New England kicks off $450M plan to supercharge heat pump adoption

Grabbing energy from the air

Sarah Shemkus, Canary Media

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

New England winters can get wicked cold. This week, five of the region’s states launched a $450 million effort to warm more homes in the often-frigid region with energy-efficient, low-emission heat pumps instead of by burning fossil fuels.

“It’s a big deal,” said Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. ​“It’s unprecedented to see five states aligning together on a transformational approach to deploying more affordable clean-heat options.”

The New England Heat Pump Accelerator is a collaboration between Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The initiative is funded by the federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, which was created by President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The accelerator’s launch marks a rare milestone for a Biden-era climate initiative amid the Trump administration’s relentless attempts to scrap federal clean energy and environmental programs.

The goal: Get more heat pumps into more homes through a combination of financial incentives, educational outreach, and workforce development.

New England is a rich target for such an effort because of its current dependence on fossil-fuel heating. Natural gas and propane are in wide use, and heating oil is still widespread throughout the region; more than half of Maine’s homes are heated by oil, and the other coalition states all use oil at rates much higher than the national average. The prevalence of oil in particular means there’s plenty of opportunity to grow heat-pump adoption, cut emissions, and lower residents’ energy bills.

At the same time, heat pumps have faced barriers in the region, including the upfront cost of equipment, New England’s high price of electricity, and misconceptions about heat pumps’ ability to work in cold weather.

EDITOR'S NOTE: We've installed two heat pumps as adjuncts to mini-split units and can attest to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness. We installed the second one this year in anticipation of Trump cancelling the energy tax credit.  Glad we did.  Still, even without the credit, they pay for themselves.   - Will Collette

Bobby Jr.'s inexplicable war on vaccines ramps up

FDA official proposes ‘impossible’ standards for vaccine testing that could curtail access to immunizations

Liz Szabo, MA

Before vaccines, 50% of children did not reach adulthood.
With vaccines, that dropped to 4%

The top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to impose vague but sweeping new standards on vaccine testing that, health experts say, would impede the development of new immunizations and likely curtail access to life-saving shots, according to a memo sent to staff on October 28.

Vinay Prasad, MD, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), proposed the "path forward" in an internal memo in which he claimed—but provided no evidence—that COVID-19 vaccines caused the death of 10 children. 

Many infectious disease experts say Prasad should share the evidence on which he based his argument. Linking a vaccine to an adverse event requires a high level of evidence, including autopsy results and medical records that rule out other causes of death and show whether the affected person was infected with the coronavirus itself, said Paul Offit, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine.

Prasad is "making a fairly fantastic statement," Offit said. "He should provide extraordinary evidence that that's clear, and he didn't, which is incredibly irresponsible and unprofessional to do."

In the memo, Prasad wrote that the FDA's current vaccine approval process falls short.

In the future, the FDA will "demand pre-market randomized trials assessing clinical endpoints for most new products," including vaccines, Prasad wrote. He noted that COVID-19 vaccines have not been tested in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in pregnant women. Such trials are the most rigorous type of study, but they can cost millions of dollars and take years to produce results.

"We will not be granting marketing authorization to vaccines in pregnant women" without such evidence, Prasad wrote. The memo's contents were first reported by a PBS News correspondent in a series of posts on X, the social media platform.

Sen. Jack Reed leads push to publicly release video of US war crimes

“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage,” said Sen. Jack Reed.

Brett Wilkins

Calls mounted Thursday for the Trump administration to release the full video of a September US airstrike on a boat allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea following a briefing between Pentagon officials and select lawmakers that left some Democrats with more questions than answers.

“I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after the briefing. “The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the president has agreed to do.”

Reed’s remarks came after Adm. Frank Bradley and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine briefed some members of the Senate and House Armed Services and Intelligence committees on the so-called “double-tap” strike, in which nine people were killed in the initial bombing and two survivors clinging to the burning wreckage of the vessel were slain in second attack.

Lawmakers who attended the briefing said that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth allegedly did not give an order to “kill everyone” aboard the boat. However, legal experts and congressional critics contend that the strikes are inherently illegal under international law.

Trump Is Lying About Grocery Prices. What Else?

Why should you trust someone who says things you know from your own experience are false?

Mitchell Zimmerman

Remember the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

President Trump has fooled too many people too many times – many more than twice. Perhaps many people are ready to believe anything Trump says because he attacks people who they enjoy seeing targeted. But what if this time it is people like us who are actually the targets of Trump’s attacks?

What else can you make of it when Donald Trump tells flagrant falsehoods about something important to our families’ well-being: the fact that rising prices are eating up our income? What should you make of it when Donald Trump denies something you know to be true from your own experience?

