Peter Erickson

All the President’s Men turns 50 today. This famous “six‑minute shot” is a masterclass in phone acting and pure technical nerve. Director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis pull off a single, unbroken slow zoom: from a wide, humming newsroom to a tight close-up on Redford. No cuts. No safety net. Tension builds in real time. Redford carries it with typical quiet confidence. Six minutes of note-taking and talking into a phone, no flashy “Oscar clip.” He even flubs a name (“McGregor” for “Dahlberg”), corrects himself naturally, and Pakula keeps it because it feels authentic. The background is part of the story. As Woodward hones in on his phone call, everyone behind him huddles around a TV watching Senator Tom Eagleton resign. The contrast is deliberate: they chase the “obvious” headline, while the camera drifts past them to Woodward, and the real story. To hold Redford and the busy background in focus early on, they used a split‑diopter lens, then had to ease it out as the camera moves in. A technical tightrope. The timing of both actor and cinematographer is spot on. As Woodward closes in on the truth, the world literally falls away: the newsroom blurs, the noise fades, and we lock into his obsession. It’s one of cinema’s great moments: Redford doing almost nothing—and somehow everything at the same time. What makes this shot brilliant is the contrast it carves between Redford and the newsroom around him. The visual language does the talking: he’s locked in, disciplined, driven, all focus and fire. He stands apart because the work matters more than anything else.

My most viewed tweet ever and it’s about the actual landfill where my friends used to drink kegs of beer over 30 years ago. Thank you for your support.

This is not some sort of fog of war situation w terrible options foisted upon us by external forces. This is a war of choice and now our country is threatening to commit genocide. It is time for all American patriots to speak up, unanimously, against this monstrous, insane war.

Use the 25th Amendment, Congress, please….

@SamAdlerBell We had one in small-town Illinois called “the Fill”, which I assumed was named after drinking (a lot) but when I went realized it was an actual, working landfill

There is culture in small towns. Where I grew up, we had a drinking spot in the woods called “The Falls,” which I assumed, before going there, must be near a waterfall, but actually it was just near a small cliff, next to which was a sign that said “the falls” with a bunch of tally marks

Our president is a deranged lunatic and should clearly be removed from office. He’s only there because of Republican Members of Congress.

@IrvingSwisher Yeah, Norway shows how distinct the issues can be, like maybe can be petrostate and electrostate at same time

“Petrostate” has a good meaning even tho it’s overused, but not a fan of the term “electrostate” Norway continues to be a leading producer of oil and gas. It also has a diversified economy and is leading the world in EV adoption The contrast is imprecise & misses the tradeoffs

Makes me want to be an editor

Annual report words: Bold Ambitious Vision Mission Unprecedented Groundbreaking Transformative Game-changing Innovative Strides Striking Strategic

@lydiadepillis (Our paper was about purposely limiting supply. Severin Borenstein pointed out that the cost to global consumers would be even greater with this excellent retort here (about California, but fundamental economics are similar anywhere): energyathaas.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/sho…

@lydiadepillis Different, more nuanced method, but we came up with about $250/ton CO2 here too (assuming oil price of $110/bbl, so not that different than current situation). link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Nobody would have designed a carbon tax with this much volatility and loss of life, but I'm still wondering how does $100/barrel oil works out in terms of dollars per ton of CO2

As we are having the distinct pleasure of living through the worst energy crisis in many generations, I thought I would give a few references for how energy security has been quantified over the last decades. 1. The IEA was established for energy security purposes in 1973. The more recent way they calculate short-term energy security is to use something they termed in 2010 or so as the MOSES model: oecd.org/content/dam/oe… 2. A paper I have always liked by Aleh Cherp & Jessica Jewell covers many of the older metrics and indices into a new framework: Beyond the Four As: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… 3. In 2006, some great researchers at ECN came up with the Supply/Demand Index, a nice contribution: publications.ecn.nl/bs/2006/ECN-C-… 4. In 2005, I helped start the Security of Supply Report for Ireland with Brian Ó Gallachóir and others. We looked at about 50 different metrics from regulatory to market to more typical import dependency, etc.: publications.tno.nl/publication/34… 5. Andy Stirling at Sussex did a lot of great work using various techniques to consider energy security starting around 20+ years ago. ideas.repec.org/a/eee/enepol/v… 6. Our 2008 book, Analytical Methods for Energy Diversity and Security, highlighted about 8 different methods for considering the topic: amazon.com/Analytical-Met… 7. The World Economic Forum under Roberto Bocca has produced an Energy Index (including Security) over more than a decade - I've enjoyed working on the Advisory Council for that work over the whole time: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… 8. Indra Overland and others (including me) developed an energy security index that focused on geopolitics: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… This is far from a comprehensive list, but hopefully useful for those of you interested in learning more about the art and science of energy security.

@bataille_chris Interesting. What does that imply about what the temp target should be, then? (If anything). Seems this logic implies the temp target should be whatever we can get to without CDR (then use whatever CDR we can to go down further?)

Reminder - the PA doesn’t commit to a single temp, but “well below 2.0C & towards 1.5C”. That covers a c-budget from ~80-250 GtCO2 to ~900-1200 GtCO2. IMO it’s dangerous to focus on 1.5C because of the CDR req. Instead everything new we build or renovate should be near zero.

Everyone keeps talking about intermittency. Let me show you two kinds. Wind and solar output varies hourly. It follows weather patterns that we can forecast days in advance. It has a well-understood distribution. We have storage, interconnection, demand response, and decades of operational experience managing it. When the wind and/or solar drops, the system operator dispatches other resources. This is a solved engineering problem. Gas supply is stable for years. Then a war starts. The Strait of Hormuz closes. Ras Laffan is hit by missiles. And 20% of the world's LNG supply disappears overnight with no forecast, no warning, and no technical fix. In four weeks, UK wholesale gas has more than doubled. Wholesale electricity has nearly doubled. The BoE has frozen rate cuts and markets are pricing hikes. Businesses with no price cap are facing existential cost shocks. QatarEnergy says full repair could take five years. Goldman Sachs says elevated prices could persist through 2027. The next time someone tells you wind and solar are unreliable, ask them this: which intermittency has done more damage to the UK economy this month? Wind variability costs the UK approximately £1.5 billion per year in constraint payments under the current (flawed) market design. This Hormuz crisis will cost tens of billions. Renewable variability is largely predictable, manageable, and getting cheaper to manage every year as storage costs fall. Gas supply disruption is unpredictable, unmanageable, and getting more frequent as geopolitical instability increases. The real reliability risk in the UK energy system is not the wind. It is the assumption that globally traded fossil fuels will always be available at a stable price through a narrow strait on the other side of the world. Every wind farm, solar panel, battery, and heat pump installed in the UK is capacity that does not depend on the Strait of Hormuz being open. That is not intermittent. That is permanent. #EnergyTransition #Intermittency #WindEnergy #SolarEnergy #EnergySecurity #UKEnergy #RenewableEnergy #GasPrices #StraitOfHormuz #CleanEnergy #EnergyStorage #NetZero #PowerSystems

@jaeporeon Awesome!

@SEI_Erickson we are really trying to come back and headline if we can soon

sort of want to move to Seattle now. what an incredible city

An absolute classic. The kind we sat our friends down and said, “you have to listen to this”.

This man is a low-key Seattle legend. Just doing his job every day, telling us what's going down in the greater Capitol Hill neighborhood. And making great photos in his spare time. Legend.

@dinosaur_info 25 minutes later, what happened?!?

The opening beat of Sufjan Steven’s Impossible Soul echoes through the half-empty bar as me and my backward baseball cap step up to the karaoke stage…