Following Sol Power Solar’s Example, R.I. Worker Co-Ops Gain Energy

Charlestown's contractor of choice for successful 2017 Solarize Charlestown program

By Eric Halverson / ecoRI News contributor

Sol Power Solar has installed renewable energy for more than 1,100 customers since becoming an early pioneer in Rhode Island’s solar industry in 2013.

The staff credit this success to the company’s business model, in which each employee is an equal owner of the company. Now, Sol Power and a group of fellow cooperative businesses are trying to pave the way for workers to democratically run their own workplaces across the state.

When Eric Beecher founded Sol Power, he always knew he wanted it to be democratically run.

“It just seemed to me like the best way to run a company, kind of the fairest and most sustainable way to do it,” said Beecher, who notes the company is technically an LLC because it was established before the state allowed businesses to register as workers’ cooperatives. “It’s really a long-term sustainable career path that can give people a living wage and really values its workers.”

At Sol Power, each employee owner gets to vote on company policies. They divide annual profits based on how much each of them worked in a given year. With 12 owners on staff, Sol Power installs about 150 residential systems a year. Whether they’re on a steep roof in the hot summer or freezing winter, the workers know they will all share in the rewards.

EDITOR'S NOTE: It'd be great if Charlestown and Sol Power could repeat the Solarize Charlestown deal before the federal tax credits are terminated at year's end. I was one of those who took advantage of the group discount deal in 2017. In the 8 years since, those solar panels have paid for themselves through reductions in energy use and monthly checks for the sale of excess energy.    - Will Collette 

Bobby Junior demands obedience from doctors on vaccine policy

RFK Jr. Warns Docs of Liability if They Stray From CDC on Vaccines

By Joyce Frieden, Washington Editor, MedPage Today

The American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) recent pediatric COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, which differ from those of the CDC, have raised concerns from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who responded with an oblique warning to any physicians who might follow the AAP's advice.

"AAP should ... be candid with doctors and hospitals that recommendations that diverge from the CDC's official list are not shielded from liability under the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act," Kennedy posted this week on X.

The AAP recommendations, released on Tuesday, included a strong endorsement of COVID-19 shots for children ages 6 months to under 2 years. The group also recommended COVID shots for older children if the parents want to do that. Those recommendations differ from guidance issued by the CDC, which has said the vaccines are not specifically recommended for children although they can still get them if parents and providers agree.

Was Kennedy correct about the liability issue? "As has become common for Secretary Kennedy, this is misleading," Dorit Reiss, PhD, a law professor at the University of California San Francisco, said in a Facebook post on Wednesday. "Whether a vaccine falls under VICP [the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the part of the Vaccine Injury Act that deals with liability issues] has nothing to do with whether AAP recommends it, and the liability protections are not removed by this."

This week's bug alert

State court backs Westerly planning board’s rejection of 2,300-housing unit

No to housing on Winnapaug Country Club

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

The owner of a century-old Westerly country club has once again been told he can’t redevelop the 120-acre property. 

Winn Properties had tried to use the state’s affordable housing laws to build 2,300 homes on the site but the town’s planning board rejected the proposal last July, a decision upheld by a Washington County Superior Court judge last week. 

In his decision, Associate Justice Jeffrey A. Lanphear ruled the board had “competent evidence” to reject the proposal to redevelop the century-old Winnapaug Country Club.

Winn Properties, which has owned the Shore Road country since 2021, proposed leveling the 18-hole public course in order to build 90 three-story buildings — 30% of which would be reserved for low and middle-income residents. 

Nicholas Scola, who owns Winn Properties with his wife Jill, had previously proposed turning the country club into a golf resort, plans that were shot down by the Town Council in 2022.

On Wednesday, Scola referred comment on the Superior Court’s ruling to their attorney, Matthew J. Landry. Landry did not immediately respond to inquiries from Rhode Island Current.

Winn Properties sought to make use of the state’s Low and Moderate Income Housing law, which limits the ability of municipalities to block high-density projects if less than 10% of the community’s residences qualify as affordable, in order to get the project off the ground.

Westerly’s affordable housing stock sat at around 6.45% as of 2024, according to data compiled by RIHousing, the quasi-state agency that finances affordable home construction.

Let's apply the Biden rule to talking about Trump's health

Alert the media: The White House is lying about Trump's health

From The Onion

Their explanations are absurd and it's time to start asking questions.

Donald Trump held a bonkers press conference on August 22 during which he lied about his authoritarian occupation of Washington DC and fantasized about sending troops to occupy other cities with Black leaders.

Given the stakes, it might seem inappropriate to focus on attire. Trump, however, was noticeably casual for an Oval Office event. Unless he’s on the golf course, he typically wears a suit with an obligatory red tie. But he didn’t bother with a tie, and he wore a baseball cap that boasted “Trump Was Right About Everything.”

