A while back there was a political scandal about the US involvement in the Marianna Islands involving some Republican congressmen. They loved the Marianna Islands as it had no regulations so they basically had slave labor. "a Petri dish for capitalism" they said. And now they are doing that here.

I have a lot of my own thoughts on this topic but @amywestervelt.bsky.social is better positioned than pretty much anyone else to comment on the situation so please read this. We need to fix this problem.

News from California. "Natural gas consumption in California fell to an all-time low last year at 4.8 Bcf/d, down 7% year/year."

@nickcunningham.bsky.social bringing the facts about the LNG industry. You know when the head of Total is sounding like me, things ain't great of the LNG crowd. “It’s not very good news, I agree, for the LNG markets,” Pouyanné added.

They replaced employees with software and then spent months realizing what the employees actually did. • Google • Meta • IBM • Salesforce • Klarna • Shopify • Amazon • McDonald’s

Range anxiety and charging time - once thought to be deal breakers for EV adoption, are no longer a thing. Gas keeps getting more expensive.

“3,400 deaths in a day: India's extreme heat days are deadlier than we imagined.” #ClimateCrisis

Seems like one of these wizards should use their AI to do some accounting. Or does Claude always approve more spending on Claude? I'm pretty confident that a clear sign of a bubble is when someone can accidentally spend a half billion dollars. Only the Pentagon gets to do that sort of thing.

The US and many other countries are planning to spend $100s of billions to build more LNG export capacity. The world is facing an LNG glut. And there is also this bit about structural demand destruction in the global natural gas market. There is no need for all of this new LNG export capacity

Using generative AI for imagery is **directly harmful** to artists, graphic designers, photographers etc. This isn't a vague moral argument: this is just normal, standard theft, except at a completely new scale and social acceptability. We need to reverse that. www.instagram.com/reel/DY2L2-g...

"The cost of renewable energy and storage has been declining while that of utility power has been rising, making the go-it-alone path more attractive. The assumption that customers must buy from the utility no longer holds. Competitive alternatives exist." This is from oilprice.com.

if you are "using AI for writing," you are not writing. i do not know how to make this any simpler

IEA World Investment Report: as a result of the tech industry's AI-driven push to build new gas power plants, the US is now investing more in fossil power than China. @carbonbrief.org

Imagine if a woman president crashed the economy and started a war with no end in sight, and her biggest, seemingly ONLY concern was building a ballroom and redecorating the White House.

Note to media: police arresting peaceful protesters singing “give peace a chance” is not protesters “clashing” with police. It’s the state violating the First Amendment rights of people upset that human beings who did nothing illegal are being held without due process and being fed maggots.

Remember when we were told that Bitcoin was going to $1 million? So much hype. Eric Trump told us that if Bitcoin crashed the global economy would end. The Pentagon would fail. Sound familiar? How's that going? Remember these guys?

20% here, 20% there....starts to add up. China is the world's largest auto market. Roughly double the size of the second biggest (US). Roughly a third of the world's vehicle sales each year.

Some regulation and safety comments. 12 years ago I learned that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) did a great job of making safety recommendations but it didn't matter as they have no enforcement authority. I wrote a book about this reality. So this quote doesn't surprise me. 🧵

This single shipload of electric vehicles from BYD will cut Australia's annual fuel demand by at least 6 million litres This is what genuine fuel security looks like - not tanks of diesel and rushed trade deals, but cutting our exposure permanently to overseas fossil fuel supply.

Reminder that banning elected officials from trading stock is a total no brainer. They can use privileged information to make money on the stock market, while they’re supposed to be working for you. Make no mistake — it’s legalized corruption.

"After more than a half a century of growth, the use of gas in Australia has peaked in all sectors and entered a “structural decline”. Structural decline is the first step.

"East Daley Analytics tallied roughly 32 Bcf/d of announced incremental natural gas demand growth across the United States by 2031, with hyperscaler data center campuses and LNG feedgas each accounting for around 16 Bcf/d" US domestic gas will be very expensive if this happens. (paywalled)

Is everyone waking up to reality today?!

You know things are changing in the oil and gas world when Javier Blas is saying things like this. "For supply, diversification away from Hormuz will be key; in demand, the diversification will be away from LNG itself. Buyers have options: solar, with the help of batteries, and coal."

"China’s oil imports are set to drop to levels not seen since the pandemic, as the war reveals the extent to which demand has disappeared and may not be coming back."

