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Don’t Be Fooled: the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project Is a Corporate Land Grab
This project is a textbook case of environmental injustice. It would carve through preserved farmland and forests, pollute streams and wetlands, and destroy habitats for threatened species.
May 21, 2025
The name “Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project” is a masterclass in Orwellian branding. It sounds like public service—what it really delivers is environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and corporate profit at the public’s expense.
My name is Karyn Strickler, and my family farm lies directly in the path of this 70-mile transmission line. Located in Carroll County, Maryland, our farm has been in agricultural preservation for decades. My sister, her family, and my 95-year-old father live on the land. The third generation is now growing up here. Our roots stretch back to the early 1700s in America—and 500 years before that in Switzerland.
We preserved this land for farming. Not for it to be bulldozed by a private utility company.
The MPRP is part of a growing national trend where energy infrastructure is being redirected to power unregulated, fossil-fueled data centers—putting local communities and ecosystems at risk across the country, not just in Maryland.
The Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP) isn’t about homes or communities. It’s about servers—giant fossil fuel-powered data centers in Northern Virginia. And while these billion-dollar corporations get the power, Marylanders get the pollution, the grid drain, and the bill.
Public Service Enterprise Group couldn’t meet the labor standards required by New Jersey for a wind project. So they ran to Maryland—where wage protections are weak, enforcement is inconsistent, and union labor is often ignored. Meanwhile, construction jobs are temporary, low-wage, and often filled by undocumented workers with no protections.
This project is a textbook case of environmental injustice. It would carve through preserved farmland and forests, pollute streams and wetlands, and destroy habitats for the bog turtle and the Baltimore checkerspot—Maryland’s own state insect. These species are already threatened. MPRP could push them further toward extinction.
And let’s be clear: This isn’t about my family alone. There is widespread grassroots opposition across Carroll, Frederick, and Baltimore counties. We are farmers, homeowners, business owners, and residents who see this for what it is: a high-voltage land grab disguised as progress.
The MPRP is part of a growing national trend where energy infrastructure is being redirected to power unregulated, fossil-fueled data centers—putting local communities and ecosystems at risk across the country, not just in Maryland.
This is not reliability. It’s recklessness. It’s time Maryland lived up to its promises of equity, sustainability, and dignity for workers. The bulldozers are warming up—but so is the resistance.
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Rising Seas From Fossil Fuels Threaten Inland Migration 'Never Witnessed in Modern Civilization'
With governments "scaling back their already meager" actions to tackle climate breakdown, said one ecologist, "our present-day human culture is on a suicide course."
May 20, 2025
Less than six months away from the next United Nations summit for parties to the Paris climate agreement, scientists on Tuesday released a study showing that even meeting the deal's 1.5°C temperature target could lead to significant sea-level rise that drives seriously disruptive migration inland.
Governments that signed on to the 2015 treaty aim to take action to limit global temperature rise by 2100 to 1.5°C beyond preindustrial levels. Last year was not only the hottest in human history but also the first in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5°C. Multiple studies have warned of major impacts from even temporarily overshooting the target, bolstering demands for policymakers to dramatically rein in planet-heating fossil fuels.
The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environmentwarns that 1.5°C "is too high" and even the current 1.2°C, "if sustained, is likely to generate several meters of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and challenging the implementation of adaptation measures."
"To avoid this requires a global mean temperature that is cooler than present and which we hypothesize to be closer to +1°C above preindustrial, possibly even lower, but further work is urgently required to more precisely determine a 'safe limit' for ice sheets," the paper states, referring to Antarctica and Greenland's continental glaciers.
Co-author Jonathan Bamber told journalists that "what we mean by safe limit is one which allows some level of adaptation, rather than catastrophic inland migration and forced migration, and the safe limit is roughly 1 centimeter a year of sea-level rise."
"If you get to that, then it becomes extremely challenging for any kind of adaptation, and you're going to see massive land migration on scales that we've never witnessed in modern civilization," said the University of Bristol professor.
In terms of timing, study lead author Chris Stokes, from the United Kingdom's Durham University, said in a statement that "rates of 1 centimeter per year are not out of the question within the lifetime of our young people."
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There are currently around 8.18 billion people on the planet. The study—funded by the United Kingdom's Natural Environment Research Council—says that "continued mass loss from ice sheets poses an existential threat to the world's coastal populations, with an estimated 1 billion people inhabiting land less than 10 meters above sea level and around 230 million living within 1 meter."
"Without adaptation, conservative estimates suggest that 20 centimeters of [sea-level rise] by 2050 would lead to average global flood losses of $1 trillion or more per year for the world's 136 largest coastal cities," says the study, also co-authored by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Andrea Dutton and University of Massachusetts Amherst's Rob DeConto in the United States.
DeConto said Tuesday that "it is important to stress that these accelerating changes in the ice sheets and their contributions to sea level should be considered permanent on multigenerational timescales."
"Even if the Earth returns to its preindustrial temperature, it will still take hundreds to perhaps thousands of years for the ice sheets to recover," the professor explained. "If too much ice is lost, parts of these ice sheets may not recover until the Earth enters the next ice age. In other words, land lost to sea-level rise from melting ice sheets will be lost for a very, very long time. That's why it is so critical to limit warming in the first place."
Not really a surprise We are already committed to a 12m+ sea-level rise, sufficient to drown every coastal town and city on the planet The only question is how long will this take www.theguardian.com/environment/...
