Remember how EVs could never compete because batteries didn't allow them to go far enough, because they couldn't be charged fast enough, because they were too expensive...? Funny how innovation works.

‘It’s not a part time job.’ Oof. Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alfonsi absolutely leveled Bari Weiss at an emergency 60 Minutes staff meeting today.

The CBS investigation portrays a modern concentration camp, similar to the Soviet GULAG (like CECOT, an acronym): sadistic guards, 24 hour lighting, isolation cells. Americans once opposed this inhumane system. The Trump administration sent innocent people there to suffer.

The nutty bit: it'll take dozens of actual scientists hundreds of hours to debunk the nonsense generated by these five 'contrarians' and their LLM.

"Made in Taiwan (Province of China)" 😐

Breaking news: Trump is citing “national security” to halt all active work on offshore wind projects Five giant energy projects, countless jobs at risk My story explains how the argument has legal weaknesses and comes from an anti-wind policy doc I reported in January

"He was usually assigned “mop-up"... After flames had died down, he would get on his hands and knees to feel for spots that were still smoldering. When he found lingering embers, he smothered them with dirt. By the end of the day, ash and grit would fill his nose and mouth."

Sounds like they're trying to Bari the story.

Scientists are supposed to be happy when their predictions are skillful, right? Why do I not feel happy?

What could possibly go wrong? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/b... [gift link]

The beans: 10/10 The vibes: 12/10 💚NYC

An immigrant works a dangerous job to protect Americans. It puts him in medical debt. Now he also has to worry about being deported by ICE when he goes to work or takes his kid to a soccer tournament. Feel safer?

The best story you'll read all day www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/u... [gift link]

12-year-old riding the rails, reading the paper. Saturday. 😍

For a quick sense of how far off course things have gotten: Mitt Romney, tax-and-spend liberal www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/o...

Move over, AI. @science.org's Breakthrough of the Year: Renewables!

20% because there's indeed plenty to like about the idea and prospect. 80% because fossil fuel $$$s have turned anything that's scalable today into politically toxic "green"/"alarmist" territory. What do I win?

Move over, AI. @science.org's Breakthrough of the Year: Renewables!

Oh. But, but, you are using it wrong. It was never intended to replace actual judgment, just make life easier by taking care of the many inefficiencies of office life... www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

I've mostly been talking about the Trump regime's plan to dismantle NCAR, but you might be asking yourself, wtf is NCAR and why should I care? @drshepherd2013.bsky.social has got you covered here. www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

Hm, with Obama supporting it while pushing (ultimately unsuccessfully) for an economy-wide carbon price and (very much successfully) using EPA to regulate CO₂ₑ , Biden doing so while passing the largest climate bill in history, perhaps we could skip the strawman? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

ClimateTech is a wondrous thing: I didn't have pine trees on my list, when writing gwagner.com/greener-steel w/ @rolandkupers.bsky.social "Weyerhaeuser has launched a venture to turn runty trees and sawdust into a replacement for metallurgical coal used in steel making" www.wsj.com/finance/comm...

Huge good news: as documented by Ben Storrow of @eenews.bsky.social, the NECEC transmission line was activated around 1 PM today & is feeding power from Quebec to the #NewEngland grid! This means lower emissions and lower prices, and we can already see the latter./1 www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Oh, look, that's a nice little Christmas bonus: @anthropic.com sending me $3k for each book whose content they "borrowed" to train Claude. Of course, I'm really looking forward to the $300k per book from OpenAI.

Vindicative and erratic strikes again

Ignore climate risk at your peril, AI data center edition: "some of the high-tech company’s biggest problems began with a very low-tech nuisance: unexpectedly turbulent rainstorms in North Texas" www.wsj.com/tech/ai/core...

Genuine question: Other than the most obvious of answers — myopic car company shareholders printing another quarter's worth of profits off the old tech — who actually *thinks* they are benefiting off delaying the EU gas guzzler phaseout?

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Just want to share with my American friends how the Australians respond to a shooting tragedy. Action, rather than thoughts and prayers.

Sunset over the Brooklyn Bridge, as seen from the Manhattan Bridge 🌉

Unbelievable - you literally wire money to some unspecified account. I assume this is so Trump can treat it as a slush fund he can deploy unconstrained by Congress (in violation of the Constitution).

ICE pepper-sprayed this 1-year-old girl. Once at the hospital, the doctor had to call in a poison control specialist. They had never seen anyone that young pepper sprayed. Another horrific story. More details below.

Essential reading about where we are today, and why. Hamm is the kind of wildcatter, who benefits the most from Trump's erratic policies. Exxon & Co, who plan on being around well after Trump II, would have preferred the U.S. to remain in the Paris Agreement. Hamm clearly didn't.

"AI could invent free renewable energy." Or, y'know, we could deploy the stuff that works and is already cheaper than the fossil alternative, while doing the hard political work of figuring out how to pass the savings on to households, balancing the interests of shareholders and ratepayers.

12-year-old in soccer uniform with electric guitar strapped to her back tasting cake batter 😎

Move over, McKinsey report showing how single-digit trillions of dollars could limit global average warming to 1.5°C. Hello, McKinsey report showing how single-digit trillions of dollars could help adapt to 2°C world.

Real-life lesson in mean vs median

Where we are www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/c...

From "good faith, rational" to "erratic and vindicative": www.inc.com/chloe-aiello...

You know congestion pricing has worked just as advertised, when even @politico.com can't find some controversy to concoct.

I did a lengthy interview with the CEO of Stardust, in which he walked back the solar geoengineering startup's testing and deployment plans a bit. The company also intends to release details about its proprietary particles early next year and expects to open a US office soon.

Yes! (± Vince mcmahon gif) Plus just really basic enforcement of traffic laws that all pass benefit-cost analyses with flying colors. Traffic cameras at every NYC intersection pay for themselves after a couple days. They hopefully won't be needed thereafter, once drivers get the message.

Excited to see my JMP cited in the Economist—it highlights the tradeoffs workers could face with a higher minimum wage and suggests more worker protections like Fair Workweek laws could be important alongside minimum wage increases www.economist.com/finance-and-...

"Human-caused warming" gone. Phew! There I was thinking we had a problem.

The bit that hurts the most: "despite laws" Monday morning.

Landmark case up for argument at SCOTUS at 10am on the power of presidents to fire independent agency heads. Here’s my quick preview in Espresso, @economist.com’s daily app. I’ll be posting live analysis during the oral argument in this thread

Sounds sanctimonious, I know, but my last day on Twitter was sometime in August 2022. Yes, my "reach" took a hit, but not really. A handful journalists signed up for my email newsletter, a prominent one reached out for coffee. Sanity: way up. Preaching to the choir here, but this isn't hard.

How was your week? So here was mine: got myself quoted 3x in the @washingtonpost.com in 3 days, on 3 entirely different, wildly controversial topics: How to make a small donation with big climate impact? "Spend it on yourself!" I s'pose that's what an economist would say. ;) wapo.st/4po6gkv

Rather interesting collection of @natureportfolio.nature.com Climate Action papers, if I may say so myself: Just out: A special issue I co-edited on the "Behavioral economics of climate action," with papers on everything from Veggie Days to carbon pricing Intro: gwagner.com/climate-action-behavior