A brief sampling…
Less clean energy will be built in Texas as a result of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” signed into law by President Donald Trump on the Fourth of July, which could raise annual energy costs for everyday residents by hundreds of dollars in the coming years, industry associations and energy researchers say.
Most damaging to the clean energy industry is that the Big Beautiful Bill aggressively phases out federal tax credits for solar and wind projects, which were greatly expanded in former President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation in 2022.
Clean energy developers will have a harder time raising money to build their projects if they can’t factor in the tax credits. Many projects may no longer make financial sense and could be abandoned altogether.
“We are, in essence, pulling the rug out from underneath these projects,” said Harry Godfrey, a managing director at Advanced Energy United, a trade group for clean energy companies across the country.
Different groups, however, disagree on just how damaging the new law might be to the industry, which has the most future solar and wind capacity planned for Texas, the state that already has by far the most renewable energy.
One model of the Big Beautiful Bill’s impact forecasts a bloodbath: Texas could lose out on 77 gigawatts of electricity capacity — enough power to supply more than 19 million homes — that might’ve otherwise been built over the next decade if the tax credits were maintained.
In other words, instead of adding 104 gigawatts of new electricity supply in the next ten years, Texas is expected to add only 27 gigawatts, according to Energy Innovation’s modeling, said Dan O’Brien, a senior analyst at the think tank.
“Texas is by far the biggest loser,” he said, compared to other states. In second place is Florida, which could see 50 fewer gigawatts of electricity supply as a result of the new law, according to Energy Innovation’s analysis.
Who among us doesn’t want higher electric bills?
ICE crackdown rattles Houston’s construction industry as contractors warn of labor shortage
Zaldaña Ramirez was held in a detention center for three weeks until he was released on bond in mid-March. “I felt desperate,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been there… I’m not a criminal.”
His story is one of many stoking anxiety across Houston’s construction industry, where more than a third of workers are immigrants. As the Trump administration escalates enforcement, even targeting those with legal work permits, the immigration crackdown threatens to destabilize a key pillar of the industry: access to affordable foreign-born labor.
With hundreds of thousands of construction jobs already unfilled nationwide, the question looms: If more immigrant workers disappear, who will be left to build?
Although estimates vary, the U.S. construction industry is short anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 workers in any given month, according to the National Association of Homebuilders.
“This shortage isn’t going to be filled just solely by U.S. citizens,” said Geoffrey Tahuahua, president of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Texas, a trade association. “It’s going to have to be a combination of many different things.”
In Texas, immigrant workers make up about 38% of all construction workers, according to the NAHB.
Nearly a quarter of Texas construction workers are undocumented, according to estimates from the American Immigration Council. That suggests there could be more than 53,000 undocumented construction workers in the Houston region.
That pool of undocumented workers in Houston is likely to shrink as immigration enforcement expands across Texas.
Who among us doesn’t want higher home construction costs?
Trump’s Medicaid cuts could be a death sentence for thousands of HIV-positive Texans
Marc Cohen can’t remember the last time he attended a funeral of someone who died of AIDs.
He was diagnosed with the virus in 1987, when the first medication to treat HIV/AIDS, called AZT, was approved by the FDA. At about $8,000 a year, it was considered the most expensive drug in history.
Cohen watched most of his friends die of AIDS, attending 40 funerals in one year, he said.
It’s frightening to think we could return to those days, but Cohen and others living with HIV know the possibility is real with the passing of the Trump administration’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which includes sweeping changes to Medicaid. Millions of people are expected to lose coverage. More than 40% of people living with HIV rely on Medicaid for that medicine, according to AIDS United, a national advocacy group.
The treatment is still expensive, so without the insurance, many people living with HIV won’t have access to the care they need to keep them healthy. The HIV/AIDS epidemic death toll peaked in the U.S. in 1995, with more than 40,000 deaths.
“I’m very worried for myself and so many others,” said Cohen, case manager at Jewish Family Services and a former project manager with AIDS Foundation Houston. “I’m concerned that rather than moving forward and seeing a decline in infection rates, we’re going to see things regress.”
Even though infection rates have declined since the 1980s, HIV remains an epidemic globally and disproportionately impacts gay and bisexual men as well as Black and Latino communities.
In Harris County, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise, according to a recent report released by Harris County Public Health. The report found sexually transmitted infection rates in Harris County significantly outpaced the statewide average from 2002 through 2015. HIV was found to be most prevalent among multiracial and Black residents, according to the report.
In Texas, approximately 102,800 people were living with HIV in 2021, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
President Donald Trump’s bill would also slash funding for federal HIV prevention, medications, support services and research, according to analysis by the HIV + HEP Policy Institute.
Who among us…you get the idea.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem defends FEMA Texas flooding response after NYT reports slow response
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the federal government’s response to the deadly Hill Country floods, dismissing claims that deployment was slowed.
During an interview Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Noem denied that a new policy she issued in June, requiring her personal approval for Federal Emergency Management Agency contracts over $100,000 had slowed the agency’s response.
“Those claims are absolutely false,” Noem said. “Within just an hour or two after the flooding, we had resources from the Department of Homeland Security there helping those individuals in Texas.”
An investigation by The New York Times revealed on July 6 and July 7, as the Guadalupe River surged, overtaking homes and children’s camps, thousands of calls went unanswered because of understaffing. Hundreds of contractors at FEMA call centers were laid off after their contracts expired on July 5, the New York Times reported.
According to the investigation, on July 5, before contracts lapsed, FEMA answered more than 99% of the 3,027 calls it received, but in the following days, that responsiveness dropped with only 16% of 16,419 calls being answered on July 7.
Noem dismissed the New York Times’ findings as inaccurate and claimed FEMA’s response to the floods was one of the best the agency has ever seen.
“False reporting, fake news,” Noem said. “It’s discouraging that during this time, when we have such a loss of life and so many people’s lives have turned upside down, that people are playing politics with this because the response time was immediate.”
Loser talk.
Trump officials want to give TxDOT more power over highway expansions
The Trump administration wants to give Texas more authority – and require less transparency – as the state expands existing highways and builds new ones.
In November, the Texas Department of Transportation asked the Federal Highway Administration to extend a special designation that lets it oversee its own compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA requires the state to document community and environmental impacts of road projects.
Now, TxDOT has submitted a new application, with changes that would give itself drastically more oversight and authority over its own federal environmental review. The draft rule would allow TxDOT to skip annual self-assessments and monthly reports that document the agency’s compliance with the federal law.
The application was revised after federal leadership “presented an opportunity to address unnecessary administrative requirements in a renegotiated MOU that preserves all of the legal requirements of the NEPA assignment program,” said Adam Hammons, a TxDOT spokesperson, in an email. He said that TxDOT was still subject to monitoring and audits by the Federal Highway Administration.
If approved, TxDOT won’t have to inform community members of their right to sue the state agency or file a civil rights complaint with the FHWA, as dozens of people did in 2021 in response to the I-45 expansion in Houston.
What could possibly go wrong?
As long as the magas own the libs, they don’t care about paying more, elite pedophiles, yes, unless it is one particular person.