Trump’s boundless egomania is not unusual, but the head covering did raise larger questions. He also made a determined effort to hide the back of his right hand from cameras.

Trump wanted to hide his right hand for a reason. Pictures show it slathered with what seems like several coats of Sherwin-Williams.

Trump’s hand still looked rough during a later press event where his hand was no longer coated with makeup, but visibly bruised.

Something clearly is up with the 79-year-old president, and the official explanations don’t make sense. That’s not surprising given that Trump is a world-class liar surrounded by toadies who surrendered their shame long ago. But it’s past time for reporters to ask some questions.

The mainstream media are still in self-flagellation mode over how they purportedly “ignored” former President Joe Biden’s decline. (In reality, they never stopped talking about.) But this soul-searching is apparently only backward looking and exclusive to Democratic presidents.

Trump has never behaved in a manner you could reasonably define as “rational,” but since returning to power, he’s been more unhinged than ever — launching destructive trade wars, persecuting his political enemies, and sending troops into US cities. Biden’s age was an ongoing story even while he otherwise governed like a normal person, but so far the media has not even considered a connection between Trump’s disordered actions and his health.

How sick is Trump?

In response to images of his obviously ailing hands and swollen ankles, the White House revealed in July that Trump has chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), a condition that occurs when the leg veins become damaged and struggle to send blood back up to the heart.

Trump’s physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, acknowledged the hand issues in a July memo that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt read to the press pool.

“This is consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin, which is taken as part of a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen,” she claimed.

Yes, Leavitt — who has a skill for stating total bullshit with conviction — really leaned into the handshaking excuse. She told the Daily Beast that “President Trump is a man of the people, and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other president in history.”

In case you find that explanation unpersuasive, Leavitt offered another one. She claimed bruising is a “well known and benign side effect of aspirin therapy.” This should’ve set off alarms or at least mild curiosity from the White House press corps.

Aspirin therapy is traditionally prescribed in people with heart disease or who are at a high risk of it. Low-dose aspirin is a blood-thinning medication, and popping them like a daily multivitamin carries significant risks, such as gastrointestinal bleeding and a stroke caused by a burst blood vessel. In fact, most medical guidelines generally reject daily aspirin use for people who have low risk of a heart attack or stroke, particularly those over the age of 60 who are more prone to bleeding side effects.

Against that backdrop, it’s shocking that since July, no major news outlets have done serious investigations about Trump’s health and what the White House is trying to cover up about it.

Trump received a coronary calcium CT scan as part of a routine physical exam in 2018. His previous White House physician, Ronny Jackson — who also demonstrated an absurd willingness to lie about Trump’s health — revealed that Trump’s coronary calcium score was 133 (anything over 100 indicates heart disease in the patient).

And yet the media seems to have accepted Leavitt’s “frequent handshaking” diagnosis. Photos from last Saturday showed Trump with bruising on his left hand too. Are we to believe that he’s double-fisting his handshakes now?

Red, blistered, and peeling skin, as well as swollen hands and feet, are considered serious side effects from aspirin therapy. Trump is incredibly vain. It’s hard to imagine that he would accept a treatment whose side effects are even slightly disfiguring unless absolutely necessary. It doesn’t require going down the rabbit hole of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories to simply ask some basic questions about the president’s health.

It’s reasonable to question the Trump administration’s candor about his actual condition. In April, Barbabella released a glowing physical exam that declared, “President Trump remains in excellent health, exhibiting robust cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and general physical function.” Has Trump’s health declined since then, or was Barbabella misleading people?

Don’t believe your lying eyes

Rich Lowry at the National Review dismisses the very idea that Trump is in decline. He wrote last week that “of all the criticisms to make of him, that he’s frail and easily fatigued is preposterous.”

But it’s far less preposterous if you remove your MAGA hat and actually look at Trump in public. He fell asleep several times in court during his criminal case in New York (yes, that was just last year). During a meeting in Saudi Arabia this May, Trump looked like he was about to doze off like a tired grandpa right after dinner.

Last month, Trump could barely keep his eyes open during a televised White House event on “Making Health Technology Great Again,” and he struggled to stay awake during an event in Pennsylvania. Moreover, visible bruising from “excessive” handshaking would suggest a Montgomery Burns-level of frailty. 

Barbabella described CVI as “a benign and common condition,” which it arguably is for a 79 year old who is not the sitting president. But Biden was never graded on so generous a curve. 

Consider a 2022 hit job in The Hill that claimed his “recent memory lapses, losses of temper and outbursts (such as calling one Fox News reporter’s question ‘stupid,’ or referring to another reporter as a ‘stupid son of a bitch’ while talking into a microphone) could be considered clues to possible cognitive problems.”

