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What Would It Take to Eliminate Storm-Related Power Outages?
• Jan 29, 2026

What Would It Take to Eliminate Storm-Related Power Outages?

Hundreds of thousands of households, mostly in the Southeast United States, were without power when a dangerous cold snap hit this week, just days after the previous weekend’s winter storm buffeted large swathes of the country. Officials in several of the affected states have warned that these outages could linger for some time—in Mississippi, one emergency management coordinator told CNN that they might last “weeks, not days.” Power outages during severe weather events are increasingly common. And they can easily be fatal, particularly when paired with extreme temperatures. What would it take to at least reduce the frequency of these outages, even as the severe weather driving them increases?“There are several points of failure that lead to these kinds of widespread power outages,” Gudrun Thompson, senior attorney and energy program leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me by phone. She pointed not just to the most recent storm but also to Winter Storm Elliott, which hit the Southeast hard in 2022, and Winter Storm Uri, which devastated Texas in 2021.Getting electricity into homes happens in a few stages: It begins with power generation, then transmission (where it goes to substations), and finally distribution to the homes themselves. Here, the amount of power demand also plays a role. “Each of these need to be tackled, and some of the solutions won’t address all three of these,” said Adam Kurland, a federal energy attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund.But both Thompson and Kurland pointed to a few things that could make a difference. “On the supply side, the biggest thing is just having a portfolio of diverse resources,” Kurland said. Renewables aren’t just good from a climate and environment perspective, he said, “they are also usually the most reliable during extreme weather events, and that’s been proven out by a number of studies that have found that both gas and coal have resulted in bottlenecks during extreme weather events.”That’s particularly true in some of the regions suffering from outages this week. “You’ve got this legacy power system where the electric grid is still in this very twentieth-century model of big central station power plants,” said Thompson. “You’ve still got coal plants running in the South, you’ve got some nuclear plants, you’ve got a lot of new and old gas plants.” And “in some of these winter storms, we’ve literally seen these piles of coal freeze, so they couldn’t run the coal-fired plants.” Gas supply networks are similarly vulnerable, and were a major factor in the Texas outages in 2021. Initial analysis from the energy and climate policy firm Energy Innovation suggests gas generation within PJM Interconnection—the country’s largest grid operator, serving over 65 million people across the mid-Atlantic to the upper South and Midwest—fell by 10 gigawatts during this most recent storm.This contradicts everything that conservative politicians, in particular, tend to say in the wake of these events—certainly after the Texas outages in 2021. “I often get asked by reporters, ‘What do you say to what the electric utility is saying about how this winter storm event just proves they need more gas?’” Thompson said. “It’s a false narrative. Clean energy resources are more reliable, more affordable, less risky for consumers, when you kind of put them all together as a portfolio. You can’t rely on any one source, so you’ll hear fossil industry apologists saying, ‘Well, the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.’ That’s true,” she said, but no one’s advocating relying on a single source. And that points to another thing that could be done to eliminate these outages: a more interconnected grid. This was one of the main factors in 2021 in Texas, Kurland noted. “Texas’s power grid, ERCOT, is primarily islanded from the rest of the United States, so there weren’t a lot of connections there to be able to bring power into Texas during that storm.” If the goal is to build resilience to severe weather events, we need “an electrical grid that’s bigger than the weather,” Kurland said. With better transmission lines connecting different regions, it won’t matter if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing or severe cold is kneecapping fossil fuel generation in a particular location, because “you’re now able to dispatch power from one side of the United States to the other.” Microgrids tied into the main grid, as well as better power storage, could also play a role. And then there’s the option of burying power lines, which would address the problem not only of the lines sagging under ice in the winter but also of stray sparks causing wildfires in other seasons. This isn’t feasible everywhere, Kurland emphasized, pointing to water tables and local geology. But even for such inhospitable locales, there are different, more advanced types of wires that are less vulnerable to sagging and the like. “There are some incentives that the federal government and the states can apply to be able to unlock those types of advanced technologies on the transmission system.”When it comes to federal incentives, though, both Kurland and Thompson noted that a lot of the policies that could make households and the electrical grid less vulnerable in severe weather have been recently reversed, or the associated funds delayed. That’s true not just for, say, offshore wind projects but also for the weatherization programs that could both help reduce strain on the grid during cold snaps and help people survive brief outages when they occur. “As of last month, there were still a number of states trying to get that funding for cold snaps and extreme weather events like this,” said Kurland. He pointed to funds already designated to states via the Weatherization Assistance Program, slated to be released in June 2025, which still hadn’t arrived as of late December. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Energy has proposed scrapping the program altogether.The entire grid feels the effect when homes aren’t weatherized, Kurland said. Weatherization is “one way that you can reduce that demand so there isn’t a big draw on the system.” If homes are drawing a large amount of energy, it can actually prolong outages. “When you have all the customers with the thermostats turned all the way up waiting for the power to come on, that can just trip that system again.”Thompson also pointed to the Trump Environmental Protection Agency “unlawfully” canceling grants that had already been awarded for community solar programs and similar projects, in the Southern states where she works. “The Trump administration, even though they say they have this energy affordability agenda, is actually working to undermine successful policies and programs that would actually help households to afford their electricity bills,” Thompson said.Stat of the Week61%Survey results released this week by Yale Climate Communication find 61 percent of Americans underestimate how worried their fellow Americans are about global warming.What I’m ReadingTime for some courage in the climate fight, tooI’ve been reading a lot of good essays from climate writers watching and troubled by the events in Minnesota in the last few weeks. Emily Atkin’s essay, over on Heated, is definitely worth your time, as is Bill McKibben’s reflection on just how wrong politicians have been, time and time again, when guessing what ordinary people care about.… it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I’m paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cellphone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.Read Bill McKibben’s full newsletter at The Crucial Years.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Trump’s Too Dumb to Know, but Philip Glass’s Symphony Is About Him
• Jan 29, 2026

