Book Review: Nature's Echo

Title: Nature's Echo

Author: Thomas Crowther

Date: 2026 (today!)

Publisher: Harper 

ISBN: 978-1-4002-5070-7

Quote: "I had been injected with a powerful shot of nocebo (the opposite of placebo), so the idea that I had been envenomated was enough to trigger a physiological response that matched the symptoms of a venomous bite."

In the opening chapter of this book, Thomas Crowther describes the experience of picking up a snake he was told was harmless. When the snake actually managed to bite him, someone told him it was venomous after all. His hand began to feel ominously numb as he was rushed to a hospital. At the hospital he was assured that the snake was the harmless one his friend had first identified it as being. Sensation returned to his hand--it was sore from having been bumped against things to measure its numbness.

Harmless snakes can do significant temporary damage--some bites are hard enough to crack a small bone in a hand or wrist--so this is not a story about foolish naivete. As Crowther ranges on through all the favorite theories and speculations of the New Age sciency crowd, evolution, quarks, spirals, etc., it takes some time to identify the theme in this book, but that theme is, primarily, the idea that many things in nature follow feedback loops. Undesirable things aggravate each other. "Pesticide" sprays aggravate the imbalance monocropped fields create, destroy predators, and allow harmless nuisances like corn earworms to explode into major pest status. Desirable things enhance each other. Seeing good results from a diet and exercise plan motivates dieters to work their programs for even better results. And so on.

Several details and side points in this book will activate the mental rubbish detectors of many readers of this web site. Some details even made me laugh. I wondered if Crowther appreciated the irony of writing about socioeconomic "inequalities" as a problem while being funded by the World Economic Forum, a group who aren't doing much about the feedback loops that bounce wealth back to them. I chortled, reading sections about global warming, after Al Gore has just told us that it may have been that old ice age of our youth that we need to worry about, after all. This book is Green, but not True Green.

Partly that's because of the writer's self-admitted limitations. This book deals with science topics but it doesn't read like a science book--neither the mass of numbers in a professional science article, nor the summaries with just a few well-chosen numbers in a really well written popular science book by someone like Oliver Sacks. Crowther admits that that's because his learning disabilities made it hard for him to do rigorous science experiments on his own, so a sympathetic teacher let him get credit for observing the results of experiments while others crunched the numbers. No woman would get a science degree that way, I'm sure. Crowther seems to read science and study nature in the informal, observational, anecdotal way I do as a non-scientist, but it's never occurred to me to call myself a scientist. (It has occurred to me to go back to university and do the work to become one.) It's not "feminization" so what's the word for that kind of effect on the sciences?

On the individual scientist, the effect is plain. Crowther accepts other people's conclusions, including Michael Mann's "hockey stick" climate change graph, which Steve Milloy has been so gleefully debunking for so long. He's not an idiot, his learning disabilities do not include autism, but he can be used as a "useful idiot" by WEF.

Nevertheless, the book is hopeful and plausible. His sponsors have warned him, Crowther admits, that only big (preferably global) government can be considered as a solution to the problem of global warming. Still, feedback loops mean that choosing a vegan meal might start a loop that could do something toward saving the planet. Crowther has been steered away from studying the problem of "pesticide" residues that make vegan meals so toxic for so many people these days. He has also seen some examples of individuals' efforts expanding outward into feedback loops that he thinks are helping the Earth. 

When he's reporting what he's seen, as he does toward the end of this book, rather than regurgitating theories, as he does toward the beginning, Crowther is a competent writer. Overall this book is a pleasant read. Not essential, not True Green, but fun.

Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate

(This week's Petfinder Post will appear on Thursday.)

I've been mulling this since the news of Trump's loathsome executive order slowing the natural disappearance of glyphosate, which is no longer even considered effective as an "herbicide," due to the inevitable Vicious Pesticide Cycle, and is now known to feed harmful fungi and disease bacteria even though it has an "antibiotic" effect on several neutral or benign bacteria, from the Earth...

I think Glyphosate Awareness has entered a new era.

