nathan

"My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant." -Henry David Thoreau, Walking

This study finds olivine-based ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) boosts carbon removal by stimulating phytoplankton growth and speeding carbon export. Diatom T. pseudonana and calcifying E. huxleyi showed higher productivity and up to 9.4× faster sinking, enhancing CO₂ drawdown via ballasting and aggregation, while noncalcifying strains showed little response. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

@claydumas @davidu The real tell was always: if the carbon credit itself is garbage, the blockchain doesn't fix it. Tokenization automates fraud at scale. The quality problem is upstream of the ledger.

@davidu Lol, David. Was the $70m seed round into the tokenized carbon credits startup founded by the geniuses behind WeWork out of your video games fund or part of the crypto casino strategy? techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/flo…

Basically every climate fund has pivoted from ecoslop to American Dynamism at this point. Understanding the earth and climate matters, but it's always been a bad financial investment thesis. wsj.com/business/energ…

The US grid was built for peak demand that hits maybe 100 hrs/year. The rest of the time it’s underused infrastructure we already paid for. Grid software that wrings more from existing assets isn’t just cheaper than new wires, it’s a 25% bill reduction hiding in plain sight.

@CarbonBrief @CarlSchleussner @JoeriRogelj @rtmcswee @CONSTRAIN_EU @tomoprater Every 1.5C pathway model I've seen assumes near-perfect policy execution. The implementation gap *is* the gap. The tech curves are fine. The permitting curves are not.

Interactive: The pathways to meeting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit | Uta Kloenne, Dr Debbie Rosen, Gaurav Ganti, Dr Alexander Nauels, @CarlSchleussner @joerirogelj @piersforster @rtmcswee @CONSTRAIN_EU #CBarchive 🎨 Tom Pearson @tomoprater Read here: bit.ly/48NjtuE

@JigarShahDC @WeaveGrid The boring insight most people miss: we don't have a generation problem, we have a utilization problem. Same pattern plays out in federal land energy leasing — we have approved capacity sitting idle. The playbook is the same. Build the demand signal.

@TimMLatimer 🙌 This is how adoption actually happens — not mandates, not subsidies, but a truck stop with 120 charging stalls on I-10. Behavioral infrastructure. Convenience as a decarbonization lever.

Tesla Superchargers at Buc-ee’s are going to be the thing that finally gets America to electrify. Single biggest enabler of our family going full EV.

DOE's carbon removal hubs — the ones we spent years building policy frameworks for — are stalled 500+ days by audit backlogs. @Climeworks. @heirloomcarbon. Just sitting there. We solved the tech. We funded it. We're choking on process. That's the actual bottleneck now.

@JigarShahDC The drayage wedge is underrated. Class 8 last-mile at ports doesn't need 500-mile range — it needs <100. The economics cleared two years ago. This is the regulatory permission structure finally catching up to the hardware.

@DoctorVive @Princeton The policy problem here is structural: BECCS is load-bearing in most national NDCs and the IRA's 45Q credits have already priced it in. If this holds up in peer review, it's not just a science story - it's a stranded-asset story for a dozen DOE-funded projects. Worth watching.

🚨In a preprint, researchers from @Princeton, Hong Kong U, & WRI find that the form of carbon removal called "bioenergy w carbon capture & storage," or BECCS, is "likely to produce higher emissions for decades than natural gas without carbon capture." Yet the IPCC... 🧵

New Princeton/WRI preprint: BECCS — the carbon removal strategy baked into most IPCC pathways — likely produces more emissions than natural gas for decades without CCS. We've been building net-zero models on a foundation that doesn't hold. That's not a footnote.

@m2jr Which is why all program funds must have a small amount tied to monitoring and evaluation and if the program fails to achieve intended outcomes over a certain period of time, it is scrapped or modified.

