Do better @nytimes.com! This too is suspect and should warrant an explainer: “while gas is cleaner than coal as a source of electricity…” When you consider the 20-year global warming potential of even modest methane leaks in the supply chain, gas may be worse than coal.

The Security and Exchange Commision’s policies have become “a reckless game of regulatory Jenga” according to commissioner Caroline Crenshaw.

While Americans are literally starving without access to SNAP Silicon Valley is going with hat in hand for our tax dollars to keep the AI bubble inflated?

Fiji is leading the way to a beautiful clean energy and climate resilient future! 🇫🇯

The transition to 100% clean energy doesn't seem so insurmountable when you break it down like this!

This is great news and a rare display of bipartisanship on a clime related issue. Because at its core, Energy Star is just a common sense way to lower bills for consumers and everyone can get behind that messaging.

It’s not awesome that the people we rely on to protect us are systemically damaging their brains over time. This news may also explain a lot of our social and political challenges in the United States.

On the other hand, if long duration energy storage can improve its cost and efficiency, we may see a future where midday solar or overnight wind is no never at risk of curtailment. With demand staying constant (either for direct use or for storage) the price will never go to zero.

“But today, these free market and fair competition foundations are under threat. Despite claiming to want clean energy to compete on a level playing field with fossil fuels, [the administration] has put their thumb on the scale in favor of their preferred technologies.”

Floatovoltaics (solar on reservoirs) can be installed vertically too! In this way (facing east and west) they maximize morning and afternoon power generation and avoid overshadowing the water, keeping oxygenation high for aquatic habitat. www.worldrecordacademy.org/2025/11/worl...

If we could shift the burden of transmission and distribution maintenance to the tax base rather than the rate base solar power could finally help us achieve the aspiration of “too cheap to meter” during midday solar peaks. Anyone with a battery could extend that free energy across time.

🤔 For direct current systems the entire concept of a circuit breaker is radically different than for AC. “A DC breaker must actively and forcefully kill the arc. This requires a more robust and complex design, often including specialized components like magnetic blowout coils and arc chutes.”

"The future is still being written. Through choices in policy, investment, education, and care for one another and the Earth, we can still create a turning point. It begins by embracing our shared humanity and recognizing the profound interconnectedness of all life on the planet"

Pick one: A. Waste $billions to keep burning carbon while destroying the habitable climate of planet Earth and risking supply constraint price shocks. B. Save $billions and transition to solar and wind while protecting the future of life on Earth and increasing energy access and reliability.

Our biggest challenge right now is that almost no institutional investor or politician understands how rapidly things are changing (how soon oil and gas investments will be stranded) and this lack of awareness means the transition will be way more economically painful & chaotic than it needs to be.

This was a great conversation that provides a well founded and hopeful case for the inevitability of the energy transition. It might not seem like it right now, but we are well into implementation of the new system. It reminds me of how early in a loan it seems like all you are paying is interest.

Only the second two methods are grounded in the biophysical realities of planet Earth. The first unit of measurement (dollars) should be somehow pegged to the others but it isn’t at all. Its only structural mandate is to grow indefinitely, which we all can recognize is a fantasy.

Given the experience with inflation under COVID stimulus I wonder if UBI would be sustainable without price controls or monetary redesign, assuming we could enact the tax structure necessary to pay it. Would universal basic services (public housing, healthcare, education, etc.) be less inflationary?

KSA is building solar power infrastructure that can deliver $0.01/kWh electricity. “The kingdom is aware that fossil fuels, the source of its fabulous wealth, are on their way out. Its leaders want to have a modern electro-state in place when the pumps fall idle.”

"A lot of the energy from light in a solar cell is wasted as heat—which itself is also a form of energy," says Dr. Ben Carwithen, a postdoctoral researcher at UNSW's School of Chemistry. "We're finding ways to take that wasted energy and turn it into more electricity instead."

"Much as granaries and refrigeration transformed food markets, storage will turn electricity from perishable to persistent, unlocking a new era of energy abundance." In the future we will look back on the oil & gas era the way we look at hunting and gathering.

How much more could Harris have possibly moved to the center? She denounced all her progressive positions from the 2020 primary (alienating the base), campaigned with Dick Cheney, embraced fracking, deportation (“do not come”), and Netanyahu. Not so obvious then…

This is a positive feedback loop (positive not as in “good” but as in “reinforcing”). Less immigration will slow growth, lead to lower wages and to less immigration. The opposite is also true. Being an attractive economic destination for emigrants grows a nation’s economy and wages.

This is the most convincing argument against Democratic candidates shifting to the right in purple districts.

Nothing makes me angrier than seeing these massive data centers with not one solar panel on them. I know it would be a small percent of their demand but it’s a lot of perfectly good solar roof area to deploy on and none of the big tech companies take advantage of it. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/t...