In 2024 Trump promised voters that when he was elected, “inflation will vanish completely.” He even vowed, further, that “prices will come down, and they’ll come down fast, with everything.” “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”

It has been nearly a year. Prices have not gone down. Everyone knows this. But Donald Trump refuses to admit it.

Trump: “We have no inflation. We have no inflation.”

On October 31st, Trump was interviewed for the CBS News’ program Sixty Minutes. When reporter Norah O’Donnell pointed out that “grocery prices are up,” Trump blew up.

“No, you’re wrong,” he insisted. “Right now they’re going down. . . . Inflation, I’ve already taken care of. … We have no inflation. We have no inflation.”

Trump asserted prices have already dropped. “Every price is down,” he said in early November. “Everything is way down.” Gasoline prices have “plummeted” and “we’re at almost $2 for gasoline.”

Really? At a gas pump near you? Here in the real world, on Thanksgiving weekend, the national average gas price was three dollars a gallon.

“Everything” is certainly not “way down.” Prices are obviously going up again.

You are not alone if you see a disconnect between Trump’s pontificating and our reality.

On November 19^th Fox News released a poll on the cost of living. Eight-five percent of Americans say they are paying more for groceries than last year. Four out of five say their cost of utilities has gone up. Two-thirds say their health care expenses and their housing expenses have increased. “Everything is” not “way down.”

Nope. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the jump in food and other prices for the first nine months of Trump’s presidency. (Beef up 13%. Oranges up 15%. Electricity 7%. Natural gas 6%. Gasoline 6%.)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture certainly did not tell Trump that produce prices are “way down.” The USDA said food prices would “rise faster than the historical average rate of growth” in 2025 – and projected food prices would continue to rise nearly as fast in 2026.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for September 2025 (the latest month for which data is now available) shows prices 3% higher than one year ago.

No one misinformed President Trump. He invented his own lies.

Just making things up that sound good is second nature to Donald Trump. 

Remember he was going to make Mexico pay for the wall? Cap credit card interest rates at 10%? Make in-vitro fertilization treatment free? End the Ukraine war on Day One? (Trump now claims that was “said in jest.” Ending a war is a joke?) Provide a tax credit for family caregivers? (Forgotten on Day One, and certainly when Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave the richest one percent of Americans a $75,000 tax break!)

But it takes a special kind of chutzpah to tell people who see their grocery prices going up that their grocery prices are going down. Trump, like one of the Marx Brothers in a 1933 movie, is saying, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

If you believe your own eyes about the prices you see in the supermarket and on your utility bill, Trump thinks you’re a sucker – for being taken in by “a con job by the Democrats.”

It’s time to ask ourselves: Who’s running the con job? And what else has Donald Trump been saying that just ain’t so?

Here’s one easy example: Who is paying the tariffs on the things you buy that come from overseas?

Donald Trump told voters over and over during the 2024 campaign that they would not be paying for tariffs. Tariffs are “a tax on another country,” Trump insisted. “It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”

That was a lie. Ask any business person. Tariffs are a sales tax that U.S. importers are paying, and since they are passing the expense on in higher prices, you are bearing the expense. They are part of the reason prices are going up.

Trump recently admitted the lie. In response to the soaring prices of tariff-burdened foods like coffee, tea, and bananas (coffee is up 20%), Trump recently cut those tariffs, saying that would bring down coffee prices “in a very short period of time.” The only way a tariff cut can bring down prices is when tariffs were the reason prices went up in the first place.

Sometimes Trump’s lies are so obvious it’s hard to believe even MAGA supporters take them seriously. Consider the lie about renaming the Gulf of Mexico.

“I called the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America,” Trump explained, “because to me, it was always the Gulf of America. We have 92 percent of the frontage. Why isn’t it the Gulf of America?”

Let’s look at the map:

The black line shows U.S. coastal frontage from Texas to Florida. The red line shows the rest of the Gulf’s coastal frontage, along Mexico and part of Cuba. Does it look to you like the black line is 92% of all the shoreline? No one could claim that with a straight face. Except Donald Trump. He thinks Americans are too dumb to notice his lies.

Here is a more consequential lie for the 83 million people – about one in five Americans – who rely on Medicaid for comprehensive coverage of health and long-term care. What Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” made savage cuts in the Medicaid program, based on One Big Ugly Lie.

$1 trillion dollars taken from Medicaid. $1 trillion given to the one percent.

Trump said he was going to leave Medicaid alone. “We’re not doing any cutting of anything meaningful,” he said. “We’re not changing Medicaid.” Immediately after his Big Beautiful Bill was passed, Trump repeated the claim that “we’re not going to touch” Medicaid.

False. Trump’s bill will, over a ten year period, hack $1 trillion off Medicaid funding, by making it more difficult for individuals to qualify or remain qualified for Medicaid, reducing benefit and reimbursement rates, and other changes. Over 14 million people will lose health coverage.

