One of the hidden gems of American government is a small division of the Department of Energy called the Loan Programs Office. This is a government bank that hands out loans to companies with business plans that go beyond the technological frontier, with ideas nobody has tried before. Commercial banks will generally not loan to such companies—as a rule, private bankers want something that is already proven to work—so the LPO helps such entrepreneurs get from the drawing board to producing and selling an actual product.
The LPO has funded thousands of successful projects, from renewable-energy installations, to solar and battery factories, to new low-emission industrial processes, to power grid upgrades, to the first new nuclear power plant in decades, to domestic EV companies, and much more in that vein. It has virtually no overhead, with just a few hundred staffers running a fund of more than $400 billion. Almost all of these projects are successfully paying back their loans. For any government—and especially the American one, with its underfunded and sclerotic agencies—this counts as a smashing success.
One of the stupidest things I’ve read in a while is an article in Sunday New York Times, that floated the idea of bailing out various oil companies who a struggling once again with a glut of oil as the global economy softens and foreign nations are suddenly less interested in importing US-extracted oil and gas due to the Trump Administration’s tariff policy. The article primes the public to be ready for taxpayers to bail out the oil companies, so they don’t go broke and abandon their wells, lest that lead to shortage of oil and gas in coming years.
But that’s pure insanity. We should be getting away from oil and gas, it’s the heroin that powers modern society. Quitting the habit is going to painful, but distributed generation with renewables is a much more stable and sustainable way to power society. Will it require changes and some pain? Absolutely, but we are smart creatures, and we’ve already overcome many of the limitations of renewable energy – the variability in production, the difficulty in storage and distribution. Is the technology perfect today, without limitations? Absolutely not, but if we never try, then we’ll never get where we need to go.
It’s stupid to bury our head into legacy technology. Typewriter and horse and buggy manufacturers had to go out of business, when computers and automobiles came to be. These new technologies laid to lay-offs and they required new skills and new ways of doing things. But they were so obviously superior, even if they did come with certain limitations. It’s just stupid to think we should be powering Artificial Intelligence and next-generation cities with coal.
Schoharie County has some pretty big elevation differences from one end of county to the other.
Part of Esperence in hollow where the Schoharie Creek runs is only about 501 feet above sea level while Huntersfield Mountain in Conesville reaches 3,428 ft.
A half-century-old highway battle is resurfacing at the West Virginia–Virginia border, as the Mountain State moves to extend Corridor H to the state line, creating pressure for Virginia to respond.
Local officials, conservationists and residents are warning that a major influx of truck traffic, environmental damage and potential economic disruption could follow — even if Virginia refuses to extend the highway.
Corridor H, part of the Appalachian Development Highway System first envisioned in 1965, has long been a source of local tension. Advocacy groups like the Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley say the promise of economic development has not materialized, while the environmental and community impacts have only grown.
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