New York's Indian Point nuclear power plant was banned on April 30th of this year - because the ruling political party and the environmental lobbyists who guide decisions convinced themselves that solar was ready to fill the gap.
Now the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, has told residents they need to shut off their air conditioners during a heat wave, because they don't have enough electricity. At the state level, alleged serial sexual predator Governor Andrew Cuomo is deflecting from his scandals by appealing to his base with another ban on energy - making the state one on natural gas using hydraulic fracturing permanent.
In 2019, Biogen announced that
it was abandoning its late stage drug for Alzheimer’s, aducanumab but then in 2021 they got FDA approval for it.
Major droughts in California happen every 20 years and smaller ones more frequently, yet northern California has not built major water infrastructure since the 1960s while the population has doubled. Environmental lawyers block any infrastructure improvements so no new water storage can be added and regulations about water flow in rivers were based on an optimistic guess. During the current drought California is sending so much water to the San Francisco Bay, which doesn't need it, that they have to issue warnings for people on the rivers.
Honeybees die each year in great quantities and some years are worse than others. Since they are a big business, primarily as roving pollinators for crops that need them at a certain time (like almonds(1) there is always a concern about how to keep losses low.
Causes of death were once a moving target. For as long as records of bees have been kept, there have been reports of extraordinary die-offs, recorded all the way back to the Dark Ages. Now we know the big problem are pests like varroa mites but there are also concerns about harsh winters, land use, and some environmental groups even try to raise money claiming it might be pesticides used on crops.
One little-known secret in the medical community is that it is not greedy doctors or insurance companies or hospitals that made health care so expensive. It is unnecessary tests and procedures doctors and hospitals must do in order to check off the boxes for the inevitable lawsuit. They are waiting to pounce on doctors and hospitals while wrapping themselves in the flag of 'holding the medical establishment accountable' and that keeps doctors and hospitals doing some things twice. And some things doctors know are unneeded but must do.
From neurosurgery to dermatology, nearly all doctors practice this "defensive medicine" and it isn't, as conspirators claim, to make more money - it is to avoid blame if something goes wrong with a patient that was basically unavoidable.(1)
There are lots of advertisements for 5G cellular service but it still isn't available in most places, and devices that take advantage of it are in relatively low use. Better quality cat videos on a 5-inch screen are not all that compelling
Sooner rather than later, people are going to want the haptic internet - a virtual reality tactile experience far more advanced than a vibrating Xbox controller - and businesses will want holographic conferencing and both will require more mobile edge computing - mini-clouds closer to users than current centralized storage.
Those will require the next evolution in the terahertz band - 6G. It is blocked out to be from 95 GHz to 3 THz.