Trevor Higgins
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thiggins.bsky.social
Trevor Higgins
@thiggins.bsky.social
1.8K followers 610 following 290 posts
Energy & Environment at the Center for American Progress and @CAPAction.

Adjunct at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy.

Alumnus of Senator Feinstein, Department of Energy.

Personal account.
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thiggins.bsky.social
October 30, 2025 at 6:07 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
New from @lucerowx.bsky.social and the team at @americanprogress.bsky.social: a timeline for implementation of the "one big beautiful bill" that will bring so much unnecessary harm to America.

See details and filter by topic area here: www.americanprogress.org/article/the-...
On July 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law—enacting the largest-ever cuts to basic needs programs in U.S. history in order to fund tax cuts for the ultrawealthy. The law’s provisions have dozens of staggered beginning and ending dates over the next decade. Below is a timeline that details the enactment dates of cuts to health care and food assistance, the cancellation of policies to make American-made energy more affordable, the implementation of tax changes, and the enactment of policies that will raise the costs of higher education.
July 29, 2025 at 1:54 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Senate Finance has released its proposed repeals, and I sure hope none of you were hoping to afford a better future for your family, or anything.
June 16, 2025 at 10:29 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Wow, the House Republican tax bill would increase gas prices. By a lot. Up to 37¢ per gallon!

New numbers published by CAP show how ending clean energy investment props up demand for fossil fuels, raises prices, and makes households pay an extra $400b over the next decade to Big Oil and Gas.
Excerpt from the Center for American Progress piece published at https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-house-republican-plan-to-increase-gas-and-electricity-prices/ The House Republican bill would: Raise gasoline prices by 25 cents to 37 cents per gallon by 2035 as demand for oil increases due to the termination of federal electric vehicle affordability programs, fuel economy standards, and tailpipe emission standards. Repeal the financial support for buying new, used, or leased electric vehicles, which would keep between 22 million and 40 million more gasoline-powered cars and trucks on the road through 2035, as roughly one-third of families who would have tried to switch to an electric vehicle can no longer afford one. Increase electricity prices for households and industry as roughly two-thirds of the wind and solar that was previously expected to be deployed this decade is not built. This would cause annual home electric bills to jump $70 by 2031. This corroborates other analysts who found, in some cases even higher electricity price increases. The Clean Energy Buyers Association forecasts an increase of $110 in household electricity spending by 2026. Force Americans to pay the oil and gas industry an additional $339 billion for gasoline and $75 billion for electricity by 2035.
May 16, 2025 at 1:27 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Kiggans and 12 House Republicans ask leadership to consider changes to salvage the clean energy tax credits.
May 14, 2025 at 9:30 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Great illustration of what's on the line, based on Rhodium's modeling
Estimated new low-carbon technology added each year, in two scenarios
May 13, 2025 at 11:34 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
This is all in Section 41007 of the House Republicans’ proposal for the energy title of their reconciliation bill, which Energy and Commerce released last night and is to markup tomorrow.
10/10
Image of the text of SEC. 41007. DE-RISKING COMPENSATION PROGRAM Available at https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=118261
May 12, 2025 at 3:32 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Even critics of NRC's safety mission think this is dumb.
The order would also call on the NRC to undergo a restructuring to speed licensing of new reactors. Along with that reorganization, the NRC would "undertake reductions in force." It would also "undertake a wholesale revision of its regulations," working with DOGE and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Both Lyman and Nordhaus say shrinking the NRC would be counterproductive. "If you go and lay off half the staff, you're going to lay off a bunch of the people you need to license new reactors in an expeditious fashion," Nordhaus says.
May 9, 2025 at 5:50 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Political interference will create safety risks.
"It's the end of the independence of the agency," says Allison Macfarlane, director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Canada who was nominated by President Obama to serve as Chair of the NRC from 2012 to 2014. Macfarlane believes the changes will make Americans less safe. "If you aren't independent of political and industry influence, then you are at risk of an accident, frankly," Macfarlane says.
May 9, 2025 at 5:50 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Why did the Senate agree to schedule its vote on repudiating Trump's tariffs at a time it would fail due to absences, even though a majority opposes the tariffs?