We've seen that every responsible researcher has come to accept that, if not a primary carcinogen, glyphosate certainly and obviously is a powerful pro-cancer factor.

We've seen that glyphosate predictably harms people each of us knows personally--people who are not motivated by money or politics or conformism or even that syndrome where a certain percentage of medical students tell the school clinicians they think they've got every condition their classes have studied. Glyphosate does not have a distinctive taste or scent of its own, so people usually don't know when they've been exposed until their reactions set in. People don't always even recognize when they are having reactions that are obvious to observers; their obvious reactions feature mental symptoms and they think their anxiety, depression, anger, or stupidity are perfectly reasonable, until the reaction passes. Although not everyone has an obvious physical reaction to glyphosate, by now the statistical odds of anyone not knowing a person who has such a reaction are minute. Most of us have a close relative who has been systematically tortured by these reactions since 2009. Many of us have a close relative who has been killed by them. 

We've seen that, while politicians clearly motivated by money are trying to dig up old whines about the poor pitiful farmers who can't raise crops without glyphosate, the fact is that "organic" farmers--even though their crop yields per acre are lower in weight--are producing crops that don't make people sick, are earning some small amount of profit more years than not, are keeping their land, and are, if anything, healthier and likely to live longer than city dwellers, while chemical farm workers' life expectancy is...I said "little more than half" of organic farmers', recently, on X. It was revealing. The actual figures are, with some variation among sources, 48 or 49 years for immigrant laborers who are more often used to handle pesticides because that group includes less educated and more desperate people, 50 to 58 for native-born chemical farm workers, and 75 to 85 for organic farmers. You can reasonably say that 58 is a lot more than half of 75 but the self-styled "farmers" didn't make that sort of reasonable quibble. They tweeted as if they thought that confusing activists with words, confusing the average age of present-time workers with their average life expectancy, and throwing in the odd verbal attack, would keep them happily profiteering on alleged "food" that makes people sick for another twenty years.

They are not debating ideas in order to learn facts and make informed decisions. They are intentionally harassing people who present facts.

It's time to stop talking to these people. 

Really stop talking to them.

What I'm actually calling for, let me make this absolutely clear, is nonviolent, Amish-style shunning.

When an Amish person sins against any of the church's multitude of rules--from murder to wilful persistence in wearing or using something that doesn't fit into the group's uniform--other Amish people stop talking to that person. 

Person's spouse may move back in with per parents.

Person is not served or waited on if person enters an Amish-owned business.

Person's business no longer exists, as far as the Amish community are concerned. Non-Amish people who persist in trading with the person being shunned, if any, may be warned that the business is not really Amish.

Usually an Amish person who gets this treatment is on per knees, weeping in penitence, in a few weeks. Their subculture has such a strong social bond that they don't hold out the way a few non-Amish people who have been shunned by their former social circle have done. Most non-Amish Americans who've been shunned on account of their opinions have, in fact, been able simply to move to the other side of the social aisle: before their relatives officially disowned them most Jews who've become Christians, Christians who've become Buddhists, Democrats who've become Republicans or vice versa, hawks who've become doves or vice versa, public school employees who've become advocates of school choice, psychiatrists who've recognized the dangers of Prozac Dementia, etc., have built up social networks on the other side and prepared themselves for the loss of some old relationships, even if the loss still hurts.

But what if all these people have in common is that they're clinging to profits...and the people who shun them are able to take those profits away? 

Gentle Readers, they are going to be sooo miserable. And they deserve it. And if anything can do them any good, our laughter at their tears is likely to be it. 

Enough farmers had naturally stopped using glyphosate, seeing that it made customers complain (and avoid their products) while it wasn't actually having much effect on the nastiest weeds, even by 2022 that even those of us whose bodies detect and react to glyphosate on the parts-per-billion level have been able to eat an almost balanced diet. All the rest of you have to do is shop and eat in solidarity with people like me to bring the Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate to their knees.

Will you miss a lot of foods you've always loved? I still do. I have found Mott's applesauce to be a safe food, although processing destroys the Vitamin C and I've not found a safe brand of fresh apples. (If you do eat apples, even if you live in Michigan and you traditionally bite into those peels, it's a good idea to peel apples thickly; the inner part of the fruit may be less damaged by glyphosate vapor drift.) I've found it safe to eat peeled oranges--but I like orange peel. I've not dared to eat any commercially grown green leafy vegetables. You have to raise your salads in your kitchen or back yard, and if you don't get a lot of sunshine your selection of salad greens may no longer include lettuce. I've not chosen to risk eating any kind of berries yet, either, because berries, cherries, and other fruits that don't have thick rinds just soak up glyphosate vapor drift like little sponges. So do carrots. So does celery. 

But I have been able to eat some oranges, pineapple, bananas, melon, even commercially grown peaches; some beans, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, peas, cucumbers, squashes, and lentils, in addition to onions, garlic, rice, and nuts. So should you be. Vitamin supplements aren't as good as food but should prevent deficiency diseases long enough to leave supermarkets and their suppliers sitting on a lot of alleged food nobody's buying. 

Let them cry. Let their families break up as they lose what they've made of their family farms. 

Don't wait on them in stores or restaurants. 

Block them on social media, in order to activate shadowbanning algorithms. If you happen to see a point that needs to be addressed in something they've said, address the point after blocking the Bitter Clinger. 

Walk out of religious services if they walk in. Without making your usual donation. 

Withhold membership dues from social clubs if the clubs don't drop Bitter Clingers from their membership.

Don't see Bitter Clingers as patients.

Don't trade with businesses that continue to employ them in any capacity.

Don't talk to the Bitter Clingers. That's all. Until they confess that they're not fit to own land and use their savings to compensate people who are willing to accept the financial loss involved in reclaiming the land they've poisoned. Repentance for actual physical deeds is not an emotional matter. Ignore the emotions until they've shown sincere repentance with more actual physical deeds.

All these people, or things that nature intended to have been people, care about is money so the effects of seeing their streams of income dry up should be valuable to other Bitter Clingers as examples. It's not absolutely necessary to laugh out loud in public when a Bitter Clinger commits suicide, as some of them will do, but it may be good for the other Bitter Clingers if we do.

I'm posting this after having had a sort of vision of an alternative future in which Bitter Clingers were allowed to roll on, in the way Trump and Kennedy seem to imagine they can be, and groups of their neighbors, armed with everything from machine guns to pitchforks, beat on their doors. In the group I was watching a Bitter Clinger came out to the door and tried to duck back inside. People beat on the door until the frame began to crack. The Bitter Clinger came out onto his porch. The crowd shouted, "Bring out your daughter," and a man stepped forward carrying a sack, unzipped the sack, and threw the dead body of a child right into the Bitter Clinger's face. The Bitter Clinger gasped, "No, not my daughter! Take me!" Then his wife was on the porch and the crowd shouted, "Take him back!" and threw a bleeding, broken body into her face. 

Justice denied tends to lead to violence and to further injustice.

Justice can be served, I believe, if enough people decide simply to stop speaking to the Bitter Clingers. Including "speech" on social media, or in the form of trade. 

Make the farmers themselves demand a ban on all open-air spraying of any chemical with a formula other than H2O, so that nobody will feel as much hated as they feel this summer.

Hurt their feelings so that nobody has to do more permanent damage to them.

Book Review: Refuge

Title: Refuge

Author: Terry Tempest Williams

Date: 1991

Publisher: Vintage

ISBN: 0-679-74024-4

Length: 304 pages, including a bird checklist

Quote: “The understanding that I could die on the salt flats is no great epiphany. I could die anywhere.”

When does a young, healthy, happily married birdwatcher look at a favorite bird refuge and think about her own death? When family members, old and young, are dying. Terry Tempest Williams wrote, “I have known five of my great-grandparents intimately,” before years when one funeral followed another and “At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family.” The good news is that Refuge is not exclusively about mortality. It’s also about birds, and natural events that threatened the bird refuge, and a mother in her early fifties who doesn’t expect to have grandchildren but, if she does have them, wants them told that she is “the bird’s nest beyond the waterfall.”

