We are still in the earliest days of battery adoption, using several chemistries. Through process innovation to allow electrification, it will eventually eat the markets of all but the highest energy density uses, eg jet fuel, extended heat loads. System inertia is the only brake

Should I be worried or overjoyed by this? 😉🤣 www.earth.com/news/an-almo...

The problem is North Americans have been simultaneously educated and reaffirmed from personal manipulated experience that: 1) climate change is dangerous and getting worse, 2) their children are only safe in SUVs+, 3) that EVs & heat pumps are very expensive. None of this was necessarily true.

The gritty municipal water sports (sailing, raising, paddling) club I belong to now has to put “winter king tide” flood control measure around *everything*. This started a year or two ago. #adaptation

I do think the “meet people where they’re at” advice has been twisted into “people are stupid” in a lot of political settings and it’s just…not true?

A propos of nothing, & I don’t like calling climate policy “left of center”, instead common sense derived from science, but the “left” has a bad history of eating itself alive through purity tests while the right swallows its pride & unites around a champion (& implodes on loss).

Distribution is everything: “the problem with QE is that it is difficult to get money into the hands of those lower down the income distribution … since QE leads to an increase in asset prices, it will benefit asset owners who tend to be wealthier than average” Lan/Topp 2024

Cutting methane emissions from oil & gas will slow climate change & create economic benefits. Read our reports: ➡️ Economic opportunities in low-emissions energy: buff.ly/pYKdTzx ➡️ Strong methane rules protect jobs & climate: buff.ly/9puqAqG #PembinaIn2025

Just for fun, I wouldn’t be surprised if the key to lowering drought & fire risk in the wooded boreal (the middle bit of Canada) will be encouraging beavers to come back and back flood the land www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti....

Official data is in today, and US solar continues to grow rapidly, with generation up 21% compared to last year!

This is the “monster of the deep” of US utility bills, natural gas prices rising due to low oil prices & LNG exports, and it hitting them twice, directly and through marginal electricity prices. The way out of this Pandora’s box is adding lots of renewables & batteries and end-use electrification.

May you all be as chilled and happy as my cat 🎄

One thing I’m noticing in this era is that people are starting to lose their grip on the basic precepts of rule of law, even on basic civil contracting stuff. You can’t just do what you want without consequences without all sorts of other stuff unravelling.

Dear @theatlantic.com, US censorship doesn't legally apply in Canada, so there was no obligation for Global TV to remove the clip. And I'm done with my Atlantic subscription, thanks.

Interesting paper. EOR can enhance subsurface methanogenesis, where the CO2->CH4. An EOR well with good MRV could exploit this for enhanced pressure & gas extraction, but a poorly run well could lead to more leakage, underscoring the importance of MRV. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

You could cry, or laugh. Next they are going to ask “how do we fill these batteries as cheap as possible”? ☀️💨

What, include all stakeholders with a unofficial if not official political veto in a consultation process? What a radical idea.

"They're going to give me nuclear armed battleships!"

1000x this👇It would be ok if we collectively shared a clear eyed POV that we would keep extracting just enough fossil fuels to make up the difference with renewables until they could fully meet end-use demand. But we don't, renewables investment is insufficient, and this is going to end badly.

As a reflection, wind turbines & solar photovoltaics were expensive toys when I started work in this field in the 1990s. They have since evolved to full commercial usability, often at lower cost than all other options with relatively minimal impacts, & it astonishes me that people are rejecting them

Short version: Punching deep holes in the earth to get stuff out is getting steadily cheaper, sealing them afterwards to make sure nothing leaks is expensive. Drill less holes.

On the one hand, Nova Scotia could pick up a lot of wind turbine equipment very cheap. On the other hand, this is a disaster for wind investment and investment certainty in general in the US. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/c...

We need to eventually get to a global structural currency to serve for liquidity, a common currency for trade, BOP closing, etc, etc, (not for national consumption transactions, and national currency cure free floats are useful), and we’ll keep paying a deadweight loss until we get it.

