The federal government is now paying utilities to keep coal plants open past retirement. This paper’s evidence says the people living near those plants are the ones paying twice: once in their utility bill, once by moving away from the pollution.

New MIT modeling: Over two-thirds of the clean electricity generation and emissions cuts under Biden’s climate law could survive under Trump’s rewrite moving forward. But falling costs aren’t a guarantee of future progress: permitting, fuel costs, and demand all matter.

Hormuz traffic is finally ticking up. 7-day average back to ~33/day after the June 17 MOU. Still about a third of normal for this time of year.

Some context on what you're looking at, and the idea behind it 🧵

Texas has no clean energy mandate. It just beat fossil fuels with wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro on 62% of days this year. Nobody told the grid to do this, just the market.

New @energyinnovation.org study from me, @matthiasfripp.org and @michelle-solomon.bsky.social shows that clean energy can meet rapidly growing electricity demand, saving money and reducing the risk of fuel price spikes. Read here! #energysky energyinnovation.org/report/let-t...

AC debates assume universal adoption is a climate villain. New PBL/IMAGE modeling: closing the global cooling gap entirely (3.6 billion people!) raises 2050 emissions by just 3.6%. Universal cooling’s climate footprint is… small.

15 years ago today: Michele Bachmann channeled John Wayne’s spirit in Waterloo, Iowa. Factually accurate, just not the John Wayne she had in mind.

To estimate whether data centers raise electricity bills, you need to solve a classic econometric problem: data centers pick low-price locations, which makes them look good. Our solution involves Dwight Eisenhower. New working paper with @asawatten.bsky.social and Geoff Blanford 🧵

How can the ghost of pre-colonial bison trails help untangle whether data centers have increased your electricity bill? Read our new working paper to find out! bsky.app/profile/bist...

One of my favorite parts of Toy Story is the Dinoco gas station, which is reminiscent of the Union 76 gas in Beverly Hills. Are there other examples of midcentury modern energy infrastructure?

Today is #ShowYourStripes day, using data visualization to convey global warming trends to non-scientists. This version splits at "Today" into five climate scenarios, each era a different shade of red.

Excited to share a new preprint with Asa Watten and Geoff Blanford. Are data centers raising your electric bill? Our causal evidence says the opposite: they modestly lowered U.S. retail rates from 2015-24. Asa's thread walks through it. Summary here: restservice.epri.com/publicattach...

The U.S. has 578 GW of operating natural gas capacity, more than Europe’s peak electricity demand. At least 66 GW is in the pipeline.

This is the most boring energy chart I've made, and that's the point. In France, clean power (read: nearly all nuclear) has beat fossil every single day since 2021. No exceptions, no drama (except for the 2022 outages). A decarbonized grid looks like nothing happening.

Trump fired the BLS chief for allegedly rigging jobs numbers. Cool new paper finds the act of firing her (and the uncertainty it created) likely cost the economy more than the entire annual BLS budget.

Closing editorial for the Focus Collection on "Climate Change Informed Catastrophe Models" with @climate-done.bsky.social @kellyhereid.bsky.social and Chia-Ying Lee is out now and open access in @iopp-environment.bsky.social iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Three things separate the Global Justice Report from the IPCC below-2C ensemble: lower income, slightly less carbon removal, and energy use that’s basically average. Only one of those is the story people think it is.

Saturday would be John Nash’s 98th birthday. He has the record for one of the shortest recommendation letters ever.

No fanfare but, at some point in the last 4 years, California stopped being a grid that occasionally beat fossil fuels and became one that does it on a daily basis.

The $850M coal rescue is ~35x smaller than what's retired since 2010. The fleet has shed ~43% of peak capacity. A chart.

Two contradictory nuclear puzzles: Bears say deployment lags, so it’s not needed. Bulls say it deploys regardless of carbon policy. Scenarios say otherwise: nuclear is much more limited when emissions don’t matter. If you care about decarbonization, you should care about nuclear.

Fully phasing out fossil fuels by 2050 requires 1.6-1.8x more power generation than a standard 1.5°C pathway. And it’s not just more solar and wind: it means a much bigger role for nuclear and green hydrogen, too. Defossilization is a different beast than decarbonization.

Respect to 1991 Mt. Pinatubo for briefly pulling the vibe back.

Locusts cost $25 billion a year in stunted child growth when monitoring fails. The monitoring system costs $37-77 million a year to run. That’s a benefit-cost ratio between 160:1 and 680:1. One of the best investments in public health you’ve never heard of.

