Archive: June 2025

Much Happening on Nuclear Energy Front

11 June 2025
Press Room
No comments

A lot of policy changes regarding energy are happening very quickly around the world, according to Robert Bryce of Substack.com. They are especially changing in regard to nuclear energy. “The politics and policies around nuclear energy have shifted faster than at any other period in the post-Chernobyl era,” said Bryce.

“Germany, the world’s long-time anti-nuclear poster child, just did a screeching U-turn. Under its new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, Germany will cooperate with France and treat nuclear as a “green” power source under EU regulations. The move comes just 25 months after Germany took its last three nuclear plants offline. As one German official said, the move is a ‘sea-change policy shift.’”

The announcement from Berlin came just days after Belgium’s federal parliament voted by a large majority to repeal a 2003 law mandating the phase out of nuclear energy and banning the construction of new reactors.

On May 20, Bryce reported that the Danish government announced it was reconsidering its ban on nuclear power, which has been in place since 1985. The country’s former prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told the Financial Times, “Wind and solar are good as long as you have wind and sunshine. But you have to have a non-fossil base-load and it’s ridiculous to exclude nuclear power.”

On May 13, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey (a Democrat) announced a plan to repeal a state law passed by voters in 1982. Healey’s administration is pointing to a recent report by ISO New England, which found that nuclear power can reduce emissions more cheaply than wind and solar.

Further, the move comes as offshore wind, which a few months ago was the darling of East Coast Democrats, is slowly sinking under the weight of market realities and political headwinds, said Bryce.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (a Democrat) signed a bill into law that allows nuclear to count as a “clean” resource to meet the state’s decarbonization mandates. “Polis signed the bill despite his 2019 campaign promise to run the state solely on wind, solar, batteries, and a soupçon of fairy dust.”

Bryce went on to say, “I wrote about the challenges facing the nuclear renaissance in the US and gave five reasons why the US won’t be able to quadruple the size of its reactor fleet by 2050.” He said he stands by that statement. “Nothing about the nuclear comeback will be cheap, quick, or easy. . . . new reactors cost too much, building them takes too long, there are too many reactor designs, and the US has to develop domestic sources of nuclear fuel.”

But it’s also apparent that the politics of nuclear is changing like never before. “Politics leads policy,” said Bryce, “And now, in heavily Democratic states and in European countries where nuclear bans have been in place for decades, politicians are changing their rhetoric and their policies.”

This tectonic shift will gain momentum when the White House releases four executive orders on nuclear power, which sources tell me will be released later this week. The orders will be the most consequential endorsements of nuclear energy by a US president since Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms For Peace speech in 1953.

Bryce said that a draft of the White House release proclaims that the US is losing the race to deploy new reactors and that China has announced plans to:

“Bring 200 new gigawatts of nuclear power online by 2035, at which point its total nuclear output will more than double that of the United States. Further, as American development of new reactor designs has waned, 87% of nuclear reactors installed worldwide since 2017 are based on Russian and Chinese designs. These trends cannot continue. Swift and decisive action is required to jump-start America’s nuclear renaissance and ensure our national and economic security by increasing fuel availability, enabling research and development, and preparing our workforce.”

The order assesses the situation in the US, stating, “Between 1954 and 1978, the United States licensed 135 civilian nuclear reactors at 81 power plants. Since 1978, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized only five new reactors, and of these, only two have been built. It charges applicants by the hour to process license applications, with prolonged timelines that maximize fees, throttling American nuclear power development. The NRC has refused to license new reactors even as significant technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable, and more abundant than ever.”

The same order directs the agency to “undertake a wholesale revision of its regulations.”

Mid-year Economic Outlook Seminar

11 June 2025
Press Room
No comments

The Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana has announced the dates for its mid-year economic update.

The program will be held in seven different Montana cities. In Billings the date is August 7, 7:30-8 am at the Northern Hotel. Registration is open at https://www.economicoutlookseminar.com/

Other programs will be held at Helena, Great Falls, Kalispell, Bozeman, Missoula, and Butte.