@andrewdesiderio.bsky.social reports it's because it was seen as "still a messaging win" and "symbolic anyway."

But...
May 1, 2025 at 12:13 AM
thiggins.bsky.social
Is google ok?
Instead of providing search results, google decides to attempt its own responses to the prompt, "list of retiring senators" with a set of photos of Senators who retired in the last session of Congress, offering opinions about their reasons. Mike Braun: Running for governor Kyrsten Sinema: Knows she would lose Tom Carper: Decided to retire Ben Cardin: Eighty years old Joe Manchin: Realized he couldn't win Debbie Stabenow: Tired of the Senate Laphonza Butler (no photo): Placeholder senator
April 30, 2025 at 5:37 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Check out this photo the WH used to show off their connection to Earth Day on Tuesday, but look what they cropped out... the president is standing on a square of astroturf to make sure he doesn't actually have any contact with the Earth itself! 😂
Trump standing in the gardens of the White House looking like a gravedigger. The full photo shows the president is actually standing on a four square-foot pad of astroturf while he holds a shovel full of dirt in this act of "not virtue signaling", "not ineffective", definitely not a "scam", and totally "rooted" stewardship of nature. His connection to the Earth seems profound. The White House used this photo to argue that "Unlike the previous administration, which wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on virtue signaling and ineffective grifts, the Trump Administration’s policies are rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources — no “Green New Scam” required."
April 25, 2025 at 3:38 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Ahem, the planet 124 light years away whose lovely sulphides caught the attention of astronomers this month is named K2-18b, plainly belying the claim that "there is no planet b"

(except in every way that matters).
The planet whose sulphides caught the attention of astronomers this month is named K2-18b, plainly belying the claim that "there is no planet b" (except in every way that matters).
April 23, 2025 at 1:18 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
"Here again we are reminded that in nature nothing exists alone."
—Rachel Carson
Illustration of a mountain lion, deer, and tree.
April 22, 2025 at 11:10 AM
thiggins.bsky.social
3—She doesn't apologize for the absurdity of it all. She doesn't attend to bad faith counterarguments. She doesn't wait for all solutions. She just sweeps you up in her confidence that we can do better.
I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life. There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand, "The obligation to endure gives us the right to know."
April 22, 2025 at 11:10 AM
thiggins.bsky.social
2—Silent Spring was published as a book in September 1962, a few months after it was serialized for popular audiences in the New Yorker in June. Seems enough people had a chance to read it themselves that public understanding could bear up under the dishonest PR response of the pesticide industry.
Website edition of the first of the silent spring stoties in the New Yorker in June 1962.
April 22, 2025 at 11:10 AM
thiggins.bsky.social
1—Carson offers a clear understanding of a very complex topic by mixing anecdote and explanation. You're left feeling confident about how everything fits together, as if ecology and chemistry were intuitive all along.
OVER INCREASiNGLY large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song. This sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest they lend to our world have come about swiftly, insidiously, and unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected. From the town of Hinsdale, Illinois, a housewife wrote in despair to one of the world's leading ornithologists, Robert Cushman Murphy, Curator Emeritus of Birds at the American Museum of Natural History. "Here in our village the elm trees have been sprayed for several years [she wrote in 1958]. When we moved here six years ago, there was a wealth of bird life; I put up a feeder and had a steady stream of cardinals, chickadees, downies and nuthatches all winter, and the cardinals and chickadees brought their young ones in the summer. After several years of DDT spray, the town is almost devoid..." But why? At first he suspected some disease of the nervous system, but soon it became evident that "in spite of the assurances of the insecticide people that their sprays were 'harm-less to birds' the robins were really dying of insecticidal poison-ing; they exhibited the well-known symptoms of loss of balance, followed by tremors, convulsions, and death." Several facts suggested that the robins were being poisoned, not so much by direct contact with the insecticides as indirectly, by eating earthworms. Campus earthworms had been fed inadvertently to crayfish in a research project and all the crayfish had promptly died. A snake kept in a laboratory cage had gone into violent tremors after being fed such worms. And earthworms are the principal food of robins in the spring. A key piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the doomed robins was soon to be supplied by Dr. Roy Barker of the Illinois Natural History Survey at Urbana. Dr. Barker's work, published in 1958, traced the intricate cycle of events by which the robins' fate is linked to the elm trees by way of the earthworms. The trees are sprayed in the spring (usually at the rate of 2 to 5 pounds of DDT per 50-foot tree, which may be the equivalent of as much as 23 pounds per acre where elms are numerous) and often again in July, at about half this concentration. Powerful sprayers direct a stream of poison to all parts of the tallest trees, killing directly not only the target organism, the bark beetle, but other insects, including pollinating species and predatory spiders and beetles. The poison forms a tenacious film over the leaves and bark. Rains do not wash it away. In the autumn the leaves fall to the ground, accumulate in sodden layers, and begin the slow process of becoming one with the soil.
April 22, 2025 at 11:10 AM
thiggins.bsky.social
I'm reading Silent Spring, and I don't know what I was expecting, but it is surprisingly well written! I should have known, given that it launched a movement. But what makes it so compelling? Three things, I think...
Title page from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. 50th anniversary edition, published 2002 in paperback.
April 22, 2025 at 11:10 AM
thiggins.bsky.social
Pope Francis to the Bishops of the U.S. earlier this year, his last message to them:
no good comes from the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others.