“Total use of fossil fuels rose 1.5% in 2024.” We need to be seeing a 7% *decline* in fossil fuel consumption every year to meet IPCC recommendations. The first year we see a 7% global decline in emissions Bill Gates can post a note about how we should invest less in climate mitigation.

“Today in the U.S., there are more than 600 district energy systems…The vast majority still use fossil fuels.” Every district heating or cooling system should be a big clean electric heat pump (and more places should have district heating or cooling networks).

“The nuclear powers might have been the most technologically advanced countries in the world, but in hindsight, it’s clear they had little idea of what they were doing, and the health of the local populations was an afterthought, if a thought at all.”

It is possible to make steel without any combustion of fossil fuels or process emissions. The magic? Electrochemistry! It will take a while to bring down costs, but this is inevitable. It makes too much sense.

I wanted to offer some thoughts on the Gates climate memo that has been circulating this week. While I can't directly speak for others, I can say that my own response is one of dismay & deep frustration (and that this view is shared by many climate/Earth scientists). [1/n]

In 2025 it is not a geopolitical point of pride to say you aren’t sure if your nuclear weapons work and you need to test them. Test bans reflect the fact that we have figured this stuff out already. North Korea might need to test but the U.S. does not.

More people need to watch this. It's what happens when a pipeline carrying CO2 ruptures. We need these pipelines for any carbon sequestration scheme (CCS, DAC). When the flood of heavy CO2 gas rolls over the landscape it suffocates everything in its path and shuts off car engines, which need oxygen.

Arguing for less aggressive investment in climate action because you think it isn't best for poor nations is insulting to poor nations who are literally losing land today because of previous inaction on climate. Funding their electrification w/ solar, wind, & storage is the absolute best investment.

Depending on CCS or other future-tech in your climate solutions framework is “like clinging to a balloon as it rises higher. The hope seems real but the distance from the ground only widens and you can only hold on for so long.”

Where you stand on the doomerism-through-tech-optimism spectrum of climate framing is based on the science *plus* guesses on human behavior, economics & politics. Both sides want to speed up the transition. It’s a matter of preferred communication strategy and theory of change (fear vs desire).

Nature is resilient! “Demolition on the last dam was completed in October of 2024. Just days later, salmon were swimming upstream, passing through the former dam sites and heading for Upper Klamath Lake, the last stop before the smaller tributary streams where they would spawn.”

This is also what the very end stage of the AI super-bubble looks like. We’re really sopping up the dregs here.

To understand the climate connection to Hurricane Melissa, check out our real-time attribution page at @climatecentral.org: www.climatecentral.org/tropical-cyc... "Climate change made the ocean temperatures along Melissa's path 500 to 900 times more likely."

Before you dunk on this forecast, look back at the hourly grid monitor for Texas in 2015 when solar never registered as even a fraction of a percent. Now in 2025 it's nearing 1/4 of midday summer power. If we want to live in a net-zero future we have to normalize the idea and manifest it today!

EU grid operators come across like your grumpy uncle who, when you point out how new technology can vastly improve his life, stubbornly refuses because he likes to do things the way he’s always done them. Spinning mass was good enough in my day! We choked on burning carbon and we liked it dammit!

I can think of at least seven ways fossil fuel producers could wiggle out of this, but still: holy shit this is huge.

The Edison Electric Institute (represents the incumbent electric power industry) and the American Petroleum Institute are both officially opposed to repeal of the E.P.A. endangerment finding on CO2 because its absence will leave their businesses open to lawsuits and a messy patchwork of state regs.

“Where did you learn that? On grokipedia?” Needs to become the go-to put down whenever someone says something stupid.

We talk about overshoot, but I'm not even sure we know with much certainty just how much resources we are consuming. "The team does not want to establish a standard for addressing scope 3 water use that the rest of Amazon would need to follow, given the larger resource implications.”

I want to glaze and fire these eight charts as ceramic wall tile accent pieces. They take the trends from the EIA data (2021 - 2025) and extrapolate them to a 100% clean energy grid for Texas by 2035. Seems doable.

“The major questions canon has not been applied by this court in the national security or foreign policy contexts.” But anything that can be considered a “major question” has some nat sec or foreign policy element, as did the COVID and climate policies the court struck down under Biden. #calvinball

Finally got the time to finish this epic book this weekend. It really is a tour de force all the way through the heartfelt acknowledgements, capturing the complexities of this unprecedented era in Earth's history and the stakes for our survival in mastering the carbon cycle using clean energy.

Allowing individuals to sit idly on fortunes the size of nation states—inflating tech stock prices and real estate, dumping it here and there into crypto, campaigns, and regulatory capture—it’s gumming up the works of capitalism and it’s not good for the individuals either.

"The world’s largest renewable energy project integrating solar power and battery storage, is capable of delivering 1 gigawatt (GW) of baseload renewable energy around the clock at a globally competitive tariff...The project reimagines the potential of renewable energy by overcoming intermittency."

Every town should be a solar town. “to deserve the name of a ‘solar town’ it would need to generate at least 25% of its energy from solar…”