John Kostyack

I believe ProPublica over Kristi Noem

I should emphasize that this rule isn't yet final. A public hearing on Nov 14 is the place where anyone concerned about the insurance industry's handling of climate risk can weigh in. www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurer...

Bill Gates hasn’t made sense on Climate since he teamed up with Bjorn Lomberg in 2009. This is just a restating of Bjorn’s book from this year about how we have a finite amount of money and we shouldn’t use it for climate. What they get wrong is that climate solutions are now fully profitable.

CA is breaking new ground on climate risk management. Under the Long-Term Solvency Regulation, insurers are required to document climate risks and opportunities projected for 2030, 2040 & 2050 that could affect underwriting, investments, or operations. With "stress tests" of climate scenarios.

An Outer Banks Village Loses More Homes to the Sea At least five houses collapsed on Hatteras Island this week. As more homes are lost to the sea, government and homeowners reach a crossroads.

In Dare County NC, more and more houses are falling into the ocean. The county spends millions on beach renourishment and doesn't talk about climate change. That would “get off message," says the county manager. "So many people have so many different points of view.”

Put the Data Center in the Box K-cup project finance, box spread rates, Best Egg and an Instagram interview.

@matt-levine.bsky.social on how Big Tech finances data centers: "If you can convince your ratings agencies & accountants that it’s not debt & you convince the debt investors that it is debt, then you can raise cheap debt financing without it counting against your pristine credit profile."

The escalating battle over renewable energy certificates (RECs) | Volts A conversation with Wilson Ricks and Killian Daly.

@energykillian.bsky.social on the @volts.wtf podcast on the importance of the GHG Protocol's Scope 2 reporting reforms underway: Big Tech is "following the [GHG Protocol] rules and they're reporting zero emissions. That objectively is absurd."

On the other side of the Hill, Democrats are asking Big Tech about who will cover the costs of financing grid upgrades to support data center expansion. With electricity costs already straining US household budgets, perhaps Big Tech could commit to not burdening them further?

Senate Republicans are bringing in Big Tech witnesses today to berate them for alleged censorship. Will anyone from the industry say they have an obligation to limit disinformation / Nazi propaganda/ manipulation of elections? Or will they embrace the bogus 1st Amendment narratives?

After a federal agent shot at a D.C. driver, claims of a police cover-up DHS said Tuesday that its agent fired after the driver tried to run him over. But a D.C. officer told a judge that no one was standing in front of the car.

Trump says DC is gripped by “a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” but the lawlessness that really worries DC residents is the impunity of his goons roaming our streets. Here, Homeland Security shoots at an unarmed Black man, then covers up the fact that he had done nothing threatening.

Trump administration uses misleading videos to portray chaos, push deportations Official videos purporting to show the triumph of recent immigration operations used footage that was months old or recorded thousands of miles away, a Washington Post analysis found.

The Trump regime has been caught red-handed putting out falsified videos to glorify its campaign to terrorize immigrants in US cities. Some of these videos capture bigger audiences on social media than mainstream news reports. Will the social media companies now remove this disinformation?

Hard to say, considering there's no ruling yet. But I'm hopeful this will help public pension funds see the need to get away from the quarterly earnings mindset that is the enemy of sustainability - and that harms their beneficiaries with longer term savings/investing horizons.

4 Youth Sue CPP Investments for Failing to Protect Pensions from Climate Risk Four youth from across Canada are suing the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for failing to protect their pensions from climate risk, in what the Board is interpreting as an attack on the pension ...

The 1st case against a Canadian pension fund for inadequate attention to climate risk & the 1st worldwide seeking to enforce the fiduciary duty of impartiality, which requires treating fairly "young contributors who will retire after 2050 when climate-related financial risks will be even greater.”

