Cutting transit and disproportionately taxing EVs won't fix the Highway Trust Fund. We’re in this mess because Congress chose to take money from all taxpayers to prop up a highway program that is failing to deliver on safety, state of repair, and mobility. t4america.org/2025/11/18/a...

Autumn at Cedar Grove Cemetery never disappoints.

Excellent deep dive on the failings and lesser-known successes of the federal electric vehicle charging program. The U.S. could have thrown a lot of money at low-quality chargers in the wrong places. It didn't. And in the long run, that's good. www.eenews.net/articles/bid...

This is counterintuitive, but true. Also true: average electricity prices are near historic lows, at least back to the 1970s, when adjusted for inflation. What has happened is that the trajectory has changed.

Got a feeling that deepening our dependence on natural gas in the name of "affordability" is not going to turn out well. For the environment *or* for affordability.

10. States with more renewable generation tend to have somewhat lower prices, but it's a weak trend. A much stronger trend: Higher dependence on natural gas for electricity generation means higher retail prices. Gas prices often set wholesale electricity prices, which utilities pass through to us.

The most depressing thing is the finding that state/local governments likely used federal transit capital funding to replace their own funds, rather than boost transit investment. If more federal funding <> more transit investment, what does that mean for federal advocacy going forward?

Excellent report documenting the real effects of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on transportation, and a must-read as the transportation reathorization conversation gets rolling in earnest.

Gonna go out on a limb here, but I'm pretty sure the solution to the deep crisis of meaning and spirit among young men (and others of us 21st c. moderns) is not permitting reform. www.derekthompson.org/p/the-monks-...

Finally driving my first EV and can’t be the only middle aged dad now *obsessed* with regenerative braking and getting as many miles as humanly possible.

"U.S. data centers would add 24 million to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually to the atmosphere through the end of the decade... The build-out also is projected to drain 731 million to 1,125 million cubic meters of water... equivalent to the household usage of 6 million to 10 million"

It's not just the AI sociopaths pushing the idea that we need data centers. The oil and gas industry desperately wants us to believe we need them and must power them with gas.

Far from serving as a sort of grid-expansion gym to help training for incoming electrification, data centres are actually eating up the finite resources need to accomodate billions of homes, vehicles and industrial facilities Here's a remarkable example from Tasmania, Australia

In 1979, a Mining Test Ravaged the Pacific Seafloor— 44 Years Later, New Evidence Reveals It’s Likely Forever dailygalaxy.com/2025/11/in-1...

New post from me, inspired by our new Clean Energy Across America data dashboard, on why the "systemic change vs. individual action" debate is outdated ... esp. since individuals and households have more access to better clean energy tools than ever before. frontiergroup.org/articles/bui...

Excited to share this tomorrow. Millions of Americans are taking part in the transition to cleaner energy - investing their time, money and faith in new technologies and practices. Let's give them their due ... and figure out how to help millions more to join them.

This essay is one of the first I’ve seen to grapple with the intersection of the burgeoning “techlash” with “abundance” but gets the political valence backwards. brinklindsey.substack.com/p/abundance-...

We’re out at the JP #openstreets event all day today, come say hi on Centre St. at the corner of Chestnut Ave. in Jackson Square!

Who could have possibly foreseen this, besides everybody?

"If Oklo couldn’t win approval from the agency charged with protecting the public from nuclear accidents, they would, essentially, go after the regulator, in much the way Uber Technologies Inc. and other Silicon Valley startups have obliterated regulatory roadblocks."

The videos of wastewater "purges" in this story are wild. Excellent journalism here. www.propublica.org/article/okla...

Just got this in the mailbox. A welcome sight to say the least.

The World War II-style mobilization of resources that folks have been calling for to address climate change turns out to have been possible all along. We’re just deploying it to build MegaMind instead.

Some of us never put much stock in the adequacy or wisdom of the "breakthrough" approach to addressing global warming, but I imagine that for some folks who sincerely invested their hopes for future generations in it, this is going to feel like a huge rug-pull. In a year full of rug-pulls.

I’ve spent more than a decade trying to catalog the damage done by America’s century-long and counting highway building spree and lo and behold but this wonderful book taught me about a bunch of impacts to wildlife that I’d barely even stopped to consider.