www.vatican.va/content/fran...
all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa. 4. I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness. This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable. This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
April 21, 2025 at 1:29 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
The thing about lawlessness is that it's contagious. It breeds contempt for the rule of law and for the idea of responsibility to society.

Here's a company defying the law in order to restart offshore oil drilling in California.

subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eene...
Excerpt from ENERGYWIRE | The California Coastal Commission voted Thursday to fine a Texas-based oil company up to $18 million for what the agency said were unpermitted repairs to oil pipelines along the Santa Barbara coast. The Coastal Commission also voted to issue its third cease-and-desist order to the company, Sable Offshore Corp., which started repairs last fall to a dormant onshore pipeline with the intent of restarting offshore oil production.
April 14, 2025 at 3:04 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
EPA claims the ghg reporting program is not required by law, but that is false. It was ordered by Congress in a law that Bush signed. Check the receipts.
Screenshot of New York Times quoting an EPA spokesperson's false assertion that "the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program was unlike other mandatory data collection at the E.P.A. because it is not required by law or a regulation."
April 11, 2025 at 5:57 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Little known fact: Congress ordered EPA to create the greenhouse gas reporting program in an appropriations bill that was signed by President Bush after Senator Feinstein inserted the instruction into a must-pass omnibus. EPA has no discretion to eliminate this program.
Screenshot of PUBLIC LAW 110–161 from DEC. 26, 2007 directing EPA to issue a final rule requiring mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions.
April 11, 2025 at 5:47 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
New from CBO: investments in clean electricity (which is virtually all new electricity investment!) could be cut by 23 to 46 percent if Congress interferes with the clean energy tax credits. Let's not do that.

www.cbo.gov/publication/...
CBO chart showing that annual investment in wind, solar, and other alternative electric power structures has generally increased over the last decade and is projected under current law to continue growing. However, without the clean energy tax credits, CBO shows a major decline in investment.
April 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
thiggins.bsky.social
Roberts and the Republican justices continue to degrade the constitutional order, trying to legitimize Trump's violation of the rule of law.

But legitimacy is a measure of public acceptance, not an utterance of legal excuses.

We must insist in our right to self govern under the rule of law.
April 8, 2025 at 1:52 AM
thiggins.bsky.social
Wile E. Coyote strapped to a rocket he's about to light. The rocket is labeled, "Liberation Day."
April 2, 2025 at 11:25 PM