Climate- Science.press

What is California’s ‘inefficient tire’ ban, and why does it matter?

Snow tires, mud tires, all-terrain tires — gone?

California’s new efficiency standard could wipe out most of the tires on the market by 2033.

Snow tires, mud tires, all-terrain tires — gone? California’s new efficiency standard could wipe out most of the tires on the market by 2033.

Marc Morano from ClimateDepot.com joins Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to explain the rule, the backlash from tire makers, and why this fight could spread far beyond California.

[SADLER] What is an inefficient tire? An inefficient tire to me is one that a tire that doesn’t roll.

[MORANO] That’s right. And all tires roll. No, what this is is they’re considering tires that are inefficient, meaning not aerodynamic enough, not fuel-mileage conscious enough. Doesn’t meet their specific requirements for carbon dioxide reduction. Their goal is to remove the equivalent of almost half a million cars off the road, you know, equivalent in CO2 reductions. That’s what’s going on behind this energy efficiency.

So when they say a noncompliant tire, say you got one from the factory that was just sort of your boring middle-of-the-road tire and you want to upgrade. So you have an SUV you want to upgrade to maybe a mud tire or an aggressive all-terrain. Well, hey. That’s not very good with resistance. That’s going to cause a lot more resistance with the road, i.e. more traction in that case, or even people who live in the mountains want snow tires. All sorts of specialty tires are going to be impacted.

And the tire manufacturers themselves say 70% of the tires currently sold in California may not be legal to be sold by the time this is fully implemented. That’s how insane this is. So it’s climate-focused, climate-motivated, and it’s unelected bean counters in California coming after just the next thing. I mean, they’ve already come after the pizza ovens, the gas stoves, the dishwashers, the washing machines, the dryers, the ceiling fans, gas-powered cars. Why not add tires to that list?

[SADLER] So what has been the response from the tire industry? Let’s say Goodyear, Bridgestone, Michelin, because it seems like they’re going to have to change their business model to deal with California. California has a huge economy; a lot of tires are sold in the state of California. What is the industry’s response, as well as the car dealerships and the car manufacturers, let’s say Ford?

[MORANO] Well, I can say no one likes this, and they’ve all been pushing hard against it. Dunlop Tire, Goodyear, they’re actually saying, as I said, 70% of the tires won’t be legal to be sold. And this is a huge business model problem. And California knows it. California dreaming is that they set environment, energy, climate policy for the rest of the country. And for years, they had that sort of terrorist role to be able to do that with the — starting with the California Air Resources Board — this is back now, and I think it was 2021 maybe, where they actually did the EV mandate and they started the slow gas-powered car ban.

And their goal was to force the auto manufacturers to follow, because California is such a big market. And then you add to that, you have other insane states that will likely follow, including Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, New York. A lot of these blue states will follow whatever. I live in Virginia and we have a law on the books that says whatever California does, Virginia will follow. So we had the California gas-powered car ban, EV mandate on our books just because we were blindly following California. It’s nuts.

And so this is huge. The tire manufacturers see what’s coming. What it really means, at least in the short term, is people leaving California to cross state lines to buy tires. Just like they’re probably buying tobacco, fireworks, gas, stoves- who knows what else they have to buy in California. They’re going to have to cross over. Manufacturers are sounding a big warning on this, but this is California. Nothing usually deters them, except that the Trump administration was able to reverse the gas-powered car ban. And that took federal statutes. That took court cases. It took years. California is like — I want to say environmental terrorist, but they’re like an economic terrorist when it comes to this. They can do a lot of damage. Damage lasts for years. It takes a lot of years to overdo it.

[SADLER] When does this ban go into effect? I read it, it’s a two-phase ban. And is there any way to reverse it before it does go into effect?

[MORANO] Well, in terms of reversing, yes. This is five unelected board members of the California Energy Commission, and it was a unanimous vote. And so they have to have the efficiency standard in place by — for original equipment tire replacement — by 2033, and the automakers are saying that by that point, you know, especially the way these bureaucrats — not even the way something’s written or the initial ruling — it’s actually how it’s going to be interpreted, and then how it makes economic sense to react to it.

So even if a bureaucrat lays out, well, here’s all you have to do: follow these 14 steps and you can still sell that tire, a tire manufacturer is going to look at that and say, that’s insane, I’ll never do it, we’re just not going to sell that tire there. And that’s the reality of it. The unelected bureaucrats don’t ever see that part of it. They just say, well, I just follow these 18 point plan and they can do it. No, well, no company will do that if the 18-point plan is going to cost more and not be even remotely cost-effective. They’ll just say, not worth it, not going to happen. And that’s what’s going to end up happening to the California consumer.

This article originally appeared at The Washington Times

Humans Brought Fire to a Fireless Amazon and Reshaped It for 10,000 Years

Glacial- period (Last Glacial and earlier Pleistocene) paleoecological records from Amazonia and adjacent areas show that fire was rare or absent before human arrival, supporting the interpretation that Amazonian wet forests evolved largely without fire.

New research shows that fire in the Amazon rainforest over the past 10,000 years has been almost exclusively human- driven, not a natural process, and has substantially shaped modern forest composition.

The study, “The pyrogeography of Amazonia: a Holocene perspective” by Crystal N. H. McMichael and colleagues (including Mark B. Bush), was published in June 2026 in the open-access journal Frontiers of Biogeography.

It is based on a compilation and analysis of 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates from 303 sites, covering soil charcoal fragments and burned archaeological materials.

Fire is essentially human- ignited in these wet forests. Pre- human (glacial- period) paleoecological records show charcoal absent or present only in minute amounts.

Examples include sites such as the Hill of Six Lakes (Brazil), Serra Sul dos Carajás, and especially the Campo Libre core on Ecuador’s Andean slopes, which recorded ~30,000 years without fire until humans arrived around 4,500 years ago. Researchers describe human arrival as introducing fire to a “naïve landscape” of evolutionarily fire-sensitive plants.

Spatiotemporal spread of fire (Holocene phases):

~10,000- 6,000 years ago: Highly restricted, mainly in peripheral areas and along the main Amazon River channel.
~6,000- 4,000 years ago: Rapid geographic expansion across most regions, coinciding with early maize cultivation in northwestern and southwestern Amazonia.
~3,000- 2,000 years ago: Fire reached the deep interior (central Amazonia had been a relative fire-free refuge for millennia).

Decline in the last ~700 years (two phases): An initial drop ~600- 700 years ago supports an “early abandonment” or major pre- Columbian land- use shift (linked to a pollen surge indicating reforestation in some lake records). A larger decline followed the post- 1541 “Great Dying” (estimated 90- 95% Indigenous population loss from disease, warfare, and enslavement after European contact), reducing ignitions and allowing further forest recovery.

Ecological legacy: Intensified human- driven fire over the last ~2,000 years caused vegetation changes on a scale comparable to major climatic events (e.g., deglaciation or Pleistocene megafauna extinctions). It selectively favored more fire- tolerant species (such as certain palms) over fire-sensitive ones, leaving a lasting imprint on today’s plant communities.

This work challenges the long- standing idea of a largely “pristine” pre- Columbian Amazon.

Fire histories were not fully synchronous across regions, but the overall pattern of human introduction, expansion from periphery to interior, and later declines is clear from the summed probability distributions and related analyses of the dated materials.

The paper is open access via the journal (Pensoft and Frontiers of Biogeography).

The findings align with broader evidence that natural lightning- ignited fires are rare in intact humid Amazonian forest, while human activity has long been the dominant ignition source.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

These records come primarily from lake and wetland sediment cores analyzed for charcoal (macroscopic and microscopic), pollen, phytoliths, and other proxies. Key examples cited in the 2026 pyrogeography paper and supporting studies include:

Campo Libre (eastern Andean slopes, Ecuador, ~2,700 m elevation)

A ~30,000- year sediment core from an alluvial terrace in a mid- elevation valley of the Quijos River.
No macroscopic charcoal was found in 122 samples spanning the full record.
Microscopic charcoal was also absent in samples dating between ~12,000 and 30,000 cal yr BP.
Fire (regional microscopic charcoal) first appears only around ~3,300- 3,400 cal yr BP, with clear human signals (maize phytoliths) beginning ~4,500- 4,700 cal yr BP.
The site underwent major vegetation shifts driven by climate and river dynamics (e.g., from active floodplain to palm forest around the Pleistocene- Holocene transition, then back toward swampier conditions), but these occurred without fire until humans arrived.

