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CLIMATEWIRE | The sweeping budget bill signed by President Donald Trump will lead to higher electricity bills, fewer renewable installations, and more planet-warming pollution, according to modeling released Friday by the Rhodium Group.

The economic consulting firm’s results are among the bevy of energy models put out in the wake of the law’s passage earlier this month.

Rhodium predicts average household energy expenditures will increase between $78-$192 by 2035, largely due to fewer electric vehicles on the road and consumers paying more for gasoline. Installations of new clean electricity projects, such as wind and solar, are expected to fall 57-62 percent over the next decade. The result is an increase in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

When Rhodium estimated America’s emissions trajectory last year, it predicted the U.S. was on track to cut emissions between 38-56 percent by 2035 compared to 2005 levels. Now, it thinks the U.S. is on pace to reduce emissions 27-44 percent below 2005 levels. For context, U.S. emissions were 20 percent below 2005 levels last year. The broad ranges reflect scenarios that assume differences in economic factors, such as the price of natural gas, renewables or electricity demand growth.

“This has a meaningful slowing effect on the deployment of of clean technology across the economy,” said Ben King, a director in Rhodium’s Climate and Energy practice.

Rhodium’s modeling is one of a series of analyses that have come out in the aftermath of the law’s passage.

FTI, a consulting group, reckons new gas plant construction in the Eastern Interconnection will surge as a result of the measure, prompting an 8 percent increase in natural gas demand for power compared to the group’s reference case scenario. The Eastern Interconnection is the power grid covering two-thirds of the country.

FTI also thinks renewable installations will plunge, leading to renewables’ share of total electricity generation to fall in the 2030s. The group’s initial modeling results did not report changes in costs or emissions.

“The accelerated phase out of clean energy tax credits results in slower growth in wind and solar capacity and leads to gas capacity picking up a greater share, with the majority of new gas builds projected to come online in the 2030’s,” Dan Goodwin, a senior director at FTI, wrote in an email.

The Repeat Project, an academic group led by Princeton University professor Jesse Jenkins, echoed many of Rhodium’s findings.

It estimates the law will increase household energy bills by $280 annually through 2035.

Repeat had expected solar installations to average 44 gigawatts annually through 2035, but that figure falls to 23 GW following the law’s passage. Wind falls from 25 GW annually to 9 GW.

As a result of such changes, it expects greenhouse gas emissions will be 7 percent higher in 2035.

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Magic Johnson is dedicated to his annual yacht trips in Europe, which typically begin with friends and conclude with family. This year is no different—the former point guard is currently vacationing with his wife Cookie, kids, and grandkids.

“Today we enjoyed lunch at the famous beach club Juan y Andrea on the island Formentera in Spain – just outside of Ibiza! I want everyone to see how beautiful the turquoise water is in Formentera😍,” Johnson wrote in the caption.

In the pictures shared, Johnson, 65, and his family enjoyed lunch on a beach, and it appears fresh lobster was on the menu.

In one of the images, the former NBA star’s daughter, Elisa, 30, posed next to him in a black dress. Johnson’s grandson, Avery, sat next to Elisa. EJ, 33, was also present and posed next to his mom, Cookie.

Additionally, Johnson’s son, Andre, 44, and his wife, Lisa, in addition to their daughter, Gigi were on the trip too.

Magic shares EJ and Elisa with Cookie and has Andre with ex-girlfriend Melissa Mitchell.

In addition to having a bite on the beach, the Johnson family also had a fun disco night, and of course, costumes were involved.

“Welcome to Club 32 disco night on the yacht with the Johnson family! Instead of the famous Studio 54 in NY, this is Club 32 in the med 😂” the former athlete wrote. 

Johnson shared an image from the disco party, showing all family members dressed in sparkly, 70s-inspired disco outfits and Afro wigs.

In 2024, the longtime couple also had their kids join them on their yacht trip, which primarily happened on their chartered boat, the Phoenix II, in mid-July. Some of the best memories are made during family vacations, and we hope to see this lavish family tradition continue!

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Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who has consistently remained one of President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters in Congress — isn’t a fan of his latest policy.

In a lengthy Thursday night post to her congressional account on X, Greene came out swinging against Trump’s latest executive order (EO) on artificial intelligence (AI). The Georgia Republican said she had “many concerns” about both the danger AI poses to the environment as well as Trump’s position against states regulating it.

My deep concerns are that the EO demands rapid AI expansion with little to no guardrails and breaks,” she wrote. “It also contains the threat of withholding federal funds from states who regulate AI, which is an absolute threat to federalism and why I strongly opposed the AI state moratorium originally in the BBB [Big Beautiful Bill].”Rushed AI expansion and data centers being built all over the country from state to state with no plan in regards to environmental and critical water supply impact has massive future implications and problems,” Greene continued. “… When you build something that requires a HIGH water demand, it will always take water away from others – that means people, cities, businesses, and surrounding counties and states.”

