go
Atlantic Circulation Not Waning in Response to Climate Change
Crops Doing Fine, Increase in Social Cost of Carbon Calculation Was Unwarranted
Budget-Busting Climate Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act Must Go
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 16, 2022. The bill was badly mistitled and intentionally so.
The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress took advantage of Americans’ desire for a response to high and rising prices for food, fuel, and other basic consumer goods. The people of the United States wanted federal leadership to take steps to alleviate inflation. Of course, the inflation itself was an artifact of federal overspending coming out of the pandemic at a time when supply chain issues and various federal and international policies were hampering supply. When demand outpaces supply, prices rise.
The IRA, in fact, contributed to higher inflation. Its provisions—the massive spending on projects no one was demanding, and policies limiting products people wanted—drove prices higher.
In truth, the IRA was nothing more nor less than a backdoor effort to impose the Green New Deal scam that Biden and company had tried and failed to pass through Congress previously. Biden promised an all-of-government approach to fighting climate change, and the IRA was the vehicle. They repackaged the Green New Deal as Inflation Reduction and brought it up for a vote. It passed without a single Republican voting in favor of it.
Critics of the law warned of its inflationary effects at the time of its passage, but the mainstream media chose to ignore their claims.
Since its passage, as critics feared, the IRA resulted in billions of dollars being wasted on various green boondoggles, including companies that were given huge infusions of taxpayer dollars in IRA spending but still went bankrupt because of poor technology and lack of consumer demand. Billions more taxpayer dollars have been shipped, without accountability or transparency, to environmental startups with no track history but with strong connections to Biden, Biden administration bureaucrats, and powerful Democratic Congress swamp creatures.
More than a year after he signed the IRA into law, when confronted with the fact that it wasn’t doing anything to curb inflation, Biden admitted the truth, saying at a fundraiser the IRA “has nothing to do with inflation; it has to do with … $368 billion, the single-largest investment in climate change anywhere in the world—no one has ever, ever spent that.”
The White House estimated the total cost of the IRA, not just the climate program portions, would be $392 billion over ten years, with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimating it would add $270 billion to the federal debt.
These estimates, as federal program estimates commonly are, were laughably low. Based on spending that is already out the door, the costs of the climate portions of the bill alone exceed Biden’s estimate for the entire bill.
As detailed in a new study by The Heartland Institute’s Tim Benson, “The High Costs of Climate Scams: Assessing the Green Giveaways in the Inflation Reduction Act,” most of the costs come in the form of tax credits given to various green energy programs.
As Benson explains, the initial federal allocation for just three tax credits tops $182 billion: the investment and production tax credit, tax credits for individual energy efficiency improvements, and the zero emissions vehicle tax credit. In addition to tax credits, there are direct federal spending, both directed and discretionary; various subsidies for the adoption of selected technologies or industrial and agricultural practices approved by the government; other subsidies; and low-interest loans and loan guarantees.
Under Environmental Protection Agency guidance issued after the IRA was passed, many of the programs are open-ended, with no caps on enrollment or claims of tax credits, so the cost estimates have ballooned. Benson examines the myriad estimates from different groups, writing,
In November 2022, Credit Suisse, the Swiss global investment bank and financial services firm, estimated total federal spending on these “green” provisions in the IRA would [because of their uncapped nature] exceed $800 billion, double the Biden administration’s claims, and possibly reaching as high as $1.7 trillion.
In April 2023, the U.S. Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), … put the spending figure at $570 billion from 2023 to 2033.18 In June of 2023, the JCT increased its estimate to $633 billion.
Also in April 2023, Goldman Sachs, the American multinational investment bank and financial services company, estimated the IRA’s spending incentives at $1.2 trillion through 2032.
In a March 2023 report, the Brookings Institution, a left-wing think tank, produced a cost estimate for the IRA’s green subsides that ranged from $900 billion to $1.2 trillion through 2031.
A February 2024 analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonpartisan think tank co-chaired by the former Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, and Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense during the Barack Obama administration and former Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton, put the cost estimate of IRA at $870 billion through 2031 and $1.1 trillion through 2033. An estimate from the Cato Institute in March 2024 found the cost of the IRA’s green subsidies could be north of $1.8 trillion over a decade.
In January 2025, CBO director Philip Swagel announced that the green subsidies in the IRA would increase budget deficits by $825 billion from 2025 to 2035, far above the original $270 billion estimate from 2022 to 2031.
President Donald Trump and his appointees are well aware of the IRA scam, its detrimental interference in consumer choice, its skewing of capital investment, and its undermining of sound energy policy. Trump directed his agencies to look for unspent IRA funds, block new spending, and claw back what they could. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency director, has already identified more than $20 billion dollars held in a private bank to be shipped to Biden/Democrat crony nongovernmental organizations, has directed the bank not to disperse the funds, and is working on getting the money returned to the government. But administrative action is not enough. The law was approved, narrowly, by Congress. As a result, some of the green spending can only be blocked or clawed back if Congress rescinds it.