Speakers will include the new director of BBER, Jeffrey Michael, who has replaced the retiring Pat Barkey. Dr. Michael has decades of experience in regional economic forecasting, public policy analysis, and environmental economics, including work on the economic impacts of the Endangered Species Act, climate change, and regulation on land use, infrastructure, property values and employment growth. Prior to joining BBER, Dr. Michael was director of Public Policy Programs and professor of Public Policy at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, executive director of the Center for Business and Policy Research in the University of the Pacific Eberhardt School of Business, and associate dean and director of the Center for Applied Business and Economic Research at Towson University (MD).

Also presenting will be Todd O’Hair, President and CEO, Montana Chamber of Commerce. O’Hair is a Montana native, from Livingston where his family owns a multi-generational family ranch. Before being named President and CEO of the Montana Chamber, Todd was the Senior Manager of Government Affairs for a major coal mining company, Cloud Peak Energy. While at Cloud Peak, he served on the Montana Chamber of Commerce board of directors and was the chair of the board in 2016-17. Before Cloud Peak Energy, Todd worked in Gov. Judy Martz’s office for four years. He also served as the Natural Resources Policy Advisor for Congressman Rick Hill in Washington, D.C., and later as State Director.

The event is sponsored by First Interstate Bank, Sibanye Stillwater and Northwestern Energy.

Lab-Grown Meat Banned in Montana

11 June 2025
Press Room
No comments

Governor Greg Gianforte has signed into law HB 401, a bill banning the manufacturing and sale of lab-grown meat in Montana.

“If you’ve ever had the pleasure of enjoying a cut of Montana beef, you know there is no substitute,” Gov. Gianforte said. “By signing House Bill 401 into law, I am proud to defend our way of life and the hardworking Montana ranchers who produce the best beef in the world.”

Sponsored by Rep. Braxton Mitchell, R-Columbia Falls, House Bill 401 prohibits the manufacture for sale, sale, or distribution of cell-cultured edible product. The bill defines cell-cultured edible product as, “the concept of meat, including but not limited to muscle cells, fat cells, connective tissue, blood, and other components produced via cell culture, rather than from a whole slaughtered animal.”

Starting October 1, any retail food establishment in Montana that manufactures, sells, or distributes cell-cultured edible product is subject to suspension of their license and could be found guilty of a misdemeanor and faced with fines and imprisonment if convicted.

“As Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and someone whose family has been involved in Montana’s meat processing industry for over 80 years, I’m proud Governor Gianforte signed House Bill 401 into law,” Rep. Mitchell said. “Agriculture is our state’s number one industry, and this bill takes a clear stand to protect our ranchers and our food supply. We won’t let synthetic products with misleading labels undercut the hard work of Montana’s farm and ranch families.”

The Montana Farm Bureau Federation praised the signing of the legislation, thanking the governor and legislature for defending and protecting the Montana way of life.

“Montana ranchers grow some of the best meat in the world, we are thrilled consumers in the treasure state will continue to enjoy authentic meat. Thank you to the legislature and Governor Gianforte for supporting ranchers and consumers with this new law,” said Montana Farm Bureau Federation President Cyndi Johnson.

Force is Immoral

11 June 2025
Evelyn Pyburn
No comments

By Evelyn Pyburn

When liberties seem to be in conflict, one must check their basic premises. One must go back and determine what they know (or don’t know) about the Bill of Rights.

It should be remembered that the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to protect the individual citizen from the over reach of government. It was not intended to dictate how individuals should interact with each other. The Bill of Rights is all about restraining government, not citizens.

So when it comes to issues like discrimination, we should keep in mind that the Constitution is addressing government – government is not supposed to discriminate in how it deals with citizens. Citizens are free to discriminate!

Every citizen discriminates every day in a thousand different ways. It is the human condition that we have to make choices in order to survive and we must be free to do so. We must be free to choose– to discrrimnate.

To attempt to prevent citizens from choosing is not unlike attempting to legislate morality, which is a violation of freedom of religion — a violation of allowing each person to  choose their philosophy about life and the freedom to choose how to live one’s life. It is to attempt to use force to make individual citizens think in some approved way. It is violence against the human mind. Nothing should be considered more vile by human beings, whose very means of survival is the human mind.