Greene’s assessment of AI’s impact on local water supplies is accurate, with Bloomberg reporting in May that AI data centers “consume immense amounts of water” in order to meet demand. According to Bloomberg, many of those data centers are in areas where freshwater resources are quickly drying up, like southern Arizona and central Texas. The outlet further reported that local communities may soon have to “compete with data center operators to access clean water.”

“Data centers are like a black holes when it comes to water requirements. They consume massive amounts of water for cooling, literally millions of gallons per day,” Greene tweeted. “… Just wait and see how bad lawsuits will become when counties are competing for data centers, in order to get rid of county property taxes, and the unintended results is new data centers that steal the water from surrounding homes and neighboring counties and states.”

As the Georgia congresswoman mentioned, the original version of the BBB imposed a 10-year moratorium on states regulating AI (Greene admitted she made a mistake in voting for the original bill that included the provision). That language was later stripped out after 17 Republican governors sent Trump a letter railing against the moratorium.

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Keith Krehbiel lived with Parkinson’s disease for nearly 25 years before agreeing to try a brain implant that might alleviate his symptoms. He had long been reluctant to submit to the surgery. “It was a big move,” he says. But by 2020, his symptoms had become so severe that he grudgingly agreed to go ahead.

Deep-brain stimulation involves inserting thin wires through two small holes in the skull into a region of the brain associated with movement. The hope is that by delivering electrical pulses to the region, the implant can normalize aberrant brain activity and reduce symptoms. Since the devices were first approved almost three decades ago, some 200,000 people have had them fitted to help calm the tremors and rigidity caused by Parkinson’s disease. But about 40,000 of those who received devices made after 2020 got them with a special feature that has largely not yet been turned on. The devices can read brain waves and then adapt and tailor the rhythm of their output, in much the same way as a pacemaker monitors and corrects the heart’s electrical rhythms, says Helen Bronte-Stewart, a neurologist at Stanford University in California.

Bronte-Stewart received approval to start a clinical trial of this new technology, known as adaptive deep-brain stimulation (aDBS), the same week that Krehbiel was preparing for surgery. He recalls the phone call in which she asked him if he wanted to be her first participant: “I said, ‘Boy, do I!’”

Five years on, the results of this 68-person trial, called ADAPT-PD, are under review for publication. Although the exact details are still under wraps, they were convincing enough to earn approval for the technology earlier this year from both US and European regulators.

The results of this study could be a boon for the estimated one million people in the United States and 1.2 million people in Europe who now live with Parkinson’s disease — and for Medtronic, the health-care technology company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that manufactures the implants. The seeming success also clears a path for other companies around the world that are racing for approval on advanced devices, says Martijn Beudel, a neurologist at Amsterdam University Medical Center who worked on the trial.

The approaching wave of therapies promises to level up DBS for Parkinson’s and other motor conditions. The technology might even help to treat neurological disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome and psychiatric conditions, including obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and depression. Several clinicians suggest that the new technology could have even more profound health implications — that is, if funding for US brain-implant research isn’t cut.

Deep trade-offs

Since DBS was first approved in Europe and the United States in the late-1990s, the vast majority of devices have been given to people with Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s is a progressive disorder, typified by the death of neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is key to controlling movements.

Existing drugs that aim to increase dopamine levels can only manage the symptoms. They can’t match the constant dopamine production of a healthy brain. “No matter how clever we are with it, we have never been able to exactly mimic the way the brain supplies it,” says Bronte-Stewart. This means that symptoms vary throughout the day — from the unwanted involuntary movements induced by the morning flood of dopamine-mimicking drugs to increased rigidity later in the day as the drugs wear off. The medication also comes with other side effects that vary from person to person. For Krehbiel, it was nausea so severe he had to lie down multiple times a day.

When these become overwhelming, a neurologist might recommend DBS. Implants typically dispense pulses of electrical energy deep into the brain 24 hours a day to regulate aberrant brain signals associated with uncontrollable body movements. Before this year, this always-on approach was the only commercially available form of the therapy.

But continuous DBS can sometimes amplify the drugs’ effects — or generate new symptoms. Some of these are harmless: one man with OCD developed a passion for the music of Johnny Cash when his stimulator was turned on, but was uninterested in the artist when it was off. Other symptoms are cause for more concern, including sudden-onset gambling disorders and other temporary changes in impulse control. More frequently, the addition of stimulation can induce speech impairments, such as slurring, raise the risk of falling, and cause some involuntary movements.

