Dan Charles

👀 Who owns the Heartland? New data reveals more than half of principal landlords having never farmed and a third now aged 75 or older. agweb.com/news/business/…

Democratic House bill aims to overturn Trump electricity policies The bill, backed by 122 House members, would reinstate clean energy tax credits and grants while aiming to speed grid interconnection to an expanded transmission system. utilitydive.com/news/democrati…

Here's the legacy media doing its job. I guess it's my civic duty to spread it through non-legacy media. But I'd love to see a graphic showing the reach of such reporting. wsj.com/us-news/immigr…

Colman McCarthy, the longtime peace activist and Washington Post columnist, has died at 87. “He wrote about principles — peace and nonviolence — and he lived by those principles,” said Don Graham, the paper's former publisher. “He made The Post better.” washingtonpost.com/obituaries/202…

@harrisondsmith Thank you for this. Colman was a treasure.

@BenPaulos Yeah, although I do in the text/web version which will get published tomorrow morning I think. The groundwater law did seem to push Westlands into this deal. They had rejected it about 4 years ago.

@DanCharlesNow Got it. Though your story didn't mention soil contamination.

@DanCharlesNow - I heard your piece on solar at the Westlands Water District. I thought the main problem was soil contamination, not lack of water. More here: wwd.ca.gov/resource-manag…

@BenPaulos About half of the land in the solar master plan is District-owned (mostly with soil issues, as I understand it) and the other half is private farm land.

@BenPaulos It's both. The soil issue has been around for a while and the district took over that land and fallowed it. The new factor is private landowners who are looking for alternatives, and that's due to lack of water, esp new limits on groundwater pumping.

I’ve Been Laid Off. I’m Not Done. open.substack.com/pub/roncharles…

It is astounding, and yet in keeping with Will Lewis's tenure leading the Washington Post, that he did not take part in today's announcement to the Post newsroom and has not offered a vision for the path forward.

The @washingtonpost layoffs are a five-alarm fire for governance and community in this city. A metro desk of a dozen people for a major metro area? No sports reporting? Will Lewis has no idea what he's doing.

The Washington Post cuts would be a tad more tolerable if the people who ran it into the ditch over the past three years were given the sack along with journalists covering sports, books, foreign, and metro. But no, Will Lewis, survives.

A staggering statement from former Washington Post editor Marty Baron: "This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations."

On a personal level, I know how much these reporters loved their work & were committed to readers. ♥️ On a civic level, this is so harmful. Sports is a fabric that ties us together. And an anemic Metro section will lead to more corruption and dysfunction in local government.

Amazing stuff: ICE has detained 4 Oglala men and is apparently refusing to release them until the Lakota--a nation of the continent's original inhabitants--“enter into an immigration agreement with ICE."

For much of the last two decades, America’s power grid was defined by flat electricity demand, declining coal generation, and fewer carbon emissions. Last year, each of those trends reversed. Electricity demand grew by 2.6% in 2025 due to the growth of data centers, electrification, and extreme heat among other factors. It was the second consecutive year of growth after decades of flat demand. Renewable energy’s contribution to the power grid rose again in 2025, but not enough to offset the country’s rising electricity demand. Collectively, the country’s solar and wind projects produced 73.5 million MWh more electricity in 2025 than they did the year before. That’s as much electricity as about 7 million US homes use in a year. Solar’s output grew by 31%, while wind had another sluggish year, only growing by 2%. Total electricity demand grew by 107 million MWh—or about 10 million homes worth. Electricity generation from fossil fuels filled the remaining gap, rising by about 32 million MWh. Strangely, most of the growth in fossil fuel power generation came from coal-fired power plants. Coal generation rose by 80 million MWh—more than solar and wind combined. Trump can take some credit for bringing coal back. Throughout the year, the administration forced utilities to keep operating old coal plants that were supposed to retire, in most cases against the wishes of the utility and at significant cost to consumers. But the more important factors behind the resurrection of coal, which had long been in decline, were high natural gas prices and growing electricity demand. Coal and natural gas power plants are always competing by bidding into electricity markets across the US. When gas prices are higher, coal plants win those bids more often, generating more electricity and emissions. Carbon emissions from the power grid rose by 4.4% in 2025, due almost entirely to the growth of coal power generation. That’s more emissions growth than any year since 2021, which was a weird COVID recovery year. For much of the last decade, the power grid has been a rare example of a huge sector getting cleaner by the year. The story of America’s decarbonization since about 2010 has really been a story of grid decarbonization. Basically no other part of the economy of significance has seen much progress. But that decarbonization happened during a period of falling electricity demand. When solar and wind produced more electricity, they cut into a shrinking pie, and cut emissions in the process. 2025 proved that we’re no longer in that era.

Flood control releases are not just an impressive display; they provide incredible benefits to California communities. Yesterday, DWR began required flood control releases using Oroville Dam’s main spillway. However, with reduced runoff levels and drier conditions in the forecast, DWR will be reducing outflows through the coming week. Some of the water released from Oroville for flood control is captured downstream for beneficial uses by local landowners, communities, and the State Water Project. #Flood #Oroville #California

Very much did not expect *American Electric Power* (AEP) to call on @FERC to implement connect & manage for generator interconnection, referencing my research (in FERC's large load ANOPR docket). Fascinating proposal to combine w/ entry fee model. elibrary.ferc.gov/eLibrary/filel…

@tylerhnorris @nytimes Yes, and that same flexible attitude toward new load on the grid should also apply to the supply side of the grid. Let new wind and solar easily connect to the grid, compete with existing generation, and curtail excess generation as needed!

I have a @nytimes op-ed today on managing power demand growth w/out driving up rates. Central point: load growth is an opportunity to *offset* upward pressure on rates, if we plan the system to make fuller use of infrastructure we’ve already paid for.

Before a new solar or wind farm gets built, its owner has to pay to upgrade the grid to handle that electricity. (It often delays or kills projects.) But the same rule apparently doesn't apply to data centers. For them, consumers pay. ucs.org/sites/default/…