Holiday Season

California energy officials vote to extend Diablo Canyon nuclear plant operations

But is it safe?

Pacific Gas & Electric’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant is the only operating nuclear plant in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom supports keeping the plant along the coast near San Luis Obispo operating past its planned shutdown date of 2025.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

BY TONY BRISCOE STAFF WRITER for the Los Angeles Times

California energy officials have voted to extend the operation of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant through 2030, extending the life span of the state’s last nuclear plant an additional five years.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved a proposal to keep Diablo Canyon’s twin reactors online, overturning an earlier agreement to close the plant in 2025.

Three commissioners — Alice Busching Reynolds, John Reynolds and Karen Douglas — voted in favor. Commissioner Darcie Houck abstained and Commissioner Genevieve Shiroma was absent.

Thursday’s decision is expected to preserve a large bloc of the state’s zero-emission power supply. But it also raises concerns over the high cost and potential safety issues associated with operating an aging nuclear power plant.

The state utilities commission acknowledged that the costs associated with the plan were still unknown but were expected to exceed $6 billion. A federal safety review will also be conducted.

State energy commissioners emphasized that the extension should serve as a bridge to renewable energy and that the plant was not expected to operate beyond 2030. The decision, they said, was intended to bolster the reliability of California’s grid, which has narrowly avoided rolling blackouts during heat waves in recent years.

“The short-term extension of the power plant as proposed is a transitional strategy to help California weather the challenges of the energy transition, including the weather and climate extremes that we have experienced … and the cost challenges that we face in scaling up the clean energy transition so quickly,” Douglas said ahead of the vote. “So this is an opportunity for us to help bridge some years.”

Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the plant’s operator, lauded the commission’s decision, saying it will help provide the state with a dependable, emission-free source of energy.

“We’re grateful for the opportunity to answer the state’s call to ensure electrical reliability for Californians,” said Suzanne Hosn, a spokesperson for PG&E.

At a state meeting filled with heated discourse, supporters argued that California needed the power supply from Diablo Canyon to avert outages and meet the state’s climate goals. The plant supplies about 9% of the state’s electricity and 17% of the state’s zero-emission power.

“It was methodically determined that Diablo Canyon is in fact integral to the California electricity reliability,” said Brendan Pittman, a Berkeley resident, who supported the proposal. “It contributes substantially to California’s zero-emission targets and the costs for continued operation are not, quote, too high to justify.”

But a chorus of critics warned that the extension could bring rate hikes from PG&E.

Opponents also argued that the plant’s proximity to several fault lines makes it susceptible to earthquakes, and a significant risk.

The plant, which sits along the Pacific Ocean about 10 miles outside of San Luis Obispo, opened in 1985. A 46-page report by Digby Macdonald, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, suggested one of the plant’s nuclear reactors “poses an unreasonable risk to public health and safety due to serious indications of an unacceptable degree of embrittlement,” or deterioration due to prolonged exposure to radiation.

Do You Oppose Jewish Genocide? ‘It Depends’ Is Not the Right Answer

Opinion by James D. Zirin

Of all universities, the Ivy League colleges of Harvard, Penn and MIT should know better. It’s very simple: Advocacy of genocide is abhorrent, dehumanizing; it instills fear and distress. It has no place on a college campus, or anywhere else in our society. It has no pedagogical value. It is murder, nihilism.

Just before I went into the Army, a lawyer friend, who had served, counseled me to give an evasive non-answer to any question I was asked: “Depends on the tactics and the terrain.”

So it is perhaps not surprising that a lawyer thought “Depends on the context” was the perfect answer for three university presidents (one of whom is now an ex-president) testifying before Congress if asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews on campus constituted bullying or harassment.

Context? What a dreadful word to use in the context of genocide. What is the context it would depend on — Auschwitz, Dachau, the pogroms of Russia in the 19th century, or the Jews’ convenience over 2,000 years as victims of dehumanizing oppression. And let’s not forget the 1,400 victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel — women raped and murdered, babies slaughtered, men butchered in barbarous ways on another day that will live in bloody infamy.

At all of these universities, I am certain, burning a cross or erecting a gallows in front of a dormitory housing Black students — both forms of symbolic speech — would constitute bullying or harassment. I’m equally certain that statements targeting LGBTQ+ students would constitute bullying or harassment.

Interestingly enough, Harvard President Claudine Gay was dean of the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was murdered on the faraway streets of Minneapolis. She published a statement, declaring that “We have been here before, too many times,” that “the headlines stir an acute sense of vulnerability,” and that “we are confronted again by old hatreds and the enduring legacies of anti-black racism and inequality.” She said she feared for her teenage son and suggested she felt personally threatened by Floyd’s death. The tragic event, she wrote, illustrated “the brutality of racist violence in this country” and gave her an “acute sense of vulnerability.”

In nothing which Gay said last week before Congress did she show any understanding or empathy that Jewish students or their parents might have felt similarly vulnerable after Harvard condoned calls for the genocide of Jews.

