in my previous job, I ran out of space on the whiteboard walls so I started scribbling calculations on the window

I love the east Bay Area. People of different races and religions live and work together to build the American Dream. We in liberal society take this for granted but the national rise of extremism stemming from online content seeks to take this away from us. darrellowens.substack.com/p/the-americ...

I'm a broken record on this but we absolutely do not talk enough about the fact that ~20% of injected CO2 for EOR-CCUS can be microbially converted to methane. coupled with lax MVA regimes, EOR "storage" could easily produce a net increase in GHG emissions! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Larger point: 45Q is arguably the most perverse energy subsidy from a climate pespective. Govt paying corporations to capture and store CO2, instead of actually reducing emissions, means incentivizing more extraction and combustion of fossil fuels because more emissions means more public $.

Like Kurt Godel on the way to his citizenship interview intent on explaining the logical flaws of the Constitution to the bureaucrat once he got there, and Albert Einstein having to talk him out of it

🔌💡 I'm big on space-based fusion. I believe that with a sufficient mass of fusible elements at the right altitude (around 93 million miles) we can attain self-sustaining gravitational confinement, producing radiative energy gain we can harness on Earth with cutting-edge optoelectronic PV devices.

what level of capitalism is this

citogenesis: no longer limited to Wikipedia

motte: AI-assisted computational modeling might accelerate the process of discovering new photovoltaic, battery, fusion first-wall materials, etc, tho bottlenecked by high-throughput synthesis bailey: AI WILL INVENT FREE RENEWABLE ENERGY, WHICH JUSTIFIES ANY AMOUNT OF ENERGY USE FOR AI DEVELOPMENT

unfun fact: far and away the #1 claim of the 45(Q) tax credit is for CO2-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) — injecting it into a depleting oil well to force out more oil. after the OBBBA updates to the IRA, EOR gets paid the same subsidy as Class VI sequestration (so why would you ever do the latter?)

how did Palmer Luckey get an advance copy of my pitch to the UK government next week

every time the NIF lasers pulse, in that instant they are consuming >95% of all energy being used by all of humanity combined

reupping this to commemorate the WSJ expose on the fabricated "AI for materials discovery" MIT economics paper. QM is an approximation to the furnace. h/t @robertpalgrave.bsky.social www.wsj.com/economy/aida...

Like 70% because of the California Coastal Commission, maybe the best public agency in existence.

ski pass prices are extortionate but have discounts for students, children, and military members. some discounts stack, so you can get a "teen military" or a "child military" pass. I assume this is for servicemembers with kids but it makes it sound like there is a special discount for child soldiers

the math doesn't even pencil out. there are ~10^24 stars in the sky. ~10^11 humans have ever lived. if everyone who ever lived on earth had a pocket universe in which every star was inhabited by earthlike civilization, that would be ~1 trillionth the number of ppl Grok would kill to save Elon Musk.

Many people think about cold in Northern Europe if the Atlantic Ocean current system #AMOC fails. But that wouldn’t be the only problem for Europe by far. This new study shows that severe drought is another one. 🌊

"reading the can, explains the can"

I go back and forth on the "hope for climate" question. On one hand, I think of this hapless interview with Andreas Malm where the journalist begs him to give them a reason to live. (yes, really) www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

cost of solar energy in 1988: ~$20,000/kW module cost, ~$40,000/kWp installed, ~$1200/MWh LCOE (inflation-adjusted) cost of solar energy in 2025: ~$100/kW module cost, ~$1000/kWp installed, ~$40/MWh LCOE 30–200× cost down across the value chain 🔌💡 #energysky

Iceland Climate Minister Johannsson: "It is a direct threat to our national resilience and security. (This) is the first time a specific climate-related phenomenon has been formally brought before the National Security Council as a potential existential threat." www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Alexandra Elbakyan has had a bigger global impact than probably any single other communist since Gorbachev

After the bubble pops, every UI designer at Google and Microsoft that added tiny ✨GenAI button nudges on the border of every slide, in every context menu, in every text box if your cursor is ever stationary — should be shot. Give me back my screen real estate. I hope the 3% KPI boost was worth it

is it good when py and python are different versions

men will literally pledge 10% of their lifetime income to highly effective charities before going to therapy

"babies are born worshipping unknown gods" is one of the most incredible dwarf fortress bugs i have heard of. its poetry.

not to defend all government consulting as an industry but to contextualize: Booz Allen Hamilton is massive and they do much more than just defense. They're the primary technical contractor for ARPA-E — BAH contractors outnumbered Feds ~3:1 and their work and expertise was consistently impressive.

Will update my file properly once the data's out but I just added in 2015, so you can see: - Wind has exited the whole "exceeding expectations" trend, which is bad - The "Current policies" scenario massively over-estimated coal use in the power sector

please don't @ me like "actually cerium is unique among the lanthanides for its +4 oxidation state" ⚗️🧪 #chemsky

SAVOIR FAIRE [Challenging: Failure]

You (yes, you) are sleeping on variable-weight fonts with your Microsoft Word 2003 "normal" vs "bold" binary. I'm out here tastefully modulating to lights & semibolds within a consistent aesthetic frame while you mash four incompatible typefaces onto a single page. Get on my level.

it's giving

David Foster-Wallace in 1996 (!): "At a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. The technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better."

if you are a 75+ y/o business executive managing a $100bn SaaS company, you should not be able to say "actually, I have a technical background in fluid dynamics" just because you earned a bachelor's in aerospace engineering 50 years ago. Your skills have decayed and your knowledge is obsolete. STFU

There are several good nonprofits, NGOs, startups, and other orgs operating in the abandoned well methane remediation space. Personally, I recommend checking out Frost Methane, Rebellion Energy, Bridger Photonics, InsightM, MiQ, Kayrros Methane Watch, and METEC at Colorado State University. 🔌💡

Forrest Smith, the only National Park Service engineer cleaning up abandoned oil and gas wells, lost his contract, leaving 93 orphaned wells on park lands unmanaged. These leaking wells release methane and toxins, threatening human health and the environment.

This is too good #EnergySky

63/ spotted on a campus bulletin board at MIT

50/ mans walkin

"tarmac is short for tarmacadam" sounds like a shitpost but it's literally true

Hydrogen is a swiss army knife technology. Like a swiss army knife, it's a tool for almost any job. Also like a swiss army knife, it's almost never the *best* tool for a job. It's best suited for applications where we have no mature alternative approaches, e.g. H2DRI for steel, or green ammonia.

If the best defense you can muster for the economics of your technology is "it works if electricity is free", it might be an unprofitable technology. 🧵 🔌💡

to contextualize this price: 50¢/kgH2 is 1.3 ¢/kWhe in pure OPEX, at 100% efficiency, 100% capacity factor, and zero CAPEX. If your electrolyzer is perfect and free and your clean electricity is 100% firmed with free batteries — breakeven LCOE is 1.3¢/kWh. www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=50+c...

gas power companies love H2 blending decarb strategies because they require minimal upfront CAPEX (1~20% of base for burner refits) and they can beg off actual decarb for lack of economical fuel supply. compare CCS with ~30% OPEX penalty via parasitic loads but ~100% base CAPEX retrofit cost. 🔌💡

born too late for an all-expenses industrial tour of Soviet factories 😔

sometimes i give guest lectures and i never know what to write for my speaker intro

The largest volunteer army in history was the Indian Army in WW2, which fielded ~2.5 million soldiers in 1945.

This gets at what I think is a fundamental problem with most well-intentioned, public minded SRM work — the governance requirements for ethical SRM would seem to be a subset of the governance requirements that would allow any plausible need for SRM to be avoided.

This is the plot of The Three-Body Problem