Happy Solstice 🕯️

The Scandinavians always get there first 🤣 … www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Everything else aside, this is the phenomenon that will define 2025-2035. China will ascend to developed country status, with cities as developed+ as anywhere in the west. What they choose to do with that wealth & implied power, & how everyone else reacts, will define geopolitics for good or ill.

Good! Colorado Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper objected to moving forward with the minibus spending package, which would have funded 85 to 90% of the federal government through September 2026, because of the Trump regime's plan to dismantle NCAR.

Who could have seen this coming? It’s lottery which of Japan, South Korea or Poland acquire nuclear weapons first now that the US umbrella is the seen as less than certain.

....and battery storage!

Worth reading if only for the vision/goal China has for itself developing into a developed economy by 2035 (~$20000 USD per capita). www.chinabankingnews.com/p/china-need...

Canada has the authority to enforce environmental laws, yet is choosing not to as climate targets fade into the distance. Former environment minister Steven Guilbeault says it's time for the federal government to tell provinces: "Actually, you can't break the law."

All you really need to understand about water usage in the western United States is that every single use - even the ones that sound egregiously wasteful like AI data centers - rounds down to 0 compared to what irrigated agriculture uses

It's long known the urban armies near Beijing wouldn't intervene & they had to resort to outside units, but this story of the gentle defiance of a general in the army that eventually carried the Tiananmen crackdown cuts deep. Gift link to NYT story. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/w...

“NCAR has played a greater role in advancing weather prediction & atmospheric modeling than perhaps any other single entity in the world,” says @weatherwest.bsky.social Dismantling NCAR would be “like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.” KH

The foundational axiom of science is that reality is real and that it can be understood at least to some approximation. The foundational axiom of fascism is that there is no such thing as reality, and truth is whatever the leader says it is. Science will always wither under fascism.

I really didn't think modern civilization was this vulnerable to "I don't like what I see so I'm going to gouge my eyes out."

Here's our reporting on the proposed dismantling of the jewel of US atmospheric science, @ncar-ucar.bsky.social. The plan is to break NCAR apart and disburse some parts to other locations (like the research aircraft fleet) and eliminate others. www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪 #AGU25 #climate

When you miss a seminar by two of your favourite scholars because you missed the ad until 30 mins after it happened ….

Ok, I’m running a fun experiment - I posed the following Q to ChapGpt, now I’m going to try the humans “Global oil demand is ~103.9 mbpd, supply is running just over 108, how much storage is there and how before this becomes a problem if demand and supply continue at this rate?”

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

A Syrian refugee took 5 bullets while taking down a gunman in the Bondi Beach Hanukkah shootings. Why don’t you see that in the @nytimes.com, because it doesn’t fit the “comfortable” politics of the moment?

It’s been a tough year for the climate movement. But while we may be down, we’re never out. Especially with the news coming out of China that coal consumption in the power sector is on track for its first decline since the Paris agreement That’s what I’d technically call a BFD 🤯

As always, the devil will be in the details. While an end to FF petrol & diesel would be great, if we get -95% & substantial coverage of the material lifecycle emissions from steel, aluminum, glass, plastics, copper, electronics etc, etc. this could be a jump forward in broader deep decarbonization.

This was a Fall of Rome moment and future historians will remember it as such

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

You think we have problems now? In ~5 billlion years the Sun will run out of fuel and explode, and about roughly the same time there’s a good chance the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide and tear themselves apart while combining 🤣

I am so mad America, why can’t you protect your children? Everyone has crazy people, most places don’t let them have guns.

One of my wife’s cousin’s kids is locked up in a library at Brown, closeted from a shooter. I know her personally. She could be a senator or president, someday, easy. I don’t know what to do with this. *fear* *anger*

The left and right sides should have been blue, for the Pacific & Atlantic. Very central Canadian centric. The Arctic should stay white, but is melting.