The last known caterpillar that could have become a Sacramento Mountains checkerspot butterfly has died. The term for an animal that is the sole survivor of a species is endling. In a sense, we are all endlings—each the last of our kind. All life is precious, irreplaceable. crimethinc.com/endlings

Forcing refiners to blend liquified corn into their gasoline is one of the dumbest policies on the books, raising the cost of food and fuel for nonexistent environmental benefits. www.slowboring.com/p/the-dumb-p...

Turlough Hill - Ireland's first pumped hydro station was proposed in 1967, initiated in 1968 and operational by 1973. Silvermines Hydro - Ireland's second pumped hydro scheme was proposed in 2012, has not yet begun construction, and is targeted for commissioning in 2032.

If you’re not a battery head (I’m not) CATL announcing the release of a $19 per kWh sodium Ion battery cell last week is a big deal. That’s going to be about $40 per kWh all in. Also - a working solid state battery is imminent - with about 5x the energy density of lithium Iron Phosphate.

Do renewables make wholesale electricity cheaper or more expensive? The answer: renewables share doesn't really move the needle - it's markets where natural gas generation sets the price that are the expensive markets. Aka more gas = more expensive electricity. Here's the mic drop graph:

New economic analysis of trawling in European seas says it is a significantly negative economic contributor mainly due to carbon release from sediment disturbance. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"... current LLMs are unreliable delegates: they introduce sparse but severe errors that silently corrupt documents, compounding over long interaction" Pre-print from Microsoft Research on LLM's ability to handle professional quality documents from multiple domains. arxiv.org/pdf/2604.15597

The world now uses at least 40 million hectares of cropland, an area the size of Paraguay, to produce biofuels that account for only 4% of global transport energy In the US, we use 30-40% of our corn supply and 40-50% of our soybean oil supply to produce…about 6% of our transport fuel

Rooftop solar is usually so much more expensive to produce than utility scale solar that it doesn't make much headway in most markets. But electricity costs in Ireland are dominated by grossly high distribution & transmission costs, so self-consumed rooftop IS highly competitive.

Great article on what a national Irish farm electrification strategy could look like - by Michael Barnard: cleantechnica.com/2026/04/21/i...

Corn ethanol serves no purpose and is purely a handout to farmers. It costs more and emits more than normal petroleum. And it takes up half as much land area as all urban and suburban land in the US. If we replaced the land with solar, we'd get 3x as much power as the US uses.

95% of biofuel programs are deeply destructive and probably worse in their impacts than the fossil fuels they replace. But they funnel money to influential agribusinesses and sound good to the general public.

Indonesia biofuels program targets 5.7 million acres of protected forests Absolutely criminal - these wonderful animals will be left homeless, without food, with no future other than a miserable death This is what bio fuels fanatics call green news.mongabay.com/2025/02/indo...

One of the problems of using engineered microbes to produce dairy proteins is that even in very short production batches, genetic drift reduces yield drastically. This is because mutated microbes that sabotage their engineering reproduce faster than those that have the burden of producing proteins.

Fervo (Fracked Geothermal Co.) has a review of its first production pilot (600 days operating). The interesting part: the 1st field data on whether fracked geothermal can be a counter-generator in a renewables heavy grid. The answer is partly: but batteries may be a better solution.

Hawthorn Shieldbug - I think

Amidst everything else, the Trump regime has quietly killed off the U.S. Forest Service 🌲 “One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests… just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.” www.hatchmag.com/articles/tru...

Weird way to introduce a carbon tax - but 👍I guess?

What will happen to the 82 USFS experimental forests around the country? Many sites have decades-long experiments that are tracking how forests are changed by timber harvesting practices and climate change. As I say here, “you can't just pick up an experimental forest site and move it to SLC.”

I wonder if CRISPR tattoos will become a thing in the future - splicing encoded text or image into a highly preserved region of mitochondrial or Y chromosome DNA.

My latest column: Ireland’s data centre policy will drive significantly greater fossil fuel use, contradicting multiple statutory and policy targets which require rapid reductions instead. www.irishtimes.com/environment/...

