Costa Samaras
@CostaSamaras
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Director, CMU Institute for Energy Innovation. Equitable decarbonization, resilience, NatSec. Former White House Chief Energy Transition Advisor @CostaSamaras46
Pittsburgh, PA
Joined November 2008
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Pinned Tweet
Last week was my last day with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Since 2021, I was lucky to have had the chance to be Principal Assistant Director for Energy & OSTP Chief Advisor for Energy Policy & then OSTP Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition.
Today is my last day with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I have been extremely lucky to have had the chance to be Principal Assistant Director for Energy & OSTP Chief Advisor for Energy Policy & then OSTP Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition.
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Our infrastructure, our institutions, our insurance industry, & our imaginations are not ready for this century
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The extreme heat in the Portland has melted power cables in the streetcar system, which caused the agency to cancel streetcar service today & tomorrow. We have a climate crisis fueling cascading health, power, and transportation crises. It's time to do something. h/t
@dburbach
In case you're wondering why we're canceling service for the day, here's what the heat is doing to our power cables.
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What if instead of loading a rocket, going to space, finding an asteroid, bringing the asteroid close to Earth, but making sure it didn’t hit Earth, & then hope its dust somewhat blocks out the sun, but not too much, what if, and hear me out, we just transitioned to clean energy?
Could putting an asteroid and its trailing dust cloud in orbit near Earth be the solution for global warming? These scientists acknowledge the risks, but they are having the discussion.
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I am honored to join the team in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as Principal Assistant Director for Energy &
@WHOSTP
Chief Advisor for Energy Policy. Together, we can build a clean, equitable, affordable, & resilient energy system.
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I received notice from CMU’s President that I’ve been granted tenure & promoted to Full Professor! I am extremely grateful to the amazing students I’ve worked with, & to my mentors, family, & all of you. Let’s all keep advocating for students & early career researchers. Onwards.
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No choice but invest in hamburgers, says Hamburglar
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If this goes on for a while, there are going to be a lot of oil workers out of a job. To get them back to work and help cushion the impact to their communities, perhaps a national policy for reinvestment in low-carbon infrastructure and an energy transition? Some sort of deal?
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Every tenth of a degree of warming that is avoided matters. Every tonne of greenhouse gas avoided matters. Every year matters. You matter.
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On climate, it's important to understand that before this Administration, grid-scale batteries in the US basically didn't exist.
Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, there will be sixteen Hoover Dams-worth of battery storage on the grid this year.
#SOTU
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International students aren’t just the next startup founders—they are people. People with families & hopes & dreams & who are willing to go to a new place far from home to learn something new. Imagine the courage that takes. We’re lucky to have them here. I’m lucky to know them.
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If we threw a bunch of subsidies at E-bikes so that the out-of-pocket costs for consumers were around $300, it would be one of our best climate policies, hands down.
Important quarantine development: I have joined the ranks of E-bike Dads.
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what is "The One Ring", really, if not a non-fungible tolkien
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I was asked today, what is the clean energy tech that I’m most excited about for the future?
Answer: e-bike
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Every city could make protected bike lines in like, a weekend
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It’s like a time lapse photo of our infrastructure & essential services atrophying
Watch how radically taxes on the wealthy have fallen over the past 70 years:
(Full column: )
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An affordable electric version of this would be a wildly popular work truck and would cut lots of transportation GHGs
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Think tank folks who aren’t public health experts: you really don’t have to offer up a contrarian take on the pandemic to remain relevant I promise
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How should Bezos spend on climate?
• big solar, EV, storage, tax credits & deployment
• state grants to electrify bus & vehicle fleets, build charging/bike/bus infra
• weatherize & remove lead
• 5x ARPA-E
• DAC, clean steel/cement/ag
/sorry, typo, not Bezos, the U.S. Govt
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This is a huge deal, there are about 650,000 automobiles in the Federal vehicle fleet, & electrifying these will cause other fleets to consider electrifying. When you look at the state & local level, there are another 2.3 million government vehicles. Electrify them all.