Hill of Six Lakes (northwestern Brazilian Amazon)

Multiple long lake records (e.g., Lakes Pata, Verde, Dragão, and more recent work on Lake Malachite) spanning up to ~170,000 years or the full deglacial period.
Charcoal is rare and present only in very low abundances (often tiny microparticles <40- 80 μm, consistent with distant sources) during glacial times.
The landscape remained continuously forested (with compositional shifts due to cooler temperatures, ~4- 5°C colder at the Last Glacial Maximum). Fire increases notably only in the Holocene, sometimes linked to possible early human activity around ~10,200 cal yr BP in newer records.

Serra Sul dos Carajás (southeastern Amazonia, Brazil)

Lake and bog records from this drier, plateau, ecotone region covering the last ~25,000- 26,000 years.
Charcoal was absent or present only in very low amounts in some locations until the deglacial period and onset of the Holocene.
Where glacial- period fire occurred, abundances were much lower than during the Holocene. Fires became more frequent during climatic transitions (e.g., dry- to- wet shifts around 11,000- 10,200 years ago) and later under seasonal conditions, with possible early human influence in the Holocene.

Additional context from related sites

Rainforest- savanna ecotones in Bolivia show very low and infrequent glacial- period fire.
Even in more fire- prone high Andean settings, pre-human charcoal levels are described as “miniscule” compared with post- human levels.

Natural (lightning- driven) fire was exceptional in these wet tropical systems.

Glacial climates were often cooler and, in many areas, drier or more seasonal, yet charcoal remained scarce.

This contrasts sharply with the Holocene, when human ignition dramatically increased fire frequency and spatial extent.

Amazonian plants are therefore largely evolutionarily fire- sensitive, making the introduction of regular anthropogenic burning a novel and transformative disturbance.

These glacial records form a critical baseline for the argument that Holocene pyrogeography in Amazonia is overwhelmingly human- driven.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

The pyrogeography of Amazonia: a Holocene perspective

The pyrogeography of Amazonia: a Holocene perspective is a 2026 open-access research article, published in Frontiers of Biogeography.

Fire in Amazonian forests rarely (if ever) ignites or spreads without human activity. Humans introduced fire to a previously “naïve” (fire- sensitive) landscape beginning in the late Pleistocene, early Holocene.

The study reconstructs the spatiotemporal patterns of this human- driven fire (pyrogeography) over the last ~10,000 years using a large compilation of radiocarbon dates.

Data and methods

Compiled 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) AMS dates from 303 sites across Amazonia (after excluding 32 modern dates post-1950, analyses focused on 1,329 dates spanning the last ~12,000 years).

Sources: individually dated charcoal fragments from soil surveys (paleoecological) and burned archaeological materials (described as charcoal or charred).

New dates added from soil charcoal in northwestern and southwestern Amazonia.

Analyses: summed probability distributions (SPDs), composite kernel density estimations (CKDEs), and regional permutation tests.

Regions examined (following ter Steege et al. 2013): northwestern (WAN), southwestern (WAS), central (CA), eastern (EA), southern (SA) Amazonia, and Guiana Shield (GS).

Main results

Earliest fires were concentrated in peripheral areas and along the main Amazon River channel (~10,000–6,000 years ago).

Geographic expansion accelerated ~6,000- 4,000 years ago (linked in part to early maize cultivation), with fire reaching the deep interior (including central Amazonia) mainly ~3,000- 2,000 years ago.

Peak fire likelihood occurred roughly 1,300- 500 cal BP (AD 700-1450).

Two-phase decline in the last ~700 years:

First decrease ~700- 500 years ago (supports “early abandonment” or major pre- Columbian land- use change/reforestation, consistent with some pollen records).
Second, larger decline after European contact (~AD 1541 onward), corresponding to the “Great Dying” (estimated 90- 95% Indigenous population loss).

Fire histories show some regional variation and are not fully synchronous, but the overall basin- wide pattern of peripheral- to- interior spread followed by later declines is robust.

The intensification and spread of human- ignited fire over the last ~2,000 years induced vegetation change at rates and magnitudes comparable to major climatic shifts (e.g., deglaciation or Pleistocene megafauna extinctions).

This selectively favored more fire- tolerant species (notably some palms) and left a lasting imprint on the composition and structure of modern Amazonian forests.

The work synthesizes and expands prior archaeological and paleoecological databases.

It reinforces that natural (lightning- driven) fire was exceptional in these wet forests before human arrival, as shown by glacial- period records with absent or minimal charcoal (e.g., Campo Libre, Ecuador: ~30,000 years without fire until humans appeared ~4,500 years ago).

The findings challenge notions of a largely pristine pre- Columbian Amazon and highlight the long- term role of Indigenous fire management in shaping today’s ecosystems.

The full paper is freely available via the journal site (Pensoft).

A contemporaneous press release from Pensoft Publishers summarized these results under the headline “Human- driven fires have shaped the Amazonian forest for over 10,000 years.”

Published: Frontiers of Biogeography (volume 19, e169863)

DOI: 10.21425/fob.19.169863

Authors: Crystal N. H. McMichael, Britte M. Heijink, Nina H. Witteveen, Annabel Zwarts, Mark B. Bush

Abstract

Amazonian forest fires rarely, if ever, ignite and spread in the absence of humans. The first colonization of people into South America happened in the late Pleistocene, and by 10,000 years ago, humans had introduced fire into a naive landscape. Here we build on previous databases of burned ¹⁴C dated archaeological material and ¹⁴C dated charcoal fragments retrieved from soils and reconstruct spatiotemporal patterns of fire in Amazonia for the last 10,000 years. We ask whether fire histories are regionally synchronous, and whether major demographic events such as the ‘Great Dying’ or ‘Early abandonment’ appear in the fire histories within or between regions. We found that most of the earliest fires occurred in the peripheral areas and spread into central Amazonian forests mostly around 2000–3000 years ago. The frequency and recurrence of burned ¹⁴C dated material also showed a two-phase decline over the last 700 years. Most regions show a decrease in fire occurrence ca. 700–500 years ago and then again during the last 400 years when European influence spread across Amazonia. The restructuring of Amazonian pyrogeography over the last 2000 years has likely played a large role in shaping modern forests.

Carney’s Dagger: How Ottawa’s Trade Brinkmanship Threatens US National Security Strategy

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the US had secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves through a partnership with private business.

From Tilak`s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

The collapse of US-Canada trade talks last week, and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s declaration that “you’re at war when you get attacked,” has turned a tariff dispute into a political toxin that now sits inside the one relationship still holding North American energy security together. Fifty-percent US tariffs have taken effect on billions of dollars of Canadian goods; Ottawa has promised dollar-for-dollar retaliation from September 8th. Crude oil, natural gas and potash were, for the moment, carved out of the American levies, but that exemption cannot be thought permanent. The uncertainty, the public flirtation with using oil as a retaliatory instrument and Carney’s larger strategic posture toward Washington already threaten the physical barrels and the political trust on which the 2025 National Security Strategy depends.

The contrast with what seemed possible only a year earlier could not be more dramatic. The August 2025 Anchorage meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, however inconclusive on Ukraine, opened a window onto a potentially different energy order: one in which sanctions-driven distortions might have eased and Russian Arctic and Siberian resources might have again attracted Western capital. Combined with the January 2026 capture of Nicolás Maduro and Washington’s subsequent assertion of control over the rules of Venezuelan oil production, that vision promised hemispheric abundance rather than managed scarcity. Carney’s brinkmanship now risks putting a dagger through it – and doing so at the expense of Alberta first.

The Anchorage window and the promise of abundance

On August 15th 2025, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, the presidents of the world’s largest and third-largest oil producers met for the first time since the outbreak of the Ukraine war. No ceasefire was signed, although the maximalist demand by EU hawks for an immediate ceasefire was dropped as a non-starter. Trump said there was “no deal until there’s a deal”. Putin later conceded that “there were indeed no agreements reached in Anchorage”. Yet the meeting itself, after years of isolation, revived talk of economic cooperation in the Arctic, LNG technology, icebreakers and even possible restarts of ventures such as Sakhalin-1. Russian officials spoke of region-to-region contacts between the Russian Far East and the US West Coast; side conversations touched Novatek technology for Alaskan gas.

