Grey Gowder

NYC and every city across the US needs urban bio swales as well. These work in concert with your sewage system by diverting a portion of rainwater into the ground, recharging the aquifer, absorbing carbon, supporting pollinators, and making the city beautiful. More please

CNN also reports that this settlement also forces the IRS to end any active audits into Trump, his family, and his businesses Not only does it further protect POTUS from accountability, but he's expanding this shield to Don Jr. and Eric and Ivanka and Jared and their interests

President Trump's $1.776 billion settlement with the IRS is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history. They moved fast to avoid the scrutiny of the judicial process, and very likely violated the Constitution. This is an outrage.

The bones of hundreds of mid-sized cities in the USA are already there, but we need a nationwide plan to build rail between them, invest in their sustainable future, and liberalize zoning so that millions of families can once again afford to live in their urban cores.

What Zohran Mamdani is doing is NOT EVEN SOCIALISM. You know what he's doing? He's showing what can be accomplished when the WEALTHY PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES.

All civilisations collapse for basically the same reason: they could have responded to reality but they didn't. Our civilisation is no different as we face the consequences of runaway climate collapse: we can but we won't. “New Orleans is in a terminal condition, and we need to be clear with the patient that it is terminal,” he said. “There is an opportunity for palliative care, we can transition people and the economy. We can get ahead of this.” But, he added, “no politician wants to first give this terminal diagnosis. They will speak about it behind closed doors, but never in public.” theguardian.com/us-news/2026/m…

Mississippi River LiDAR

In an effort to enhance the prestige of vocational training, the Danish government is building 3 new Håndværkskollegiet (craft colleges). This one, in Herning, opened last year. It hosts up to 85 people at once, & specialises in masonry, carpentry, plumbing & metal. Stunning!

My contribution to the solar/farm discourse is that solar panels capture about 100x as much usable energy from the sun as corn grown for ethanol, if you include the energy cost of growing corn. Ethanol corn is 40% of all US corn and is literally just there to capture energy from the sun. We have a way of doing that much more efficiently now!

Trump's Arc de Triomphe would lionize Gen. Robert E. Lee's mansion and obscure the Lincoln Memorial. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

@aufcXylph Fuck ICE

Atlanta United 2 winger Moises Tablante recently posted that his father was detained by ICE at work if you are able to, please support him and his family through this difficult process gofund.me/e2365341f

If a million of us each planted one native flower this spring, we'd feed pollinators across hundreds of species, like bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, beetles, and hoverflies. A single milkweed produces up to 300 flowers over a summer and attracts more than 100 insect species. A single mountain mint plant supports over 40 species of native bees. A patch of goldenrod feeds 126 species of butterflies and moths. The numbers stack up fast when you consider an individual plant gets hundreds to thousands of pollinator visits across its bloom period. A million plants would produce hundreds of millions of pollinator visits across a single growing season. Bees feeding their young. Caterpillars completing their life cycles. Migrating monarchs refueling. Hummingbirds fattening up for the trip south. The pollinator collapse we keep reading about is real. It's also reversible, and the reversal doesn't require everyone to be an expert gardener or rip up their lawn. It requires enough yards to have one native flower in them. Plant one this spring. Native milkweed, mountain mint, bee balm, coneflower, goldenrod, aster, sunflower. Whichever fits where you live and what you have room for. Then leave the seed heads up through winter so the birds can pick at them and the next generation of pollinators can overwinter in the stems. The math of habitat doesn't require everyone. It needs enough of us. One plant per yard, multiplied by a million.

Welp. That’s fucking insane.

The World's largest Wind Turbine 26MW. In its lifetime it will produce the same energy as burning 750,000 tons of coal. That's 44,118 truck loads. And that's just 1 Wind Turbine.