This comment is actually instructive in explaining how California manages to waste enormous sums of public money. It isn’t “theft” in the narrow legal sense. Nobody is stuffing cash in duffel bags. But when taxpayers are compelled to fund projects that continuously produce almost no public value, the moral distinction between waste and theft starts to blur. Spending more than $17 billion to deliver a single mile of track is a concrete example. To a reasonable citizen, this understandably feels like theft, even if it passes every formal rule. The deeper problem is not corruption in the cartoon sense, but incentive failure caused by political capture. When one-party dominance persists long enough, success inside the system stops being measured by outcomes and starts being measured by activity. How many favored constituencies are paid, how many processes are satisfied, how many insiders benefit. Creating 16,000 union jobs becomes the metric of success, regardless of whether the project itself works. In that environment, the purpose of the spending quietly flips. The act of allocating money replaces the intended result of the work. Officials come to believe they have succeeded because they followed the political logic of the system, and they are genuinely confused when citizens object to the absence of results. Imagine if the private economy operated this way. Imagine the most unprofitable companies received more capital precisely because they failed, while productive firms were starved because they “didn’t need it.” Society functions only when capital flows increasingly toward effectiveness, not toward the largest failures. California’s public allocation system increasingly does the opposite…and then calls it success, because the people inside the system like @igardon actually *believe* it’s success.

@chamath Durant mistakes the terms. Liberty and equality are enemies only when misunderstood. Equality of rights grounds liberty; liberty produces unequal outcomes. Justice is their harmony—freedom ordered by equal law, not enforced sameness or unchecked license.

The great Will Durant: “Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917.”

@friedberg @michaeljburry

to be clear, i am not opining on the general short positions @michaeljburry has taken in AI tech… my commentary was strictly regarding the thesis that 6 year depreciation on data center infrastructure was artificially boosting earnings. there are obvious and important questions afoot regarding round tripping capital into revenue, contractual commitments that aren’t really committed, off balance sheet debt instruments, inflated valuation multiples, unsustainable capex exposure, and so on. burry is very thoughtful and his broader short thesis may be well-timed. but i’m not sure depreciation schedules are the pin that will pop any bubbles…

@dcinvestor Dry sauna. +85 Celsius

dealing with a thing where whenever i train fairly hard on a given day (1 hour fairly high intensity weightlifting with average heart rate at 120+), even when i do it at like 1 or 2 PM, i get pretty tired by 10 PM and crash hard. that part is OK the problem is i find myself awake by 3-4 AM and often can't get back to sleep. my body feels sore and i'm a bit jittery with a brain which doesn't want to turn off this happens about half the time, and i feel more worn out the next day and feel like i'm not recovering as well as i should be. i try to nap it off, but often don't have time for that what am i doing wrong?

@chamath What?! Beth Galetti, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, mentioned that the layoffs are part of efforts to cut bureaucracy and reallocate resources toward strategic areas, particularly AI-driven initiatives. This quote comes from Business Insider.

Non obvious take: this is not AI job loss. This is the unwinding of the DEI-fueled Hiring Bonanza of the past decade. Many jobs in that period were created under fragile pretenses / immutable traits. Ie, things other than talent. But eventually the chickens come home to roost. All of this hiring may have left Amazon, in their eyes, bloated and inefficient. “AI” is the convenient air cover for articles and pundits trying to find a scapegoat but it’s not the root cause if I had to guess.

The @LBNL & @TheBrattleGroup teams have an excellent study out this week on what's feeding electricity price changes over the past 5 years. Legislators should be required to read or get a briefing on it before taking any vote on electricity policy! Highlights & my commentary🧵

@russvought Fuck off

Maybe GAO shouldn’t be partisan

Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!

@jon_charb With his family and insiders at the ready to buy puts every time.

What if the supercycle is just Trump tweeting to make the price go back up whenever it starts to dip

@elonmusk Except that many in the federal government work on highly sensitive, national security issues. All staff already have performance metrics and frequent reporting requirements. This type of reporting is redundant and has the potential to expose sensitive and classified info.

This is a trivial task