Biden's infrastructure plan calls for using federal procurement to electrify the entire federal vehicle fleet, including the U.S. Postal Service,
@zcolman
reports
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We are grateful to the peer reviewers for their helpful comments. Below we provide a point-by-point response to each reviewer
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Idea: federal government forgives the student loans of all nurses effective immediately
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boring company hire one (1) geologist challenge
Practically every inch under Florida is under water. The limestone bedrock beneath Florida is porous and basically all underwater caves, and can’t support tunnels. Level of naivety is astounding.
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@MattZeitlin
Love metric but Fahrenheit is the way. Oh it’s really hot and you’re telling me it’s 36° degrees C? Grow up
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Here's some paragraphs about the Texas deep freeze. No, not this one, the one that happened in 2011.
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The USG could/should make this happen by COB tomorrow
Ventilator manufacturers can ramp up production. But they need assurance their products will be bought. Here's a perfect place for the US government to step in: Order the ventilators, front manufacturers the working capital, & distribute them to hospitals.
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An EV cash for clunkers program would be expensive, difficult, and as we show in a forthcoming paper, required if you want to decarbonize the vehicle fleet in the next 20 years. So, let’s go.
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Timing is bad, but we published a huge study on Uber & Lyft impacts on cities & found they increase average vehicle ownership. Anyway Uber is "skeptical of the methods" but guess what we anticipated this & controlled for the issues they raise, so stay mad
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Individualized Mass Transit ❌
Individualized Bass Transit ✅
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This *week* in climate:
- Extreme heat in Pacific Northwest results in deaths and also disrupts critical infrastructure
- Heavy rains flood Detroit's homes and highways for days
- ‘Conserve Energy’: New York City Begs Residents to Help Avoid Outages
- Ocean on fire
The Gulf of Mexico is literally on fire because a pipeline ruptured
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Reducing methane leaks is (was) one of the easiest, no regrets, high impact climate policy tools around
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This drop in lithium-ion battery prices is truly incredible. Solar power costs dropped by ~90% in the same time period. Now we need to ramp up deployment of EVs, energy storage, and solar.
The evolution of lithium-ion battery pack prices:
2010: $1,191/kWh
2011: $924
2012: $726
2013: $668
2014: $592
2015: $384
2016: $295
2017: $221
2018: $181
2019: $157
2020: $137
(all real 2020$)
Annually from
@BloombergNEF
; analysis by
@JamesTFrith
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We could do this in US cities, right now. Like it would take a couple weeks and then it would be done.
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When the varied history of this Website is written, it needs to be known how special EnergyTwitter was. Lucky to learn so much, make lifelong friends, & change the arc of my career. There were meetups w/ EnergyTwitter friends that had never met IRL but felt like a family reunion.
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@profmusgrave
waiting all afternoon to hear songs you like on the radio and so you could tape them and then spending much more time stitching these together as a physical playlist
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The climate executive order is a big deal:
-Establishes White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy (essentially a Dept of Climate)
-Directs agencies to buy clean power/cars
-Directs agencies to develop resilience plan
-Climate & Env justice initiatives
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There is a well established literature showing that the pollution regulations of the Clean Air Act & Amendments was a driver of innovation & patents for air pollution control technologies by US firms:
FWIW, I think Warren’s spiel about catalytic converters—the EPA mandated very high emissions limits for toxic pollution, then the car industry figured out how to meet them—is the first time I’ve seen a politician say that regulation often *is* innovation policy.
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Anxiety about climate change, institutions, society, & infrastructure metaphor alert
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Read this great thread on Solyndra. A bigger point: the loan program that contained Solyndra ended up having a very low failure rate. Too low, even! This means the govt wasn’t taking enough risk, which is what we should’ve been mad about. But instead we got “Solyndra!!1!” shouts.
The myth of Solyndra drives me a little nuts. I was the Senate Energy staffer in charge of financing programs - worked on the original program in the 2005 law, wrote the modifications creating "1705" in ARRA, and created the ATVM program for vehicle manufacturing.
