USDA announces it will discontinue funding solar projects

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will discontinue providing funds for solar and wind projects, through its Rural Energy for America (REAP) grant program. In recent years the USDA has provided over $4 billion to fund energy projects in rural and farming communities. 

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 added over $2 billion in funding for the program through Fiscal Year 2031. Post-IRA, over $1 billion in funds supported 6,822 projects from 2023 to 2025, contributing an estimated $2.75 billion to rural economic development.

For GREEP Zoom #236, our beloved Poet Laureate MIMI GERMAN opens with her usual brilliant verse from “Where Grasses Bend."

We commemorate the passing of the great RICHARD LEE who founded Oaksterdam University, devoted to the cultivation of cannabis / marijuana & its immeasurable power.

We then get updated by "America’s Mayor” HEIDI LAMPERT about the battle for democracy in Waldport, Oregon, the Mayberry of the deep west coast.

Long-time activist MICKI LEADER shares her concerns about whether the 2026 election will be cancelled.

From radio host LYNN FEINERMAN we hear charges about so-called “Christians” who so deeply love to trash the preachings of the actual Christ.

Grassroots campaigner DOROTHY REIK warns that people with no human feelings are taking over the world with the view that the non-rich are a “burden.”

Legendary journalist DAVID SALTMAN tells of a network cohort who received a kidney from an anonymous donor whom he then honored with a legendary poem.

The Palestine Chronicle is not a militant organization. It is a modest, independent publication, sustained by small donations and animated by a singular mission: to bear witness. It tells the untold stories of Palestine, documenting dispossession, resistance, and the endurance of a people condemned to silence. In a media landscape dominated by powerful conglomerates repeating the language of governments, the Chronicle insists on a journalism of proximity — grounded in daily lives, in the rubble of Gaza, in voices otherwise erased. Its true offense, in the eyes of its detractors, is not invention but truth.

Can a play influence public perception of our shared atomic history enough to shift the conversation away from a presumed nuclear “renaissance” and into a more critical, life-protective examination of what this technology is and could do to us all?  

Playwright and podcaster Libbe HaLevy believes it can. She spent 13 years researching and writing that play—Atomic Bill and the Payment Due—which will have its premiere staged reading next week, on September 9th, as a featured presentation at the 50th anniversary celebration of the establishment of the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College in Ohio.

For 14 years, HaLevy has hosted the podcast Nuclear Hotseat, aired on 20 Pacifica affiliate radio stations throughout the United States and, as its website (NuclearHotseat.com) says, has been tuned into and downloaded by audiences in over 124 countries around the world.