I'm going to spin this a different way: The first adult to be born in this photo, Luckey Roberts, was born in 1887. The last adult in this photo to die, Rollins, died a few hours ago.

“economic freedom is not absolute; it must always be measured against the common good and the dignity of every person.” This encyclical is REALLY good! I especially love the part where he takes down posthumanism. The folks who most need to read this probably won’t unfortunately.

“Batteries are a gas demand assassin.” Gassassins! With fossil gas demand down 60% in California over the past three years demand destruction is driving down prices faster than LNG exports can raise them, which may be playing into why some data centers are shortsightedly going with gas.

If the goal is to save trees in the Puget Sound watershed, then the absolute best strategy is to increase density in the already built up areas like Seattle with infill housing and upzoning. Otherwise, you force sprawl and deforestation in surrounding areas and increase vehicular traffic.

The list of reasons to plant trees is nearly endless: shade, windbreak, habitat, microclimate, water conservation, erosion control, beauty, food... The one thing definitely not on the list is anthropogenic carbon dioxide removal at a scale that, on its own, could affect the pace of climate change.

Cloud enhancement effects (CEE) can cause solar panels to generate more than their nameplate capacity. You know how you will sometimes see visible rays where sunlight is being directed by cloud edges? If a solar panel is under one of those rays it can experience CEE.

How does this idea that we can reverse anthropogenic CO2 impacts by planting trees have so much staying power? Simple math shows how impossible it would be. Even if the net tree count were rising (which it is most certainly not), we simply don’t have the space.

The gist of this op-ed is that there will soon be a new cohort of AI centibillonaires and they should do what the gilded age millionaires did—make great monuments and art. That is nice nostalgia and I love art, but we also have climate change etc. to deal with. Maybe tax them so we get to decide?

It is “Worth” re-listening to this episode. The first segment explains why our insurance premiums are so high and the last segment explains why the economic services provided by nature are ~$150 trillion dollars per year—1.5 times the GDP of the entire world.

I can’t wait to read Jack Smith’s Bundt cake recipe.

In chemistry, a supersaturated solution is one where you've kept adding a solute to a liquid beyond where the liquid can dissolve everything. All it takes is a nucleation site / seed crystal for the solution to rapidly (sometimes violently) crystalize. Unrelatedly, the US has more guns than people.

“We protect what we love. We love what we understand.”

This is why, even if there were a super-intelligent AGI that could solve all our problems, it still would not solve any of our problems.

Yes! More of this. Our EV future must coincide with a beautiful and playful automotive design revolution. We must put an end to the long dark age of shitty boring SUV-size boxes that look like ugly sneakers on wheels. Let the people express themselves again!

1. London Underground station flooding has reportedly been reduced by around 90% thanks to a group of engineers: beavers. After conservationists reintroduced a family of beavers into a nearby city park, the animals built dams and restored wetlands that now absorb and slow floodwater naturally.

Rather than blowing things up, this is probably a more effective form of metaphorical political violence—taking out ads on Rumble and Truth Social against climate deniers and delayers. Make their lives as miserable as possible and using every tool available in modern political communications.

😢 In the U.S. we’ve had our share of such horrible disasters, with more than 100,000 Americans losing their lives in coal mines, not counting those whose lives were cut short from black lung. Now that there are cheaper and more reliable ways to make electricity why are we still doing this?

“Neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” —U.S. Constitution

We need longer memories if we are going to withstand the gaslighting.

“This idea that prediction markets are the arbiter of what's true doesn’t match up to reality…If every other buyer and seller in the market is incentivized to lie, cheat, and conceal information against you if it benefits them,” there is no fair marketplace of ideas. —Jathan Sadowski

New: Berkeley is the first US city to require home sellers and buyers to replace gas furnaces/water heaters with heat pumps or make other green upgrades as a condition of sale. It's changing the local real estate market as sellers tout electrification. Free link. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I recommend everyone see this film. It's an incredibly well crafted and all-too-believable story about how close we are every day to ending it all (by design) should one unexpected event take place either by intention or by accident.

Another piece about geologic hydrogen. My take is that it's just another non-renewable resource with leak management challenges. These wells too will eventually tap out. As we design our new energy system let's stick to sources of energy we know we can rely on for generations into the future.

