If we combine nuclear and renewables under the umbrella of carbon-free generation, then that’s up by nearly 1 percent since 2022 and is likely to surpass 40 percent for the first time.

The only thing that’s keeping carbon-free power from growing faster is natural gas, which is the fastest-growing source of generation at the moment, going from 40 percent of the year-to-date total in 2022 to 43.3 percent this year. (It’s actually slightly below that level in the October data.) The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity. But its use is going to need to start dropping soon if the US is to meet its climate goals, so it will be critical to see whether its growth flat lines over the next few years.

Outside of natural gas, however, all the trends in US generation are good, especially considering that the rise of renewable production would have seemed like an impossibility a decade ago.

If you’d like to visit a New York City public library on a Sunday, you’re out of luck, thanks to recent city budget cuts. But if you’d like to see a subway station crawling with cops (including the PR-friendly robot variety), the possibilities are bountiful. This is life in Eric Adams’ New York.

In 2022, amid concerns about rising crime in the city’s transit system, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams took the idea of “defund the police” and flipped it on its head. They dreamed up a strategy of “the three Cs” — “Cops, Cameras, Care” — which Hochul announced in October last year. What if, they imagined, we added more than a thousand uniformed police officers to patrol the subway every day and paid them much more — millions more? Now, one year later, city records show it led to a $151 million increase in NYPD overtime pay, a negligible decrease in crime and a vast increase in fare evasion tickets and arrests of people of color.