Mrs. Tempest, the author’s mother, was one of a lucky few. After a diagnosis of breast cancer, she lived more than ten years before cancer appeared in a different part of the body. Observing the impact her cancer had on the rest of the family, Mrs. Williams thought that individuals don’t get cancer; families do. This observation moved past its intended meaning and became literally true as other relatives developed cancer.

The slow, painful death scene in Refuge is not allowed time to dominate the reader’s memory. The book moves us on. Bereaved people normally go through a stage of wanting to blame someone for the loss; Mrs. Williams found that blame for her extended family’s years of funerals could be assigned reasonably.

A popular protest song refers to “gentle, angry people...singing, fighting for our lives.” Terry Tempest Williams was such a person; Refuge is a gentle, angry, True Green book. It’s recommended to all who appreciate good nonfiction writing; and to all who care about the environment; and to all who think that environmentalism may be turning into a religious cult; and to all who have living parents, and need to be reminded to enjoy them while they can. 

Bad Poetry: Tearing Hate Down with Love

[Photo credit was lost because Google behaved badly.[

https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2025/11/friday-writings-203-why-i-love-hate.html

Let's all hate

glyphosate.

Tear it down.

In its place

love Queen Anne's Lace,

tall and proud and in your face.

Love milkweed

where butterflies feed.

Love pretty fluff

of dandelion puff.

Love a sharawaggi look;

let tall flowers form a shady nook

carpeted by violets and sheltered from the weather:

Can you get five colors of violets together?

Oh, so mean--

atrazine.

Tear it down.

Where it was

let the laws

of nature mandate kittens' paws

or ponies' feet

or lambs' faint bleat.

Love the children

and the beasts.

Love a fruit or flowering tree.

Bend your back and bend your knee

till every trace of Astroturf or of devil grass

is covered up by something native that was meant to last.

What a blot--

paraquat.

Tear it down.

Cry "begone!"

to the lawn

and the corporate greedheads' pawn.

Plant green peas,

strawberries.

Plant potatoes

or tomatoes.

Let green push away the pavement,

gardens push away enslavement

to the foolishness of zoning that, a hundred years ago,

said that from our homes to work needed twenty miles to go.

Status Update: Excursion with Ruminations

I went into town yesterday. This has become a rare occurrence rather than a daily commute. I hate to say it but I was in better condition when it was a daily commute; ninety-degree heat shouldn't bother me...

Ninety-degree heat, yes. At the Cat Sanctuary the sun beating down on the metal roof had raised the temperature on my front porch from about 75 to a little over 80 degrees Fahrenheit when I walked out the door. Not a mile further along, once I'd reached the paved highway, the dashboard thermometer of the person who offered a lift was reading 93 in the sun, 92 when the car passed through shade--and this I could believe. It was a lot hotter near the pavement than it was up on the hill, among the trees.

Local climate change is well distributed around the world but it is not global climate change. The temperature changes we're seeing are far beyond even the most alarming indicators of potential global climate change (which could happen, but I'm not likely to be here long enough to know whether it ever does). They are also very local.

I happened to be near a television set that was broadcasting the local weather news and forecast. The local weather news showed absolutely typical July weather, the weather of my childhood and, according to them, my grandparents' childhood, in the smaller towns surrounding Kingsport and Bristol: temperatures around 70, even lower at higher elevations overnight, rising up to 80 or 85 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime. For Kingsport's weather station, which is still closer to the river than to the streets where Kingsporters actually live, overnight lows were in the 80s, the afternoon high at the weather station would be about 90, and the 90% humidity would make it feel more like 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Ten-degree difference. (Before the overpavement along Stone Drive, it was two or three degrees. Before the slum was built, it was five or six degrees.) Now remember that in Gate City I'd seen a ten-degree difference between my home, which is basically an orchard, and the paved highway. In Kingsport, around the slum, the actual temperature probably was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The forecast was that it's going to be like this for at least another week.