That window mattered because the post-2022 sanctions regime boomeranged on its progenitors. Measures intended to turn the Russian rouble into rubble instead accelerated Europe’s de-industrialisation, sent discounted Russian barrels through Indian and Chinese refiners into European markets at a premium and encouraged experiments in non-dollar settlement. A genuine US-Russia thaw would have reversed those distortions, reopened Siberian unconventional plays to American fracking expertise and reduced the incentive for BRICS energy trade to migrate away from the dollar. Developing countries, long subject to decarbonisation demands while the West consumed the fossil fuels that built its wealth, would have gained cheaper energy and a less politicised development path. The ‘spirit of Anchorage’ never became a treaty. By mid-2026 it had largely dissipated. But the mere possibility of ending the sanctions-driven split in global oil trade – and of pairing US technology with Russian Arctic and Siberian geology – was part of a larger architecture of energy abundance. The other half of that architecture was sitting in the Orinoco Belt.

Venezuela’s heavy oil and the Trump Corollary

In the pre-dawn hours of January 3rd 2026, US forces captured Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York to face narcotics-terrorism charges. The operation was the most muscular application yet of what the administration calls the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The November 2025 National Security Strategy had pledged that the United States would “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere” and “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to… own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere”. Venezuela’s oil was precisely such an asset.

The Energy Institute’s Statistical Review still lists Venezuela as holding the world’s largest proved reserves – on the order of 300 billion barrels, the great majority of them extra-heavy Orinoco crude. At recent prices that stockpile is notionally worth many trillions of dollars. Venezuelan output has risen from well under a million barrels per day toward roughly 1.2 million, with several hundred thousand barrels now moving to US refiners. Supermajors remain cautious; service companies and smaller independents have moved first. Full restoration toward two to three million barrels per day still looks like a multi-year project even under favourable political conditions. That timeline is why Canadian barrels remain indispensable in the near term – and why treating them as a weapon is so reckless.

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the US had secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves through a partnership with private business. This unprecedented US agreement to take control of a fifth of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves is a bet that American companies can revive the nation’s battered energy industry.

As important as the headline volume is the molecule. Long-chain, high-sulphur, high-residuum crude is ideally suited to the delayed-coking complexes that dominate the US Gulf Coast. Those refineries convert discounted heavy sour barrels into diesel and jet fuel more efficiently than light-shale slates can be upgraded. Control of Venezuelan heavy oil therefore complements, rather than merely duplicates, the Permian’s light sweet output. It gives the United States a full-spectrum position across the barrel and a second wing for a non-OPEC Americas bloc that already includes US shale, Canadian oil sands, Guyana’s new discoveries and Brazilian pre-salt, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

Four million barrels a day and the Alberta-Ottawa fault line

EIA data show US crude imports from Canada averaged 3.9 million barrels per day in 2025; weekly figures through 2026 still cluster around 3.5–4.2 million. Those volumes have routinely accounted for around 60% or more of US crude imports. The main destination is not only Houston. It is first the US Midwest, then the Gulf Coast: complex refineries configured over decades for Alberta’s heavy sour crude. Bloomberg put 2025 Midwest receipts near 2.7 million barrels per day vs about 416,000 barrels per day to the Gulf. These barrels are not interchangeable with Permian light or with distant Middle Eastern grades that must travel longer, more vulnerable sea lanes. Without them, utilisation rates fall, product yields suffer and pump prices rise. In a tight global distillate market – the spread between crude and diesel, the “crack spread”, has run over $100 a barrel – the substitution problem is acute. As David Blackmon assesses, there is no ready alternative outlet of comparable size and proximity for Canada either. Canada’s only large operating Pacific marine outlet is the Westridge terminal in Burnaby, the end of the Trans Mountain pipeline, rated at 890,000 barrels per day. That line can be optimised toward about 1.19 million barrels per day by 2028. A separate million-barrel West Coast pipeline has been proposed, with construction possibly starting in 2027. Neither is a substitute, this year or next, for the US inland system.

Canada’s own vulnerabilities are equally structural. Eastern provinces, home to most of the population, still depend on US-sourced barrels or on west-to-east pipelines whose routes pass through Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Ottawa’s long refusal to approve adequate all-Canadian eastbound pipelines left Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa exposed. Any serious disruption therefore boomerangs on Canada as surely as it would hit Chicago and Houston.

That is why using oil as a weapon would detonate inside Canada long before it wounds the US – an economy 13 times larger that absorbs just under three-quarters of Canadian exports and some 90% of its oil exports. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has said she “cannot think of a more disastrous policy decision than cutting off or taxing Alberta’s oil to the United States”. Doing so, she warned, would extinguish hundreds of thousands of livelihoods in Alberta, hobble Ontario and Quebec, send the TSX into a dive – and hand US cokers a reason to look to Venezuela instead, perhaps permanently. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was equally blunt: his province “cannot and will not support any kind of export tariff” on oil or potash. The producing Western regions of Canada have told Ottawa no.

Danielle Smith also points out that an export tax on Alberta crude invites a symmetric American levy on gasoline and diesel heading into Ontario and Quebec “right as we turn into fall and winter”. Carney himself said in July he did not “see the value” in using energy as leverage and that Canada must remain a “reliable supplier”. The ‘war’ language of last week sits uneasily with that earlier caution. If Ottawa now flirts with the oil card, it will reopen the oldest Canadian fracture: Alberta and Saskatchewan sell the oil and potash, and the Carney Government in Ottawa is tempted to treat those exports as leverage. Alberta’s separatist undercurrent does not need a better recruiting poster.

This interdependence is a strength when relations are stable. It becomes a glaring weakness when they are not. Even though energy was excluded from the latest 50% tariff list, the collapse of talks has already injected the uncertainty that markets and capital abhor. Cross-border projects feel it immediately. South Bow’s Prairie Connector – a partial reuse of cancelled Keystone XL pipe, with 20-year commitments for about 465,000 b/d and a mid-2027 investment decision – needs a permit that survives the next election. CEO Bevin Wirzba has said the company will not proceed without a “durable” US authorisation. Twenty-year contracts cannot be financed on a relationship described as war.

Waiting out Trump: Democrats, Davos and a lame-duck bet

Mark Carney is a former Bank of England governor and UN special envoy for climate finance who once argued that central banks should help impose “moral sentiments” on capital allocation in the name of Net Zero. In his January 2026 Davos speech he told middle powers that the old rules-based order was fading and that “when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness” – obviously, if obliquely, referring to Trump’s America. He has signed new “strategic partnerships” with the EU and China, diversified trade talks across four continents and presented Canada as an “energy superpower” whose customers need not be confined to the United States.

Carney elevated Maia Johnson — an American who worked on scheduling and operations for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and later on the Biden and Harris efforts and who was tied to Michael Bloomberg’s political-data firm Hawkfish — into a newly created senior operating role in the Prime Minister’s Office. The hiring choice is a signal about which American political network Ottawa finds congenial. So are Carney’s private meetings this year with leading 2028 Democratic contenders – including Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg and Elissa Slotkin – as Democrats begin to audition for the post-Trump era.

The timeline fits a waiting game. People familiar with Ottawa’s deliberations told Bloomberg that Carney’s Government sees little chance of restarting talks before the November 2026 midterms and is designing support “to ride out the balance of Trump’s term if necessary”. Carney himself said Canada would back affected firms “for as long as it takes, in other words, beyond the life of this US administration”. Danielle Smith, from the other side of the same calendar, has urged diplomacy so that Canadian oil can be kept out of the trade war. CityNews put the question directly: is Carney waiting for a lame-duck president?

But a Democratic midterm gain would not automatically unwind executive tariffs; a White House official called that expectation “a desperate pipe dream”. A 2028 Democratic restoration does little to alleviate the trade standoff. It might, however, restore the Net Zero reflex that spent a decade making Canada’s physical ability to get crude out of Alberta and to paying customers harder. Betting the continental oil system on a US partisan cycle is the opposite of energy security.

Trump’s National Security Strategy is an energy-dominance doctrine that treats pipelines, upgraders and heavy-oil reserves as instruments of hemispheric security. The Venezuelan reset was meant to reduce extra-hemispheric influence in the Americas and, over time, to give Washington a substitute source of heavy crude. That substitution is years away. In the meantime any sustained interruption – or even the credible threat of one – raises the odds of tighter product markets, higher prices for American and Canadian consumers alike and the postponement of the very infrastructure that would make the hemisphere more secure.

The Anchorage meeting and the Caracas operation together sketched a world in which the Western Hemisphere could become a low-cost, high-security energy platform spanning Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – light oil from the US Permian and other shale oil basins married to heavy Orinoco and Athabasca crude, insulated from Eurasian pipeline politics and Middle Eastern chokepoints. That architecture still requires Canadian flows in the critical intervening years. Carney’s war language, his Democratic entanglements and the temptation to ‘wait Trump out’ do not create new heavy-oil supplies or new all-Canadian pipelines. Rather, they raise the probability that the existing system fractures worsen – between Ottawa and Alberta, and between Ottawa and Washington – at the precise moment when US strategy is attempting to lock in hemispheric advantage in energy supplies.

The physics, economics and geography of global oil trade flows remain broadly unchanged. What has changed is the political choice to treat an existential energy partnership as another front in a trade war, or as a holding action until the next American election. If cooler heads do not prevail, Carney’s dagger threatens not only the oldest and most intimate trading relationship in North America but also the energy security interests of the entire American hemisphere.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

“Super” El Nino Misinformation

The media and social media are abuzz with talk about the upcoming “Super” El Niño, with forecasts of low snowpack, drought conditions, and massive wildfires

Surprisingly, there is nothing called a “Super El Nino” in the scientific world.

From Watts Up With That?

From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog

Cliff Mass

The media and social media are abuzz with talk about the upcoming “Super” El Niño, with forecasts of low snowpack, drought conditions, and massive wildfires (see sample below).

My local newspaper and some amateur social media are making similar claims.

Few of these scary claims are supported by the facts: in reality, the outlook is quite favorable for our region if a “Super El Niño” continues to develop.

Let me prove this to you.

Surprisingly, there is nothing called a “Super El Nino” in the scientific world.

If the temperature anomaly (difference from normal) of the ocean surface in the tropical Pacific is 1.5 to 2 C above normal, it is called a strong El Niño. More than 2C, a very strong El Niño.

The media calls this a “super”; the scientific community does not.

Below is the latest forecast by NOAA.

They are predicting a very strong El Niño this autumn (peaking around 2.2 C above normal).

There is little doubt we will get a very strong El Nino, but this is not unprecedented, with others occurring in 1982-1983, 1997-1998, 2015-2016, and 2023-2024 (others have occurred before as well).

A KEY point is that very strong El Niños are very different animals than their more moderate cousins. With different impacts.

Moderate to strong El Niños are typically associated with less snowpack and drier-than-normal conditions.

Very strong El Niños bring near-normal snowpack and plenty of moisture.

Thus, our water resources are generally fine with very strong El Niños like the upcoming winter.

Want the proof?

Below is a plot of precipitation from October to April (our wet season) since 1980. The red arrows indicate very strong (“super”) El Nino years, and the yellow line is the average of the period (1980 to today).

Very strong El Niño years are NOT particularly dry… their average is a bit ABOVE NORMAL.

What about snowpack?

Let’s check out a few sites, looking at April 1 snowpack (which is generally the date used for evaluations).

Crystal Mountain Ski area (around 6000 ft)? Snowpack during very strong El Niños is nearly normal (horizontal line) during such years.

The much lower Stampede Pass (4000 ft)? Same story.

Even LOWER at Snoqualmie Pass (below). Same story…nearly normal snowpack during very strong El Niño years!

Very strong El Niño years have near-normal snowpack in our mountains. I could show you a dozen other locations: same story.

What about temperature?

Over Washington State at the surface, very strong El Niño years are about 1°F above normal, although one was below normal (2024).

With normal rain and mountain snow during a very strong El Nino year, the expectation is that there will be plenty of water next year for our region’s needs.

So those predicting drought, drastically reduced snowpack, and enhanced wildfires over the region will have a lot of the proverbial egg on their face next summer.

So what exactly does a very strong El Niño do to the larger-scale atmospheric circulation around here? I am a weather scientist and am curious!

Below is the average of the upper-level heights at 500 hPa (think pressure at 18,000 ft), showing the difference from normal for October through March of a very strong El Niño year. Purple is much lower than normal heights/pressure (a strong trough).

Mama mia! A HUGE intense low-pressure area over the north Pacific!

Let’s look at the local implications of this intense pattern by examining the difference from normal in the winds around 5000 ft for such a very strong El Nino year (below).

There are greatly enhanced winds from the southwest offshore, bringing in lots of moisture into the West Coast. That means more precipitation. NO DROUGHT.

To demonstrate this, below is the difference in precipitation from normal for such very strong El Niño years.

A lot more precipitation over the West Coast, with the greatest increase over northern CA and southern Oregon.

Our region will be a bit warmer than normal, but the additional moisture should result in near-normal snowpack in the mountains above 3500 ft. Lots of water to fill reservoirs and moisten the soils.

No problem.

Federal Oil and Gas Well Bonding: Undoing Biden

“BLM is proposing to shift the state bonding minimums back to what they were prior to 2024, consistent with the White House’s intent to reduce regulatory barriers to energy production…. The large majority of oil and gas well operators are responsible, and it makes no sense to treat them all as though they were reckless and financially unstable.”

From Master Resource

By Timothy Terrell

“BLM is proposing to shift the state bonding minimums back to what they were prior to 2024, consistent with the White House’s intent to reduce regulatory barriers to energy production…. The large majority of oil and gas well operators are responsible, and it makes no sense to treat them all as though they were reckless and financially unstable.”

The Biden Administration enacted hundreds of punitive actions against the domestic oil and gas industry. The Trump Administration has worked to reverse this overreach. The latest reversal concerns a Bureau of Land Management’s proposal to lower statewide bonding on oil and gas leases from $500,000 to $25,000.

In protest, the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) and other left-of-center environmental organizations claim that companies will be incited to abandon wells and stick taxpayers with the cleanup bill. EEN misleadingly argues that “asking companies to cover their own cleanup costs is not a regulatory burden….”

To clarify, the BLM is proposing to shift the state bonding minimums back to what they were prior to 2024, consistent with the White House’s intent to reduce regulatory barriers to energy production. The higher minimums imposed in 2024 have not taken effect yet, as the BLM had extended the phase-in date to June of 2027.

Analysis

While it is appropriate that taxpayers not be on the hook for any company’s liabilities, the EEN’s complaint here is misleading. Companies will still be liable for their own cleanup costs if the bonding requirements revert to the pre-2024 level. The oil or gas well operator remains responsible for plugging wells and restoring the surface under the Mineral Leasing Act. If the operator does not comply with reclamation requirements, the lease can be cancelled, and other punitive actions can be taken.

Additionally, as the BLM explained, the lower bond minimums do not mean that the operator is not being required to provide adequate protection for the taxpayers. The bureau can increase the bond amount on a case-by-case basis, as when companies are “at-risk.” It can also “impose more stringent interim and final reclamation requirements, implement additional bond reviews, and develop other measures to limit the risk to the U.S. taxpayer from a lessee failing to meet its reclamation obligations.”

Will the BLM actually take these actions? A 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report stated that the BLM had not been properly using its discretion to secure larger bonds where the risks justified doing so—a point which opponents of the lower bond minimums have emphasized. But in 2024, the BLM addressed this problem with Instruction Memorandum IM2024-014, which strengthened the review process for setting bonds to help ensure that higher-risk operators pay accordingly. The BLM also indicated in its proposal this year that it is “contemplating re-instating nationwide bonds,” which the 2024 bond increase rule had eliminated.