It's been a while since I've done a non-political nerd thread. And I wish I could do them more often! So let's do a palette cleanse to talk about this article from WaPo that is technically true, but deeply misinformative about US electric markets. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Grateful for this piece. The bear dens are among my favorite places in Boston - mysterious in a way that fewer and fewer places in the modern city are. Fodder for the imagination.

What we have wrought:

I would like this, too. But transportation reformers have been pushing for better transparency/accountability around federal highway funds *for decades* only to be undercut by officials whose fiscal conservatism has a big “except highways” asterisk next to it.

A: Yes. Yes, they would. The evidence being US highway expenditures long ago departed from the realm of the rational. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

California will spend $31 billion on transportation this year with about 3% of that budgeted for support for transit agencies. lao.ca.gov/Publications...

I love the image this evokes, happy little batteries just relaxing on the pasture, eating grass and living their best calm life, recounting the stories of crazy adventures they had. (from @volts.wtf interview of Colin Campbell about Redwood)

For the first time in more than 100 years, Chinook salmon have been spotted at the confluence of the Sprague and Williamson rivers in Chiloquin, the government seat of the Klamath Tribes in Southern Oregon.

The stories coming out of the Klamath dam removal are inspiring. It’s like nature was standing patiently by the door waiting to be let back in. www.opb.org/article/2025...

Holy wow, +3.5 ppm CO₂ last year, up from +2.4 ppm average the past decade, and +0.6 ppm in the 1960s. It gets scarier the closer you look at it. All this is a stress test for the planet, and it's buckling. Two big reasons for the massive increase: wildfires, and the ocean sinks are shutting down.

Oh, hey! This project never officially made our (newly updated!) list of wasteful, destructive highway projects, but this is great news. Congrats to folks in the Catskills who pushed back on this against what seemed to be pretty long odds.

All the lip gloss being put on the AI boom as somehow good for climate or the energy transition is masking that, at the present moment, it's a disaster. Not only more gas generation, but the worst, dirtiest, least efficient kind. Turning the clock back 25 years. heatmap.news/energy/natur...

Always a pleasure to talk with @usa.streetsblog.org, this time about our newly updated “Highway Boondoggles” dashboard and what it will take to make better transportation investments that solve real problems. usa.streetsblog.org/2025/10/09/a...

A good day to remember that both the energy and financial maths of near-term direct air capture deployment don’t math, and they math even less today than they did when the IRA was passed as the pace of grid decarbonization slows. frontiergroup.org/resources/ca...

Much gratitude to the New Englanders who, three decades ago, envisioned a regional grid without polluting coal and pushed to make it a reality. The day has finally arrived.

Has anyone added up the subsidies that the federal government, transmission grid operators, and electric utilities have given to AI companies so far and compared that amount (doubtless > $100 billion) to e.g. the entirety of IRA ten-year funding for clean energy technologies (~$350-400 billion)?

Good to hear this project - an old-school "ram a new-build highway through the middle of a neighborhood" type project - is on the ropes. But zombie highway projects can continue to haunt neighborhoods' future prospects for years to come. Time to end it for good. www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025...

But if you have one EV battery catch fire, it seemingly justifies questioning the entire energy transition.

"We estimate that 36 percent of Americans over the age of 10 do not or cannot rely on a personal vehicle to meet their daily travel needs..."

Direct air capture (DAC) continues to be small, slow, and very expensive. Not because it’s an early stage technology, but because it runs into fundamental thermodynamic challenges that money can’t solve. This is exactly why it’s not recommended by Project Drawdown. www.ft.com/content/fa4c...

Some might call it a "cost shift." One of many ways the broader public is paying the price for data center expansion. Much gratitude to @ucs.org for bringing this issue to public attention in such a clear and compelling way. blog.ucs.org/mike-jacobs/...

Why yes, let’s repackage a broadly popular and historically crucial movement for clean energy - with a long history of policy successes - as being in rhetorical/ideological alignment with whatever this is. Should win hearts and minds.

No surprise that data centers attract more vehement opposition than wind/solar. They have tangible local impacts renewables don’t (power/water demand, sometimes air quality/noise) and approximately none of the pro-social “halo” of renewables.

hey @massdcr.bsky.social - the new coatings on the overpasses crosssing Morrissey Blvd are incredibly slick when wet. With more cyclists connecting from Morrissey to the Neponset Trail some warning signs are in order.