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— Prof Bill McGuire (@profbillmcguire.bsky.social) May 20, 2025 at 7:50 AM
While the paper sparked some international alarm, Stokes highlighted what he called "a reason for hope," which is that "we only have to go back to the early 1990s to find a time when the ice sheets looked far healthier."
"Global temperatures were around 1°C above preindustrial back then, and carbon dioxide concentrations were 350 parts per million, which others have suggested is a much safer limit for planet Earth," he said. "Carbon dioxide concentrations are currently around 424 parts per million and continue to increase."
The new paper continues an intense stream of bleak studies on the worsening climate emergency, and specifically, looming sea-level rise. Another, published by the journal Nature in February, shows that glaciers have lost an average of 273 billion metric tons of ice annually since 2000.
Despite scientists' warnings, the government whose country is responsible for the largest share of historical planet-heating emissions, the United States, is actually working to boost the fossil fuel industry. Upon returning to office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump declared an "energy emergency" and ditched the Paris agreement.
Responding to the new study on social media, Scottish ecologist Alan Watson Featherstone called out both the U.S. and U.K. governments. He said that with many countries "scaling back their already meager and [totally] inadequate actions to address climate breakdown, our present-day human culture is on a suicide course."
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Trump Cares More About Growing Fossil Fuel Profits Than Shrinking Your Energy Bill
Many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil.
May 20, 2025
It would be tempting to dismiss U.S. President Donald Trump’s many functionaries as idiots, because many of them are. Here, for instance, is a transcript of leaked audio from a recent staff meeting led by acting Federal Emergency Management Agency director David Richardson, a man with no experience in disaster management (but who did write what the reliable Kate Aronoff described as a bad autobiographical novel with the inspired title War Story). Anyway, put yourself in the place of the FEMA staff hearing this highly relatable anecdote:
The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend, she's from Texas. She's got like huge red hair. Like, she's from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up. However, they do disaster recovery very, very well, and so does Florida, okay. So, we should be able to take some lessons learned on how Florida and Texas do their disaster recovery, we’ve got to spread that around and get other folks do it some way. And there should be some budgeting things that they have, I bet. I bet Gov. [Greg] Abbott has a rainy day fund for fires and tornadoes and disasters such as hurricanes, and he doesn't spend it on something else.
But if there’s endless idiocy at work (some of it as cover—if I was taking flak for my $400 million flying bribe I’d start tweeting about Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen too), there’s also a kind of underlying feral cunning. All the stupid stuff heads in the same direction.
For example, the administration announced earlier this month it would get rid of the Energy Star program, which rates various appliances by their efficiency so that consumers (and landlords and building owners) can make wise choices.
“The Energy Star program and all the other climate work, outside of what’s required by statute, is being de-prioritized and eliminated,” Paul Gunning, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Atmospheric Protection, told employees during the meeting, according to the recording obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Gunning’s office itself is also slated for elimination.
This is a program begun by Republicans—former EPA administrator William K. Reilly wrote a fond reminiscence yesterday for The Washington Post, who pointed out that if you were actually worried about, say, waste, then this would be the last program to cut:
The program costs $32 million in annual federal outlays to administer but has saved consumers $200 billion in utility bills since 1992—$14 billion in 2024 alone. The averted air pollution, which was the EPA’s initial objective, has been considerable, equivalent to the emissions of hundreds of thousands of cars removed from the road.
But what if you wanted to burn more fossil fuel? What if you wanted to stretch out the transition to cheap, clean renewable energy? Well then it would make a lot of sense.
Or take last week’s news, from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who vowed that he would eliminate the “start-stop” technology in cars because “everyone hates it.” This feature keeps your car from idling at stoplights—when you tap the accelerator the car turns back on. It’s not mandatory for carmakers, and drivers can turn it off with a button. But, as Fox News points out,
The feature can improve fuel economy by between 4% and 5%, previous EPA estimates showed. It also eliminated nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year as of 2023.
Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to excellent reporting in Heatmap News Friday, is taking federal money designed to convert a steel plant to electricity and hydrogen and instead using it to convert the steel plant to… the fossil fuel it’s already using. The company, its CEO explained, is working with the Department of Energy (DOE) to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” and those priorities, of course, are to use more energy.
Occam’s Razor, I think, would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy. Remember all that endless Trump nonsense about low-flow shower heads? They cut the use of hot water by about 40%. Ditto incandescent bulbs, which use 75-90% more energy, and which Trump is trying to bring back. It’s strange to be pro-waste, but there you are. This administration is garbage in every way.
That all of this costs consumers money is obvious—but we don’t really pretend to care about consumers any more. Remember: two dolls and five pencils apiece. No, the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: It became increasingly clear this week that the Republican congressional majority is all too willing to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.
And Big Oil is in trouble. Power demand in New England hit an all time low in late April, because so many homes now have solar panels on top. In, um, Saudi Arabia solar arrays are springing up left and right. Bloomberg’s David Fickling chronicles the “relentless” switch toward spending on clean energy, albeit too slowly to hit the most important climate targets. A new global poll of business executives found that 97% were eager to make the switch to renewable energy for their companies, on the grounds that
Electricity is the most efficient form of energy, and renewables-generated electricity a value-add to businesses and economies. In many countries, fossil fuels, with their exposure to imports and volatility to geopolitical shocks, are a liability. For business, this isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. Volatility drives up costs, turns strategic planning into guesswork, and delays investment.
That’s how sensible people with sensible goals—like making their businesses work, think. But it’s exactly the opposite of how our government now imagines its role. The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register last week: Their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: Either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech.
So the goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear: Do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating.
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