To change biases requires addressing the mind. It falls to the very challenging task of persuasion and reason — reason being the hallmark of the human mind.

To coerce people to think some specific way, is an impossible quest, as history has amply demonstrated. It also requires the use of force against people who have not initiated the use of force themselves. The very essence of a free society is accepting that the only moral use of force is for self-defense or the defense of others.

Government is pure force. It is the legalized use of force. Ultimately, everything government does, it does at the point of a gun. That is the vision one should hold in mind when suggesting government should “do something.” The only legitimate use of government in a moral society is to protect its citizens from the use of force by foreign adversaries and to stand as defender and arbitrator when citizens use force, one against another.

Hence, the only legitimate purpose of government in a free society, is the moral use of force. In a moral society government is established in recognition of that fact.  Government should exist to defend the country, the citizens, from outside forces, and to restrain how citizens use force against each other. Such is the purpose of law enforcement and courts, to protect citizens from murder, theft, fraud, government, etc.

Almost all other issues that a society sees as legitimate concerns — such as philanthropy in regard to human kindness, welfare and charity, most issues of health and safety, all of education, research, innovation and community benefits or enhancements — could and would be provided for by the private sector. Many are already provided for in creative ways, and they would be to an even greater extent if not for the competitive interferences of government force. There would be voluntary systems and processes and alternatives that ingenuous citizens would quickly devise should they see a need for them– innovations that would amaze us all.

So in trying to decide when government is right or wrong the conclusion should fall to the issue of force and how much emphasis was put on restraining government in the use of force. Anything that requires the use of force against citizens who have initiated no use of force themselves teeters at the brink of being a crime in and of itself.

For government— or to use government as a surrogate, to force someone — which essentially means using the point of a gun – to do something against their will, has to be seen for what it is – wrong. So when we are told the Constitution says it is illegal to discriminate, or to adhere to one religion over another, or over no religion at all, or that we have to wear a mask, or drive a certain kind of car, or use one cooking stove over another — it is all untrue. It is all a crime against humanity. What the Constitution and the Bill of Rights say is that none of those things should be dictated to any citizen in a free country – most especially since it is an abhorrent violation to choose – a human being’s very means of survival.

Essential Air Service Uncertain

11 June 2025
Press Room
No comments

Small communities in Montana dependent on Essential Air Service (EAS) may lose the $300 million those airports have depended upon to fund air service from services such a CapeAir.

Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget issued a letter in May which included the loss of that federal subsidy as one of the cuts that the federal executive branch wants to make in the fiscal year 2026 budget.

“The EAS program funnels taxpayer dollars to airlines to subsidize half-empty flights from airports that are within easy commuting distance from each other, while also failing to effectively provide assistance to most rural air travelers,” the document reads.

Montana has seven airports that receive EAS funding: Butte, West Yellowstone, Glasgow, Glendive, Havre, Sidney and Wolf Point.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, Montana had 2.87 million passengers boarding a plane, in 2023. About 2.5 million of those boardings came from airports in Bozeman, Missoula, Kalispell, and Billings. Bozeman had 1.2 million.

Through the EAS program, Butte and West Yellowstone received about $2.5 million combined in 2023 for SkyWest to operate flights to Denver and Salt Lake City.  West Yellowstone had 8,750 passengers an increase of 19.11% and Butte had slightly more than 16,000 passengers in 2023.

Sidney had 8,000 boardings — a 22% increase more than 2022 — with Wolf Point, Havre and Glasgow each having around 3,000 boardings. Glendive had 2,177 boardings in 2023.

Bull Mountains Mine Expansion Tucked into Budget Bill

11 June 2025
Press Room
No comments

By Amanda Eggert, Montana Free Press

Congress has tucked an 800-acre expansion of an underground Montana coal mine into a budget reconciliation bill that cleared its first committee vote last week.

A two-page provision of the Natural Resources Committee’s bill authorizes Signal Peak Energy to access federally owned coal beneath central Montana’s Bull Mountains in accordance with an expansion plan the company submitted to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement in 2020.