While walking along Route 23 above Gate City, I heard sirens. Not enough sirens for a fire or police call. Only one vehicle was using only one siren, only intermittently. So someone was being taken to the hospital. Likely that would be some older person, out of condition, who'd pushed perself to work outside in the heat. 

I walked very, very slowly in the 93-degree heat. Well, I walked at the pace I usually use around the house, not hurrying, not dawdling, in between patches of shade, where I sat down and rested while the wind off the passing traffic dried off the sweat. I managed to get into town with unsoaked clothing. 

You get a choice, Gentle Readers. How deadly hot do you want summers to be? If you don't want your local summers to be hotter, let trees replace some of the existing construction and paving in your neighborhood. If you want to cash in on anybody's greedhead ideas about "housing," buckle up and brace for longer, hotter summers than you've ever survived before.

That television set was braying about a "need," not in Kingsport but further into Tennessee, for labor in a new quarrying project that was apparently an unwelcome surprise to local people. It was anticipated that people willing to work on this project would not be local and would not want to live in the neighborhood they were about to make ugly. During about an hour of television exposure I heard two commercial ads from different real estate speculators, and the talking head at the news department obligingly repeated and explained a line from the advertisement. Tennessee landowners could legally keep their houses while renting out their land to people who would use the land to build new "housing."

Y'all don't think your summers are hot enough already, in Tennessee? 

Even in Virginia it feels to me as if doing anything useful in this weather really requires gills. I want nothing to do with "housing." If people can't live in (or renovate) existing houses that become available when people die and their heirs want to be somewhere else, that may be an indication that nature intended those people not to move into my town.

I will hear no idiocies about this having anything to do with what people look like. I don't expect to spend enough time looking at them to care if their skins are fluorescent green and they have spiral fluorescent horns instead of fingernails. (Well, if they were that unusual-looking I might at least feel curious about whether they were actors making a movie about space aliens or young people trying to start a kicky rebellious fad that would differ noticeably from any older one. 

It's about how many people need to live in one place, and whether they can walk on gravel paths or think they need pavement and cars, and whether they can raise their own food in a sustainable way (not spraying, but eating, the "weeds"), and whether they can run a neighborhood biomass burner on waste without killing any trees or dumping any sewage in any condition into rivers, and whether they appreciate large farms as natural habitats for large extended families or want to ruin them with "housing" projects, i.e. slums.

Reversing the kind of climate change we can all see and feel and agree on does not require a global dictatorship at all. It requires local self-governing communities to say no to any proposed construction of new "apartment" or "town house" or "row house" buildings, to say that even temporary laborers deserve houses where each person has a room of per own and at least a plot of kitchen garden.

Book Review: The Hairy Man

Title: The Hairy Man 

Author: Barry S. Brunswick 

Date: 2022 

Quote: "[T]hey looked at the branch that had nearly hit them. There was no way a man could throw it so far." 

"Yowie" is the simplest Australian word for a giant hairy ape-man rumored to live apart from humans, to throw big branches and rocks at hunting parties but--perhaps--to help lost children. This short, simple story describes a Yowie family. The male chases teenagers away by throwing branches. He's kind to a little girl who takes apples to him.

This self-published book might benefit from the attention of a professional developmental editor; notably, it raises questions about how long the young of the species gestate before birth, but it's a nice introduction to Yowie lore and to the idea that, if you want to observe a wild creature, you should proceed slowly and respectfully rather than blundering into its habitat.

Morgan Griffith on Preventing Blackouts

Editorial comment: This is timely. I think yesterday was the second day this year I've thought the office could benefit from the Lasko fan. (Your local hardware store probably has a crop of new window-type fans in search of loving homes.) We in the Point of Virginia have enjoyed three months with very little need for climate control.

(Last week's refrigerator-like nighttime temperatures...I thought, "Don't touch that hot-air fan. Put on your tabard," at myself. Then I considered the baby kitten in the office, and touched that hot-air fan.)

