Can you hear it — that loud roar coming from the East? It’s the sound of 1.4 billion Chinese laughing at us.

The Chinese simply can’t believe their luck: that at the dawn of the electricity-guzzling era of artificial intelligence, the U.S. president and his party have decided to engage in one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm imaginable. They have passed a giant bill that, among other craziness, deliberately undermines America’s ability to generate electricity through renewables — solar, battery and wind power in particular.

And why? Because they view those as “liberal” energy sources, even though today they are the quickest and cheapest ways to boost our electricity grid to meet the explosion of demand from A.I. data centers.

It is exactly the opposite of what China is doing. Indeed, Beijing may have to make July 4 its own national holiday going forward: American Electricity Dependence Day

Even Saudi Arabia

You cannot make this up: Even Saudi Arabia is doubling down on solar power to meet the needs of the A.I. data centers it wants to recruit from the West, while Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” actually does just the opposite. It quickly phases out tax credits enjoyed by utility-scale solar and wind — as well as electric vehicle tax credits. This virtually guarantees that China will own the future of solar energy, wind power, and electric cars and trucks, as well as autonomous vehicles.

Thankfully, Trump and friends did keep until 2036 a major Biden-era tax credit for companies that build other emissions-free technologies such as nuclear reactors, hydroelectric dams, geothermal plants and battery storage. The problem is that it can take up to 10 years to build a nuclear plant in America, and, as The New York Times reported, the bill added “complex restrictions” to the battery credits “that bar recipients from having ties to ‘prohibited foreign entities’ like China.’’ As a result, “some worry that the restrictions are so complicated that the credits could end up being unusable for many projects.”

In sum, this dog’s breakfast of a bill — rushed through without a single congressional hearing with independent energy experts or even one scientist — is sure to put at risk billions of dollars of investments in renewable energy, mostly in Republican states, and potentially kill the jobs of tens of thousands of U.S. workers. By the way, the bill also bans for 10 years a first-ever fee on excess methane emissions from oil and gas production, a key driver of global warming.

How does this make sense?

So, in one fell swoop, this bill will make your home hotter, your air conditioning bill higher, your clean energy job scarcer, America’s auto industry weaker and China happier. How does that make sense?

It doesn’t.

And the person in America who knows that best is actually Elon Musk. It is really sad to me that Musk — who is without question one of America’s greatest manufacturing innovators, having started globally leading companies making electric vehicles, renewable rockets, battery storage and telecommunications satellites — has discredited himself with so many voters because of his dalliance with Trump and because of his Department of Government Efficiency’s capricious cuts to the government workforce. Because of that, many will not understand the vital truth that Musk has been shouting to his fellow Americans: Trump’s bill is “utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

This is not complicated and this is what China knows: There has never been a more intimate connection than there is now between a nation’s ability to generate huge amounts of electricity at affordable prices (and in the cleanest way possible) and its ability to develop AI engines that consume huge amounts of electricity as they learn and generate answers that could give us the tools we need to cure diseases, discover new materials and even produce the holy grail of cheap, clean, climate-saving fusion energy.

To put it differently, there has never been a more intimate connection between the amount of cheap, clean electricity a nation can generate for AI models and its future economic and military might.

That is why Musk and many others find it so “insane and destructive” that Trump and his GOP cult have rejected an energy policy of “all of the above as clean as possible as fast as possible” — oil, natural gas, coal, wind, hydro, nuclear, solar, geothermal, hydrogen — that is always working to phase out the dirtiest for the cleanest, the way China often has. Instead, Trump has chosen instead to kneecap America’s renewable energy industry the way China has not. The president has even called clean energy tax credits a “scam,” saying he’d rather spend the money anywhere else. This is industrial-scale foolishness.

I was struck by a quote from an energy expert in The Wall Street Journal the other day. “The big-picture outlook for energy is we are going to be less competitive because of this law,” said Nick Nigro of Atlas Public Policy. “Ten years from now, we could look back on this moment as the time in which the U.S. pulled back and essentially lost the transition to clean energy.”

Alas, truth be told, Democratic Party progressives helped to make Trump and his party this foolish on energy with their own crazy fantasies. Too many of them behaved as if we could go cold turkey from a fossil fuel economy to a clean and green one, without scaling cleaner fuels to bridge the transition, such as natural gas and nuclear, and without loosening permitting standards for more transmission lines to get clean power from the middle of the desert to the cities where it is needed.

China widens its lead

Few Americans understand how far ahead of us China already is in this realm and moving further ahead, and faster, every day.

Consider this snapshot: In 2000 China produced just over 1,300 terawatt hours of electricity while the U.S. produced nearly 3,800 (a terawatt is equal to 1 million megawatts). Fast forward to today, China produces over 10,000 terawatt hours while the U.S., since 2000, has added only 500 — an increase of only 13% in 2-1/2 decades. Much of China’s electricity growth originally came from expanded coal-fired generation, but in recent years, it has been driven by expanding hydro, solar, wind and battery sources, which are easier, cheaper and quicker to build and also help the climate.