The House Committee on Natural Resources voted in the early morning hours of May 7 to advance the nearly 100-page bill, with Republicans in favor and all Democrats except Rep. Adam Gray of California opposed. The bill is part of a larger budget reconciliation package that representatives are expected to debate in the coming weeks in the House Budget Committee and on the House floor.

In addition to directing the Interior Department to authorize an expansion of the Bull Mountains Mine, the bill allows for noncompetitive leases of federally owned fossil fuels, creates a pathway for companies to pay for expedited review — and guaranteed approval — of environmental impact statements, reduces royalty rates for coal, oil and gas, and reverses the Biden administration’s moratorium on new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin of southern Montana and northern Wyoming.  

According to committee members’ remarks on the bill during the nearly 12-hour hearing, the budget bill is either the “most extreme anti-environment bill in American history” and part of an agenda to “help Big Oil executives and billionaires profit any way they can,” or a sincere effort to address the country’s national debt by “delivering on the American people’s mandate to restore common sense to the federal government and stop the fiscal bleeding.” 

Committee Republicans estimated the bill will generate $18 billion in new revenue and savings. Democratic members of the committee argued that Republicans are forwarding a flawed fiscal argument and said the measure would increase the country’s deficit.

Environmentalists and agricultural groups opposed to coal mining’s effects on the state’s climate and water resources are critical of the bill’s Bull Mountains Mine provision, arguing that Signal Peak should be subject to the standard environmental review process outlined in the National Environmental Policy Act.

Shiloh Hernandez, an Earthjustice attorney representing environmental and climate groups in litigation about the Bull Mountains Mine, described the measure as a “giveaway to Signal Peak” that reflects both how “desperate” the company is for an expansion and its clout with Montana’s all-Republican federal delegation. (Montana Reps. Troy Downing and Ryan Zinke do not sit on the House Natural Resources Committee.)

“The Office of Surface Mining has been reversed twice now for not following the law in permitting the mine,” Hernandez told Montana Free Press May 14. “If the Trump administration was following the law, they wouldn’t have to create a legal exception for the mine, which is what the reconciliation bill is doing.”

Pat Thiele, a Roundup resident who serves as vice-chair of the Bull Mountain Land Alliance, argues that regulators should take a “hard look at the mine’s impacts.”

“Why is the U.S. Congress rushing through legislation that benefits a criminally convicted corporation while risking further damage and safety risks to our community?” Thiele wrote in an emailed statement to MTFP. “We’re tired of politicians spending all of their time bending over backwards for corporations while ignoring the concerns of everyday people like me and my neighbors simply trying to protect our land and water.”

In 2022, Signal Peak was fined $1 million for illegally dumping mine waste and violating safety standards. Executives with the company were separately convicted of drug and firearm violations, embezzlement, tax evasion and bank fraud. 

All four of Montana’s elected federal officials have supported efforts to expand the Bull Mountains Mine. In 2023, Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Ryan Zinke wrote in a letter to then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that more than $100 million in revenues and royalties are riding on the expansion, and saying the U.S. government has a national security dog in the fight. 

The vast majority of coal pulled from beneath the Bull Mountains is bound for Asia via a shipping terminal in Canada. Signal Peak’s access to international markets appears to have made it less vulnerable to the demand decline that’s squeezing mines more reliant on domestic markets, according to Hernandez.

Judge blocks coal mine expansion sought by Signal Peak

In a Feb. 10 ruling, a Missoula judge found that the federal government’s environmental review of Signal Peak Energy’s proposal to expand the Bull Mountains Mine harbored “sufficiently serious” errors. The order effectively halts Signal Peak from mining federal coal until an environmental impact statement has been completed.

Signal Peak and the Montana Coal Council did not respond to MTFP’s requests for comment.

The budget bill comes amid Signal Peak’s frustration with the pace of the Interior Department’s production of a court-mandated environmental impact statement on the mine.

In 2023, a federal district court judge in Missoula ordered federal regulators to prepare an environmental impact statement to examine how a 7,100-acre expansion would impact climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions and local water supplies. Signal Peak has been impatient with the time the EIS is taking, telling the Yellowstone County Commission last year that the company will run out of coal to mine sometime this year if the expansion is further delayed, and that 262 jobs are at stake.