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Ada Zielińska

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Poor sleeper? Sleep expert and hypnotherapist Malminder Gill was the same until she managed to turn it all around. Here, she shares the four changes that made a difference. 

It seems like everyone has some sort of sleep-related problem these days, whether it takes you hours to get to sleep or you wake up in the night and feel groggy the next day. And sleep expert Malminder Gill was no different.

Gill, 43, who’s also a clinical hypnotherapist, was once like many of us, tossing and turning at night. Insomnia disrupted her life during a transitional period around 20 years ago while she was studying for exams at university, and it took a series of changes for her to get a handle on it.

“I was under a lot of pressure, not only worrying about performing well but what the future held for me,” Gill says. “I was totally unaware of how to care for myself and my mental health.” 

She wanted to perform well, but without sufficient sleep, it was difficult. “One anxiety led to another, which led to insomnia, which disrupted my day-to-day life,” she says. Many of us will know stress loops like this all too well. There’s the wanting to get to sleep, then feeling stressed because you know you need to go to sleep, but the stress is preventing you from getting to sleep. And thus, the cycle continues.

It wasn’t until Gill took a trip to India that everything changed, and she was able to completely reset. She was off on a long holiday, looking for an adventure, but it was getting out of her routine that solved everything for her. Around the same time, she uncovered triggers that were stopping her from sleeping and learned new, healthier habits.

Since then, Gill has not only become a much better sleeper but has also made a career out of it, working as a sleep expert and hypnotherapist on Harley Street. Below, she shares the four simple changes that helped her to get the sleep she craved. 

1. Getting out of a routine 

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Hmmmm… Hamburger Lovers Delight!

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As for their namesake burger, the original Balboa burger, expect “lettuce, tomato, onion, American cheese, homemade zesty aioli for $11.85.” Further, “add to any burger or sandwich salt and pepper fries for $3.00, garlic fries $4.00.”

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Trump is shafting his base economically in three ways most Trump voters don’t see or know. It’s important that they do.

The Consumer Price Index has risen 2.7 percent from a year earlier. That’s the fastest pace since February. The trend is worrying, especially for working-class consumers who have to sacrifice a larger portion of their paychecks to buy what they bought before.

So-called “core” inflation — which strips out volatile food and energy prices and is therefore a more reliable measure for underlying price pressures — is rising even faster: up 2.9 percent from the same time last year.

Trump’s tariffs are the major culprit. Prices rose noticeably on appliances, clothing, and furniture — all products heavily exposed to Trump’s import taxes from Canada, China, and other major trading partners.

Prices will almost certainly rise further over the course of the summer, as new so-called reciprocal levies go into effect, including a 50 percent import tax on Brazil and an eye-popping 50 percent import tax on copper, all set to take effect August 1.

The Yale Budget Lab has estimated that consumers will face an overall effective import tax rate of 20.6 percent. That’s the highest in 115 years, the equivalent of a $2,800 hit in yearly household income.

$2,800 is a far bigger deal for lower-income consumers than higher-income. Much of Trump’s working-class base will be hurt.

Trump wants Fed Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates in order to stimulate spending. But there’s no way Powell is going to do that with core inflation picking up.

Trump doesn’t have the power to fire Powell, but Trump is trying to pressure him with a White House investigation of an expensive renovation of the Fed’s headquarters, which Trump may try to use as a pretext for firing him. Earlier today, Trump again tore into Powell over both interest rates and the cost of the renovations to the Fed’s headquarters.

Trump’s pressure on Powell is worrying investors that Trump won’t allow Powell or his replacement to control inflation.

This worry is raising inflationary expectations — already causing lenders to raise longer-term interest rates. The worry is also eroding confidence in the safety and stability of the U.S. dollar, which is plunging in value.

Lower-income American consumers will be hit with three big cost increases:

(1) Import taxes (Trump’s tariffs), which will rise further on August 1. These import taxes will take a bigger bite out of the wallets of lower-income Americans than higher-income.

(2) On top of the import taxes, the declining dollar makes everything imported from the rest of the world even more expensive. Again, lower-income Americans will be hit harder than higher-income.

(3) Trump’s Big Ugly bill will cut Medicaid and food stamps, which will raise the costs of health care and food for lower-income Americans, including much of Trump’s base.

Income inequality is wider than it’s been since the first Gilded Age. Trump’s policies — import taxes (tariffs), pressure on the Fed that’s driving down the dollar, and Big Ugly cuts in Medicaid and food stamps in order to help finance a tax cut mainly for the rich — will further widen it.

Many of the working-class people who voted for Trump will be harmed the most.

They need to know.

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(REUTERS)

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