“Washington is not a static city. It must grow to allow the next 250 years of Americans to celebrate their accomplishments,” the panel’s chairman said before making a motion to fast-track approval of a static design that is a bad copy of authoritarian architecture from many centuries ago.

This is why we desperately need structural reform at the constitutional level to restrict freedom of speech to natural persons and limit political campaign contributions. We are no longer a functioning republic when only the PACs who buy political offices have sway over legislation.

As the industry group points out, it's too late to muck with the HFC phaseout to reduce costs. This is just being pro global warming for kicks.

Oh look! The xenophobic and inhumane policy of forced deportations has had the opposite of its intended effect on U.S. employment. Who could have possibly guessed this (besides every economist and historian)‽ “American-born workers lost more jobs than immigrants as a result of the deportations.”

Are we glossing over the part where by his own account the bottom 50% of people are so damn poor they can only contribute 3% of income tax revenue? In a healthy society that number would be way higher. His proposal assumes the poor will stay poor.

Why can't we "wake up in the morning, think the future is going to be great" and invest our time and energy in making things better right here on planet Earth? There's plenty of work to be done fixing our damage and bettering ourselves before we waste our money on trying to populate cold dead rocks.

"Normally, the defense department evaluates whether a turbine is within the line of sight of a radar or in a low-altitude military airspace. If so, the department and developer typically agree on mitigation options — a process that usually takes a matter of weeks."

"Over the decades, exposure to atrazine has been linked by scientists to an increased risk of birth defects and several cancers, as well as fertility problems like low sperm quality and irregular menstrual cycles. The WHO found that atrazine was probably carcinogenic to humans.” So we're good then!

Follow along at home with this handy dashboard. We are so not ready for this. It would be one thing if we had a robust social safety net, public jobs programs, social housing, public healthcare, and universal basic services. But we have none of that.

For all of the boosterism of technology in education, test scores show that we're basically at the same level that we were in the 1970s. Progress was made up until a peak in 2012 from which point it all slid back down.

This is quite something and it's a window onto the future of grids everywhere. In just two years any operator can entirely replace their gas peaker infrastructure with batteries if they want to, and save money for ratepayers by doing so. From: www.volts.wtf/p/volts-comm...

The Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan would be 21 GW added to California's grid. Adani's Khavda Renewable Energy Park north of Mumbai is going to be 30 GW. These megaprojects are equally as important as the local rooftop solar projects that complement them.

It's really incredible how A.I. is already helping to solve climate change.

It’s interesting to compare the status of the legitimate (passed by Congress) Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund—which has been held up for a year for no good reason —to the illegal slush fund made up this week with no consent of Congress.

Excellent summary. This is why I think we won’t ever truly solve the polycrisis until we establish a system whereby new wealth can only be minted as a consequence of verifiable metrics of environmental regeneration. Think of it as gold standard for currency but instead of gold it’s regrowth.

Explains quite a lot

Pick your future: Do you want the silicon brains of your digital overlords zipping by in low earth orbit or bobbing in the oceans? Or why not both?

"Incremental extensions of existing frameworks are unlikely to capture the scale and nature of transformations required to address the underlying causes" of the polycrisis. New research agenda: Bigger ideas and the world-building tools necessary to captivate the public imagination with them.

100% of No Kings protesters also got ready for the march listening to Carole King. Mic drop.

Polymarket knows who these users are. Why has only one person been prosecuted?

Most exoplanets lack just the perfect magnetic field like Earth has. This protection is underrated for its contribution to the ability of life to thrive and it simply can’t be engineered (like on Mars for example where there is no solar wind umbrella).

It’s just a sloshing puddle curve now.

The official events to mark our nation’s 250th birthday are all backwards-looking, nostalgic. They’re all about history and legacy. That’s fine but where is the next 250 years represented here? Don’t we have an awesome future? Even the space museum is about WWII planes. Invention is about the past.

This is bizarro world public policy. We can absolutely figure out a way to pay for roads that doesn’t require major disincentives against effective climate solutions. Many states already do this, so it’s a double sin tax on the very thing we need most of.

Let this become an epidemic.

This is a great small island nation decarbonization option if you have the right conditions! Why pay out the nose to import diesel and fuel oil when you’ve got hot rocks beneath your feet‽

Learning from WPA-era projects, when the mass A.I. layoffs begin to happen at scale, the U.S. government should be prepared to offer full employment for anyone interested in manufacturing and installing solar panels on approved public lands and rooftops.