As a recent article from Shanghai in the Financial Times put it: “China is on its way to becoming the world’s first ‘electrostate,’ with a growing share of its energy coming from electricity and an economy increasingly driven by clean technologies. It offers China a strategic buffer from trade decoupling and rising geopolitical tensions with the U.S.”

As for Trump’s goal of making America globally energy dominant during his term of office, his bill just made that impossible. There is no path to energy dominance in the next five years without renewables.

Let’s say you want to generate additional electricity for more data centers just through natural gas today. Even if you have an abundance of gas, as America does, you need more giant turbines to convert the gas to electricity. If you ask the major manufacturers of those turbines — GE Vernova, Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Power — they will probably tell you that they will be very happy to deliver you one, but you will be lucky to have it installed by 2030. That is how long their backlogs are. And there is no telling what that turbine will cost with all of Trump’s new steel and aluminum tariffs.

By contrast, you can build and put online a new solar farm with battery storage in Texas in just 18 months.

Charging in Texas

“During the past quarter, Texas took the lead in clean power installations, adding an impressive 2,596 MW of new utility-scale solar, wind and storage capacity,” reads an October research report from Texas A&M, referring to megawatts of power. “This milestone marks the first time Texas has surpassed California to become the top solar state in the nation.’”

A Texas energy expert, Doug Lewin, posted last week that the Texas grid, known as ERCOT, recently reported that the state had added 10,000 megawatts of power in just the last year — most of it from supercheap solar power with battery storage, so energy can be distributed at night when the sun is not shining. As a result, Texas has seen a drop in brownouts on its grid because of more renewables combined with bigger storage batteries. Texas can still deploy solar-plus-batteries in the future, but now the electricity will cost consumers a lot more, thanks to the Trump bill.

If that higher monthly electricity bill bothers you, call Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He assuredly knows better, but like every other sycophant in Trump’s Cabinet, he seems to have just told the boss what he wanted to hear. As Wright must know, solar energy plus storage batteries made up 81% of the new electricity capacity added in the U.S. in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Now Trump’s idiotic bill will slash that amount.

The result for Americans? The research firm Energy Innovation, whose peer-reviewed energy modeling is widely respected, projects that Trump’s effort to diminish America’s renewable energy industry will cause wholesale electric power prices to increase roughly 50% by 2035, and that cumulative annual consumer energy costs will increase more than $16 billion by 2030. It also projects that about 830,000 renewable energy jobs will be lost or not created by 2030.

For all of these reasons, I am certain there are only two political parties in the world today cheering the passage of this bill: Trump’s Republican Party and the Chinese Communist Party — because nothing is more destined to make China great again than Trump’s “big, beautiful, America surrenders the future of electricity to Beijing” bill.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

By AMANDA SEITZ and JONEL ALECCIA, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.

He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.

“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week.

But an Associated Press review of Mom’s Meals menu, including the ingredients and nutrition labels, shows that the company’s offerings are the type of heat-and-eat, ultraprocessed foods that Kennedy routinely criticizes for making people sick.

The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.

“It is perfectly possible to make meals like this with real foods and no ultra-processing additives but every one of the meals I looked at is loaded with such additives,” Nestle said. “What’s so sad is that they don’t have to be this way. Other companies are able to produce much better products, but of course they cost more.”

Related Articles

Temporary status to be removed from roughly 80,000 Hondurans, Nicaraguans after 25 years in US

What to know about a potential deal to keep TikTok running in US

Student loan cancellation program could become Trump retribution tool, some advocates fear

Debate erupts over role job cuts played in weather forecasts ahead of deadly Texas floods

Deals made by Trump since pausing his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs remain sparse

Mom’s Meals do not have the artificial, petroleum dyes that Kennedy has pressured companies to remove from products, she noted.

Mom’s Meals said in an emailed response that its food products “do not include ingredients that are commonly found in ultra-processed foods.” The company does not use synthetic food dyes, high fructose corn syrup, certain sweeteners or synthetic preservatives that are banned in Europe, said Teresa Roof, a company spokeswoman.

The meals are a “healthy alternative” to what many people would find in their grocery stores, said Andrew Nixon, U.S. Health and Human Services spokesman, in response to questions about Mom’s Meals.

Mom’s Meals is one of several companies across the U.S. that deliver “medically tailored” at-home meals. The meal programs are covered by Medicaid for some enrollees, including people who are sick with cancer or diabetes, as well as some older Americans who are enrolled in certain Medicare health insurance plans.

Patients recently discharged from the hospital can also have the meals delivered, according to the company’s website.

It’s unclear how much federal taxpayers spend on providing meals through Medicaid and Medicare every year. An investigation by STAT news last year found that some states were spending millions of dollars to provide medically tailored meals to Medicaid enrollees that were marketed as healthy and “dietician approved.” But many companies served up meals loaded with salt, fat or sugar — all staples of an unhealthy American’s diet, the report concluded.

Defining ultraprocessed foods can be tricky. Most U.S. foods are processed, whether it’s by freezing, grinding, fermentation, pasteurization or other means. Foods created through industrial processes and with ingredients such as additives, colors and preservatives that you couldn’t duplicate in a home kitchen are considered the most processed.