The question put to the university presidents by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) was not all that difficult. The three scholars likely would not have had such a hard time responding if it had been based on race, gender or sexual orientation. If asked whether the burning of crosses has any place on a university campus, rest assured that the answer would not have been “It depends.”

Jewish students should be treated no differently — and certainly no worse — than others. But the ideal outcome is not to coddle Jewish students or make them another overly protected class. It would be much better for these elite schools to reconsider many of their current practices. They ought to set consistent guidelines on free speech and enforce those. They ought to refrain from partisan statements on national and international issues, which are beyond their scope of responsibility.

Historian Niall Ferguson — among other things, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center — has it right in a piece he recently wrote in The Free Press. Ferguson argues that the answers given by the troika of university presidents may have been technically correct under the First Amendment but constituted the “treason of the intellectuals.”

“The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear,” Ferguson writes. “In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, ‘speech crossed into conduct.’ The ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ began as speech — to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide.”

Germany and France both have more robust approaches to hate speech and incitement to genocide that have much to recommend them. But they’re flatly inconsistent with the way the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment. There is obviously much to think about but, as far as fear of harm goes, violence or the threat of imminent violence obviously is not protected speech. So anyone who commits violence violence, or launches an imminent threat of violence, is breaching university rules.

But is this enough to nip genocidal ideation in the bud? Are the crazies among us more or less likely to become violent if they’re forbidden from engaging in speech about it? I’m not sure.

Perhaps university authorities are more likely to identify dangerous people in their communities if they’re allowed to speak their minds — otherwise, an attack comes without warning. But is it feasible for universities to identify the potentially violent students on campus after they have expressed odious views, put them in a digital dossier, and keep them under artificial intelligence until they attack a Jew heading to class?

One professor I know at Penn explained it this way:

“Oh, I fully agree with no threatening/no taunting/no cross burning. And all of those are prohibited by the Penn speech code. The issue is what to do about a call for genocide at a protest — someone chants ‘Kill all the —.’ I think that contributes nothing to discourse and has no place in a university community, and I would try to teach students norms of civility and respect. But I wouldn’t expel them for saying it, in part because I do think usually the best answer to bad speech is good speech, but more because I worry about giving university administrators the task of deciding who’s calling for genocide. In the Israel-Hamas conflict, for instance, each side accuses the other of genocidal goals, so supporting either side will be called endorsement of genocide. And I just don’t feel like student disciplinary proceedings are the place to decide who’s right about that. Administrators have a very hard time being neutral.”

Right. But can they be neutral about murder? And should university administrators take political positions at all? As Justice Jackson put it in his concurring opinion in Terniniello v. Chicago, “if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

Keeping students safe is of paramount importance. So I would forbid anyone on a college campus to advocate the murder of anyone.

James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He is also the host of the public television talk show and podcast, “Conversations with Jim Zirin.”

“COP28 is now on the verge of Complete Failure”

This AP (Associated Press) article is worth displaying in full. The world has a problem that needs attention now.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Countries moved closer to reaching what critics called a watered-down final deal on how to act on climate change on Monday, to the disappointment and anger of nations who called to phase out planet-warming fossil fuels as the United Nations summit in Dubai neared its culmination.

A new draft released Monday of what’s known as the global stocktake — the part of talks that assesses where the world is at with its climate goals and how it can reach them — called for countries to reduce “consumption and production of fossil fuels, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

The release triggered a frenzy of fine-tuning by government envoys and rapid analysis by advocacy groups, just hours before the planned late morning finish to the talks on Tuesday — even though many observers expect the finale to run over time, as is common at the annual U.N. talks.

Anger grew as people had more time to read the document.

In a closed-door meeting late Monday, some country delegation chiefs needled COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber’s frequent calling of the goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times his “north star,” saying the president’s proposal misses that star.

“It is not enough to say 1.5, we have to do 1.5. We have to deliver accordingly,” Norway minister Espen Barth Eide said.

A person inside the room said several negotiating blocs, including those for small island states, Latin American countries, the European Union and developing countries, all spoke against the new draft, saying its ambition wasn’t strong enough. The person spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak without fear of affecting the negotiations.

Some Pacific Island nations argued the text amounted to a death sentence.

The proposed text “doesn’t even come close to delivering 1.5 as a north star,” Tuvalu’s delegation chief Seve Paeniu said. “For us this is a matter of survival. We cannot put loopholes in our children’s futures.”

Small island nations are some of the most vulnerable places in a world of rising temperatures and seas. Final decisions by COPs have to be by consensus and objections can still torpedo this. Activists said they feared that potential objections from fossil fuel countries, such as Saudi Arabia, had watered down the text.

German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said Europe is “extremely unified” in opposing the COP presidency’s text, calling it unacceptable.

“We’re prepared to stay as long as it takes to get the course correction that the world needs,” Morgan told The Associated Press as she walked into the heads of delegation meeting.