Taking all of this into consideration, the fact that the proposed statewide minimum bonding requirements “fall far below the BLM’s own estimated cost of $35,000 to $200,000 to decommission wells” is not particularly relevant, though a superficial comparison with the lower bond minimum might cause alarm among those who do not investigate further. The BLM can raise bonding requirements where necessary—especially since its IM2024-14 revisions—and has other means by which to induce compliance and protect Americans from the costs of unplugged and abandoned wells. The large majority of oil and gas well operators are responsible, and it makes no sense to treat them all as though they were reckless and financially unstable. Matching the bond requirement to the risk is better stewardship than a policy that ignores differences across firms and well characteristics.

Imposing high bonding requirements across the board does little to protect taxpayers or the environment and ties up capital in unproductive ways. In fact, as some states have ratcheted up financial assurance regulations, and as capital market trends have increased costs, some operators have been unable to cope. Ironically, this can make the well abandonment problem worse—a foretaste of what could come if higher federal minimums come into force.

A group of western oil and gas producers pointed out the unintended consequences: “Financial assurance pressures increase bankruptcy and/or premature well abandonment, orphaning legacy assets without adequate plugging and reclamation funding. Increased financial assurance requirements are intended to prevent orphaned wells, but the reverse is occurring; such requirements are increasing the number of wells being orphaned.” Lower bonding requirements should avoid these problems, and would particularly help smaller independent operators, who face even higher burdens if the 2024 rule phases in next year.

For consumers, the effect of higher bond minimums is to increase the expense of producing energy at a time when international conflict has already driven up prices significantly. Since lower-income Americans face comparatively higher budget strains from higher energy prices, and any increased burden on taxpayers (which should be minimal) would fall disproportionately on higher-income Americans who pay the vast majority of federal income taxes, it is even more difficult to understand objections from those who profess to care for the poor.

Politics or Market Process

An underlying problem here is common to any government ownership and management—the problem of determining the best use of a resource through political means. How does a bureaucracy such as the Bureau of Land Management determine the best use of land and its mineral resources amid the pressures of interest groups and the noise of public comments?

Without a market process through which energy users, farmers and ranchers, wildlife lovers, industries, and home buyers reveal the strength of their preferences for different uses of land, governments will have no way to find that “best use,” or to discover the appropriate financial terms to impose on users of the land. Instead, disputes over bonding requirements, oil and gas leasing revenues, environmental conservation, and the like will be settled through fractious interest group politics and alarmist rhetoric. A better way is to privatize the mineral rights to public lands and the surface land as well, a subject for another day.

Timothy D. Terrell (terrelltd@wofford.edu) is T.B. Stackhouse Professor of economics at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and is a senior fellow at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and at the Mises Institute.

New York’s New Solar Religion Is Absolutely Devastating To Wildlife, Farmland

From CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

Drive from Buffalo into Genesee County and you will pass fields that have grown corn and soybeans for generations. Soon, thousands of those acres will be covered by steel and glass. New York state is forcing industrial-scale solar plants onto rural communities that never asked for them, and the people who live there are discovering just how little their voice counts when a governor decides differently.

The Mandate Behind the Mess

New York is tearing up rural communities, wiping out wildlife sanctuaries, and burying prime agricultural soil under solar installation in the name of green energy. The root of this campaign is New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) of 2019, which demands that renewable sources supply 70% of the state’s electricity, that greenhouse gas emissions fall 40% below 1990 levels, and that the state build at least 3,000 megawatts of storage.

The footprint of the 18 solar power plants is staggering. The Cider Solar Farm in Genesee County will cover 4,000 acres, and the Ridge View Solar Farm in Niagara County will take another 2,000. Both were pushed through over the strong objections of the people who farm.

Destroy Wildlife and Redact Key Information

What becomes of the animals living where these panels will sit? The Fort Edward project targets land inside a Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) grassland and bird sanctuary. DEC documents describe the area as critical for breeding grassland birds and wintering raptors.

The site hosts the short-eared owl, a bird so rare that the Grassland Bird Trust counts fewer than 50 breeding pairs in New York. The northern harrier, listed as threatened, hunts there. Fifteen species of reptiles and amphibians already of concern to biologists will lose their homes. These are key indicator species wildlife specialists monitor to judge ecosystem health.

You would expect a state that prides itself on environmental leadership to publish this information without hesitation. Instead, residents who filed Freedom of Information requests for an agency report on the Fort Edward site received a document so heavily blacked out that one local compared it to the redactions in the Epstein files. Why does a government agency need to hide a solar project’s effect on endangered owls?

Governor Kathy Hochul created the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission specifically to override the objections of the towns and counties in its path. Critics say the agency exists to cut through red tape, sideline environmental review, and neutralize local pushback so projects move forward regardless of what residents want. That is silencing the communities the state claims to be protecting.

A Federal Reckoning Arrives

By 2026, even New York’s own climate agenda had begun to buckle under the weight of its contradictions, forcing Governor Hochul into a March recalibration of the CLCPA that acknowledged the complaints of rural communities.

Then came a rebuke from Washington. U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, and Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler jointly challenged New York’s approval of solar projects on productive farmland, criticizing the state for not applying federal standards in evaluating its farmland.

And here is the contradiction that should embarrass every official who signed off on the policy. Hochul announced a moratorium of up to a year on new data centers that draw more than 50 megawatts, which typically occupy 15 to 40 acres. Meanwhile, New York has already parked solar complexes on approximately 11,000 acres of federally certified prime farmland and wildlife habitats.

Centuries ago, South American civilizations offered land, crops, and sometimes human lives to appease gods they believed controlled the climate. New York has updated the ritual for a modern audience. It has built altars of solar farms and appointed a priesthood of bureaucrats who redact the evidence of their policies’ destruction.

A government convinced it can control the climate by conquering the countryside is not practicing science. It is imposing an ideology on a citizenry that pays the tribute in property and quality of life.

Originally published at Daily Caller, August 29, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

Hole punch clouds- How Planes and Mountains Carve “UFOs” in the Sky

On June 24, 1947, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying his small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State. He reported seeing nine brilliant, flashing objects flying in a chain at incredible speeds.

When describing how they moved to journalists, he noted that they flew erratically, “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.”

A hole punch cloud, officially known in the World Meteorological Organization’s International Cloud Atlas as a cavum, is a rare atmospheric phenomenon characterized by a large circular or elliptical gap appearing in mid- to high- level cloud layers.

Also referred to as a fallstreak hole, skypunch, or cloud canal, these formations look as though a massive cookie cutter has stamped a clean hole out of a uniform sheet of clouds.

Hole punch clouds are a fascinating mix of physics, meteorology, and human aviation. They require a specific recipe to occur:

Supercooled Water: The phenomenon takes place in thin layers of altocumulus or cirrocumulus clouds. These clouds consist of supercooled water droplets, water that remains in a liquid state despite being far below the freezing point (0°C / 32°F).

The Disturbance: Supercooled droplets are highly unstable and will flash- freeze instantly if disrupted. While higher ice clouds can drop natural ice crystals into the layer below, the most common trigger is a passing aircraft.

The Chain Reaction: As an airplane punches through the cloud, air expanding over its wings or propellers rapidly cools. This intense temperature drop causes the water droplets to instantly freeze into heavier ice crystals

The Evaporation Process: Through a phenomenon called the Wegener-Bergeron-Findeisen process, these newly formed ice crystals aggressively absorb moisture from the surrounding air. This dries out the local atmosphere, forcing neighboring water droplets to rapidly evaporate and widening the hole.

The Fallstreak (Virga): The heavy ice crystals eventually descend from the center of the newly formed gap, creating wispy, ghost-like streaks of precipitation called virga. Because the air below is usually dry, this falling ice or snow evaporates or sublimates before ever reaching the ground.

While they look otherworldly and are often mistaken for UFOs or secret military experiments, hole punch clouds are well-documented and completely natural environmental interactions. They are most commonly spotted near major airports or underneath busy high-altitude flight corridors where planes frequently pierce through appropriate cloud layers. If an airplane flies horizontally through the cloud layer rather than climbing or descending through it, the resulting gap can stretch into a long, linear highway in the sky known as an ice canal or canal cloud.

Their striking, clean- cut symmetry and the central wispy trails make them one of the most common causes of UFO sightings and conspiracy theories worldwide.