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What are the energy & GHG implications of different vehicles for package delivery? 🚨 Here's a major new paper led by
@CMU_CEE
Ph.D. student Thiago Rodrigues, in collaboration with
@CMU_Robotics
&
@CMU_Stats
, published in
@CellPressNews
'
@Patterns_CP
1/
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When folks say "it's too late to do something about climate", they want you to surrender your very real and powerful agency to do something about it, in advance. Don't.
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People who work on climate change: please don’t do this stuff. Take care of each other. Also, block these takes.
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Route 50 is a major highway leading into DC from the East. The road turns into New York Avenue, which leads to the White House. Rt. 50 continues across the country, and ends in Sacramento, CA. The beginning of this road is underwater, & the end of this road is surrounded by fire.
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I’m still on public service leave, but today is my first day as a tenured faculty member, & my first day as a full professor. I’m grateful to the students, staff, faculty, mentors, & family that made this possible. We’re all responsible for lifting up early career folks. Let’s go
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I think people are underestimating the huge value to both consumers & the grid in this EV, & all EVs, having the ability to power your home when the power goes out. I think it will induce a bunch of folks to buy EVs. It's grid-edge storage that can also hold a sheet of drywall.
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The EVs that are available in Norway are basically the sames ones available here: Audis, Teslas, Nissans, etc. It's just they made a choice to tax gas cars and not tax EVs, build charging stations, and do other stuff to support EVs, and we...didn't.
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Seriously why is there hesitation to just order the ventilators and PPE through the Defense Production Act? It is an insurance policy, the storm is here. It’s used every year for the national security supply chain. It’s not a big deal to use it, why wait on it?
FEMA Administrator Gaynor tells
@chucktodd
the Defense Production Act is an "insurance policy" & "we haven't had to use it yet" but "will we have to? Maybe." There's been some confusion on this since the president signed it Weds. Many medical professionals calling for full use.
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Our institutions need to rise to the challenge of this pandemic & serve in the public’s interest
*Steak-umm nods in agreement, laces up boots, rises*
friendly reminder in times of uncertainty and misinformation: anecdotes are not data. (good) data is carefully measured and collected information based on a range of subject-dependent factors, including, but not limited to, controlled variables, meta-analysis, and randomization
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If you read this deep dive on package delivery in New York, it becomes clear this model is unsustainable going forward, unless NY is just all trucks & empty cardboard boxes. We have a big research project on improving the energy efficiency of delivery.
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As you see protests on highways, remember that infrastructure was often used to destroy & segregate black neighborhoods. Future infrastructure plans need to center equity & justice. Read
@KevinMKruse
’s piece, which I assign to our first-year engineers:
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If you work for climate justice, work for racial justice
Flooding in the U.S. disproportionately harms black neighborhoods and the impacts can exacerbate existing racial and social inequality
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What if instead of filling a stainless steel underground tube with hydrogen, that is flammable, expensive, and energy-intensive to make, in order to *checks notes* drive a submarine through, we could idk build a high speed rail line?
Hyperloop may face some competition from this propeller-powered car designed to zip at supersonic speeds through tubes filled with hydrogen.
Patent No. 10457295
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“Accused of jaywalking”
This is enraging. Cities should decriminalize jaywalking to remove it as a pathway for police to harass Black residents.
NEW: Authorities in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are investigating the arrest of two black teenagers accused of jaywalking, with video from an eyewitness showing one officer forcibly pulling a teen out of a patrol car and onto the ground. More tonight.
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Here's what happened in Texas: the energy system was dressed for summer and extreme winter showed up. So natural gas & other pipes froze, which reduced the amount of gas available to power plants, which then shut down, which caused blackouts. Which caused a lot of suffering.
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If enacted, this could seriously be the most rapid way to reduce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. Let's get 50 million e-bikes deployed by 2030.
BREAKING-- Congress just released text of the “EBIKE Act," which would offer a refundable tax credit of up to $1,500 for a new e-bike purchase.
