The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: 6 Democratic Governors Have Linked Arms With the GOP to Push Fossil Fuels
Dear Diary. I have voted for Democrats ever since I became old enough to do so in 1980. It always pains me to learn that some more conservative members of the Democratic Party vote with Republicans to put the brakes on needed change, particular in this day and age of worsening climate change. We saw this when President Biden was trying to pass the Inflation Reduction Act from 2021-2022 when Senators Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin, both Democrats threatened to derail the thing with their crucial votes. The IRA was the first major climate legislation to be put into law in the United States, which Trump and his cronies are trying to destroy as we move through 2025.
Now six democratic governors are threatening to side with Republicans to allow states to keep fossil fuel spigots open because of such excuses as power drains from artificial intelligence. For shame! Thankfully, younger people are joining the democratic party in droves in response to Trump. I’m confident that the party will cast off more conservative members through attrition and become much more bullish on climate mitigation, particularly as the climate crisis deepens going into the 2030s.
Here are more details from Truth Out:
6 Democratic Governors Have Linked Arms With the GOP to Push Fossil Fuels | Truthout
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6 Democratic Governors Have Linked Arms With the GOP to Push Fossil Fuels
A bipartisan group of 13 governors urges Congress to “reform” energy permitting. It’s a terrible idea.
Published November 22, 2025
A fossil fuel plant in Monaca, Pennsylvania, on August 6, 2024.Jeff Swensen for The Washington Post via Getty Images
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A bipartisan group of 13 governors is pushing to deregulate the permitting of energy infrastructure in the U.S., arguing that doing so is necessary to “win the AI race, lower costs for consumers, and responsibly develop the advanced energy sources of the future.”
But in reality, deregulating energy infrastructure construction would be a disastrous mistake that would increase greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution, further harming already polluted communities, and drive up utility bills by enabling proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.
The bipartisan group of governors, which was led by Oklahoma Republican Kevin Stitt and Pennsylvania Democrat Josh Shapiro, sent a letter on October 28 to the leaders of several House and Senate committees urging them to deregulate the permitting of energy infrastructure. The group includes seven Republicans (Stitt plus Mike Braun from Indiana, Jeff Landry from Louisiana, Kelly Armstrong from North Dakota, Bill Lee from Tennessee, Spencer Cox from Utah, and Mark Gordon from Wyoming) and six Democrats (Shapiro plus Jared Polis from Colorado, Ned Lamont from Connecticut, Wes Moore from Maryland, Maura Healey from Massachusetts, and Dan McKee from Rhode Island).
Their letter essentially argues that all forms of energy are equally beneficial; that excessive regulation is impeding needed energy infrastructure; that a lack of energy infrastructure is raising utility bills; and that winning the “AI race” is in the public interest.
But every one of these assertions is demonstrably false. Let’s correct the record, one by one.
Some Energy Infrastructure Shouldn’t Be Built
There is a nearly universal scientific consensus today that building more fossil fuel infrastructure locks in growth in greenhouse gas emissions, precisely when we should be cutting them instead. Burning fossil fuels, of course, heats the planet. And building new infrastructure — even for supposed “bridge fuels” that could be phased out later on — creates costs that fossil fuel companies will want to recoup and profits that they’ll want to lock in for years.
All of the credible international institutions with expertise on the subject — including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Environment Program, and the International Energy Agency — have concluded that we need to stop building fossil fuel infrastructure.
The International Court of Justice ruled in July 2025 that countries have an obligation under international law to phase out fossil fuels. Earlier, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea reached similar conclusions as the International Court of Justice.
The Trump administration officially rejects this overwhelming consensus, but its irrationality is no justification for governors from both parties to push for more fossil fuel infrastructure.
“Permitting Reform” Won’t Help Expand Renewable Energy
We undoubtedly need to build more renewable energy infrastructure. But “permitting reform” won’t help with that.
Peer-reviewed studies show that permitting requirements aren’t a major factor in obstructing renewable energy. One study found that the vast majority of renewable energy projects are either subject to streamlined federal environmental review, or exempt from it altogether. Another study found that most delays in permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act are not attributable to stringency of the permitting process, but to staff shortages and turnover at permitting agencies (exacerbated by federal budget cuts), and delays in project developers submitting required information to agencies.