When a perfect circle suddenly opens up in an otherwise flat, grey sky, often trailing a glowing or shimmering mist in the center, it easily mimics the popular imagination of a spacecraft breaking through the atmosphere or a weapon firing from above.

Why They Spark UFO Rumors?

Geometric Precision: Nature rarely looks like it was cut with a laser, so the sharp, circular, or elliptical edges look highly artificial.

The Central Mist: The falling ice crystals (virga) in the middle can catch the sunlight at sunset or sunrise, creating a glowing, fiery, or metallic pillar that looks like a propulsion trail or a tractor beam.

Sudden Appearance: A hole can form and expand to be several kilometers wide in less than an hour, making it seem like a sudden “event” occurred in the sky.

Fallstreak holes are not the only clouds that trigger alien rumors. Several other rare formations regularly confuse onlookers:

Lenticular Clouds (Altocumulus lenticularis): These smooth, lens-shaped clouds form over mountains and look exactly like classic flying saucers. They can even stack on top of each other like a pile of UFOs.

Scud Clouds: Low, detached, irregular cloud fragments that move rapidly below a storm path. People frequently mistake their dark, ragged shapes for low- flying craft.

Roll Clouds: Long, low, tube- shaped horizontal clouds that look like a giant, rotating alien mothership rolling across the horizon.

Lenticular Clouds (The “Flying Saucers”)

Lenticular clouds (Altocumulus lenticularis) are the undisputed champions of cloud-based UFO sightings. They form when moist air flows over a large geographic barrier, like a mountain range. The air is forced upward, cools, and condenses into a smooth, stationary lens or saucer shape that sits perfectly still above the peak while high winds blow right through it.

Specifically, this exact photograph was captured on March 8, 2023, by observers at the **W. M. Keck Observatory** in Hawaii. The saucer-shaped formations were spotted hovering majestically over the peaks of the Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa volcanoes.

Fallstreak Holes (The “Atmospheric Portals”)

Fallstreak holes open up a stark, clean-cut gap in an otherwise uniform cloud layer. Because they often feature a column of wispy ice crystals falling directly down the center, people frequently mistake them for a spaceship cloaking or an energy beam punching through the sky.

The image is a famous, real- world photograph of a **hole punch cloud** (Fallstreak hole) captured over **Old Mountain Road in Iredell County, North Carolina**.

The photo was taken by viewer Phil Lambert and initially went viral after being broadcast by the local news station WBTV on November 11, 2019. It caused a massive stir on social media at the time, with many residents rushing to report it as a potential UFO or a rotating tornado due to its stark, isolated oval shape hovering directly over the highway.

The Historic Sighting That Started It All

The very origin of the term “flying saucer” is directly tied to a famous sighting near a mountain known for lenticular clouds.

On June 24, 1947, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying his small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State. He reported seeing nine brilliant, flashing objects flying in a chain at incredible speeds. When describing how they moved to journalists, he noted that they flew erratically, “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.”

The press ran wild with the phrase, coining “flying saucers.” While Arnold maintained he saw solid objects, Mount Rainier is one of the most famous breeding grounds in the world for massive, stacked lenticular clouds. Meteorologists and skeptics have long pointed out that a chain of catching- the- sun lenticular wave clouds along the ridge perfectly mirror what Arnold likely witnessed from his cockpit.

The Ark-La-Tex may be leading America’s lithium race

The discovery of vast lithium resources in the Smackover Formation, most notably in southern Arkansas and into far northern Louisiana and across northeast Texas, has sparked widespread interest among corporations and community leaders in all three states.

The Ark-La-Tex has long been a major U.S. oil and gas hub, but the region has recently suffered a downturn in drilling activity, production growth, and economic impact.

From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

Last year, the Venture Center, Standard Lithium, and the University of Arkansas launched the Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator (ALTA), the nation’s first accelerator program dedicated to lithium and battery supply-chain innovation. Then in July, the first State of Lithium Symposium was held in Texarkana to examine the future of lithium mining in Texas.

Not to be outdone, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry on August 20 signed two executive orders that fast-track environmental permitting for critical minerals and rare-earth production. The first requires state agencies to examine which permits can be permanently expedited. The second declares heavy rare-earth extraction and advanced chemical processing to be vital to local job creation and national defense.

Excitement across the Ark-La-Tex stems from the fact that the heaviest concentrations of lithium in the Smackover Foundation lie in a band from southern Arkansas (crossing into far northwest Louisiana) and far northeast Texas. Arkansas is farthest along, but Texas is itching to join in an economic boom that could also spread into north Louisiana.

The Ark-La-Tex has long been a major U.S. oil and gas hub, but the region has recently suffered a downturn in drilling activity, production growth, and economic impact. This, coupled with the national emphasis on critical minerals, has refocused regional leaders on the hope that lithium extraction will rekindle local economies and bring new prosperity.

Executive Order 13817, which President Trcump issued early in 2017, authorized creation of a federal strategy to ensure secure and reliable supplies of critical minerals and break America’s dependence on China for 21^st Century technological progress.

Political enemies have fought against the Trump critical minerals agenda from Day 1. Until he won a second term, progress toward achieving EO 13817’s goals was stymied.

To reset his reshoring agenda, President Trump in January 2025 issued Executive Order 14154, Unleashing American Energy, which established the U.S. position that it should be the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals, including rare-earth minerals.

Two months later, Executive Order 14241 announced immediate measures to increase American minerals production. The EO stated that overbearing federal regulations had crippled the nation’s minerals industries and forced increasing reliance on hostile foreign powers for the minerals critical to the auto, semiconductor, and power industries.

The President upped the ante on August 13, 2025, when the Department of Energy made available nearly $1 billion in funding to advance and scale mining, processing, and manufacturing technologies across key stages of critical minerals and materials supply chains. A few days ago the DOE announced $162 million for nine projects that will recover critical minerals, materials, and other byproducts from industrial feedstocks.

One of these critical minerals is lithium, which is used in high-performance batteries for electric vehicles, grid storage systems, and consumer electronics as well as in the production of metals, ceramics, and pharmaceuticals – and in the aerospace and defense industries. While there are ample lithium resources inside the U.S., in 2025 the nation relied on imports – mainly from Chile and Argentina – for more than half its lithium consumption.

Lithium can be mined from hard rock ore in the form of lithium spodumene or extracted as an ion from briny water. China, which possesses 95% of the world’s hard-rock lithium, has long controlled 70% to 80% of the global electric vehicle lithium-ion battery market. Unless the U.S. dramatically increases its own lithium production, prioritizing electric vehicles benefits an increasingly hostile Chinese government.

Hard-rock lithium production began in North Carolina and became important during World War II for hydrogen production, high-temperature lubrication, and carbon dioxide absorption until outpriced by cheaper, brine-based lithium facilities. Today the Kings Mountain facility is only used for lithium conversion and research. But in 2024, Albermarle Corporation began work to reopen the mine after receiving a $90 million grant from the Department of Defense.

The only active U.S. lithium production operation today is Albemarle Corporation’s Clayton Valley facility in southwestern Nevada. Since 1966, brine extracted from saltwater aquifers has flowed into evaporation ponds, where the lithium is concentrated in multiple solar evaporation ponds for up to 24 months.

The Biden DOE in October 2024 issued a $2.26 billion loan to Lithium Nevada Corp. to expedite lithium carbonate production at a facility adjacent to the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada, home to the largest U.S. lithium deposit. Last year, the Trump DOE negotiated a 5% equity ownership in Lithium Americas in exchange for deferring $182 million of debt service.

Even so, all the buzz today over the potential of lithium to lift spirits and fill pocketbooks is in the Ark-La-Tex. It began even before Exxon Mobil in 2023 announced plans to build one of the world’s largest lithium processing facilities near Magnolia, Arkansas, with a capacity to produce 75,000 to 100,000 metric tons a year of lithium carbonate –twice as much as at Thacker Pass.

ALTA has since sponsored three cohorts, each involving multiple companies, to showcase Arkansas’s promotion of lithium production and offer support to companies in sustainable lithium extraction, advanced battery technology, and recycling. Arkansas had folded its lithium production regulations in a network long established for oil- and gas-related brine production.