Trump’s Too Dumb to Know, but Philip Glass’s Symphony Is About Him

Donald Trump responded to Philip Glass’s withdrawal of his Lincoln symphony from the Kennedy Center the way he usually does when confronted by someone of real stature: with a sour-grapes, self-aggrandizing rant. The tirade was petty, frivolous, and quickly forgotten. But the episode itself deserves attention because Trump’s insult, unsurprisingly, missed the broader point of Glass’s gesture.Glass, 89, a towering figure in modern composition whose place in the history of music is secure, did not merely pull a much-anticipated work that is likely his last symphony. He pointedly sounded the symphony’s theme as a direct protest to the dangerous authoritarian rule under Trump.Glass wrote, “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.… Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.” And he announced his withdrawal on January 27—exactly 188 years to the day after Lincoln gave the speech that inspired the symphony.Symphony No. 15, Lincoln, draws centrally from Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address, generally considered his first great speech. Lincoln delivered the address to a group of young professionals in Springfield, Illinois, when he was just 28—an age when Trump was still shining his father’s shoes.Trump, who one suspects has never read the Lyceum speech or listened to a Glass symphony, viewed the gesture, as he invariably does, as a personal affront. In fact, it was far more. It incorporated Lincoln’s prescient warning about democratic collapse, a warning that lands with unsettling accuracy on the dangers of Trumpian rule.In the Lyceum, Lincoln was already grappling with the question of how republics fail. He begins by asking where the danger to American self-government will come from. Not from abroad, he insists. No foreign army, no invading conqueror, no modern Bonaparte. If destruction comes, Lincoln says, “it must spring up amongst us.” If the republic falls, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”Lincoln identifies the mechanism of that self-destruction with striking clarity. It begins with an “increasing disregard for law,” a willingness to substitute “wild and furious passions” for “the sober judgment of courts,” and the replacement of lawful authority with mobs. This condition, Lincoln warns, is “awfully fearful” in any community—and it would be an insult to intelligence to deny it where it exists.The specific outrages Lincoln recounts—lynchings, burnings, mob executions—belong to his era. But his insight is structural. The deepest danger of mob law, Lincoln explains, lies not in the immediate violence but in the example it sets. When lawlessness goes unpunished, “the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice.” Having known no restraint but fear of punishment, they become “absolutely unrestrained.” They come to regard government as their enemy, rejoice in the suspension of its operations, and “pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”Lincoln also warns of a subtler and more corrosive effect: habituation. As lawlessness persists, the public grows accustomed to it. What once shocked begins to seem normal. Expectations shift, standards erode, and defiance of lawful authority becomes ambient rather than exceptional behavior. This slow corrosion is what makes democratic collapse possible without a single dramatic rupture.At the same time, Lincoln observes, law-abiding citizens begin to lose faith. When rights are held only at the “caprice of a mob,” attachment to government erodes. A republic without the affection of its best citizens, Lincoln warns, cannot endure. The danger is not merely that the lawless grow bolder but that the lawful grow disenchanted.This dynamic, in turn, creates the opening for a particular kind of leader. When reverence for law collapses, Lincoln argues, men of ambition will not be lacking. Such figures seek distinction above all. And when the glory of building has already been claimed by others, these ambitious men will seek distinction by tearing down. Lincoln’s language is stark. A man of towering ambition, he says, will pursue fame “whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”It’s impossible to read this description without seeing how exactly it fits Trump’s conduct. His contempt for law is not episodic or rhetorical; it is foundational. Courts matter only when they serve him. He casts legal accountability as persecution. He elevates loyalty over legality, impulse over judgment, grievance over governance. Mobs are not an aberration but a tool—summoned, legitimated, and excused. The result is precisely the “mobocratic spirit” Lincoln warned would rot a republic from within and prepare the ground for despotism.Lincoln’s remedy is as important as his diagnosis. He does not call for charismatic saviors or heroic leaders. He calls for simple “reverence for the laws”; what he famously terms, in high Enlightenment rhetoric, a “political religion.” Lincoln is explicit that bad laws may exist and should be repealed. But while they remain in force, they must be obeyed, for the sake of example. “There is no grievance,” he insists, “that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” The alternative is not liberty but a descent into lawlessness that invites tyranny.The Lyceum Address is not poetry but prose—a plainspoken diagnosis of how democracies fail. Lincoln identified contempt for law as the root condition of democratic collapse and traced how it hardens into despotism from within.Glass has long aligned his work with serious engagement in democratic and constitutional life, including by making his music available to projects devoted to sustained legal and civic discussion. He has also contributed his music to Talking Feds, the podcast I host. That Trump met Glass’s gesture with bullyboy insults only sharpened the contrast between Lincoln’s gravity and Trump’s intellectual unseriousness.Glass’s withdrawal was not a partisan gesture but a civic one: To premiere a work grounded in Lincoln’s defense of law under an institution now explicitly branded with Trump’s name would have recast the symphony as an endorsement of the very lawlessness it was written to oppose. Trump’s callow response only underscored the point. Lincoln warned that contempt for law is the republic’s gravest danger. Trump, without intending to, has demonstrated exactly why.

JOE IS SO GONE...
9:33
• Jan 29, 2026

JOE IS SO GONE...

Trump Team Secretly Met With Group That Wants to Separate From Canada
• Jan 29, 2026