Zhao Yingmin, China’s vice minister for Ecology and Environment, said at the meeting that “the draft fails to address the concerns of developing countries on some key issues” and in particular the idea that greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025.

United States climate envoy John Kerry says the language on fossil fuels in the text “does not meet the test” of keeping 1.5 alive.

“I, like most of you here, refuse to be part of a charade” of not phasing out fossil fuels, Kerry said. “This is a war for survival.”

Kerry’s remarks received a round of applause from the room.

A combination of activists and delegation members lined the entry into a special late-evening meeting Monday of heads of delegations, with their arms raised in unity as delegations walked through, creating a tunnel-like effect. A few activists told delegates passing by: “You are our last hope. We count on you.”

Negotiators broke well after midnight, and it wasn’t clear when talks would resume.

“We need to find a solution that has maximum ambition and maximum equity,” South Africa minister Barbara Creecy said as negotiators left the room. “One without the other will not solve the conundrum we face.”

In the 21-page document, the words oil and natural gas did not appear, and the word coal appeared twice. It also had a single mention of carbon capture, a technology touted by some to reduce emissions although it’s untested at scale.

Activists said the text was written by the COP28 presidency, run by an Emirati oil company CEO — Al-Jaber — and pounced on its perceived shortcomings. It fell fall short of a widespread push to phase out fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal altogether.

Al-Jaber skipped a planned news conference and headed straight into a meeting with delegates just after 6:30 p.m. It was the second time for him to cancel a press briefing on Monday.

“We have a text and we need to agree on the text,” al-Jaber said. “The time for discussion is coming to an end and there’s no time for hesitation. The time to decide is now.”

He added: “We must still close many gaps. We don’t have time to waste.”

Critics said there was a lot to do.

“COP28 is now on the verge of complete failure,” former U.S. Vice President and climate activist Al Gore posted on X. “The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word. … It is deeply offensive to all who have taken this process seriously.”

Jean Su from the Center for Biological Diversity said the text “moves disastrously backward from original language offering a phaseout of fossil fuels.”

“If this race-to-the-bottom monstrosity gets enshrined as the final word, this crucial COP will be a failure,” Su said.

But Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa said the “text lays the ground for transformational change.”

“This is the first COP where the word fossil fuels are actually included in the draft decision. This is the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era,” he said.

Also on Monday, the latest draft on the Global Goal on Adaptation — the text on how countries, especially vulnerable ones, can adapt to weather extremes and climate harms — was released on Monday.

The adaptation is “utterly disappointing” and “an injustice to communities on the frontline of the crisis,” said Amy Giliam Thorp of Power Shift Africa.

“The text is even weaker, more vague in many areas, and lacking in ambition,” she said. It’s “set to corrode trust between developed and developing nations. A framework focused on action without concrete targets, especially to support developing countries, is pointless and toothless.”

Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, a senior advisor for adaptation and resilience at the U.N. Foundation said “the new text doesn’t have the strength that we were hoping to see.”

On Monday morning, visibly tired and frustrated top U.N. officials urged COP28 talks to push harder for an end to fossil fuels, warning that time is running out for action.

“We can’t keep kicking the can down the road,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “We are out of road and almost out of time.”

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Associated Press journalists Olivia Zhang, Malak Harb, Bassam Hatoum and David Keyton contributed to this report.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Inflation is Real

“It’s the economy stupid” was a phrase coined by James Carville in 1992, when he was advising Bill Clinton in his successful run for the White House. And it is still true today.

The Biden administration may want you to believe that inflation is not real but they are telling you a lie. This report from the latest Bloomberg Business Week provides the facts. In my own personal life my Quaker Oats Apple and Cinnamon now provides 8 packets down from 10 in a box. My shaving cream is now in a 7 ounce container down from 10 ounces. Next year’s inflation rate of an expected 2% won’t be bringing prices down.

Hatred of Jews has Reached a New High

It’s called anti-Semitism.

Harvard President Apologizes for Congressional Testimony on Antisemitism. The president, Claudine Gay, told the campus newspaper that she “should have had the presence of mind” to answer differently.

The presidents of leading Ivy League universities seem to be in support of on campus groups calling for a genocide against all Jews.

The exchanges involving Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Dr. Gay and two other university leaders, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T., have thrown three of the country’s most influential colleges into turmoil. On Thursday, a House committee opened an investigation into “the learning environments” on all three campuses, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said the three presidents should leave their posts.

When the hate reaches a fevers pitch there is one place American Jews can go and feel safe. Israel. That is the reason that even Jews who believe Israel attacks on Gaza are too much still support that country.

Norman Lear

An amazing man who has had a huge impact on our culture with all his creative work and the iconic shows he produced and created. Archie Bunker, Maude Findlay and George Jefferson were among the characters he brought to America’s living rooms.

There will never be another like him. Here is a list of the programs he created.

ALL IN THE FAMILY

THE JEFFERSONS

MAUDE

SANFORD AND SON

GOOD TIMES

ONE DAY AT A TIME

MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN