Impact of coffee intake on human aging: Epidemiology and cellular mechanisms

Potential 17% impact!

CHEERS!

In the StarTribune today:

Soaring CWD numbers in southeastern Minnesota prompt DNR to stop culling deer

Here’s the STrib’s map below — this map might be from just this year’s testing?

I’ve been tracking chronic wasting disease in deer for a while, right up there with bovine spungiform encephalophy (BSE, “mad cow”) sheep scrapie, even in pigs, and of course Creutzfeld-Jakob in humans (ages ago, it was also Jakob-Creutzfeld). This came to my attention in the late 1990s, when a swimming coach at Northfield high school died of Jakob-Creutzfeld.

• Of mad cows and pissy deer… September 15, 2005
• Downer cows = Mad Cow disease? February 11th, 2008
• Mad Cow Beef & MN Dept of Education February 11th, 2008
• They’re actually saying “MAD COW” February 19th, 2008
• Creutzfeld-Jakob variant – 4th declared case June 6th, 2014
• More CWD (chronically wasted deer) in MN December 30th, 2016

And then there’s all the elk at Elk Run:

Sharpshooters begin destroying elk herd

What does CWD mean to Elk Run development?

From CWD-INFO.org, a detailed source of info which seems up to date:

Preliminary Test Identifies CWD-Positive Wild Deer in Southeast Minnesota

MN – News release: CWD confirmed in a wild deer near Wheaton in western Minnesota

Here’s the CWD-INFO.org map:

And reason for concern among hunters:

2 hunters may have died of prion disease from eating contaminated deer meat, researchers say

Deaths of three men prompt Wisconsin to look for connection to fatal brain disease in deer

Puerto Rico is in the dark today. That’s the Luma “load shed” map, above, and here’s a chart from the Luna site about outages.

UPDATE as of 1/1/2025 at 3:24 pm:

Granted this is distribution, not transmission, but this AP photo, from the article linked below, shows the hornets’ nest we’re dealing with in Puerto Rico:

I remember during the Arrowhead Transmission Project hearing in Wisconsin (the EIS is in the Library of Congress?!?) the repeated threats that if it was not permitted and built, we’ll freeze in an incubator without a job… or was it we’ll die of heatstroke on a respirator… whatever. The histrionics were extreme, and so unnecessary, as necessary as that transmission project.

Puerto Rico is another story. The Puerto Rican electrical system sucked before Hurricane Maria in 2017, and afterward, it was pretty much non-existent. Paper towels were insufficient.

Supposedly, triggering this outage was an underground cable that faulted and put the whole island in the dark. From the AP article linked below:

AP: Nearly all of Puerto Rico is without power on New Year’s Eve

How is it that “failure of an underground power line,” a singular power line, can black out the entire island? Two things come to mind… 1) where’s the redundancy; and 2) underground transmission is far more reliable than above ground; oh, make that three, 3) transmission is generally more reliable than distribution, transmission outages are VERY RARE.

Puerto Rico is “serviced” by Luma and Genera PR. Here’s Luma HQ looming:

And here’s Genera PR’s generation:

And real time generation details HERE:

So does this mean what I think it does??? No generation?

And more on that same page:

Oh my! And even more:

And over those corporations is the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, PREPA. Luma and Genera PR were granted authority and responsibility to operate by PREPA. For sure there’s enough responsibility to go around, but effectiveness and reliability are missing. There’s nominal power to the people.

What has PREPA done? Here’s info on the PREPA workplan for Puerto Rico’s Electric Power and Distribution System.

You can find a massive amount if info including Data Requests, Compliance, RFPs, Evaluations at the above Puerto Rico’s Electric Power and Distribution System page.

Something tells me that “Completed June 2020” isn’t quite accurate. Why? Well, that’s the Luma “load shed” map above. Seven plus YEARS after the hurricane, they’re still having problems. Today, most of Puerto Rico in the dark. For Luma, at 3:00 p.m. CST, 13.2% of customers have electricity, and how many people per “customer” is that?

Here’s an interesting twist at https://poweroutage.us/area/state/puerto%20rico – they were asked/directed NOT to report outages:

Did Puerto Rico not get a boost from the big Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)?

Recent alert came over the wire about a transmission project on BLM land, this one in Wyoming, and yes, that map is fuzzy, no details, and it’s direct from the application on the BLM site, awful!