We have those "older" power plants, "old" as in, what, ten years? Fifteen? Do we need to keep replacing things every ten years, or do we need to build them better the first time? We do need to keep them working; don't need people dying of heat exhaustion in their fully electric climate-controlled apartments in the local warming zones in the Hump and the Swamp. 

But, fellow Virginians, we've got plenty of sunshine going to waste. We've got literally tons of biomass and all we're doing with it is dumping it, maybe with a pool chlorine tablet tossed in here and there, into the Tennessee River where our neighbor State gets most of its drinking water. Most of our homes and all of our towns could be producing renewable energy, without relying on hazardous resources like nuclear plants, or on stripping or deep-mining what's left of our coal. Why are we not doing this? Why are APCo, PEPCo, and Dominion not being more proactive in wiring our southwest-facing roofs to be clean energy producers? 

The Ninth District is the home of many people who are retired, disabled, just plain poor, or under the impression that we've become a culture that encourages welfare-cheating. Making assumptions about what the lardbuckets ahead of us in the checkout line are buying, or why, or what they ought to be buying or doing instead, is not likely to help. Demanding that some of our biggest and most directly interested corporations stop enabling the welfare cheats with handout programs, and start empowering all of us to collect payment for what we have to offer to the rest of Virginia, is what we need to be doing.

My home could very easily be generating five times as much electricity as I consume, even in winter. So could some of yours. Please let Congressman Griffith know that these companies don't need insurance for high-risk deep mining and nuclear power schemes; they need to focus on the transition the Point of Virginia should be making, right now, from consumption to production of electricity. Yes, new energy sources need to be regulated. Yes, companies need to know that they'll be monitored to ensure that community biomass burners are burning primarily sewage, a little landfill-type waste, occasional prunings, but no trees. Yes, companies need to know that the solar collectors in which they're investing must come with adequate gutters and filters to keep batteries from eroding into the water supply. That is what Congress is for. We need no shortsighted grabs at the short-term cash infusion, and long-term risks to life, presented by that "small nuclear reactor" some fools have babbled about putting in Wise County. We need intelligent investment in Wise County, and in Scott, Lee, Buchanan, and the other counties in the Ninth District. Do we need it now? We needed it years ago. 

Our entire Congress need to take a firm line with the corporations. NO talk about nuclear plants, about deepening mines, or about strip mining, until we're fully optimized for solar energy production and until our river water is entering Tennessee (or the Chesapeake Bay) 100% sewage-free.

From US Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9:

"

Many families have prepared for the return of summer.

Plans include pool parties, barbecues and vacations.

Some plans will account for summer heat. Air conditioning and other tools will be increasingly used to keep homes cool.

This increased electricity demand means that our electric grid will be under greater stress.

We are already hearing of potential breaking points this summer in our electric grid.

The Friday before Memorial Day, Energy Secretary Wright issued an emergency order directing the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) to ensure a coal-fired power plant in Michigan remained operational.

Wright issued the order to minimize the risk of blackouts ahead of the high electricity demand expected.

New Orleans is part of MISO, a regional grid operator that provides transmission service to all or part of 15 U.S. states as well as Manitoba, Canada.

Notwithstanding keeping the plant open, the New Orleans metro area suffered a large and unexpected power outage during Memorial Day weekend. At the blackout’s peak, more than 100,000 customers lost electricity.

According to news website Axios, utilities were aware of the strain on the grid for at least 48 hours before the disruption.

Reports confirmed that two of the region’s nuclear power plants lost connection to the grid. One was due to expected maintenance, the other was unexpected. Constrained by a lack of energy supply, grid operators cut power to customers in New Orleans.

Entergy, an electric utility company in the region, said that the forced outages directed by MISO were done to prevent a larger scale and more prolonged power outage from impacting the electric grid.

This blackout was not the only major power outage in recent memory.

On April 28, Portugal and Spain witnessed the worst blackout in their history, affecting 55 million people, per British newspaper The Guardian.

Airports were shut down, cars drove on streets without traffic lights, hospitals resorted to backup generators and some people were stuck in elevators!

While the Iberian Peninsula blackout continues to be investigated, it is interesting to note that on April 16, Spain reported its first weekday where its national power grid was 100% reliant on renewable power.