The American Medical Association condemned the bill:

“Care will be less accessible, and patients may simply forego seeing their physician because the lifelines of Medicaid and CHIP [the Child Health Insurance Program] are severed. … This bill will make patients sicker. … Acute, treatable illnesses will turn into life-threatening or costly chronic conditions.”

About one trillion dollars taken from Medicaid is just about the right amount to pay for the One Big Beautiful Bill’s $1 trillion tax gift to the top one percent of Americans. These are people who make more than $1,149,000 each year. They will get a much-needed $75,400 tax break next year.

Finally, let’s look at Trump’s lies about undocumented immigrants. He wants to deport over 10 million people, an action that Trump’s own Labor Department has said is already making food shortages and increased food prices likely, and is impacting home construction, meat packing and the availability of home health aides.

Trump seeks to justify the disruption and downright cruelty by saying he’s only deporting “the worst of the worst.” But there aren’t millions of criminals among the immigrants who came to America without proper authorization. They came seeking a better life or desperate to escape brutal gang violence in their homelands, and the overwhelming majority are law-abiding and hard working.

The ice cream man isn’t the “worst of the worst”

Even Fox news reports that the “worst of the worst” claim is false: “The majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions. Of those who do, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes.”

A U.S. government-funded study confirmed the point, finding that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”

Common sense tells us Trum
p is lying. ICE is not seizing people for deportation by the millions by targeting particular individuals found guilty of serious crimes. By the U.S. government’s own explanation in court, ICE “contact teams” try to find undocumented immigrants by looking for individuals who have a Spanish accent or look Hispanic and who are found in locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, and agricultural sites.

ICE’s targets are not the worst of the worst. In Culver City they seized a beloved ice cream man. Law-abiding young people, who were brought here as small children, are being targeted for deportation from the only country they know, the U.S.A. when they are about to graduate from high school. Day laborers at Home Depot. Shoppers in a Walmart parking lot. Patients in a hospital.

Trump’s lies about immigrants are shameful.

It would take an encyclopedia to list and correct all the lies Donald Trump has told. When you encounter Trump’s pronouncements on matters such as whether federal troops are needed in our cities – whether crime is out of control – whether all third-world immigrants are a threat – whether voter fraud is a real problem – whether civil rights laws discriminate against white people – whether the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – or whether anything Donald Trump does not like to hear must be fake news, ask yourself: Are groceries cheaper?

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. He's also a longtime contributor to Progressive Charlestown. His writing can also be found on his Substack, Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman.

Subscriptions to Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman are free at this time. If you find my writing of value, please like, subscribe and recommend Reasoning Together to your friends. Thank you.

You may also be interested in my road-trip novel / social thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Read an excerpt. Read the Progressive Charlestown review HERE.

No reason

Who would you trust?

 

Goodbye and thank you!

Dr. Ashish Jha, a familiar face during COVID pandemic, stepping down as Brown’s public health dean

By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current

Dr. Ashish Jha — one of the most recognizable public health experts during the COVID-19 pandemic, and at one point a leader of the federal response to the virus — is leaving his post at Brown University’s School of Public Health. 

Jha will step down at the end of December to spearhead “an initiative that aims to bolster the nation’s defenses against emerging pandemic and biological threats,” the school announced Thursday. The unnamed initiative will continue the work Jha started in April 2022 as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator.

But that was all the information available Thursday about Jha’s new venture.

“At this time there are no additional details to be shared on what he is doing next,” Rob Hancock, a spokesperson for the School of Public Health, said in an email.

Jha said in emailed comments Thursday evening that his new venture will be informed by his time at Brown and as a face of the federal response to COVID — experiences which taught him how to communicate public health challenges to non-scientists.

Vaccinating newborns against hepatitis B saves lives.

Why might a CDC panel stop recommending it?

Liz Szabo, MA

RFK Jr. is the problem. He thinks vaccines are bad
but taking his grandkids to swim in sewage,
despite warning signs, is fine.

Alex Lee suffered for years because of a chronic hepatitis B infection.

Like many people with chronic hepatitis B, Lee contracted the virus from his mother during birth. Lee didn't learn he was infected until he was 40, when his mother underwent a liver transplant due to organ failure caused by hepatitis B.

By the time Lee was diagnosed, he already had advanced cirrhosis, a serious liver disease. He has since undergone surgery to remove growths on his liver, followed by chemotherapy to treat liver cancer caused by the virus, as well as a liver transplant. Although Lee is healthy today at 68, he will need to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life to prevent his immune system from attacking his new liver.

Yet Lee considers himself lucky; he doesn't need to worry that his children will develop the same disease. All three were vaccinated against hepatitis B, the first anti-cancer vaccine approved in the United States.

