Larger point: 45Q is arguably the most perverse energy subsidy from a climate pespective. Govt paying corporations to capture and store CO2, instead of actually reducing emissions, means incentivizing more extraction and combustion of fossil fuels because more emissions means more public $.

The “AI will revolutionize academia because it can summarize articles” argument is so funny because this is what an abstract is for?? What it is good at is circumventing paywalls

If you are working towards a vision of shared prosperity in a clean energy future and your principal adversaries are unions, environmentalists, and community-based justice orgs, consider if just maybe it might be possible that you haven't unlocked secret knowledge they are all too dumb to understand

2. What he says about climate is patently false (more on that later) but to the extent he's saying "politicians shouldn't do the right thing unless it's popular", I'd note only that that is a toddlers view of leadership. If the popular kids are mean, should you be mean?

i do find it funny that yglesias brings up sheinbaum as some kind of gotcha here. like ok Matt do you want to talk about nationalizing the us fossil fuel industry under a socialist presidency?? many climate people would LOVE to chat about that

But markets!!! (All this is making my survey of people who live by many of the plants affected by this trend into more of an experiment than I’d expected…)

i'm regularly surprised by the pushback i get on the idea that a carbon tax isn't useful for full decarbonization. like it seems on its face obvious that taxes become less effective at changing behavior as wealth gets bigger, so you push out non-luxury stuff way before luxury stuff.

it's not actually funny but it's kind of funny that I wrote a thing for my school paper (if I remember correctly) about larry summers being shitty... ... WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL None of this was unclear! Social media didn't even exist, I wasn't a radio person, and I *still* knew that!!

No love lost for Nature as a publisher (independent of this work) but omg how is this not in Nature Italy (yes that’s a thing)

I'm running a not-especially-heavy model on Excel that keeps crashing, and my only conclusion is that I must have discovered forbidden knowledge. (The forbidden knowledge is that US coal isn't worth anything. I knew that, but I guess Excel didn't.)

Look around you. Do you see policies being implemented at scale? Do you see the end of investment into new fossil energy? Do you see phasing out of existing fossil infrastructure? Do you see massive renewables deployment and the lowering of demand for energy and materials? You do not. 3/n

Energy efficiency and demand flexibility can avoid costly power grid buildout, but utilities rarely invest in them because utities profit by putting steel in the ground. This is a main barrier to lowering your power bills. Utility regulators have had decades to fix this but few have done anything.

Geothermal for direct heat is the single biggest exception to electrify everything. Energy use is about 50% heat, 30% transportation, and 20% electricity. The less heat you have to put on a winter peaking electric grid, the better.

can I punch my midwestern card yet I forgot my coat and have about 45 minutes of nondiscretionary outside time today and was like eh, it’s 32, whatever (the feels like is 15) (I’m pretty cold)

So even small lies about data, about papers and their conclusions matters a lot. Super dismaying to see electricity people keep saying grid load growth brings down residential prices when it has not and there's a sleight of hand happening with "all retail prices" and "residential retail prices."

My partner, on discovering multiple students told me that the most interesting part of my class this term was "Emily talking about parking spaces" (💀) "You do get animated on the topic"

holy shit I didn’t check the # but it’s so emblematic of how Not Doing Well we are that the Biden rule is characterized in this article as “significantly” reducing climate emissions while also stating it‘s equivalent to taking 165,000 cars off the road…by 2050. THE US HAS 280,000,000 CARS

every neoliberal policy analyst wants to "trim the fat" of society until the lean times come. community level resilience, redundancies, etc are good actually

you can tell i'm doing a revision because i am poasting but i just suddenly realized this fucking review is AI the copyright / IP implications of a confidential MS going into these models aside, what a waste of my one wild and precious life politely explaining the critiques are bad

i appreciate the volunteer labor of my colleagues who peer review my work but also i am very tired of having to do point-by-point responses to comments like "you need a citation for the claim that fossil fuel combustion drives climate change" and "an LLM would probably make your paper better"

but ... markets! NO profitability is not the right sorting mechanism for asset phase-out!

Tfw what you, and many others, have been screaming about finally gets traction: "a big and growing number of countries recognise that a managed, collectively navigated route to fossil fuel phaseout is preferable to the chaotic absence of planning we currently have" cc: @gruberte.bsky.social

I cannot even begin to unpack how disappointed I have been that so many colleagues doing research on how to mitigate and adapt to climate change in US agriculture have been squandering their time to produce small science that just parrots and validates industry talking points. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

Dispatches from being an editor: having a full professor tell me that my writing is "unworthy of a Stanford graduate" when I politely explained that his paper was not currently publishable

🚨job alert🚨 I'm looking to hire at least one PhD student for next year, looking at decarbonization-oriented technology deployment within an ethical frame of resource allocation and justice outcomes. Full ad attached! Pref for CEEES admissions; deadline is 1 January.

LLMs are high on my list of Not Worth the Resource Allocation, but I am worried about how worried we are about the power demand. the US needs to go from ~1 TW of dirty and/or old capacity now to 2? 6? 7? TW of clean new cap by 2050 to keep us warm, cool, and transported. AI is a rounding error.

The fossil fuel industry has a long, sordid history of leaving behind toxic sites for taxpayers to clean up. State policy makers now need to protect taxpayers from the costs of stranded data centers and the gas plants and pipelines built to power them.

literally anyone who has ever been in a room where they weren't the most powerful person understands why "all of the above" energy doesn't work

Drax still burning 250-year-old trees sourced from forests in Canada, experts say

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