With this in mind, a coalition of groups, led by our allies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, sent a letter to the Republican-controlled Congress requesting they stand by their earlier stance on the IRA and get back as much of the money as legally possible. The letter, signed by 53 leaders of research institutes and state-based think tanks across the country, including James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute, and Cameron Sholty, executive director of Heartland Impact, states in part,
The undersigned organization urge all legislators, regardless of party, to make it a priority to get rid of the IRA’s Green New Deal provisions. Many conservative policymakers have made undoing the Green New Deal a priority. This is impossible without undoing the IRA “green” subsidies, which are the heart of the Green New Deal.
The spotlight will be on Republicans and more specifically on whether they can come through for the American people by getting rid of these IRA subsidies. If the subsidies are not repealed in reconciliation, this will be a devastating result. It will be characterized as a major failure and an ominous sign for the 119th Congress, as well as a failure to advance President Donald Trump’s Unleashing American Energy agenda. Those characterizations would be fair. . . .
The IRA is filled with numerous subsidies that were designed to shift our country away from reliable electricity generation (coal and natural gas) to unreliable electricity sources (e.g. wind and solar). This comes at a time of concern about the reliability of the nation’s electricity grid, in large part because of misguided corporate welfare policies that undermine reliable baseload generation.
There are also IRA subsidies that work in conjunction with other policies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s de facto electric vehicle mandate, to kill off gas-powered vehicles—undermining the freedom of Americans to choose their cars.
These examples capture just some of the problems with the IRA “green” subsidies.
The letter is worth reading in its entirety, and I encourage you to do so.
Atlantic Circulation Not Waning in Response to Climate Change
Two recent studies, one published in Nature in February 2025 and one in Nature Communications in January 2025, come to the same conclusion: there is no evidence the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is in decline or slowing, much less being on the verge of collapse, despite repeated media claims to the contrary over the years.
The AMOC is critical for global ocean carbon and heat uptake and transference, in large part controlling the climate in the North Atlantic and large regions of the continents and nations that abut it. The January study found climate model simulations fail to accurately reflect the AMOC’s patterns and changes. Looking at heat flux data (the amount of energy transferred from one place to the other in the form of heat) for the AMOC, the authors of this study conclude the AMOC has not weakened over the past six decades.
The February study found once upwelling and downwelling across the system are properly accounted for, the AMOC is resilient even in extreme greenhouse gas emission scenarios. As a result, the researchers write, “[o]ur findings reveal AMOC-stabilizing mechanisms with implications for past and future AMOC changes, and hence for ecosystems and ocean biogeochemistry, … suggesting that an AMOC collapse is unlikely this century.”
My colleague meteorologist Anthony Watts covered these reports in a recent Climate Realism post, noting that in the past few years climate alarmists have asserted the AMOC is slowing down, which they claimed would lead to catastrophic consequences, and alternately that it is speeding up, which would lead to dire consequences, with the two inconsistent scenarios blamed on human greenhouse gas emissions. The mainstream media, Watts points out, have shamelessly promoted both scenarios, writing scary stories about climate doom while never asking how the AMOC can be slowing down and speeding up at the same time.
Now that back-to-back papers show neither scenario seems to be occurring, that in fact the AMOC is stable and perhaps even largely self-stabilizing, with little or no threat of causing dangerous climate conditions in the foreseeable future, Watts asks why the media aren’t covering this good news:
So, where is the wall-to-wall media coverage of this reassuring news? Where are the CNN specials, the New York Times op-eds, and the breathless Guardian headlines announcing that disaster is not in the offing? They are nowhere to be found.
Now that we have two peer-reviewed studies that have determined the AMOC has been stable for at least six decades and is extremely unlikely to collapse in the foreseeable future, the silence from mainstream media outlets is deafening. The same journalists who eagerly ran worst-case scenario stories are now unwilling to report findings that contradict their previous fearmongering.
Crops Doing Fine, Increase in Social Cost of Carbon Calculation Was Unwarranted
The Biden administration increased the federal government’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) assessment by 500 percent, based on the claim that data on crop yields from 2014 suggested a sharp decline over time, dramatically increasing the cost of each ton of carbon emitted.
Research recently published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports looking at the same datasets came to the opposite conclusion. Professor Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph in Canada found the Biden administration used less than half the data that was available for analysis. The administration threw out datasets that were missing critical variables, primarily carbon dioxide levels, necessary for a multivariate analysis.
After examining the underlying sources of the data, McKitrick was able to recover the missing data for 366 additional datasets. Analyzing the broader set of records, McKitrick found not only would crop yields not be expected to decline as CO2 increased in the atmosphere, yields would increase, as they have in fact done up to this point.
McKitrick writes,
While the original smaller data set implies yield declines of all crop types even at low levels of warming, on the full data set global average yield changes are zero or positive even out to 5 °C warming.
[Any] negative temperature effects are fully offset by gains from CO2 fertilization and adaptation.