Biden’s temper was hardly a new development, and linking these “outbursts” to cognitive impairment requires audacity after Trump spent his first term posting unhinged screeds on social media. 

And finally, this

His childish cyberbullying has since advanced to straight-up mobster shakedowns in broad daylight of politicians, universities, and private companies.

Whenever Biden confused the names of world leaders, it was front page news. But Trump also frequently flubbed names on the campaign trail. On Monday, a confused Trump called Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer "Kristi — uh, Kristi Whitman. Whitmer.”

If the media unquestionably accepts Trump’s CVI diagnosis, they should at least badger Leavitt with questions about how Trump is managing his condition. CVI tends to develop in people who spend a lot of time on their feet and midterm campaign season is arriving soon. Will Trump still have his regular hate rallies?

The relentless coverage of Biden’s age reinforced a public perception about his fitness. So Trump and Republicans in general benefit when the media shrugs off his obvious health issues as Trump just being Trump.

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McKee asks to meet with Trump over Revolution Wind project still in limbo

McKee wants to use his logic and negotiating skill to convince Donald Trump to change his mind on wind power

By Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current

I'd pay money to watch these two intellectual titans
do a UFC cage match on what used to be
the Rose Garden. - Will Collette, editor

After a dozen days in limbo, state and federal officials keep ramping up the pressure on the Trump administration to let the Revolution Wind project resume. 

The offshore wind project already under construction south of Rhode Island was put on hold on Aug. 22, leaving workers in the lurch and risking critical energy reliability and climate change mandates.

In a Wednesday letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Gov. Dan McKee outlined the consequences of the stop-work order, while asking for a meeting with President Donald Trump.

“The stop-work order undermines efforts to expand our energy supply, lower costs for families and businesses, and strengthen regional reliability,” McKee wrote to Burgum. “This action puts hundreds of well-paid blue-collar jobs at risk by halting a project that is just steps away from powering more than 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut.”

Do you think McKee understands this?

More than 1,000 union workers have spent much of the last two years building the 65-turbine project, 45 of which have been installed, as well as a pair of substations that will connect the power supply to Rhode Island and Connecticut. 

The 704 megawatts of nameplate capacity was set to be delivered by mid-2026, and already baked into the long-term plans for meeting Rhode Island’s decarbonization mandates under the state’s 2021 Act on Climate law. It is also critical to regional electrical grid reliability, especially in extreme weather events where fuel supply might be limited.

Since the project was put on hold, the hits have continued, with the U.S. Department of Transportation pulling $679 million in federal infrastructure grants tied to offshore wind projects on Aug. 29, including $11.2 million for Quonset Point. Meanwhile, a separate offshore wind project Rhode Island is eyeing for additional renewable electricity, SouthCoast Wind, is facing new setbacks after federal administrators indicated in federal court filings that they want to yank already approved permits for the Massachusetts project.

McKee first spoke with Burgum on Aug. 29, with a virtual meeting among staff members for both officials earlier Wednesday, Olivia DaRocha, a spokesperson for McKee’s office, said in an email.

His request for a meeting with Trump comes a day before a federal court hearing in Massachusetts, where a group of 18 state attorneys general, including Rhode Island’s Peter Neronha, are seeking to bar the Trump administration from blocking offshore wind projects more broadly. 

Brown University researchers find genetic marker that helped the first Americans survive

Extinct human relatives left a genetic gift that helped people thrive in the Americas

By Kevin Stacey, Senior Writer for the Physical Sciences, Brown University

A new study provides fresh evidence that ancient interbreeding with archaic human species may have provided modern humans with a genetic variant that helped them adapt to new environments as they dispersed across the globe.

The study, published in Science, focused on a gene known as MUC19, which is involved in the production of proteins that form saliva and mucosal barriers in the respiratory and digestive tracts. 

The researchers show that a variant of that gene derived from Denisovans, an enigmatic species of archaic humans, is present in modern Latin Americans with Indigenous American ancestry, as well as in DNA collected from individuals excavated at archeological sites across North and South America. 

The frequency at which the gene appears in modern human populations suggests the gene was under significant natural selection, meaning it provided a survival or reproductive advantage to those who carried it. It’s not clear exactly what that advantage might have been — but given the gene’s involvement in immune processes, it may have helped populations fight off pathogens encountered as they migrated into the Americas thousands of years ago.

New Research Shows More Extreme Global Warming Impacts Looming for the Northeast

Blizzards and nor'easters

By Bob Berwyn

A pair of new climate studies suggest an intensification of strong storms called nor’easters and other disruptive extremes affecting the East Coast of North America on an overheated planet.