The July Texas lithium symposium was a first step toward a legislative campaign to set rules for lithium extraction and processing in the Lone Star State. East Texas lithium producers plan to rely on a new technique – direct lithium extraction – that does not involve solar evaporation. This means reinjection of the spent brine, which in Texas today means back from where it came.

Industry representatives, however, say this would dilute lithium concentrations in the brine and force frequent relocation of operations. They are seeking legislative changes in 2027, using the Arkansas regulations as a guide, that would make their operations more productive, and more profitable, over a longer time frame.

Economic geologist Brent Elliott says Texas is in a position that could set the stage for real industry growth and development that even Arkansas lacks. Geoframe CEO Bruce Cutright is urging the Texas legislature to resolve such issues as rights and responsibilities regarding critical minerals and brine. The sticky issue is whether lithium brine is a mere byproduct of oil and gas production or is extracted specifically to recover lithium through direct lithium extraction.

The Ark-La-Tex lithium industry is in its infancy but has potential to revitalize rural and small-town economies – and that dovetails with the goals both of President Trump’s 2018 Rural Prosperity Task Force and 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill – as well as with his call for rebuilding the domestic critical minerals industry and ending the stifling of mining operations in America.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

Colorado River Crisis Brings Major Cuts for California, Nevada, and Arizona

California, Nevada, and Arizona allocations will be cut a combined 1.25 million acre-feet annually for the next two years, while the upstream states evade mandatory reductions for now.

Arizona will see the biggest cuts, while states upstream — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — do not face any for now.

From Watts Up With That?

Phoenix is planning to dip into its emergency water bank as a result.

From Legal Insurrection

Posted by Leslie Eastman

Federal officials are ordering the West to live within the limits of a Colorado River system drained by decades of over- allocation, drought, and policy delay.

California, Nevada, and Arizona allocations will be cut a combined 1.25 million acre-feet annually for the next two years, while the upstream states evade mandatory reductions for now.

Arizona will see the biggest cuts, while states upstream — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — do not face any for now.

Meanwhile neighboring Mexico will reduce its intake by 250,000 acre-feet (about 310 million cubic meters) under a U.S.-Mexico treaty.

“We’ve been in this 26-year prolonged drought period,” said Andrea Travnicek, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science. “We continue to see a prolonged drought in our future. So continuing to work together as a whole within the basin is going to be extremely important.”

The current rules governing the use of the river’s water are set to expire in October, and the seven states have been unable to reach a consensus on sharing it over the long term.

Federal officials announced sharp water cuts for the next two years on Friday for three Western states that rely on the imperiled Colorado River.

Years of overuse combined with drought and rising temperatures due to climate change have depleted the country's two largest… pic.twitter.com/OsVdsaFKMN
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) August 23, 2026

Arizona will see the largest cuts, with annual water deliveries reduced by 31%. As a result, the city of Phoenix is planning to dip into its emergency water bank.

Arizona’s large cut results from agreements and court fights over water rights more than 100 years ago.

The result was that Arizona got the lowest priority for Colorado water in times of shortages, and California the highest priority. That’s what the state is living with today.

The City of Phoenix has been preparing for this day.

The city’s plan starts with dipping into an emergency water bank for the first time since its creation more than 35 years ago.

Arizona will lose 31% of its Colorado River water over the next two years — the largest cuts of any state. Phoenix is now tapping its emergency water bank for the first time in more than 35 years to keep water flowing to residents.https://t.co/pb7ZUzlE0X pic.twitter.com/ZBaqR20f5K
— 12 News (@12News) August 22, 2026

The cuts could significantly affect Nevada, which has been enjoying robust real estate development as Californians flee the Golden State.

In Southern Nevada, Kyle Roerink, senior adviser at the conservation group Great Basin Water Network, said efforts to build a new airport and shopping malls and some public land sales have not progressed, reflecting the dire hydrology inked in the federal documents. Further cuts could slow real estate development in metro Las Vegas, he said.

River water levels are so low that hydropower plants may no longer generate power.

The river’s health often is determined by how much water is in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S. Together, the reservoirs are at their lowest point since they began filling, according to a recent paper by Colorado River experts, and approaching levels where they could no longer produce hydropower.

Hoover Dam could lose the ability to generate hydropower if Lake Mead falls below its minimum power pool, reported as roughly 950 feet above sea level. At lower elevations, there is not enough usable water intake to operate the turbines.

It gives a whole new meaning to “Deadpool“.

The minimum level to generate power is 950 feet, and if the level drops to 895 feet, then that’s the dreaded Deadpool.

Deadpool is the point when water can no longer flow downstream from the dam, and if that happens, then the system as we know it fails.

Lake Mead’s reported water-surface elevation is 1,039 feet above sea level, about 190 feet below full pool and approximately 27% full.

Even though this plan is final, the threat of litigation looms.

Tribes, states or other groups are now able to sue Reclamation over its final plan, and could argue that the agency erred in how it conducted its environmental review.

Some tribes, like the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) in Arizona, have indicated that drastic federal water cuts could force a lawsuit. Many tribes in the basin also have water rights on paper that have never been fully realized.

GRIC Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said that while litigation is certainly not the community’s first choice, it is an option.

“The community … will not hesitate to turn to the courts to protect our interests and our future,” he said at a CU-Boulder water conference in June.

Perhaps the anticipated historic El Niño will bring the Southwest the rain and mountain snowpack needed to offer the Colorado River system some breathing room.

But precipitation alone will not solve a crisis worsened by decades of over-allocation, political procrastination, and an aversion to building the reservoirs, recharge projects, and other infrastructure needed to capture water when it actually arrives.

The real test will be whether Western leaders can move beyond emergency rationing and litigation long enough to prepare for both the next wet cycle and the inevitable dry one.

Finally, and as a much needed reminder, severe droughts have occurred periodically in this region of the US….long before Henry Ford invented the car.

Look carefully at this figure.

Tree-ring reconstructions show the American West experienced megadroughts lasting hundreds of years long before industrial CO₂ emissions. Cook et al. report that Medieval drought conditions persisted, with few interruptions, for “a few hundred… https://t.co/jgFEktkKQv pic.twitter.com/dWd5QwARgF
— Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki (@MatthewWielicki) August 25, 2026

World’s Oldest Fortresses Discovered in Siberia — Built by Hunter-Gatherers 8,000 Years Ago

Oldest fortresses in the world just discovered are 8,000 years old- Archaeologists have discovered the oldest fortresses in the world.

Around 6100- 6000 BCE, the climate in the Northern Hemisphere (including western Siberia) was shaped by the aftermath of the prominent 8.2- kiloyear event, an abrupt global cooling episode.

This was the largest abrupt climate shift of the Holocene (the current interglacial epoch).

“Oldest fortresses in the world just discovered are 8,000 years old”

Tthis refers to the Amnya (or Amnya I) fortified settlement in western Siberia’s Lower Ob’ region (Taiga), dated to around 8,000 years ago and widely reported as among the world’s oldest known forts or fortified habitation sites.

An international team (led by researchers including those from Freie Universität Berlin, with Russian collaborators) conducted fieldwork in 2019 and published new radiocarbon dating and analysis in the journal Antiquity in December 2023.

The earliest fortifications (ditches, banks/walls, and evidence of wooden palisades) and associated pit houses date to the final century of the 7th millennium BCE (roughly 6100- 6000 BCE), with a main occupation phase into the early 6th millennium BCE.

The earliest fortifications (ditches, banks/walls, and evidence of wooden palisades) and associated pit houses date to the final century of the 7th millennium BCE (roughly 6100- 6000 BCE), with a main occupation phase into the early 6th millennium BCE.

This makes it the northernmost known Stone Age fortification in Eurasia and one of the earliest fortified settlements worldwide on current evidence.

It sits on a promontory/spit overlooking the Amnya River, a resource- rich location. Structures include roughly 10 sunken pit houses (some nearly 2 meters deep, with central fireplaces, suited to cold winters) enclosed by earthen banks, ditches, and palisades. There is also a nearby related area (Amnya II).

Built and used by hunter- gatherer- fishers (not farmers). They exploited the taiga environment by fishing the river, hunting elk and reindeer with bone- and stone-tipped spears and making elaborately decorated pottery to store surplus fish oil and meat.

