Groundhog Day for renewable energy

Do you feel like you’ve read this newsletter before? Because if you do, you might be caught up in a temporal loop — or it might just be Groundhog Day.

Do you feel like you’ve read this newsletter before? Because if you do — okay, I’m sorry, I can’t keep it up.

Today is indeed Groundhog Day, a bizarre little springtime ritual that rests on a very special East Coast rodent named Punxsutawney Phil crawling out of his den to a crowd of witnesses who gather outside on on Gobbler’s Knob to see whether he will see his shadow and be frightened back underground or stay out and enjoy the weather. As you probably already know, his actions are supposed to predict whether the winter will drag on or if spring is just around the corner.

I wanted to know why a Pennsylvania woodchuck had anything to say about the weather to begin with, thinking it might have to do with some sort of spring ritual it had overshadowed — pun intended — so I looked it up and discovered that Groundhog Day has twofold origins: a pre-Christian European tradition celebrating the arrival of spring that eventually evolved into Candlemas and which traveled over to the United States with European immigrants, and from the original creation stories of the Lenape people who still live in the area, in which the groundhog Oijik or Wojak (pronounced something like “woodchuck”) was an ancestor to all humanity.

In the spirit of Groundhog Day, we’ve got a story about predictions by renewable energy scholar Sanya Carley, who accurately warned about Trump administration energy policy.

And she’s got a far better track record than Punxsutawney Phil, who only predicts the weather for the year correctly about 30 percent of the time. (Sorry, Phil.)

Thoughts? Opinions? Let us know what you think by emailing news@timesofsandiego.com.