A coincidence? Maybe, maybe not!

Coincidentally, in a recent Virginia Tech press release, professor and Power and Energy Center director Dr. Ali Mehrizi-Sani highlighted how the systems that control these clean energy sources are more susceptible to blackouts.

As parts of the world transition to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the lack of seamless grid adaptation to the use of these sources, as illustrated by the blackout in Spain and Portugal and by experts like Dr. Mehrizi-Sani, threatens destabilization of electric grids and more blackouts.

For years in Congress, I actively warned about the threats posed by leftist policies that attempted to gut our grid’s reliance on fossil fuels and convert to renewables.

Federal policies, like the Obama-era “War on Coal” and the Biden Administration’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), shunning reliable baseload forms of energy like coal and natural gas have made our electric grid more vulnerable to failure.  

California’s reliance on renewables continues to subject residents to rolling brownouts. California has since, seemingly, mitigated the issue, but accordingly has one of the highest electricity rates in the country.

In 2013, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced plans to close eight coal-fired power units, citing a flat demand for power.

They have already closed five, but have opened several natural gas power plants.

TVA customers have experienced rolling brownouts as energy demand increases.

I have already introduced a bill this year to help improve our electric grid.

H.R. 3632, the Power Plant Reliability Act of 2025, allows states and regional grid operators to delay proposed closures of baseload power plants forced on them by state or federal mandates and regulations until a reliability solution is implemented.

This bill was passed by the House Energy Subcommittee on June 5.

There are also elements of the House reconciliation bill that support our electric grid. 

In the House bill, we curtail some IRA tax credits, which disincentivize coal and natural gas power plants. We kept the incentives for nuclear because of its significant potential for baseload power.

We also create an energy project insurance pool to help protect energy investors from permits being revoked for coal, oil, critical minerals, natural gas or nuclear installations.

This de-risking compensation fund will make it harder for federal policies to discourage and phase out these reliable sources of energy.

I will continue advocating for reliable energy solutions that secure America’s electric power grid!

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.

"

Urgent Link for Tennessee and Other State Residents

As regular readers have been warned already, having a high profile in Glyphosate Awareness can be dangerous. This is a timely link everyone can use to sign a group petition that will be forwarded to your State governors. If you just sign the form with your screen name and e-mail address, the only risk is that you'll be asked to send money to organizations working on the issue. 

Not to me. Never to me. You're welcome to send money to support this web site, buy hard-to-find books, commission blog posts on topics of your choice, ask me to proofread and/or review book manuscripts, ask me to ghostwrite books or contribute to anthologies, etc. As a movement publicly led by me, Glyphosate Awareness does not want your money. We want your talent. We want your time and energy. We want you to have a high profile and speak out publicly about the cause if, and only if, you can say:

"My name is ......

I am [specific age over 50] years old.

If I live another fifty years, I'll still have a long list of things to do.

If I die tomorrow, I'll still have had a longer and better life than most of humankind.

I am not afraid of Hell."

If that's where you are, you probably have done or are doing other things for the cause as well as rewriting the basic petition text to add facts your Governor needs to know. You probably have your own favorite links to documents your Governor and staff need to see, about the toxicity of glyphosate and the why-insult-weasels character of Bayer; you can search this web site or MomsAcrossAmerica.org for more links.

If you are or could become a parent, we want you to avoid buying or using glyphosate, avoid buying or using Bayer products, buy and eat food that is "clean" of "pesticide" residues, sign this kind of mass petitions when they circulate, and vote for people who support these petitions too, but not call attention to yourself. Your children come first. People whose income is based on products that kill human beings aren't always scrupulous about harming human beings in more direct ways. 

Whichever tier of activism you belong on, you should sign this group petition:

https://pirg.org/take-action/tell-your-governor-we-need-strong-pesticide-protections/

A form will pop up asking for money. You decide whether to use it or close it. USPIRG will stop sending you e-mail if you want them to. I think their e-mail is interesting--most of it gives information and doesn't ask for money.