Kennedy has said healthier U.S. diets are key to his vision to “Make America Healthy Again.” His call for Americans to increase whole foods in their diets has helped Kennedy build his unique coalition of Trump loyalists and suburban moms who have branded themselves as “MAHA.”

In a recent social media post where he criticized the vast amount of ultraprocessed foods in American diets, Kennedy urged Americans to make healthier choices.

“This country has lost the most basic of all freedoms — the freedom that comes from being healthy,” Kennedy said.

Aleccia reported from Temecula, Calif.

A new French restaurant is coming to St. Paul’s Selby Avenue.

Aubergine, which means eggplant in French, will open late this fall in the former Revival space.

Owners Bjorn and Megan Jacobse, who both previously worked for chef Gavin Kaysen locally, had been living and working in Portland, Ore., for six years before moving back to St. Paul last year with their 2-year-old son, Hugo.

It was in Portland that they honed the idea for Aubergine, hosting a number of successful pop-ups. Bjorn was born in Lyon, France, and lived there for the first four years of his life.

Bjorn and Megan Jacobse of Aubergine, the upcoming French restaurant on Selby Avenue in St. Paul. (Courtesy of Aubergine)

“I was born in France, so French cuisine has always been near and dear to my heart,” he said. “My mom lived there for a while, and she’s fluent in the language. So I grew up hearing stories and eating the food.”

The menu will change with the seasons but will take inspiration from Lyonnaise cuisine.

“It will be focused on French technique, old-world French cooking,” Bjorn Jacobse said. “The menu will be relatively local, focusing on local meat and vegetables, utilizing the whole animal.”

Megan Jacobse, whose experience includes being on the management team at Kaysen’s Spoon and Stable, will run the front of the house. The beverage program will be very wine-focused, she said, and they’ll highlight under-appreciated regions and varietals in the U.S. as well as France, Germany and Italy.

“There’s lots of fun stuff happening in the wine world,” Megan Jacobse said. “We want to focus on some different varietals coming out of regions you wouldn’t expect.”

The pair is significantly changing the layout of the restaurant, which will seat 45 with eight additional bar seats and a flexible private dining area that can accommodate overflow.

And, of course, they’ll use the pretty, shaded patio behind the space in the warmer months.

Christian Dean Architecture has drawn the plans for the new space, and the pair said they took a lot of inspiration from Montreal, where Bjorn worked for a while.

“It will look like a completely different space,” Megan Jacobse said. “We are expanding the kitchen and reworking the bar. There will be elements and touches that make it a warm, welcoming, cozy environment. There’s a similarity in culture and climate between here and Montreal, and there is a warmth and unpretentiousness that we wanted to bring to the space.”

Construction should begin soon, and the pair are hoping for a pre-Thanksgiving opening.

Aubergine: 525 Selby Ave., St. Paul; restaurantaubergine.com

Related Articles

A new generation of Indigenous chefs is growing and cooking foods traditional to their ancestors

Quick Cook: How to make Cherry Almond Ice Cream at home

Recipes: Chocolate and peanut butter go great together in these treats

America’s 10 most destination-worthy pizza joints

Recipe: Use cherries to make this relish for grilled meat

Mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus have been detected in Anoka and Carver counties, but officials say people shouldn’t be alarmed.

“We have detected West Nile virus … but not to the point where we’re concerned about human transmission,” said Monte Ebbesen, Metropolitan Mosquito Control District public affairs assistant. “This is kind of the normal time of the year where it’s at its peak. We’ll expect some cases, but right now, we’re not concerned.”

She said their agency is working to ensure that the community stays safe.

“It’s all a part of our Integrated Pest Management Program. We treat water-holding areas at the larval stage, and if needed, we’ll do adult treatments — what people call ‘spraying,’” Ebbesen said.

But officials urge that it’s not just up to them; individual action is needed too.

“It’s also on people to take personal responsibility — wear bug spray, dress appropriately, avoid perfume and wear light colors,” she said. “There are ways to avoid getting bitten and lower the risk of transmission.”

Most people infected with the virus show no symptoms, according to the Mayo Clinic Health System. When symptoms do appear, individuals may experience fever, headache, body aches, swollen lymph nodes, diarrhea, rash and vomiting.

People with cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure or kidney disease face a higher risk of severe illness associated with the virus. More severe symptoms of the virus include neck stiffness, muscle weakness and paralysis.

Mosquitoes with West Nile are known to linger around swamps and ponds and are most active between dusk and dawn.

In 2022, 22 West Nile cases were reported in Minnesota. The virus first was detected in the state in 2002 and has since become a recurring seasonal concern.

Related Articles

City promotes new off-leash dog area with ‘Yappy Hour’ at Kellogg Mall Park

St. Paul Rookies Fastpitch ‘most likely’ ending after more than 40 years

When Bemidji called for help, local and statewide firefighters answered

Pioneer Press covered a local girl’s quinceañera in 1985. Now it’s her granddaughter’s turn.

Oklahoma man’s swim from Twin Cities to New Orleans grabbed headlines in 1930