If the plan is approved, Signal Peak could garner access to an additional 175 million tons of coal, bolstering its position as one of the country’s largest underground coal mines.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, has set a goal of passing the budget package out of his chamber by Memorial Day to comply with Trump’s request that Congress present him with a “big, beautiful bill” to sign by July 4.

This story was originally published by Montana Free Press at montanafreepress.org.

Bill 1 Agressively Cuts Wind and Solar

11 June 2025
Press Room
No comments

The reconciliation package passed by the US House of Representatives, aggressively sunsetted wind and solar energy subsidies – more aggressively than an earlier version would have, according to Isasc Orr and Mitch Rolling on Substack.com.

While the original version would have gradually phased out the “clean electricity production credit” and the “clean electricity investment credit” for all resources starting in 2029 and ending them in 2032, the new version will end technology-neutral clean electricity tax credits for sources including wind and solar starting in 2029. It will also require those projects to begin construction within 60 days of the legislation becoming law and be placed in service by 2028.

The law also includes provisions that bar U.S. projects from using components, subcomponents, or even materials from China that would make it nearly impossible for US solar and battery manufacturers to qualify for the tax incentives, according to analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Bloomberg reports that without the tax credits, returns for renewable power plants could drop below the threshold necessary to stimulate investment and likely spur a strategic capital shift away from the US.

The amount of wind and solar installed in the future is likely to drop dramatically compared to the endless taxpayer handouts for wind and solar in the Biden administration’s IRA.

“The House bill saves money for taxpayers and helps stop the continued erosion of grid reliability by stopping subsidies for wind and solar while still providing a temporary leg up for nuclear power,” said the Substack.com report.

Entities such as Energy Innovation Policy & Technology advance arguments in support of the subsidies with the claim that without them costs will increase for customers. Orr and Rolling rebut the claim stating, “This could be true if you happen to live in a state with aggressive mandates for wind and solar, because these foolhardy policies will require utilities to construct these intermittent energy sources regardless of the cost. Therefore, without the subsidies, ratepayers will be on the hook for the full cost of transitioning to wind and solar and will no longer get to shift this cost onto taxpayers. However, the key reason costs will go up is that lawmakers are mandating the adoption of wind and solar in the first place.”

“…repealing the subsidies will make it more difficult for monopoly utilities to pretend that wind, solar, and battery storage are cheaper than keeping the existing coal and nuclear plants online and using new combined cycle natural gas to meet incremental increases in electricity demand.”

Another claim that is made about the need for subsidies is that “red” states benefit more from the subsidies than “blue” states.

While it’s true that many of the manufacturing plants that are supposedly under construction due to the IRA are located in “red” states, this is not because of the benevolence of Congressional Democrats who passed the IRA in 2022, wrote Orr and Rolling. They point out that “manufacturing facilities are going to ‘red’ states because ‘blue’ states are generally more hostile to businesses with higher taxes, higher energy prices, and higher labor costs.”

Repealing these subsidies will prevent the malinvestment of this capital into non-competitive industries, and the tax provisions in the reconciliation package designed to boost domestic manufacturing will disproportionately flow to “redder” states for the same reasons the IRA money was going there: they have healthier overall economies that are accommodating to growth.

Furthermore, “benefit” is the key word here. While the IRA subsidies sparked investment in wind and solar energy, doing so ultimately resulted in (and would continue to produce) electricity grids prone to blackouts—which leads to myth three: that these sources of electricity are needed because we are in an energy emergency, and we need more electricity generation capabilities to power data centers.

“While wind, solar, and batteries may have short construction times, we have yet to read an article about a data center developer who is eager to run their facility intermittently and subject to swings in the weather.”

“Our reliability modeling has shown consistently that even with tens of thousands of MWs of battery storage available, a grid reliant on intermittent wind and solar is more prone to blackouts because it still needs to deal with the issue of prolonged droughts and severe underperformance, and the batteries don’t charge themselves.