The U.S. battery storage market is essentially two markets. California builds 4-hour batteries because policy demands it. Texas builds 2-hour batteries because markets reward it. The national average lands at 3 hours, one number that hides a deeply divided grid.

In 1990, carbon pricing existed in a handful of Nordic countries. Today: 80 instruments, 99 national and subnational jurisdictions, $100B+ in annual revenue.

Bad news: Climate change could triple wildfire’s odds of destroying the carbon stored in U.S. forest offset projects. Good news: This paper has exquisitely designed figures.

Hard to read this @defaultfriend.bsky.social column (“We are Sliding Back Into the Middle Ages”) without thinking about Carl Sagan’s 1996 book “A Demon Haunted World” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/o... Sagan: archive.org/details/demo...

Counterintuitive chart of the month: Bank tellers survived the ATM. They did not survive the smartphone.

Measuring poverty used to mean flying data collectors to remote villages every decade. A satellite AI model just mapped every 6-km area of Africa for 36 GPU-hours total, which is roughly the cost of a tank of gas. Cool paper by @marshallburke.bsky.social, et al.: arxiv.org/abs/2604.23166

The current U.S. grid: -44% cleaner than 1990 -Texas nearly matches the national average -Illinois almost cleaner than California (nuclear+renewables OG) -Coal states still high (though ND dropping thanks to wind)

Does new transmission actually move the needle on clean energy? Here's a month of California data before and after SunZia came online. Wind is up by a third, and gas down by a third. Judge for yourself.

The electricity bill for this image is higher than Scottie's salary in 1997

Over 85% of California's industrial heat demand is below 600°C. That's the threshold where electrification starts to look commercially viable. New research puts a facility-level number on just how much of the "hard-to-abate" sector might not be that hard.

Bad news: Climate change could eliminate more than 90% of the range of 1 in 10 plant species by 2100. Good news: Well... technically there isn't any. But this paper does have terrific figures!

Roughly 40% of the $6.8 billion in annual lifesaving benefits from Uber are pure externalities, per Anderson/Davis (2026): $2.7B in benefits to other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists who never opened the app. That alone exceeds Uber's annual US ridesharing shareholder surplus.

Updated through today. The ceasefire announced April 5 knocked $35 off oil prices. Then Trump called it “on massive life support,” prices climbed back >$107, and the 2026 Hormuz line became something historical crises never were: a spike, a partial recovery, and a second climb.

This chart from our paper is the one I keep coming back to. Without IRA: 13-61 GW/yr of clean electricity IRA: 23-131 GW/yr OBBBA: 29-59 GW/yr Even OBBBA is near 2024 record levels, because demand growth changed the baseline. Policy matters, but so does the starting point.

Today is Florence Nightingale’s birthday. Beyond nursing, she used data visualization to prove soldiers were dying not from battle wounds but preventable disease. One of the earliest examples of a chart used to change policy. Deaths fell by 2/3 within a year.

The global EV transition in one chart: Leader: Norway Almost there: Netherlands, China Accelerating: U.K., France, Germany Starting: Thailand, South Korea Barely begun (yet still selling millions): U.S., India, Indonesia Doing its own thing: Brazil (ethanol)

11 models. Same scenario. 30 percentage points of spread in power sector CO2. Why? Assumed electricity demand, discount rates, temporal resolution, coal economics. Ranges >> point estimates.

Wild figure from a new paper on the large premium for regulated returns for natural gas and electricity utilities relative to capital cost benchmarks (dots are rate cases since 1980). Utility returns barely budged as rates plummeted after 2008. The gap is now 1-5 pp. Cost to consumers: ~$7B/yr.

New paper in Nature Reviews Clean Technology with @rynacui.bsky.social and co-authors: What did the IRA actually accomplish, and what does the One Big Beautiful Bill Act undo? We’re on Shift Key with @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social today breaking it down: heatmap.news/podcast/shif...

New on SHIFT KEY: The OBBBA swept away many of the climate incentives in the IRA after less than three years. What did that do to our climate trajectory? @bistline.bsky.social and @rynacui.bsky.social join @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social to discuss: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

Projected increase in household energy costs from curtailing IRA's power sector credits: ~$55-640/year in 2035. States matter more than the national number.

Paper @science.org today led by Junna Wang and my @ucdavis.bsky.social colleague Xiaoli Dong. 7-16% of plants at risk of extinction under climate change, largely from vanishing climates, not slow dispersal. But plants will move, reshaping local species composition www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

California has a lot of solar and energy storage coming. Texas has even more.