That means the Biden administration was wrong to predict increased CO2 would cause large global welfare losses through declining crop yields, and that its huge upward revision of the SCC was unjustified.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
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This video by Paul Burgess looks at the extreme policies advocated for us all to follow in order to reach the holy grail of net zero. Most of it will comes as quite a shock to the public.
The old saw, “Everything is bigger in Texas,” may soon be coming true once again, as the Nueces River Authority has revealed plans for a deepwater desalination plant off Harbor Island near Corpus Christi that would immediately become the nation’s largest – and with planned expansions by 2070, larger than all but two of the world’s existing desalination plants.
Desalination today provides potable water to billions of people worldwide, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and other Middle Eastern countries leading the way. The world’s largest, Ras at Khair in Saudi Arabia, has a capacity of 228 million Imperial gallons per day (MIGD).
A 2022 report stated that of the approximately 17,000 operational desalination facilities globally, only about 300 were in the U.S., led by 167 in Florida, 58 in California, and 52 in Texas. The Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest U.S. desalination plant and currently the world’s ninth largest, supplies up to 50 MIGD to the city of San Diego.
Seven of the next nine largest U.S. desalination plants are in Florida, but ranking fifth is the Kay Bailey Hutchison facility in El Paso, which opened in 2007. The El Paso facility, however, is also the world’s largest inland desalination plant, cleaning up to 27.5 million gallons per day (Mgpd) of brackish water for use at Fort Bliss and in El Paso.
Close behind is the H2Oaks facility in San Antonio, which opened in 2017 and currently produces up to 12 Mgpd, with plans to expand capacity to 30 Mgpd by 2040.
When Alice, Texas, decided to expand capacity for its own brackish-water desalination plant in 2022, it became the first brackish-water desalination plant in the state to employ a public-private partnership rather than rely on 100% financing from theState Water Implementation Fund for Texas (SWIFT).
Florida-based Seven Seas Water Group convinced Alice officials that by financing the desalination plant with private sector capital and completing the source wells and pipelines with state revolving fund financing, the city could lower its water supply costs while transferring the risks of construction and operations to Seven Seas. After 15 years, the city can assume ownership of the facility.
John Byrum, Executive Director of the Nueces River Authority, says the NRA intends to use that same route for construction and operation of its planned 100 Mgpd phase 1 desalination plant (twice the size of the Carlsbad plant), which could become operational within the next few years. The system design includes options to increase capacity to 450 Mgpd by 2070, depending on growth and water needs.
Byrum points to current drought conditions and to a 2015 NASA prediction that the American West is likely to experience severe “megadroughts” that may be more extreme and prolonged than even the droughts of the 1930s. Lake Corpus Christi and the Choke Canyon Reservoir, which service south central Texas, are currently at 17.9% of their combined capacity.
Bynum’s team has obtained water needs projections from every public and large private water user in a 14-county area in the Region L water planning area in search of water purchase commitments from the proposed desalination facility. The NRA is working with the Port of Corpus Christi, which has applied for permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the intake and water diversion structures for the planned facility.
The NRA is also negotiating a lease with the Port of Corpus Christi for the Harbor Island property, which is east of the city near the Port Aransas ferry dock.
Just as Alice relied on a public-private partnership, the NRA facility would be financed via a public-private partnership in which the Authority would construct and operate the conveyance system to distribute the water while a very experienced desalination company would build and operate the plant at least until the debt owed to the company was fully repaid.
Byrum says the waste material would be sent, with negligible environmental impact, into deep water in the Gulf of America, though it is possible that the brine could first be “mined” for valuable minerals. Another benefit from using desalinated water is that, as this “new water” is processed through wastewater treatment after use it adds to streamflow in south central Texas’ parched Frio and Nueces Rivers.
While the NRA facility is being designed to serve the area’s large industrial facilities as well as smaller communities in need of additional potable water, the City of Corpus Christi is awaiting final permits before moving forward with construction of its own 30 Mgpd desalination plant, to be built in the ship channel in the inner harbor. The city’s contractor, Texas-based Kiewit Infrastructure South Co., which has designed and built several desalination plants, anticipates it could complete construction by early 2028.
Texas is hardly done with desalination projects. The Southmost Regional Water Authority just announced plans to double the capacity of its Brownsville brackish water desalination plant from 10 Mgpd to 20 Mgpd at a cost of $213 million. Brownsville Mayor John Cowen is seeking funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for the project, which is needed to serve area industries and its growing population.
Earlier, the Laguna Madre Water District announced plans to build a 10 Mgpd reverse osmosis seawater desalination plant in Port Isabel using Gulf of America water from the Brownsville Ship Channel. LMWD general manager Carlos Galvan says district voters had approved a $15.6 million bond in 2011 to build the plant, which is being augmented by a $10 million SWIFT loan.
The SWIFT program, housed within the Texas Water Development Board, has committed nearly $11.5 billion to fund implementation of recommended water management strategy projects within the state’s water plan since 2017. This revolving loan fund is a huge part of the state’s long-term water security strategy as Texas continues to add people and industrial facilities.
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