Environment
Los Angeles is set to host the 2028 Olympic Games, with Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine serving as the venue for Olympic baseball. Transforming this iconic ballpark into a fully green-powered facility—and turning its vast parking lots into sources of clean energy—could position LA as a global showcase for a Solartopian future.
It would hugely further the massive green energy conversion that’ll define human survival.
AND…it’ll lower both the very high electric rates and soaring temperatures that threaten our city.
Here’s the bottom line: with currently available technology, solarizing Dodger Stadium could be done within three years, as canopy costs drop and electric rates rise.
Available battery back-ups can keep the park lit for night games. AND help meet the city’s prime time power needs.
Solar canopy technology is now widely used in both urban and agricultural settings (where it’s known as “agri-voltaic”) .
Numerous parking lots throughout the world are now being covered.
The current administration is not a supporter of “clean energy” alternatives
Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens report on the Trump/Republican aim to end the “clean energy boom” that occurred during the Biden administration (https://nytimes.com/2025/05/13/climate/ira-republican-tax-bill-clean-energy.html).
“The party’s signature tax plan would kill most Biden-era incentives,” they write. Overlooked by the Republicans, “G.O.P. districts have the most to lose.” They refer to “wind farms in Wyoming, to a “huge solar factory expansion in Georgia. Lithium mines in Nevada. Vacuums that suck carbon from the air in Louisiana.”
Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age with the first explosion of an atomic bomb, I visited the expanse of desert known as the Nevada Test Site, an hour’s drive northwest of Las Vegas. A pair of officials from the Department of Energy took me on a tour. They explained that nuclear tests were absolutely necessary. “Nuclear weapons are like automobiles,” one told me. “Ford doesn’t put a new automobile out on the highway until they’ve gone through a lengthy test process, driving hundreds of thousands of miles.”
By then, in 1980, several hundred underground nuclear blasts had already occurred in Nevada, after the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty required that atomic testing take place below the earth’s surface. Previously, about 100 nuclear warheads had been set off above ground at that test site, sending mushroom clouds aloft and endangering with radiation exposure not just nearby soldiers but downwind civilians as well.
Donald Trump on May 23rd declared nuclear power to be “a hot industry.” Nuclear power plants are “very safe and environmental,” he said. He made the claims as he issued executive orders to quadruple nuclear energy capacity in the United States.
He failed to mention that nuclear power plants are subject to catastrophic accidents—such as the Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters. And in routine operation, they release deadly radioactive emissions. Also, the nuclear fuel cycle—including mining, milling, enrichment of nuclear fuel—is highly carbon-intensive.
He missed the fact that in pure economic terms they portend the largest economic debacle in human history. He omitted mention of who would pay for 300+ new nuclear plants in the U.S. to be built under his executive orders. (There are currently 94 nuclear plants operating in the U.S.)
Nuclear Situational Updates from the Decom Working Group
Each week we are honored to join the Decommissioning Working Group, a community of sister and brother activists from various organizations in a Zoom meeting in which information about nuclear-related developments are shared in a sweep across the country for on-the-ground reports.
Just a brief summary of our notes from today’s DWG Zoom confab gives a synoptic nuclear situational awareness view of what can be described as an ongoing nuclear complex coup.
We have stolen the above title from a wry quip by meeting participant Paul Gunther of Beyond Nuclear.
In a series of recent executive orders, the Trump Administrations has detonated a demolition bomb in the existing architecture of nuclear energy regulation and arms control. [ See background links below.] The volley of moves combined have the unified goal of ushering in a so-called ‘American nuclear energy revival.’ They aim to:
1. Dismantle nuclear safety oversight by regulatory agencies;
US House Reconciles Legislation That Handicaps Renewable Energy Projects
The Republican controlled House of Representatives passed reconciliation legislation that effectively will eliminate nearly every renewable energy incentive that is currently in place.
The bill will end the 30 percent residential solar investment tax credit by the end of this year and the applicability of residential solar leases for tax credits.
The Investment Tax Credit (ITC) and the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for commercial and utility scale projects would go away completely for any project not placed in service by the end of 2028.
There are a couple of poison pill provisions put into this legislation that are designed to prevent any renewable energy projects from moving forward.
I write this as someone who has long worked across ideological divides to bring people together around shared values of health, freedom, and stewardship of the land. I have dedicated my life to helping heal the broken systems that shape our food and our future.
I write this with deep respect for the courage it takes to lead, and with a profound commitment to the principles that unite us: The right to nourish our families, the freedom to protect our health, and the responsibility to care for the land that sustains us all.
This is a call to action for leaders, for the MAHA community, and for every American who believes that a healthy future is worth building, and where necessary, fighting for!
Donald Trump’s lethal fossil/nuke attack on the US renewable energy industry is poised to destroy America’s ability to compete in global markets for the foreseeable future.
“Drill baby drill” and yet another “nuclear renaissance” are Trump’s siren calls for a destroyed American economy.
Despite Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” hype, wind, solar, geothermal, battery storage and other green sources are far cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable, faster to build and job producing than fossil fuels and nuclear reactors.
Thus, more than 80% of the world’s new energy production continues to come from wind, solar, geothermal, battery storage and other green sources. Both nuclear power and fossil fuels are in steep global decline.
Though photovoltaic cells were first deployed at New Jersey’s Bell Labs in 1957, the booming solar panel industry is now dominated by China. The U.S. does have the capacity to produce a substantial 50 gigawatts of solar panels every year.