This is something out of 1950’s pulp sci-fi. That war planners relied on LLM outputs for *strategic* war decisions should horrify ANYONE that has worked with them.

Ireland’s plan is to take 10% of its grassland and feed it to anaerobic digesters to make wildly expensive biomethane.

Using fossil methane to grow protein for animal feed plumbs new depths in unsustainability: agfundernews.com/unibio-plans...

Austin supply side reforms to housing development increased supply and decreased rents:

Great news from the south of England where life is recovering five years into a trawling ban. a "quiet but powerful transformation is unfolding beneath the waves" 🐟 www.bbc.com/news/article...

Natural gas is a great climate transition fuel in the sense that once you're on it, you realize you have to transition off it ASAP.

Michael Barnard summarizes the case for pessimism about Small Modular Nuclear Reactors: cleantechnica.com/2021/05/03/s...

"The sector does not operate within planning or environmental laws" says @epaireland.bsky.social Yet commercial peat extractors exported €40m worth of the product in plain sight last year www.irishtimes.com/environment/...

Whoever is responsible for the iOS 23 UIX should be fired.

Agriculture is by far the biggest impactor on water quality

Nitrate levels in the South East continue to drift up above the yellow line - which is the max guideline for moderate quality.

We have significant nitrate pollution in the South East in particular, and the Midlands is increasing.

Post elimination of dairy quotas - the last fifteen years has seen a steady decline in the quality of Irish river water. 115 river segments slipped from good/high status to moderate or worse. (And "moderate" is a euphemism - moderate status rivers are significantly impaired ecologically.)

The Irish biomethane strategy doesn't make any sense at all - and seems like a way to keep Gas Networks Ireland in business. How does it make sense to replace cheap fossil methane with €120/MWh to €220/MWh biomethane produced (contrary to industry messaging) primarily from dedicated energy crops?

Well that was a prescient observation.

Our perspective on ERW -Uncertainties of enhanced rock weathering for climate-change mitigation- was featured in the New Scientist Here is the paper: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

NOAA announces planned rollback of North Atlantic right whale protections www.mainepublic.org/environment-...

Estimated LCOE maps for geothermal electricity for (a) 2020, (b) 2030 and (c) 2050. [Limberger et al. 2014.] LCOE reductions over time is driven by improved drilling productivity. Current and near term geothermal LCOE remains high in most geo's.

Yup.

Good overview article from BCG - interesting how Finland added 3GW of electric boilers to help balance supply and demand in a high renewables grid. www.bcg.com/publications...

All the useful idiots talking about the fragility of the renewable energy supply chain may be about to get a lesson in how vastly more fragile the fossil supply chain is.

This poorly informed nytimes article on closed loop geothermal is a perfect example of why you need specialist reporters covering energy topics or else you just get warmed over regurgitation of company talking points. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/b...

Overlooked and overexploited: Extensive conversion of grasslands and wetlands driven by global food, feed, and bioenergy demand @pnas.org 🌐 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Boston Metal has a well progressed unique tech for electrochemical steel making Yes it’s raised a lot of capital and progress has been slower than hoped - but it works and could decarbonize the global steel industry.

One of the small joys of life: finding out that the old shoe that fit you perfectly hasn't been discontinued, so you can get another pair :)

Great perspective on Dutch geothermal energy strategy from two ex-oil + gas authors. > Focus on district heating schemes from known-good shallow-ish geothermal. > Stop wasting money on deep closed loop hopium projects. (Google translate from Dutch) energeia-nl.translate.goog/geothermie-v...

South German geothermal is primarily for district heat, but there is some electricity generation. The challenge is that Organic Rankine ⚡Generators really needs 180 degree heat to be cost effective, and you have to go to 5km+(with $$+ on drilling) to get there in that geo.

Windows 11 AI has a heavy footprint - uninstalling Copilot or other AI apps doesn't solve this. Instead - disable the WSAIFabric service - which prevents 2GB+ of WorkloadSessionHost (AI support) processes spawning.

Across Europe, only Norway seems to be at the right run-rate to reach 100% heat-pump based building heat in a 20 year time frame (50 new units per 1,000 households)