Assumed: We will always need gas peaker plants. No longer true. Assumed: Heavy trucking will never be electrified. No longer true. Assumed: Industrial electrification is impossible. No longer true. Assumed: We will always need fossil fuels and nuclear for baseload. No longer true.

“Put differently, could the world actually function with something like 9% less oil?” Something to ponder.

Sick of the relentless adult content I see on Bluesky: back pain, interest rates, tax brackets, that noise you make when you stand-up sometimes.

“The role of gas used to be in the evening to meet the evening peak and that came at a cost, because gas is not a cheap fuel. But more and more, every day, it is batteries that are surging into the market at 6pm,” he says. Gas is not a cheap fuel. n power markets, low cost wins.

Lots of wishcasting in the fossil fuel industry right now. "The transition to more resilient, independent energy systems will take decades, and reliable LNG from a powerful economy is precisely what energy-hungry Asian economies need throughout that journey." Evidence says otherwise.

“Put differently, could the world actually function with something like 9% less oil?” Something to ponder.

I don't think Americans really understand just how fkn shitty our corporate overlords have made our country. In China they got cars under 10k... What would Americans financials look like with one of those instead of the COVID vehicles most are stuck with that hold marks for 50k+ vehicles.

It’s telling how many of the large news organizations who are flush with money aren’t sending journalists to cover ICE (and now state trooper) violence overnight outside Delaney Hall and the independent outlets with far less financial and insurance coverage are braving it.

We're trying to save our independent media, New Internationalist magazine has been going since 1973, we're a non-profit co-op with 4,600 ordinary people as co-owners. please could you look and consider sharing if you approve? bsky.app/profile/newi...

Read the whole thread.

When gas has to compete on the same playing field with batteries powered by solar there is no contest. Batteries will win every time. In other words they will “scoop the pool.” I’m not sure how I feel about that expression though.

Once again: German universities were the envy of the world before the Nazis rose to power and took an ideological wrecking ball to the entire enterprise. If you want to know how long it took for German universities to recover… they haven’t.

New phrase in the batteries vs gas power wars. "Scooped the pool!" "Battery storage technology has triumphed again over fossil gas generators after scooping the pool in an open tender designed to deliver firm supply at times of system stress in Australia’s most advanced renewable grid." Firm.

After a Wisconsin town did this, the mayor said: “The fact that they didn’t take the cameras down shows that we are the product. They were never really selling to us in the first place. They're selling to much bigger agencies the ability to spy on a ton of people.” (via boltsmag.org/verona-wisco...)

"I'm not blind to what's happening around us and in the world, but we ran on a platform that was very strong on climate change just over a year ago. Donald Trump was there a year ago, the tariff war had started a year ago," he said.

"And that’s not even the most glaring oversight. The word “climate” appears exactly zero times in the 80-page document, a weird choice in a report about water, even if you don’t attach the word “change” to it." Thoughts and prayers. That is the basic plan for the looming TX water disaster. 🙏

"France: ministers are meeting to assess the country's preparedness for heatwaves" It's 2026. No one thought to do this before now?

New phrase in the batteries vs gas power wars. "Scooped the pool!" "Battery storage technology has triumphed again over fossil gas generators after scooping the pool in an open tender designed to deliver firm supply at times of system stress in Australia’s most advanced renewable grid." Firm.

Perhaps if the sociopathic oligarchs' rockets keep blowing up they will rethink their plans and focus on keeping earth a livable planet? I kid.

"Despite a 2% increase in overall U.S. electricity demand this summer, we expect natural gas-fired electricity generation to be similar to last summer, primarily because of forecast increased generation from renewables." From today's EIA release.

Has @theonion.com ever not been a mirror?

"We are in a war of elite predators against ordinary people whom they view as prey...I do not think this is a war that good people are destined to lose. I think some folks do not understand the battlefield.

Today we learn of another new nuclear company going public to cash in on the datacenter hype. If all goes as planned they will have a commercial reactor by 2032. Their reactors would produce 1/5 of a gigawatt. Meanwhile, today, solar adds 1 gigawatt of capacity every day by noon.

Big Law!! "fighting to create legal precedent that will entrench the power of those who already have it."

"If data centres were a country, they would be the second-largest destination for gas turbines ordered from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026" New IEA report confirms this isn't a normal industry. It is a fossil-fuelled, high-polluting heavy industry producing socially corrosive products at massive climate cost.