A real obstacle to expanding renewable energy is the “interconnection queue,” or the wait time for new power generation facilities to be connected to the grid. In 2023, the generation and storage capacity waiting in the interconnection queue (which overwhelmingly consisted of wind, solar, and battery storage) was more than twice the existing grid-connected capacity, which was dominated by fossil energy.
A call for speeding up interconnection requests is one thing the governors’ letter gets right. One of their proposals is to require grid operators to fulfill interconnection requests by new generation and storage facilities within six months of receiving a complete application. That makes sense.
Today, there are two other factors obstructing renewable energy growth.
One is the repeal of tax credits for renewable energy. Under the GOP budget bill signed into law in July, tax credits for residential solar energy — essential for expanding distributed renewables — expire at the end of 2025. Tax credits for utility-scale solar and wind energy projects that commence construction after July 4, 2026, are ineligible for the tax credit if they are placed into service after December 31, 2027, creating significant uncertainty for new projects.
A solar or wind energy developer planning to build a new project today is under pressure to complete all pre-construction activities (site selection, land acquisition, obtaining financing and permits, etc.) before July 4, 2026. Otherwise, they face an 18-month deadline to complete all of these steps, plus construction, to qualify for tax credits.
Another factor is the Trump administration’s arbitrary cancellation of offshore wind energy leasing and permits for already permitted wind energy projects. Why bother building a wind energy project if the administration can just cancel it for ideological reasons?
“Permitting Reform” Won’t Lower Electricity Bills
Electric utility rates for residential customers reached a three-year high in August 2025, causing serious hardship.
In 2020-2021 (the last time the U.S. government collected residential energy consumption data), 27 percent of all households, 52 percent of Black and Indigenous households, and 57 percent of households with an annual income below $10,000 had difficulty paying their utility bills. Today, these numbers are almost certain to be higher.
Two key factors are to blame. One, our energy mix contains too much of the wrong kind of generation capacity. Solar and onshore wind are significantly cheaper than natural gas or nuclear energy, but renewable energy projects are waiting in line to be connected while our grid is still dependent on old, expensive fossil and nuclear power plants.
Accelerating the transition to renewables will help lower bills. But as we’ve seen, permitting “reform” won’t help with this transition.
Another factor, determined by analyses by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Bloomberg News, is the proliferation of data centers to power the internet — and increasingly, to provide the computational capacity to run AI.
The AI industry is increasing the load on the grid, and passing the costs of needed generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades on to households. It’s not an altogether new phenomenon. Residential customers consistently pay higher rates than commercial and industrial customers, subsidizing big corporations through their bills.
The “AI Race” Harms the Public Interest
Winning the “AI race” and lowering costs for consumers are mutually exclusive — unless utility rate structures are reformed to make large commercial and industrial customers pay the full cost of their added load on the grid.
Utility rate structures are set by state legislators and public utility commissions. If these governors were serious about lowering costs for consumers, they would prioritize reforming utility rate structures in their states, instead of writing gimmicky letters to Congress while encouraging data center development in their states — or while local governments in their states make secretive deals with data center developers.
The U.S. data center boom is undermining the needed transition from fossil fuels. Data centers are sourcing much of their immense hunger for energy (40 percent of the total data center energy use in the U.S.) from fracked gas — a share that’s likely to grow in the future, according to a recent Center for Biological Diversity study, which found that greenhouse gas emissions from data centers could triple by 2035.
Besides threatening the climate, AI-driven fossil power generation is poisoning communities. A striking example is Elon Musk’s data center in a majority-Black Memphis neighborhood already intensely polluted by legacy facilities. It was found to be illegally powered by more than twice the number of portable gas turbines allowed by its permit, greatly adding to air pollution.
Data centers also consume prodigious quantities of water, threatening communities’ access to water, especially in an age of increasing water scarcity driven by climate change.
No technology, however useful, should be allowed to have such existentially adverse impacts. The kicker, though, is that AI isn’t particularly useful. Using AI for research is highly unreliable. But AI does appear to be useful for activities that harm the public interest, such as increased government surveillance, enabling more oil and gas extraction, and spreading online misinformation.
If these governors were well-informed and well-intentioned, they would not push for more fossil energy. Instead, they would focus on the real obstacles to building renewable energy and lowering utility bills, instead of being distracted by “permitting reform” and promoting polluting AI data centers that hurt consumers, our communities, and our planet.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)