Nor’easters generally form within about 100 miles of the East Coast between North Carolina and Massachusetts, often when cooler air from Canada meets warm, moist air over Gulf Stream waters. 

Those contrasting air masses can start to spin with a nudge from the jet stream, fueling storms that can produce damaging winds, coastal flooding and intense, disruptive snowfall in the winter.

The strongest nor’easters are already significantly windier and rainier than they were in the middle of the 20th century, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, a co-author of a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A 2022 study showed a similar trend of intensification for storms forming over the Atlantic and hitting Europe, and that the track of those storms is moving northward, potentially putting unsuspecting areas more at risk.

“There are two reasons to look at the most intense nor’easters,” Mann said via email. “First, from an impact standpoint, they do the most damage, including coastal erosion, destruction and paralyzing snowfalls. The 1962 Ash Wednesday storm, with 84 mile per hour gusts, is a great example. In today’s dollars, it did $21 billion worth of damage.”

And just last February, a classic nor’easter described at the time as a “bomb cyclone” dropped several feet of snow over parts of Virginia and North Carolina and caused damaging flooding along parts of the Massachusetts coast, Eastern Long Island and the Jersey Shore.

Tom Sgouros: Landlords, Inflation, and Market Regulation

When landlords charge "what the market will bear," at what point does it become gouging?

Tom Sgouros

I live in North Kingstown, and a friend of mine, a retired police officer, rented the downstairs half of a house down the street from me. At least he did until last year when his landlord told him the rent wasn’t nearly as high as the market would bear, and raised it again. 

When my friend moved in in 2019, he was paying $1350 a month, and he left in 2024 when the rent went to $2500. This is a guy who never missed his rent and helped make repairs to the house. So he left, but had to leave town to find something he and his wife could afford.

My friend’s story is hardly unique. In Rhode Island and much of the country, rents are up. At the end of 2024, the median asking rent in Providence was up 12.6% over the previous year. Average rents were up 2.5%. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, the metro area that covers about 3/4 of Rhode Island has 176,000 households that are either “cost burdened” (paying more than 30% of their monthly income for rent) or “severely cost burdened” (more than 50%). This is 45% of all households, for those keeping count.

People routinely blame the rising costs on "supply and demand," and sure, a housing supply that isn’t keeping up with increased demand is a big part of the story, but that lets a lot of people off the hook way too easily, including my friend’s landlord.

The thing about inflation is that it’s a matter of choice. Prices go up when someone decides to raise them. Lots of economists like to imagine the economy as a series of auctions where supply and demand find their magic balancing point, but that’s not the way the world works. 

In the real world, there are power imbalances between buyers and sellers that are different in different markets. Big buyers have a lot of power in commodity markets, for example, and that’s why our country has agricultural price supports to keep farm prices up. But in today’s rental housing market, the sellers have the high cards. Landlords have pricing power that tenants simply do not.

This is not to say that landlords’ costs do not rise. Property taxes go up, but they are limited to 4% per year. They are usually less than a quarter of a landlord’s expenses, so a 4% increase in taxes is certainly less than a 1% increase in overall costs. Few towns hit the limit every year, and North Kingstown certainly has not. Insurance rates are going up, too, but they are generally around 5-10% of a landlord’s costs. 

Even when costs rise, there is a question of how much is enough. If you’re clearing $400 a month on an apartment you rent and your costs go up $200, are you justified in raising the rent $200 to make up for it? Do you *deserve* all of that $400 per month?

Donald Trump, master deal-maker

Friday, South County Rising meeting in Richmond

Two years later: Quidnessett Country Club’s illegal rock wall still stands without enforcement action

Save the Bay demands the CRMC enforce its own order

In SteveAhlquist.news

From a Save The Bay press release:

Today marks two years since the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) issued a cease and desist order requiring Quidnessett Country Club to remove the illegal rock wall they erected without permission on Narragansett Bay. Since the issuance of that order, CRMC’s politically-appointed Council has allowed Quidnessett to retain the unlawful wall, allowing numerous extensions, at the cost of Rhode Islanders’ access to the natural shoreline and local habitats like the beach and salt marsh near the shores of the country club.

How to learn the songs of nature’s symphony with some simple techniques

Birding by ear

Chris Lituma, West Virginia University

Watch the American robin, a common songbird, singing it’s song and making calls.

Waking up to the dawn chorus of birds – one of the natural world’s greatest symphonies – is a joy like no other. It is not surprising that bird-watching has become an increasingly popular hobby.

A simple way to start bird-watching is to buy a feeder, a pair of binoculars and a field guide, and begin watching birds from your window.

However, one of the most rewarding ways to identify birds is to listen to them and learn to recognize their songs.

As an ornithologist and educator, I often introduce students to the intricacies of bird songs, and I have developed some tricks that can make birding by ear less daunting.