challenge difficulty for chatbot-using applicants: impossible

a protip is not to plagiarize my paper in your application if you want me to fund you

It would seem they're still flaring in the Bakken.

Elsevier just published an article advocating more AI-use in peer-review... that was written with the assistance of AI. Abolish predatory journals (Elsevier). www.elsevier.com/connect/reth...

It's been really, really nice seeing the Catholic social justice tradition in the US feel like it's empowered to spread its wings again without risking censure after a long time of being suppressed by US Catholic leadership, and it's exactly what I was hoping for from Pope Bob.

🌧️ Correlation distances of precipitation gauges vary in both space and time! New work out in @agu.org's GRL, led by @alexayeo.bsky.social (with @lakeographer.bsky.social and me) examines precip correlation distances over the US. Check it out: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

It’s a good thing Texas installed so much reliable solar, wind, and battery capacity to shoulder the load in the event the state’s unreliable coal generation suffered a catastrophic failure. Because apparently it did. 🔌💡 ieefa.org/resources/ne...

At the risk of angry-posting, I hope we learn something from this given the *extensive* environmental justice and environmental concessions that were made to "protect" the programs

DOE appears set to terminate tens of millions in funding for Project Cypress and South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub, the two big projects in the US DAC Hubs program.

This is a privileged complaint, but one thing I find really, really insidious about search-embedded LLMs that affects my life is that summaries make me sound way less technical than I am, and also basically claim that I advocate for really problematic technologies as social justice tools.

Will I be the first to suggest the carbon offsets worked exactly as planned: they delayed real action for another 25 years

my kingdom for the research community to stop bemoaning the need to "overbuild" renewables while smiling magnanimously upon the economically efficient choice to have peaker gas plants running at 10% cap factors. it's not overbuilding if we need that much to meet demand!

Give all research faculty support for 1 student/year challenge

So I assumed this was coming and/or happening but I just found my first actual record of using LLMs instead of people in a participatory decision making process. Tbc I support doing work to figure out what likely problems are before using people's time, but actually *subbing* the people...smdh

Coal recommissioning 🙃 Relatedly, what was that again about how EPA didn’t need to regulate new build coal because no one would do that? I heard proposals for new coal under Biden and I hear them more now.

welp tonight i'm reading a 1975 paper that uses iron lung patients as an example group of people who care a lot about electricity reliability and just...thank fuck I haven't had to worry about polio in my life, and also bloody hell, do we need to worry about polio again???

I would not have gotten the direction of this chart right (US petrochemical feedstock supply, specifically from petroleum) but as soon as I thought about it, it clicked. Pretty sure this shows the big shift from oil to ngas-derived feedstocks for plastics &c -- but check me?

In a convo today i was reflecting on the sheer level of detailed analysis that the fossil fuel corporations put into their planning and execution work. If we are going to put them out of business for good, why would it be possible with less strategy or analysis than they put into their reproduction?

Very excited to announce our* $450k RFP for ~$25-100k proposals on research for economic resilience in fossil fuel-dependent communities in the United States as they transition. Hit us with your preproposals, due 31 October 👻 *Resilient Energy Economies Initiative! This one sponsored by Sloan

(extremely Žižek voice) ::sniff:: that…is ideology

One thing I learned in almost 30 years of work in US ag policy is that people self censoring their scholarship & doing work within the parameters of what they think big ag will accept resulted in a world where nobody knows how to think meaningfully about alternative choices & argues for them. My 2¢.

What a change from the era where every grad student had a fairly shitty scicomm training that started with “make a twitter account”

I liked this piece. A point too infrequently made: resource use (eg energy) isn’t inherently a problem; resource use for things that aren’t worth that precious allocation absolutely is a problem. i don’t think AI is worth it.

Weird how this is always go to Jupiter or live in the center of the earth but not “everyone has a good union job and healthcare”, like that’s the thing that is believing in unicorns

The hill I will die on: making people appreciate the policy continuities between administrations/parties. In energy and and agriculture, they are essential to understand how we got here. The narratives may change at the margin, but the powerful rent-seekers are the same.

One of the good uses of this time where climate has extremely little juice in the U.S. would be to sit down and map out exactly what we have to do if climate is an imperative again, primarily on social and fiscal policy.

The pro-gas orientation I experienced in the Biden DOE was honestly kind of wild. And that built on the Obama DOE.

I don't find these narratives compelling when you look at the data is all. This is not some great undoing from the last admin.

This is obviously wild in how plain it is, but it's also wild how much the effort to sell gas is fully consistent with Obama, Biden, etc. policy (though the climate denial there wasn't overt!)

I have so many feelings about the use of Ivanpah as the image here

I don't want to start a thing so I'll just say that there will never be a good argument for privatizing USPS. That would be like privatizing libraries. The aim of services isn't to be run for profit, they are for serving the greater good, which USPS has been extremely successful at.

We shouldn't need to do this type of shit when we have a Dem trifecta and the feds are declaring war against our cities. Get your shit together @gavinnewsom.bsky.social

Hi, decarbonization projections suggest we need 5-8 TW of clean capacity by midcentury. (Extensive) feelings about the application aside, if we can’t succeed at…10? 300? GW by the highest resource companies we are deeply unserious about this

It sure looks like every last major tech firm is abandoning past commitments to end their use of fossil fuels. Particularly concerning given how we know that fossil fuel burning power plants are being built NOW with the explicit aim of powering data centers www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/i...

Don’t wanna be like “we’ve been saying“ but….we’ve been saying (Even if uptake were higher the sovereignty, land use, etc implications are wild. There’s no easy out through CDR — mitigate mitigate mitigate!)

The achievable carbon uptake from planting trees is much lower than previous estimates, and even lower than many nations have committed to. New paper by Wang et al. in Science. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪🌏🌳🌲🌐

Doing a “I guess I should have data to support my takes” test AI project and yeah, it can’t do math. Sometimes when I tell it it’s wrong I get an emotional dump from a computer and a slightly less wrong answer, though, so…yay?

this is why governments can't rely on voluntary action (re: the AZ governor being concerned that the utility walked back its GHG goals, which were only goals). the literal government has a lot more levers than being mad online!! use them!!

Oh hey, I’ve got surveys out in the street at both Campbell and Eddystone (plants with emergency stay-open orders) and 👀

I hate this so much for a ton of reasons but especially because of *course* physical & life sciences are political. Maybe moreso, because they can be very expensive. Why do you study this instead of that? Who decides what’s fundable? It’s a resource allocation, and that’s political.

Hey guys check this out

If you wouldn't be willing to let it close / stop existing / whatever, you already own the liability. Don't sell the profit.

This is an important article, as i think it's the first time i've seen these two things intersecting in such a public way. Jigar Shah makes the case that, for a small reduction in rate of return (0.13% is what i am told), it's OK to sell our infrastructure to private equity firms.

I, too, have been surprised for a while that we don’t see more acts of sabotage at fossil facilities

we already had a tool for this, it was called a model railroad

this guy is what people pretend Gavin Newsom is

Oh cool so now AI is stealing and misinterpreting my shit (academics / writers: it’s eye opening to prompt the LLMs to describe what you do!) and also my own government is rewriting and destroying my shit. Very cool, very motivated to write more.