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Traditionally, U.S. Presidents try to be circumspect and accurate when fielding press conference questions, relying on information from experts to avoid misstatements that confuse or misinform the public. Donald Trump is anything but traditional. His knack for puzzling or downright false statements is well known from his first term, but in his second go-round as President, he’s outdoing himself–especially when it comes to the environment and climate.
He castigates wind farms with false claims about their cost (they’re far from the “most expensive form of energy”–that’s usually nuclear) or impact on whales (there’s no evidence to support his claims they kill and drive them “loco”) and birds (they kill them but housecats, powerlines and windows are a bigger threat).
But his lack of understanding of where Southern California gets its water is remarkably poor. Last week, shortly after wandering around the White House roof, the 79-year-old Commander-in-Chief held forth at a briefing on what he believes is the source of L.A.’s water: the Pacific Northwest.
“I’ve been fighting with them for a long time to let the water come down from the Pacific Northwest, essentially,” he said, after an event on planning for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. “They’ve got to allow the full complement of water to come down from the Pacific Northwest.”
He also once again conflated efforts to protect the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta smelt, an endangered small fish, with Southern California water supplies and praised his February decision to release billions of gallons of water held in reserve from dams in California’s Central Valley after the devastating Los Angeles fires. Not only did that move not solve the city’s water issues, since none of it flowed to L.A., but it didn’t help farmers, as it wasn’t released during planting season. The move’s stunning wastefulness was decried by one scientist as “hydrologic insanity.”
The City of Angels gets its water from two main sources: an aqueduct flowing south from the Sierra Nevada mountains via Owens Valley and the Colorado River. Among major U.S. cities, L.A. already ranks among the most water-efficient, but is trying to increase that with an expanded catchment system to hold more winter and spring rain and greater reuse of treated water.
The Pacific Northwest region, beginning hundreds of miles north of the Sierras at the Oregon border, sends no water to Los Angeles, aside from whatever arrives over time in the form of rain as part of the natural water cycle.
In the past, a President saying things so untethered to facts would be shocking, but it’s par for the course in the Trump Era. And while it can seem amusing, his views have become policy, ranging from ending federal climate science research, denying the harms of rapid climate change and killing incentives for electric vehicles and renewable energy in favor of higher fossil fuel production, the main driver of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Like the song by The Smiths says, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore.”
The Big Read
Illustration by Macy Sinreich for Forbes; Getty Images
NASA Is Prepping To Build Trump A Nuclear Reactor On The Moon
NASA administrator Sean Duffy declared the Trump Administration’s intention to land a working nuclear fission reactor on the moon by the end of the decade. “We’re in a race to the moon, in a race with China to the moon,” Duffy said.
Planting reactors is more effective than planting a flag in the lunar dust. Duffy referenced the idea of a “keep-out zone” around a reactor that effectively lays claim to a desirable area, like a crater holding frozen water.
Does Duffy’s 5-year timetable seem too aggressive? Not particularly, when you consider that NASA and its many contractors have been relying on atomic power for a long time. Since the 1960s, NASA has powered Apollo missions, space probes and Martian landers using radioisotopic batteries that turn the heat emitted by Plutonium-238 and other decaying isotopes into electricity. The Apollo devices are still on the moon with those on Voyager and Pioneer probes were the first manmade objects to leave the solar system.
But those devices only put out 100 watts or less. The nuclear fission reactors Duffy is talking about are far more complicated. They generate heat by splitting apart Uranium-d238, and would put out 100 kilowatts. That’s only enough electricity for a couple of dozen homes on Earth. You’d need a lot of them to power a moonbase.
Read more here
Hot Topic
Richard Seagraves via Ford
Alan Clarke, executive director of Ford’s new Electric Vehicle Development Center in Long Beach, California, on developing lower-cost EVs
Ford initially set this facility up as a kind of skunkworks. What’s changing as it becomes a bigger engineering and design facility?
The way I’d frame it is first of all, a skunkworks is not a team really. It’s a way of working. When we first started it was, we described it so that people understood that we were very small, very scrappy, very fast in working on technology. And if you look at what we have here, it’s still modeled in exactly that way. The difference is in a traditional skunkworks model, you’re making 200 airplanes at most. We aim to make affordable electric vehicles.
That’s hyper capital intensive and the industrialization process is incredibly challenging. It’s getting thousands of suppliers to all deliver parts to the same place, needing an industrial footprint, manufacturing facilities and supply chain quality that gets you actual vehicles. It’s really tough to do that in a skunkworks style.
Every product that a small team would make in the automotive world has to figure out a way to work within that industrial system.
What’s the benefit of locating this operation in Long Beach rather than Dearborn, Michigan?
It’s a bunch of different things. In terms of Long Beach specifically, why here in Southern California? Why here in California? There’s a bit of an adventurous mindset of individuals who live here – and people who are used to working fast and working on new technology in the EV space.
There’s also a lot of people who have EV experience here, people who come from consumer electronics companies like Apple, companies like Rivian, companies like Tesla. There’s a lot of people who have experience who have launched multiple EVs. From a Long Beach standpoint, people want to work where they can easily get to the place, they can have more affordable living, being close enough to the water, being halfway between LAX and John Wayne Airport, are all very important things. And then creating an atmosphere for people to work in so that they want to come here is very, very important.
Changes in U.S. federal policies are creating challenges for the electric vehicle market here, while globally China is dominating that space. How do you plan to navigate this?
We’re writing our product roadmap now.
I think between tariffs and emission standards changing and consumer tax credits changing, it’s a game of chess, not checkers at this point. I think agility wins and being able to make your strategy adapt to whatever the market conditions are, it’s really, really important.
Is Ford now more focused on competing with Chinese EV makers than Tesla?
I don’t think we’re sleeping on anyone. We’re not sleeping on the other Detroit competitors. We’re not sleeping on Tesla or Rivian or Lucid. We’re not sleeping on the Chinese either.
Like I said, it’s about agility winning. Who can adapt to market conditions to whatever the powertrain technology is? I mean, certainly evidence shows that Tesla’s pretty good at it. Evidence has shown that the Chinese are fantastic at it, in industrialization. It simplifies the problem if you say, “here’s our one competitor that we’re worried about.”
I think we’re, in a very humble way, terrified of all of the competition that’s happening right now. I think that’s healthy because from that comes drive – and this whole team has a drive to succeed.
What Else We’re Reading
Extreme heat is breaking records around the world, with wildfires and poor air quality compounding the crisis (UN News)
These nuclear reactors fit on a flatbed truck. How safe are they? (Washington Post)
JD Vance’s team had the water level of an Ohio river raised for the family’s boating trip (The Guardian)
Trump EPA plans to claw back $7 billion in rooftop solar grants. The administration seeks to rescind awards under the Solar for All program, including grants to 49 states for lower- and middle-income households (Washington Post)
Killing the EPA climate rule could backfire on industry. Repealing the Endangerment Finding could bring more lawsuits against companies emitting planet-warming pollution (Politico)
L.A. powers up a major clean electricity plant. An immense solar-plus-storage plant in the desert is now pumping out cheap, clean electricity at full bore (Los Angeles Times)
A NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose. The Trump administration asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions (NPR)
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