Here’s the BLM page for the project — a rather short line in the cosmic realm of things — and there’s little info to go on. There’s a 15-day public scoping period prior to preparing an environmental assessment (EA), and comments are open until 4 p.m. on January 7, 2025:

BLM Lucky Star Transmission Page

Per the press release:

For more information, contact the Rawlins Field Office, 307-328-4224. Submit written comments to the Rawlins Field Office, P.O. Box 2407, Rawlins, WY 82301-2407, Attn: Lucky Star Wind Transmission Line Project.

And there are these emails listed on their page, I’d send to these plus snail mail (this is 2024/2025 — comments by snail mail?):

It’s a pretty small project, 24.8 miles:

And the full application, PRELIMINARY application:

And as usual, the maps suck. How can one effectively submit a scoping comment “prior to preparing an environmental assessment (EA)” when there’s this timeline that shows the “Draft EA done 1/6/2024, and the EA was STARTED five days after it was DONE. From TIMELINE PAGE:

And they acknowledge the error and fixed it!!!

GOOD!

Recent alert came over the wire about a transmission project on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, this one in Wyoming, and it’s to be built “mostly” on BLM transmission corridors. WHAT? Yup, here’s the main page. BLM transmission corridors And yeah, it’s grim. That map above shows how grim it is.

So before I get into Lucky Star Transmission, we need to get familiar with the BLM set up… and there’s a LOT. It’s originating with the “Energy Policy Act of 2005” There’s so much info that the BLM Lucky Star Transmission Project will be the next post. Lots of ground to cover — and they’re sure working on covering it with transmission. Ya wonder why challenging transmission projects feels hopeless, other than minor route changes…

Did you know the feds designated the “West-Wide Energy Corridor, a BLM-designated energy-transmission corridor,” over a decade ago? This is another aspect of the “Energy Policy Act of 2005.”

That Energy Policy Act of 2005 is the law that triggered the coal gasification rush that thankfully was brought to a halt, particularly thanks to everyone of “No New Coal Plants,” challenging every one of them, and helping establish that coal gasification was nothing more than “Pipedreams of Green and Clean,” and that claims of feasible carbon capture and storage was not happening on a level to be even close to a CO2 climate change miracle.

As for CO2… CO2 capture and storage is a recurring nightmare, a red herring that keeps coming back.

It’s so disturbing to see the same ol’ thing coming around, after the intense challenge to the Excelsior Energy Mesaba Project, where Xcel Energy, of course, and our local advocates mncoalgasplant.com(pre 2012 captures) and Citizens Against the Mesaba Project (CAMP)(pre 2012 captures) worked together to tank Micheletti’s boondoggle. At the last minute, Excelsior Energy camp up with a CO2 capture and storage plan, where it would capture a minute percentage of CO2 and then transfer it to the PLANT GATE!Their plan? Read it and guffaw, snort, hoot and holler: Ex_EE1067_Plan for Carbon Capture and Sequestration

From nearly 20 years ago, that was a nightmare I don’t really want to remember: Pipedreams-of-Green-Clean-IGCC The Excelsior Energy Mesaba Project was an all encompassing HUGE project for me and all of us challenging coal gasification, time wise, technically, and the sheer room for all the boxes of crap taking up an entire wall in my office… and OH MY DOG, I missed a lot that grew from that Energy Policy Act of 2005.

The current push for CO2 capture, pipelines, and storage a la Summit Carbon Solutions, is another pipedream/nightmare, proof that “we” don’t learn anything. The Iowa parts of Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline project was APPROVED (!) by the Iowa Utilities Board f/k/a Board of Public Utilities last summer, and the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission recently approved a very short part of Summit’s pipeline, I’d guess a Summit trial balloon for Minnesota, as a much larger pipeline project is proposed for southern Minnesota. Sooooo… we’re off to the races.

And that brings us to the transmission part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors we know about. The original three are now joined by others, also receiving a big push right now by the Biden Administration adding some additional corridors, and dropping others proposed.

But these BLM “energy corridors” are a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. When first established, they were challenged, with Plaintiffs arguing it wasn’t enough, hence a “Settlement Agreement.” Y’all know what I think of “Settlement Agreements” and this one seems no exception — look at all the groups blessing this BLM facilitation of another massive transmission buildout:

Here’s the BLM’s “Regional Report” with links to the documents:

Regional Review Final Report

And the map of the corridors:

Here’s their guidance for siting transmission in these corridors:

Interim Directive 2726.43k – Use of 368 Corridors in Siting Energy Projects

And here’s their study, which supposedly evaluates whether the Section 368 corridors are achieving their
purpose to promote environmentally responsible corridor-siting decisions and to reduce the proliferation of dispersed ROWs crossing Federal lands.

From this, the “priority corridors” map:

Ain’t this just delightful??

On to the Lucky Star Transmission Project