Spot on. Hard to make a definitive statement, but if (1) Clean tech is only getting cheaper and better, while O&G (and especially coal, of course) are hanging on, clamoring for Trumpian subsidies and (2) NEPA made it hard to build then yeah, Kavanaugh just sped up clean tech deployment.

Forecasts, predictions, projections oh my. diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2025/05/28/f...

🧵A meta-comment on yesterday's paper about ice sheets in a 1.5°C world. For the purposes of my comment, *assume* the finding is correct. My puzzle: the article is being highlighted by a number of (mostly bluesky) social media accounts most opposed to CO₂ removal (CDR). wapo.st/45gMoZp 1/x

This Substack post is a very good (3ʳᵈ of 4) quantitative review of the relative (read: very small) energy (and, by extension, carbon) impacts of ChatGPT queries vs other individual elements composing one's personal carbon footprint. I'll highlight a separate... open.substack.com/pub/andymasl...

"When policymakers claim expertise that isn't real, it degrades trust in actual expertise." you don't say!... (and, without hesitation, I'd extend that to activists...)

When policymakers claim expertise that isn't real, it degrades trust in actual expertise. Here @bataille_chris and I provide some guidance on when NOT to use energy-economic modeling tools to support climate change policymaking www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Economic models often predict less dramatic changes than you would infer from popular discussions & even from financial markets. They're predicting 0.75-1.5pp less growth this year as a result of the biggest tariff increase in U.S. history. Large but not historically memorable.

"US border officials track the origin of the drugs seized in the northern border region (34 states)... "In fiscal 2024, 99.87 per cent of fentanyl recovered was linked to either Mexico, the US or had unknown origins. Fentanyl identified as coming from Canada amounted to 0.74 pounds..." 🎁 article👇

(3/3) If a candidate announced a tax increase on the poor and middle class to fund a tax cut for the rich, voters would soundly reject that proposal. But tariffs wrap this fiscal switch in a veneer of nationalism. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/o...

a nice, simple test of warming "acceleration"... Warming is proportional to cumulative CO₂ emissions. If cumulative CO₂ emissions have accelerated over time, we'd *expect* to also see some acceleration of warming with respect to time. But that doesn't mean warming has necessarily accelerated with

Ontario Premier Doug Ford "will cut off U.S. electricity exports 'with a smile on my face'", in response to today's announcement of Trump imposition of tariffs...

This is ominous. Commerce Secretary suggests new GDP calculations might deliberately exclude government spending to obscure impact of DOGE cuts. apnews.com/article/trum...

How bad is this? Let me count the ways Also, and related, short of firing Powell (or trying, anyway) screwing with economic data would be just about the dumbest (and worst) thing to do apnews.com/article/trum...

"Why Nothing Works" by Marc Dunkelman was revelatory. I've been thinking about these issues for decades but found this book gave me an entirely new perspective that linked domains as disparate as welfare reform, antitrust and infrastructure permitting. My review: www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Anyone know what this👇is about? "Editor’s Note: Readers are alerted that the reliability of data and methodology presented in this manuscript is currently in question. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved." 🤔

Elon Musk Offers Self $10 Billion Federal Buyout theonion.com/elon-mu...

Carbon Monitor is out with their estimates for 2024 CO₂ emissions and its yr-over-yr growth [fossil fuel and cement emissions only]. +0.9% increase globally over 2023. (both the China (-0.3%) and US (+1.6%) estimates catch me slightly off-guard🤷) carbonmonitor.org

Draft chapter outline for IPCC AR7 WGI is now public - *subject to approval* at the plenary, end of Feb What's new? Compared to AR6: -More concise -greater range of modeling approaches -chapters span Earth System domains -considers diverse physical scenarios /thread/ apps.ipcc.ch/eventmanager...

Incidentally, if you want to see the carbon intensity of your local grid, or where the exports/imports are going, @electricitymaps.com is strangely hypnotic.. app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly

That time in 2009 when Donald Trump took out a full-page NYT ad with other business leaders calling on President Obama for aggressive climate action: “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic & irreversible consequences for humanity & our planet.”

We reduce emissions to reduce long-term damage from climate change. We adapt to reduce near-term damage from climate change. New open access paper discussing how emissions mitigation and climate adaptation are complementary approaches to reducing climate damage: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

This article👇 makes some very interesting observations. A few that caught my eye: "lack of an algorithm [... means...] it won’t incentivize posts that drive conflict/comments..." "X set up a popularity contest [... amongst...] academics" 1/3 www.science.org/content/arti...

These kind of anecdotes risk turning me into a Price Sicko. Yes, I have read (and written) a thousand different warnings about how solving climate change isn’t as simple as pricing the externality*, and yet when one beholds the shining glory of a fully operational Pigouvian battle tax in action…

"Remembering Robert Solow" panel session at the AEA conference will begin livestreaming (very) shortly at (no sign-up) link: www.aeaweb.org/conference/l... 10:15am - 12:30pm PST [other sessions at the link, including the already recorded ones]

Thank you!

Humans vs Ants: Problem-solving Skills

Ed Conway: "A few months ago I promised to write a series of posts documenting the world’s lost materials. I was quite excited... I was hoping to build up a catalogue of... substances humanity once used to mine and extract... but have now been exhausted. "... I came to an unexpected conclusion."

Great thread on why this NYT depiction of CDR is, ummm, problematic.

Received a Christmas card from a cousin who referred to me as Mr. Gill instead of Dr. Gill. I don’t have time for that crap any more. He knows I go by Dr. Gill because I have his kids call me it. It’s not funny to disrespect someone’s title. You either respect it or get cut off.

“Draw a picture of a professor claiming to be working class.”

It’s not ok that many people are confusing a policy goal (1.5 C) with a physical limit of the climate system. It threatens rash actions, it threatens despair, and it threatens loss of credibility.

(And misunderstandings of attention-grabbing terms can’t just be mitigated by shouting at the world that they are using the wrong definition of the term - words mean what they are used to mean)

Strong points made by @draliceevans.bsky.social and @mattyglesias.bsky.social on X. I think academic culture would really be improved if more people adopted the habit of not being intimidated by people trying to enforce their views through bullying tactics.

There has been...interest...in my NYT essay about industrial agriculture. I've seen a lot of thoughtful commentary, not all of it about the depth of my evil. Thanks! Here's a gift link, then a quick thread responding to the most common critiques. 1 www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/o...

Great rundown of the permitting bill.

“How much do you weigh building more renewables versus selling more fossil fuels to the world?” @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social takes an in-depth look at the Manchin-Barrasso bill, feat. @chazteplin.bsky.social:

A key finding from this work is worth highlighting. We knew risk hurts capital-intensive renewables more. But we found the problem is even worse. Variable renewables are also less able to pass on higher costs than fossil fuel plants. So inadequate contracting favors fossils more than we thought. 🔌💡

3 mechanisms drive how risk impacts the investment mix: 1) uncertainty (e.g. in demand) that cannot be hedged implies a risk premium that increases a tech's cost of capital; 2) that raises total cost depending on capital intensity; 3) that changes investment depending on system-level interactions.

Since I suspect we will be arguing about it for awhile, this is a regular reminder that climate politics are not physics. Theres room for a variety of different views on decarbonization strategy without one being a "denier", and we should all try and approach differing views by assuming good faith

There are now six recent studies published on 2020 low sulfur fuel regulations (in addition to @piersforster.bsky.social and my early 2023 estimate). They generally find somewhere between 0.03C and 0.08C near-term; an important contributor to recent anomalous warming but not the whole story.

I'll be giving a talk at The Collider (1 Haywood Street, Suite 401) in Asheville tomorrow night at 7 PM about current climate trends and where we are headed. Feel free to come by if you are in town! Details here: docs.google.com/docu...

Turns out you can use cap-and-trade not just for pollution but also for forests - and in this case, it worked. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is Koby. He was feeling pretty weird after surgery, but also pretty okay with it. 12/10

It took over a decade of hard work by many people to build Liberal credibility on climate and the environment in Canada. It’ll take a fraction of that time to light it on 🔥. www.thestar.com/politics/pro...

I have — to my surprise — been nominated as one of Prospect's "Top 25 Thinkers" for 2025. Quite the honour among so many great others. If you'd like to vote for me so that I don't come in last, that would be grand. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/worlds...

Some thoughtful words on overheated language. If we use the word "tipping point" to describe everything bad that might happen as a result of climate change, what does "tipping point" mean beyond "bad thing that might happen"? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excellent, as always - from @bobkopp.net et al In addition, we don't say often enough that though there may be tipping _elements_, there's little evidence to date for global scale tipping points. Best understanding remains that we warm as much as we cumulatively emit. No more, no less.

Think GDP is a meaure that exludes everything that's important in life... blah blah blah You should look at experimental measures that include all the stuff everyone's been calling for - they're a mess www.ft.com/content/3a03...