Link:
If it passes, the EBIKE Act would be groundbreaking. A 🧵:
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In general, we are probably overestimating the costs of climate action and underestimating the damages of not acting
Wow - many popular climate models have been assuming electric vehicles will remain more expensive than internal combustion engine cars all the way to 2100. As a modeler, I sympathize cost assumptions are hard but there’s a lot of room for improvement here.
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Gonna do a class lecture about ecofascism. If you have good suggestions for readings, send them my way. Not this one.
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Everybody is talking about heat pumps, which are very efficient appliances that use electricity heat and cool homes. But how do they work? In short: heat likes to move to where the cold is, & a heat pump makes this happen. But really, a heat pump is like a McDLT. A short 🧵 1/
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A mob full of white supremacists attacked a branch of government that was fulfilling its constitutional duties, & this mob murdered a Federal police officer & injured many others, threatened elected officials, & destroyed parts of the Capitol. This happened not even 4 weeks ago.
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We just broke the all time record for named storms and we're a third of the way through the Greek alphabet we use for overflow storm naming. Today it was be 78 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, DC. It's November 9th.
And here we go... Theta has formed. Storm number 29, breaking the all-time seasonal record of 28 storms set in 2005 and, before that, 20 storms set in 1933.
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EVs: good
Lighter EVs with a clean grid: great
Lighter EVs with a clean grid, & robust public transit, safe streets, e-bikes, & accessible & equitable infrastructure: fabulous
Paper:
An excellent summary of
@auffhammer
,
@CostaSamaras
and my’s
@Nature
piece by
@adele_peters
@FastCompany
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No, it’s not, by far. The “don’t have kids because of climate” argument is bunk, & absolves the choices of companies & policymakers. Buy clean, drive clean, drive less, live & eat efficiently, work for change. But don’t waste our time with this stuff.
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97% of US highways were built using governmental rainfall statistics that were released in 1961, before The Beatles formed. They weren’t built for climate change. It’s time to make all our infrastructure climate-ready, while also getting emissions to zero.
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PBS pitch: next week Kornacki makes a guest appearance on Sesame Street to go over counting with the Big Bird
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Here's another Op-Ed Pitch, and this is one I'll probably actually write soon:
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A decade ago, electric vehicle sales were basically zero. Now, passenger electric vehicles are 10% of global car sales. There's a lot of work still to do, but innovation and policy have enabled optimism about the future of clean energy technology.
Chart: passenger electric vehicles are now 10% of total car sales. And most of those sales are pure battery EV, not plug-in hybrid.
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seems like there's more anger about having to go through a metal detector than there is about the deadly attack on a branch of govt performing its constitutional duty & the threatened kidnapping & execution of the first three in the line of succession, other electeds, & staff
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On his show,
@chrislhayes
quoted the West Virginia Governor on the recovery bill, "if we overdo it a little bit, a downside risk is minimal. If we underdo it, the downside risk is enormous." Guess what this also applies to:
┳┻| _
┻┳| •.•) reducing GHG emissions
┳┻|⊂ﾉ
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The distance from Madrid to Barcelona is just a little shorter than the distance from D.C. to Boston, except in Spain they get a high-speed rail ride for the price of a McRib combo
#Spain
launches low-cost bullet train between
#Madrid
and
#Barcelona
—330 km/h, tickets starting at €5
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When all the buses are finally electrified, we're going to look back in horror that diesel exhaust was blown in people's faces while waiting for a bus
Also, I should add, enormous built-in equity benefits. Electric buses will directly improve the health of those most vulnerable.
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This remains something that many folks who don't work in energy haven't heard about– the costs of solar and wind power have fallen so much over the past decade that they are very often the cheapest source of new electricity generation. Look at solar and coal in 2012 vs. in 2020.
Chart: the entirety of new power generation growth in 2020 came from wind, solar, and hydropower.
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If we're going to have a rapid transition to clean mobility, electrifying the most popular vehicle in the country for the past 40 years is absolutely necessary. It's a yes AND situation. Electric pickups/vehicles AND a big scale-up in public transit AND streets safe for everyone.
