ClimateCal

This is worth pinning

@TomSteyer Where are you on single-stair? (And is that also a security risk, come to think of it)

The average California homebuyer used to be 32. Today they're 49. We used to build 300K homes per year. Now we barely build 100K. That's why housing is so damn expensive. I'll fix it.

These benefits are both good. Are there inherent security risks to shading a parkinglot with solar? (I know that I feel safer in the open air, if around people I'm not sure of.) If so, are there ways minimize the added risk? Who is our solar red-teamer?

This is the thing about economic growth in the modern west. There is no growth without physical transformation — new people, new homes, new infrastructure — and everywhere it actually happens people get upset at the fact of change.

India is not doing this for the climate. India does not have the natural gas resource of the US, and certainly not enough to support the power needs of a population nearly 5X the US. They are investing in domestic solar mfg also. This is energy independence and economics.

This is what the novel Ministry of the Future got wrong, with its horrifying "wet-bulb" event in India, where the grid goes down and air conditioning becomes unavailable, letting heat kill a million people. Now in places with fragile grids, people are taking matters into their own hands with cheap distributed solar. Democratizing technology leads to self-reliance.

Summary of my argument: Five-minute EV charging will be available to you. It will come at a cost. In the US, drivers will generally not choose to pay that cost. People will discover that that feature isn’t actually very important. Ubiquitous, reliable charging *is* important.

Solar, wind, batteries*, and EVs only dropped in price to where they win economically because earlier policy driven by environmental concerns scaled them. * - Batteries are a partial exception due to early scaling from consumer electronics. But that only got them part way.

I wonder if LLMs or anyone else is lexically lumping climate or social justice people in with the "justice-impacted" crowd.

@AndyMasley Venn with GMOs.

I'd be pretty interested in polling about what's driving very local opposition to data centers. How much are people motivated by water vs. noise vs. air pollution vs. electricity prices vs. worried about AI more broadly

@RARohde From the comments I can see, sadly, why there was a migration to bluesky.

We need to talk a bit about how utterly absurd the March heatwave was in the USA. This heatwave would have been impossible without a boost from climate change, but even with climate change it remains a deeply unlikely event. A thread looking at some of the numbers. 🧵

In March 2026, at least 1008 weather stations in the USA set (or tied) their local record for the warmest day ever observed in March. Of these, 229 recorded a new March record so extreme that it would also beat any previously observed day in April. 5/

@TomSteyer Maybe it's oilco astrophage.

@TomSteyer Tom, I want to buy an EV. I want to live in a safe, spartan 0NetE home. I can afford these things. What I don't have is a safe no-scam path from here to there, the aid of a doula. You might think churches would step up, or climate groups, but I have seen no evidence of such.

Fossil fuels are expensive. Renewable energy is cheap. I'll lower costs for Californians by fully embracing climate technology and making polluters pay.

So the 50th anniversary of Earth Day would have been in Spring of 2020?

@JessePeltan Who could calculate ROI on these (sheep&solar) vs alternatives?

this could have been a beautiful Roundup Ready™️ soy farm but now it’s ruined by all these sheep and solar panels 😭😭😭

There's a new heat pump in town with *no outdoor unit*: The Merino Mono Retails for $3,800 including installation. Mounts to the wall with two small holes to exchange heat w/ outside. Just in SF and LA for now. Founding team is Ex-Quilt, Ex-Gradient. heatmap.news/sustainability…

Je vais employer un mot fort : alarmant. Vous pouvez me le reprocher (ou m'insulter). Mais je l’assume, car il est justifié. Les prévisions sont alarmantes, oui : nous nous dirigeons vers l’un des (ou le ?) El Niño les plus puissants jamais observés depuis le début des mesures. Comment je justifie l'emploi de ce terme "alarmant" ? ➡️Parce qu’El Niño agit comme un accélérateur ponctuel de chaleur à l’échelle mondiale. ➡️En plus de cela, de nombreux travaux montrent une accélération du réchauffement climatique (depuis 2015). ➡️Et depuis le précédent El-Nino, les températures mondiales semblent décrocher des trajectoires habituelles. On voit sur la carte que, dans la zone clé du Pacifique équatorial (domaine de El-Nino), les anomalies de température de surface de la mer pourraient atteindre +2,5 à +3°C en moyenne. Autrement dit. Comme ça c'est clair : on ajoute une couche de chaleur exceptionnelle sur un climat déjà fortement réchauffé qui ne s'est pas encore remis du dernier El-Nino. Il est donc très probable que les records mondiaux (déjà pulvérisés il y a à peine deux ans) soient de nouveau battus, et largement, dès cette année... Je crois que, pour la plupart, vous ne vous rendez pas compte des conséquences et notamment agricoles, dans un contexte géopolitique extrêmement tendu.

@marcportermagee Not being conformist by nature probably also helped them in inventing.

One of the funny quirks of British history is that religious nonconformists weren't allowed to go to Oxford or Cambridge, so a bunch of bright students were tracked into apprenticeships and technical education, and then they invented the modern world