Critics decry company created to rush power to Indiana data centers Northern Indiana Public Service Co. says the spinoff is needed to meet surging power demand. Others say it’s an excuse to bypass regulations that protect…

The Indiana regulator has approved utility NIPSCO's plan to send all data center business to its subsidiary GenCo. CAC's Olsen: cost-shifting to ratepayers is "hidden in opaque process." Clean Grid Alliance's Piontek: the deal exempts GenCo from rate regulation & insulates it from competition.

Great insights here. Good move by the @rooseveltinstitute.org to pull this group of ex-officials together for shared accountability and learning, with no one hiding behind the cloak of anonymity.

Tesla rehashing old threats to get shareholders to approve Musk’s $1 trillion pay day Rinse, repeat.

Musk's response to shareholder concerns about his spearheading of DOGE, his support for Europe’s far right parties, his Nazi salutes at the Trump inauguration, his decision to turn X into a vehicle for propaganda by election deniers and white supremacists? Ignore them & insist on a pay increase.

The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

As we head into Tesla's annual meeting, a new study shows Musk's activism has badly harmed shareholders. Tesla's Oct 2022 - April 2025 sales would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26M more vehicles, if he hadn't participated in the authoritarian takeover. #TeslaTakedown

Yes, people are desperate for a tech innovation they can believe in. And not motivated to try outduelling the bullshit peddlers, that is just so much work and unwelcome in many quarters. Love the term "bullshit asymmetry syndrome," it explains so much about the world.

"Climate reporters at these outlets [Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and The Washington Post], who requested anonymity to avoid professional repercussions, described the practice as “gross,” “undermining,” and “dangerous”."

All of the factors that create bubbles are here with AI. As Brian says, the core of the problem is the "storytelling" of the tech companies. You'd think that after the 2008 crash, institutional investors would have learned to ask tougher questions. But the quarterly earnings mindset continues.

Meanwhile, dissemination of AI "deepfake" videos is accelerating. What happened to the promises made 4 years ago by the tech industry that it would ensure that all videos include details about how and when they were made or manipulated? "Progress is still all but invisible."

This should be the Surgeon General's warning that pops up every time you open ChatGPT. Also, "things written down" on the internet are often correct, but increasingly less correct every day.

“This is not just about building warehouses full of computers,” said Davante Lewis. “The real health risks come from the utilities rushing to build more gas plants and delaying renewable energy commitments,” locking communities into “decades of pollution and higher bills.”

Heartily agree with this proposal to "reverse the private-by-design loophole that allows companies to remain private even as they raise huge sums of capital from hundreds of shareholders. If you access the public’s savings at scale, you should meet the public’s disclosure standards."

Watching this year's COP to see how the non-petrostates will respond to Trump's attempt to bully them into fossil fuel dependency and further destabilization of the climate. London Business School's Ioannou: China "offers more stability than the Trump administration.”

Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows Executives at world’s biggest datacenter owner grappled with disclosing information about water used to help power facilities

"Amazon as a whole consumed 105bn gallons of water in total in 2021, as much as 958,000 US households, which would make for a city bigger than San Francisco, according to the memo."

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Great points. The entrenched utility business model, including regulatory capture, is now benefitting from Big Tech's unparalleled $ and political clout. A better headline for WaPo: Without reforms, the data center building spree is likely to inflict big financial pain on residential ratepayers.

Trump Is Putting Election Deniers in Charge of Elections

Before she became Trump's top official overseeing election integrity, Heather Honey suggested that a declaration of a national emergency justifying a federal takeover of our election system could happen - using the pretext of the supposedly stolen 2020 election.

Agree with these additional takes on the @shannonosaka.bsky.social story. Would love to see more on the cost impacts of the data center industry's current trajectory of relying heavily on gas-fired power versus cleaner and cheaper alternatives (renewables/batteries, flexible demand and DERs/VPPs).

Follow up stories for @shannonosaka.bsky.social: how much pain for ratepayers if the utilities attempt to maximize their revenue using speculative data center proposals from the tech and real estate industries? Are the PUCs likely to protect everyday ratepayers from cost-shifting?