A lot at stake with Ford's new electric F-150 pickup truck, writes
@nealboudette
. If it's a hit, it could really help accelerate the shift to electric vehicles. If not, that could be a sign that the EV transition will be a lot slower than hoped:
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If the CEO of a major energy company doesn’t know that the US power grid is less than 30% coal and dropping, down from 50% since 2001, that’s...concerning?
What’s the point of having “electric vehicles that will end up being charged by power generated from coal” - Exxon $XOM CEO Darren Woods
#OGCI2019
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"For the first time since the mid-20th century, over 95 percent of this year’s planned new electric-generating capacity in the United States is zero-carbon."
Read that again.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law & the Inflation Reduction Act are enabling a clean energy economy.
Our CEA blog today highlights a remarkable recent announcement from
@EIA
: For the first time since the mid-20thcentury, more than 95 percent of this year’s U.S. planned new electricity capacity is zero-carbon! 1/
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We literally don’t have time for a “what’s worse natural gas vs coal?” timeline today, this week, this year, this decade. All emissions have to get to zero, full stop. The rest is largely uninteresting now.
ᴮᵗʷ ᵗʰᵉ ᵃⁿˢʷᵉʳ ⁱˢ ᵐᵒˢᵗ ˡⁱᵏᵉˡʸ ᶜᵒᵃˡ ⁱˢ ʷᵒʳˢᵉ
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This billboard is racist trash and any folks talking about overpopulation have no place in the environmental movement.
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A barrel of oil has 42 gallons. A barrel of bottled water costs $42. A barrel of oil costs now less than a barrel of bottled water. But a barrel of tzatziki still costs $756. Worth it, imo
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It
was
one
hundred
and
twenty
degrees
in
Sydney
today
48.9C (120F) recorded at Penrith in suburban Sydney today. 48.9C. Just look at that number. Suddenly projections of 50C don't seem all that crazy. This is it. We're here. This is
#ClimateChange
.
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Roadway deaths spiked in 2020 to 42,060 people killed by drivers, an 8% jump over 2019. Because total driving was down, the death rate per mile driven spiked 24% in 2020, which is the highest estimated jump in year-over-year roadway death rate in 96 years
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Those who dedicate their careers to public service are some of the best of America. There has been a decades-long, false smearing of public service employees, because the lie that public service is bad serves those who want power without accountability. Public service is good.
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What I hope the Moore documentary represents, is the last gasp of the pathetic nuclear vs renewables fight that has been going on for 20 years. If you want to avoid the worst of climate change: build as much renewables as you can, build as much nukes as you can, where you can.
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Stopped into a Tesla storefront. Model 3 looked nice. Store worker said to someone else: “as soon as states fix their laws & regulations you’ll be able to sleep in the car while it drives you around”
This is not even close to being true
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The problem is not only that our infrastructure isn't future-proofed, it isn't even today-proofed. Our power systems both contribute to & are affected by climate change, and the same with: roadways, airports, ports, water systems, everything. Long past time to take this seriously
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More than three-quarters of new cars sold in September in Norway were electric. How did they achieve this? A sustained effort on policy and charging infrastructure deployment:
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@JimPethokoukis
I think the Democratic nominee has a record and is running on a “it's time to build platform: permitting deregulation, energy and housing abundance, big-time science funding, even the orbital economy”?
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Climate E.O. directs the new interagency working group to "publish an interim Social Cost of Carbon, Social Cost of Nitrous Oxide, and Social Cost of Methane within 30 days of the date of this order". Wow.
Biden's new executive order on climate/environment has just been posted. Establishes an interagency group on the social cost of carbon, tells EPA to consider new methane regulations on existing oil/gas operations, plus a lot more:
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Lots of disappointments on the timeline lately but this is a terrible take
@algore
@GretaThunberg
Jane Goodall @ Davos: "All these [environmental] things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”
The world population 500 years ago is estimated btwn 420 and 540 million — 6.7 billion fewer people than today.
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finally CO2 will have a voice at the table after being ignored for so long
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