Trump Team Secretly Met With Group That Wants to Separate From Canada

Senior Trump administration officials have held meetings with the Alberta Prosperity Project, a fringe separatist group that seeks to split the province away from Canada. The Financial Times reports that State Department officials have met representatives from the group in Washington, D.C., three times in the last nine months. The group’s counsel, Jeff Rath, told the publication, “We’re meeting very, very senior people leaving our meetings to go directly to the Oval Office. “The U.S. is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta,” Rath said. The Times, citing unnamed sources, said that the group was hoping for another meeting in February to request $500 billion in credit to prop up the province if an independence referendum, which has not yet been called, were to pass. The State Department confirmed the meetings to the publication but said, “No commitments were made,” and a White House official added that “no such support, or any other commitments, was conveyed.”Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent played up Albertan independence, calling the oil-rich province “a natural partner for the U.S.”“They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people. Rumor that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not,” Bessent said to right-wing podcaster Jack Posobiec.  Podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon discussed Alberta breaking away from Canada in an episode in November, saying that President Trump sees Canada like Ukraine. “The Chinese and the Russians are up there and they see the undefended northern territories of Canada, they’re going to take a bite,” Bannon said. His guest, right-wing commentator Brandon Weichert, expounded further. “I know a lot of the people in charge of the Alberta separatist movement,” Weichert said. “The Albertans are ready to vote in the next six months. They’re going to get out of the Canadian union. They’re going to become an independent country. We’re going to recognize them, and that’s going to put them on the pathway to becoming the fifty-first state.” In reality, polls show that the majority of Albertans would prefer to stay in Canada. Canadian leaders have denounced the APP’s meetings, with British Columbia Premier David Eby calling them “treason” and Ontario Premier Doug Ford saying that “going behind Canada’s back and negotiating is unacceptable.”The U.S. is growing increasingly unpopular in Canada, thanks to Trump’s threats to make them the “fifty-first state.” The idea that his team would try to engineer a breakup of the country will only worsen the relationship, especially considering that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is already seeking to make Canada financially independent from the U.S.

IHIP News: 🚨 Trump Wants Stephen Miller GONE as Republicans Call For HIS REMOVAL in Public ATTACKS!
22:49
• Jan 29, 2026

IHIP News: 🚨 Trump Wants Stephen Miller GONE as Republicans Call For HIS REMOVAL in Public ATTACKS!

Here’s Why Nicki Minaj Is Suddenly Trump’s “Biggest Fan”
• Jan 29, 2026

Here’s Why Nicki Minaj Is Suddenly Trump’s “Biggest Fan”

Some people marry to obtain U.S. citizenship, while others undergo a complex and pricey naturalization process. For Nicki Minaj, it was a simple matter of panhandling the Trump administration.The Trinidadian rapper turned MAGA activist has been begging for citizenship for months. In one particularly skin-crawling social media missive in November, Minaj whimpered to “Papi Trumpo” in a bid for “honorary citizenship.”On Wednesday, her dreams came true.Shortly after appearing beside the president for the unveiling of Trump Accounts—the White House’s attempt to slyly privatize Social Security—Minaj posted an image of her reward: a newly minted Trump “Gold Card” granting her legal residency and a pathway to citizenship.“Residency? Residency? The cope is coping,” Minaj posted Wednesday night alongside an image of the Chucky doll flashing a middle finger. “Finalizing that citizenship paperwork as we speak as per MY wonderful, gracious, charming President. “Gold Trump card free of charge,” she added.For months, Donald Trump and his team pitched his Amex-inspired “gold card” as a replacement for the EB-5 visa program, which gives foreign investors an opportunity to gain permanent residency and bypass the traditional visa system. But the $5 million price tag on the slice of plastic has sparked significant backlash, as did its questionable legality.The “gold card” program officially launched in late 2025, but the novel citizenship framework has come under fire by immigration experts, who have scrutinized the Trump administration’s decision to bypass standard congressional immigration law.Minaj took a hard-right turn toward MAGA avenue three months ago, when her vaccine skepticism—which by then had become a hallmark of the far right—veered into a larger conservative ideology. Since then, her “everything must go” sellout spree has morphed her into an administration mouthpiece. She has reposted White House messaging attacking trans kids, spoken at the United Nations on behalf of the Trump administration, chastised her own LGBTQ+ fans (after initially using her allyship to propel her music career), joined Erika Kirk at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, and attacked Democrats with the White House’s talking points.

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