A solar farm in Minnesota planted native wildflowers between its panel rows. Five years later, total insect populations tripled. Native bees increased 20-fold. Not only did insect populations boom, soybean fields next to the solar arrays got twice as many bee visits as fields farther away. Two of the things we usually think of as competing turned out to reinforce each other. One study, published in Environmental Research Letters in late 2024, tracked two utility-scale solar sites built on retired farmland in southern Minnesota, where the developer seeded native prairie species between rows of panels in 2018. By 2022, the sites looked less like industrial energy infrastructure and more like remnant prairie. Goldenrod soldier beetles colonized the goldenrod stands. Bumblebees nested in the soil. Monarch butterflies passed through during migration. The wildflower diversity grew sevenfold; insect diversity grew eightfold. This matters because, like it or not, utility-scale solar is going to take up real space. The US is on track to cover roughly six million acres in panels by 2050. The default approach is turfgrass, gravel, or herbicide-maintained bare ground, which is ecologically dead. The Argonne study shows the alternative isn't more expensive or harder to maintain. It's just a different seed mix.

Most people have no idea that the U.S. is currently pulling off the largest "plumbing" project in human history right in the Florida Everglades. For nearly a century, we basically tried to kill the Everglades by draining them to build houses and farms. We turned a massive wet swamp into a dry, rotting mess. That dry soil didn't just sit there—it started "bleeding" carbon back into the atmosphere like a massive, invisible leak. Now, there is a massive federal and state mission to literally reverse the flow of water and re-flood the land. They are calling it "Restoration," but it’s really a massive environmental "U-turn." And it’s working. New data shows that putting the water back is doing more for the air than almost any "green" tech we’ve invented: • The Squeeze: The re-flooded land is now sucking 14 million tons of CO2 out of the sky every year. • The Math: That’s like erasing the exhaust of 3 million cars annually. • The Powerhouse: The coastal mangroves are the real MVPs, trapping that carbon in the mud and locking it away for good. We spent billions breaking the planet's natural filter. Now we're spending billions to turn it back on—and the results are staggering. We’ve known how to move water for a century—so why did it take a climate crisis to use it like this?

The strongest El Niño in 150 years? That’s not hype, it’s the actual median forecast right now for the developing event later this year. It could rival — or even surpass — the legendary 1877 El Niño, the strongest on record, which was linked to widespread drought, monsoon failure, and global food crises in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. But what does that mean today? It means a tremendous amount of excess ocean heat being released into the atmosphere - energy that can rearrange weather patterns around the world. That typically leads to: 🌧️ Increased flood risk in some regions 🔥 More intense/ prolonged heatwaves, drought and fires 🌪️ A shift in severe storm tracks 🌀 And often a suppressed Atlantic hurricane season, but boosted in the East Pacific. Since it’s so huge, when the Pacific talks, the atmosphere listens! But this isn’t 1877… forecasting, infrastructure, and global awareness are far better today. We’ll be better prepared. Now transparency on the science: the 1877 3-month Nino 3.4 ocean temp anomaly maxed out at +2.7°C. The latest median forecast for all ensembles in late 2026 is +2.75°C in the Nino 3.4 region. So, it may be stronger. Here’s the caveat: that region is now approx .75 - 1°C warmer than it was in 1855, so some of the heat building up there is on top of a baseline which is already warmer today. So in absolutes… this will probably rival 1877, but relatively speaking due to global warming, the event will likely fall short and thus its global impacts may not rise to that level. That’s why we now have the RONI (index) which accounts for our new warmed World. (Pictured here is the October NMME with a region of +3-4°C over the East Tropical Pacific) Will certainly be interesting to watch from a scientific perspective.

53 Nations participating: Angola, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, European Union, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Kiribati, Luxembourg, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Mongolia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Portugal, Senegal, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, Türkiye, Tuvalu, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Vietnam.

The National Park Service ran on a $3 billion budget and generated $56 billion in economic output in 2024. That’s over $17 back for every $1 invested. With a record of 332 million visitors last year, Americans clearly care about their parks and expect them to be funded.

ICYMI: Yesterday’s post at CSY. If the federal government would just assert its role in the reimagining of the U.S. Numbered Highway System, we could dramatically change our suburban environment. petesaunders.substack.com/p/a-proposal-f…