Evidence of repeated burning of houses and structures suggests possible inter- group conflict or violence. About eight to ten similar Stone Age fortified sites are known in the broader region.

The site had been known and partially investigated earlier (with some prior radiocarbon dates), but the age and interpretation as early fortifications by foragers were confirmed and refined by the new work, overturning earlier skepticism that such complex defenses seemed too advanced for that context and period.

This challenges traditional views that permanent settlements with monumental or defensive architecture, social complexity, and territoriality primarily emerged only with agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution.

Comparable enclosures appear later in Europe (often post- agriculture), and while some hunter- gatherer groups elsewhere built defenses (usually later and often coastal), the early inland Siberian examples are described as unparalleled in timing.

It supports a more diverse picture of prehistoric social development, possibly linked to rich local resources, population increases, or climatic shifts around that time (such as the 8.2- kiloyear event).

The core claim holds researchers confirmed prehistoric fortifications in Siberia dating to ~8,000 years ago that rank as the oldest or among the oldest known of their kind. The findings come from peer- reviewed work rather than a brand- new 2026 discovery, but they remain a significant recent revision to understandings of early human societies.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

This was built 2000 years before the mighty walls of Uruk and Babylon in the Middle East and thousands of years before agriculture reached some parts of Europe and Asia.

That comparison is drawn directly from reporting on the Amnya site (and similar early Siberian fortified settlements).

It appears in coverage such as the Science article summarizing the 2023 Antiquity study: the Siberian structures date to roughly 8,000 years ago (earliest phase around 6100- 6000 BCE), which places them about 2,000 years earlier than the major city walls of Uruk and well before the famous fortifications associated with Babylon, as well as thousands of years before farming reached certain parts of Europe and Asia.

Amnya fortifications: Initial construction in the final century of the 7th millennium BCE (~6100- 6000 BCE), with main occupation into the early 6th millennium BCE. These are modest promontory forts with earthen banks, ditches, wooden palisades, and pit houses built by hunter- gatherers.

Uruk’s city walls: The large, famous circuit (roughly 9 km long in later phases, enclosing several square kilometers) is archaeologically tied to the Early Dynastic period in southern Mesopotamia, primarily the first half of the 3rd millennium BCE (often linked to Early Dynastic I or around the late 4th/early 3rd millennium transition into the era associated with the Gilgamesh legends). This is broadly ~2,000+ years after Amnya’s earliest phase. Earlier monumental architecture and settlement at Uruk itself go back further into the Uruk period (4th millennium BCE), but the major defensive walls postdate the Siberian forts.

Babylon’s walls: The most renowned ones (Imgur-Enlil and related fortifications) are primarily Neo-Babylonian (6th century BCE under rulers like Nebuchadnezzar II), though earlier city walls existed from the Old Babylonian period onward (2nd millennium BCE). These are far later.

The “mighty walls” phrasing refers to these iconic Mesopotamian urban defenses that symbolize early complex, state- level societies, not the absolute earliest enclosures anywhere.

Agriculture (plant and animal domestication) began in the Fertile Crescent/Southwest Asia around 12,000- 10,000 years ago (roughly 10,000- 8,000 BCE).

It spread outward gradually:

Into southeastern Europe/the Aegean and Balkans by ~7000- 6500 BCE.

Across central and western Europe over subsequent centuries/millennia (reaching Britain and northern areas later, around 4000 BCE or after in some regions).

In parts of Asia, independent or related developments occurred (e.g., rice and millet in East Asia by ~8000- 6500 BCE in some areas), but full agricultural systems reached many regions, including northern/western Siberia and remote areas, much later, often millennia after the Amnya forts.

In the western Siberian taiga where Amnya sits, the local economy at the time of the forts remained based on hunting, fishing, and gathering (with pottery for storage), and agriculture arrived substantially later.

This is why the site is significant: it shows complex defensive architecture and semi- sedentary settlement among foragers, independent of (and predating in this region) the agricultural package often linked to such developments elsewhere.

The comparison underscores how the Amnya evidence complicates linear models of social complexity emerging only after farming.

The ~8,000- year- old Siberian forts predate both the classic Mesopotamian urban walls by roughly two millennia and the arrival of agriculture in various parts of Europe and Asia by thousands of years in some cases.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Around 6100- 6000 BCE, the climate in the Northern Hemisphere (including western Siberia) was shaped by the aftermath of the prominent 8.2- kiloyear event, an abrupt global cooling episode.

The 8.2-kiloyear event

This was the largest abrupt climate shift of the Holocene (the current interglacial epoch). It began roughly 8,200 years before present (around 6250- 6200 BCE, with precise ice- core dates near 8175 BP or ~6225 BCE) and lasted about 150- 400 years overall, with the coldest phase concentrated in the first ~60-160 years.

Cause: A massive outburst of freshwater from the residual Laurentide Ice Sheet (drainage of glacial Lakes Agassiz and Ojibway into the North Atlantic via Hudson Bay). This freshened surface waters, weakened the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), reduced northward heat transport, and triggered widespread cooling and other changes.

Magnitude and effects: Greenland temperatures dropped by roughly 3- 6°C (decadal averages ~3.3°C cooler) within decades. Northern Hemisphere cooling of 1- 3°C was common in many records. It involved drier conditions in parts of the tropics and mid- latitudes, shifts in monsoon systems, reduced atmospheric methane, and hydroclimate variability (e.g., wetter/drier swings in some regions). Recovery was stepwise over decades to a century or more.

The event is clearly recorded in Greenland ice cores, speleothems, lake sediments, and other proxies across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and beyond. It marks the start of the Northgrippian stage of the Holocene.

Relation to the Amnya forts and western Siberia

The earliest fortifications at Amnya I (and the broader appearance of similar sites in the western Siberian taiga) date to the final century of the 7th millennium BCE (~6100- 6000 BCE). This places them shortly after the main phase of the 8.2 ka cooling (often framed as ~6200- 6050 cal BC).

Researchers studying Amnya note that this timing coincides with signs of increased territoriality among hunter-gatherers in parts of northern Eurasia.

Possible links include:

Resource stress or shifts (e.g., changes in aquatic ecosystems, fish populations, or vegetation affecting hunting, fishing yields).

Population movements or aggregation as groups adapted.

Or, conversely, post- event amelioration and resource abundance enabling more sedentary, defensive strategies in the rich taiga environment.

Local western Siberian Taiga records from the broader early- to- mid Holocene show a general trend toward warmer conditions after the early Holocene, with the Holocene Thermal Maximum developing (warmer and sometimes wetter than present in some reconstructions for the region around or after this time).

Peatland expansion in the western Siberian basin became more pronounced later (~6000- 5000 years ago in some areas). Vegetation was dominated by boreal forests (taiga elements like pine, spruce, birch, larch), supporting the hunting- fishing- gathering economy.

Specific high- resolution local proxies for the exact decade of the 8.2 event can be sparse or muted by the onset of warmer conditions, but the global cooling is the key reference point.

6100- 6000 BCE falls in the recovery phase or immediate aftermath of a significant Northern Hemisphere cooling pulse.

For the Amnya hunter- gatherers, this climatic context is hypothesized as one possible factor contributing to social and settlement changes (alongside local resource richness and other social dynamics), though direct causation remains under discussion.

Climate- Science.press

What is California’s ‘inefficient tire’ ban, and why does it matter?

Like this:

Humans Brought Fire to a Fireless Amazon and Reshaped It for 10,000 Years

Like this:

Carney’s Dagger: How Ottawa’s Trade Brinkmanship Threatens US National Security Strategy

Like this:

“Super” El Nino Misinformation

Like this:

Federal Oil and Gas Well Bonding: Undoing Biden

Like this:

New York’s New Solar Religion Is Absolutely Devastating To Wildlife, Farmland

Like this:

Hole punch clouds- How Planes and Mountains Carve “UFOs” in the Sky

Like this:

The Ark-La-Tex may be leading America’s lithium race

Like this:

Colorado River Crisis Brings Major Cuts for California, Nevada, and Arizona

Like this:

World’s Oldest Fortresses Discovered in Siberia — Built by Hunter-Gatherers 8,000 Years Ago

Like this: