Why is the US secretary of Energy telling the EU they have to get rid of their methane regulations? It's simple. The distance between what the EU says they require and what the real science and data shows is happening in US gas production is so vast, the only way to get around it is to ignore it.

Bats For All please

1) New paper! Replacing US fossil-fueled vehicles & appliances with electric versions could improve health & climate outcomes, but could cost up to $790 billion in distribution grid reinforcement. Strategic demand-side management could cut 2/3 of those costs.🔌💡 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I'm glad more people are thinking and talking about electricity affordability. As we do, I think it's worth pondering the fact that households typically pay around twice as much as industrial customers for a unit of electrical energy. How did this come to be? Does it have to be this way?

Good stuff for sure - but you'd never know from the reporting that India's been doing this for 13 years. Just, effective decarbonization demands that the US learn how to learn from others. Maybe deeper acknowledgement of India's experiences here could have allowed CA to FFW past the <2MW pilot step!

Well that hope didn't last long

The Nazi Party was only able to forge the memory of Horst Wessel into a tool of political terror because their political opponents participated in his martyrdom and amplified the Party's claims of victimhood. I hope we can learn some lessons.

Good stuff for sure - but you'd never know from the reporting that India's been doing this for 13 years. Just, effective decarbonization demands that the US learn how to learn from others. Maybe deeper acknowledgement of India's experiences here could have allowed CA to FFW past the <2MW pilot step!

This message was crystal clear in early 20th century discussions of the income tax - the principled value of progressive taxation is that it retethers the wealthy to society.

Too angry to say much more, but the only newsworthy thing about the Senate's LA wildfire investigation is that these far-right hacks are lying to disaster victims. Outlets that choose to cover this straight, as an investigation rather than as a cruel performance, are ambulance chasers at best.

If you are writing about the causes of - and complexities of fighting - the Palisades and Eaton fires without mentioning the role of climate change, you are missing part of the story! Same thing if you are writing about Republicans trying to blame Democrats for the scope of the fire damage.

EXTRACTION is hitting the road this fall. Thrilled to be in conversation with @dharna.bsky.social @bentarnoff.com @dwallacewells.bsky.social @earthworks.bsky.social and others. Stay tuned for more events in the winter and spring! @wwnorton.com

Faculty governance is the path to restoring public higher education - and that's why Texas has outlawed it.

Low key one of the most talked about episodes of this podcast, josh is brilliant

"I'll take a sheet of those Air Bud stamps, and a veggie McRib please."

Get in, loser—we’re reimagining government services

Easy tax filing at the New Post Office

Postal Service: The Real Everything App

In the Fourth Republic, we're going to resurrect the Postal Service with postal banking, public email accounts, and neighborhood post offices that provide constituency services and free legal advice. It's going to be so good.

It sure looks like every last major tech firm is abandoning past commitments to end their use of fossil fuels. Particularly concerning given how we know that fossil fuel burning power plants are being built NOW with the explicit aim of powering data centers www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/i...

"The American way of life" is constantly being negotiated. The question is whether we're brave enough to do so in public, explicitly, rather than leaving it to lobbyists in back rooms.

Also fascinating: Bush I at the 1992 Earth Summit said, "The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period." It's wild that so many energy system modelers carry water for Bush I to this day by choosing - based on values, not evidence - not to model lifestyle changes in net zero scenarios.

I miss having politicians who at least pretended to love the places they govern

Great story, with voices I respect like @aldasky.bsky.social and @jlappen1.bsky.social offering prescient commentary. (1/) heatmap.news/politics/ele...

Honored to be named an Honorable Mention for this year's Urban History dissertation prize - and to be in such excellent company! What I've already read on this list I've loved and learned a tremendous amount from, and I can't wait to read the others! www.urbanhistory.org/2025awardwin...

"Clean" is a massive stretch here, true only if you wrap your mouth directly around the ferry's exhaust vent. The article acknowledges that SF's ferry H2 is grey - i.e. heavy CO2 emissions in manufacturing! The article doesn't mention how H2 gets to the ferry: via diesel truck.

Great investigation of the growing rhetorical combat over energy affordability. Note who's barely in this story, though: the clean energy industry itself is largely silent on one of its greatest strengths. Why? Lots of possibilities, and certainly multiple reasons. Two I've investigated lately:

To me, the problem and the solution here are one and the same. Reps are reacting to real inequities in state transit spending - most visibly, CalTrain electrification. That project, despite its problems, has been a huge political boon for CAHSR in the Bay - so how about doing it again for Metrolink?

Great investigation of the growing rhetorical combat over energy affordability. Note who's barely in this story, though: the clean energy industry itself is largely silent on one of its greatest strengths. Why? Lots of possibilities, and certainly multiple reasons. Two I've investigated lately:

🚨 Longread alert for your long weekend: I wrote about why the climate movement is suddenly hyper-focused on electric bills, how we got here, and the oncoming messaging war over affordable energy, with insight from many smart people. I hope you give it a read. heatmap.news/politics/ele...

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

got talked into subjecting myself to Landman. The propaganda is grotesque, but nontheless encouraging - it's the first mainstream climate denial I can think of that completely concedes on values. They stake it all on "clean energy would be better, but it won't work" - and that's ground we can win on

A massive attack on several humanities units (Arabic Studies, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Classics, Religion, German & Scandinavian, Russian/East European/Eurasian Studies) *and* tenure now unfolding at the University of Oregon (a blue state!). Closure of units and faculty layoffs threatened.

Not going to spend the time to validate this facile, arrogant, narrow-minded, and extremely revealing argument with my real thoughts. Instead, perhaps we should just jettison this guy?

I use this graph (created by Maricopa County ) when I lecture about climate and social systems. Multiple brutal feedback loops in overlapping action.

Much more consequential in the long run than topline news about grant cancellations is the ongoing gutting of the archives and databases that support entire fields of research. These are infrastructure, and they require constant maintenance - and once they're abandoned, they're very hard to restore.

This is what haunts me whenever anyone starts up on "why can't we build anymore." Folks, building new stuff is the part we are and have always been *best* at - and maintenance is the part that's getting harder the fastest!

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.

Three years ago, Gov. Newsom's administration convinced lawmakers to give PG&E a highly unusual $1.4 billion loan to keep open its nuclear power plant. It was supposed to be completely repaid by expected federal money. We found nearly half might have to be forgiven. My latest for @calmatters.org

This is what haunts me whenever anyone starts up on "why can't we build anymore." Folks, building new stuff is the part we are and have always been *best* at - and maintenance is the part that's getting harder the fastest!

Speaking as someone who has manually cleared marine intake screens, this is actually a major engineering problem and not at all easy to solve! But classify this on the less-weird end of the spectrum of super weird ways climate change is going to make infrastructure more brittle

Isn't it weird how any person who wants any type of change inherently wants to stop/slow some things and start/speed other things?

What will you do when evildoer interests simply reframe your effort to build good thing (say more solar power) as stopping a thing (say community preferences)? Stopping things is always bad, so you lose, right? What if instead we abandon the framing wars and just do stuff? Sick of this shit.

if they start threatening wind energy executives with jail time over bird deaths, just remember that oil pits kill three times as many birds per year, according to the federal government’s own data

These guys care about birds now? www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_0P...

I’m heartened to see this.

If you're in the Bay, come to the SF Public Library on Tuesday! 5:30pm

This may sound positive, but it's deeply disingenuous. SB 1221 requires priority zones - but doesn't make those zones exclusive! If gas utilities want to prioritize widespread zonal decarb, they're free to do so in parallel with 1221's pilot process! CPUC should call this bluff and require both.

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.