"I would recommend all babies take the vaccination," said Lee, a volunteer health educator for San Francisco Hep B Free, a nonprofit that educates community members about hepatitis B. "I was lucky that I found out early and that my liver cancer was not advanced." 

A 99% drop in hepatitis B

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first recommended vaccinating all babies against hepatitis B at birth in 1991. Since then, chronic hepatitis B infections in children and adolescents have fallen by 99%.

A study published in 2022 found that US children who received the vaccines as newborns were 22% less likely to die from any cause.

The universal birth dose of hepatitis vaccine "has been incredibly effective,” said Ravi Jhaveri, MD, head of infectious diseases at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “The US is in many ways is an envy of the world because we have been able to do this."

Since 1991, the universal HBV birth dose has prevented more than 500,000 childhood infections and prevented an estimated 90,100 childhood deaths, according to a joint statement from the American Public Health Association and 72 public health experts that was submitted as a public comment in response to an upcoming meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Again, weekend snow seems unlikely for Charlestown

Donald J. Trump Puts His Name on ‘US Institute of Peace’ while waging illegal wars and killing civilians

Latest chapter in Trump's quest for the Nobel Peace Prize

Jon Queally

The signs on the building of the United States Institute of Peace were changed overnight to include “Donald J. Trump,” adding the name of the sitting US president who, among other examples of warmongering and war-making, has openly supported the Israeli genocide in Gaza, bombed Iran, sent an aircraft carrier strike group to threaten Venezuela, and ordered the extrajudicial killings of over 80 people aboard boats in the Caribbean and Pacific in recent months.

The building’s name change preceded a meeting on Thursday between leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a proposed peace deal between the two warring nations is set to be signed. It also came amid an ongoing clamoring by the president to be recognized as a great maker of peace despite his record of violence, thuggery, racism, and human rights violations.

Critics of the move were swift in their condemnation of Trump, known more for being possibly the most famous narcissist in the history of humanity than for waging anything that remotely looks like a just and lasting peace.

“This is pathetic, like a little boy running around putting ‘Property of Donald’ stickers on everything in the house,” said Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. “It’s not the Trump institute of peace, it’s the US Institute of Peace.”

Trump's ugly Thanksgiving meltdown

It's getting so bad that even Republicans are starting to notice.

Noah Berlatsky

Thanksgiving is supposedly a holiday devoted to welcoming family, friends, and guests to eat together. So of course, Trump used it to indulge in a bizarre orgy of xenophobia and hate, culminating in a gutter attack on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who he referred to as “seriously retarded.”

Trump’s decision to “give thanks” by spewing bigotry and slurs is not a surprise. Even by his standards, though, his harangue was despicable. It was also a disgusting effort to leverage for partisan ends the shooting of National Guard members in Washington DC.

As his popularity and influence slips, Trump seems more and more desperate. That makes him more reckless and in many ways more dangerous. It also opens up opportunities for opposition, though — sometimes from unexpected quarters.

100% accurate Narco anti-missile system

Not even Kim Il Jun has this power

This is even a greater achievement than his glorious 2019 feat of changing Hurricane Dorian's path with his magic SharpieⓇ

If you walk in RI woods between Dec. 6 and Jan. 2, beware of shotgun-toting hunters

DEM requires you to wear orange to keep from getting killed 

Orange hats and vests are so chic this season – shotgun deer season, that is. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) reminds the public that starting this weekend on Saturday, Dec. 6, it’s time to make a bold fashion statement in hunting areas by adding plenty of orange into your winter wardrobe. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: "bold fashion statement" my ass. DEM wrote this cutesy news release, not me. While I have no problem with subsistence hunting, I am no fan of killing such magnificent creatures for sport. Unless the deer are armed so they can shoot back.   - Will Collette

Anyone in state management areas and undeveloped state parks during shotgun deer season must wear 500 square inches of solid, fluorescent orange, such as an orange vest and hat worn above the waist, through Friday, Jan. 2.  

Wonder what Bobby Jr. thinks of this

Garlic shows promise as a mouthwash alternative to standard chemical compounds

By University of Sharjah

Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

Garlic extract demonstrates antimicrobial efficacy comparable to other widely used antiseptics and disinfectants, such as chlorhexidine, according to University of Sharjah medical scientists.

Published in the Journal of Herbal Medicine, the study suggests that while garlic-based mouthwash may cause more discomfort than chlorhexidine, it offers longer-lasting residual effects.

"Chlorhexidine is widely used as a gold standard mouthwash but is associated with side effects and concerns over antimicrobial resistance," the authors note. "Garlic (Allium sativum), known for (its) natural antimicrobial properties, has emerged as a potential alternative."