Matt Baker

Don’t you mean costs? Rates were increasing faster than costs before fires and the big distribution build.

“Adjusted trade deficit” is the new adjusted EBITDA

Doctor Behind Award-Winning Parkinson’s Research Among Scientists Purged From NIH Leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the US’s leading medical research agency, were swept up Tuesday in the Trump administration's latest firing blitz.

NEW: The doctor behind breakthrough Parkinson’s research was among the scientists purged from the National Institutes of Health, the US’s leading medical research agency. www.wired.com/story/doctor...

In the hearing this week on Fix our forests, the statement was made that 75% of those already laid off were red carded. This summer’s fire season, if it isn’t a quiet one, is going to be a reality check for these policies.

www.eenews.net/articles/for...

NOAA adjusts their climate data — so what? A misunderstood concept in climate change is the allegation that climate data is manipulated. NOAA and other climate agencies around the world often have to ...

Recommended watch: A short video report by ABC News explained how the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses automated techniques to record climate data.

As federal research grants continue to be frozen, and NIH staff is being gutted, please note this study was funded by federal research grants, including from NIH. If they continue with staff cuts, and continue to freeze new awards, this is just one example of what we lose.

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

The termination of 850 Indian Health Service physicians, nurses, and dentists will have a grave impact on access to care for millions of Native Americans.

Upholding our treaty obligations is not optional.

I saw this but didn't the IRA define greenhouse gases as air pollutants? Didn't Congress do this specifically to short circuit this kind of hackery? Someone smarter please explain

Image from NOAA SPC depicting location of "extremely critical" and "critical" fire risk on Monday, Jan 20, 2025.

Here we go again. Another round of very strong & locally damaging offshore winds is imminent across SoCal. Due to now record-dry vegetation, this will result in another "extremely critical" wildfire risk period, esp. across parts of LA & Ventura counties Mon-Tue. #CAwx #CAfire

Isn't there some quip about how it's cheaper to hang a flat screen TV over a hole in your drywall than pay someone to come out and fix it?

I'm half convinced there's a Tim Powers novel of this.

The "Relative Nino Index" (helpful in a warming climate) suggests a stronger #LaNina influence than traditional measures would otherwise indicate (esp. strong/north-shifted NPAC jet), w/wet PacNW and dry SoCal: www.climate.gov/news...

The Triassic is my favourite geological period. Such a carnival riot of diversity, and a defiant raspberry to the preceding Permian catastrophe.

Here is a hopefully useful chart for those who think China's electricity demand growth is driven by data centers (part of IT services), EV charging, solar manufacturing or EV manufacturing.

This is not surprising. Our work showed that coal-to-gas transition is unlikely to be replicated in other countries because of (i) high LNG prices, (ii) lack of gas/pipeline infrastructure, and (iii) national security concerns. DoE's analysis reaffirms that conclusion. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

PG&E Gets $15 Billion Loan Offer From Biden’s Green Bank The Biden administration is offering PG&E Corp. a loan of up to $15 billion for a portfolio of projects that includes upgraded hydropower generation, battery storage and transmission lines.

Using their filed integrated resource plan, the utility identified hundreds of projects that could be switched to cutting edge American technology saving $Billions for ratepayers and overcoming decade long “death by pilot” www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/co...

How could we actually structure a market system that is actually capable of deep decarbonization? Energy only markets are going to get stuck on cannibalization and undervaluing reliability. Vertical utilities tend to be slow and under capitalized...

Book reviews and author podcasts are a life saver!

Great podcast about it on Grey Area w Sean Illig.

Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny [Watts, Edward J.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

a.co/d/6PZXFll

That’s Dr Emil to you all!

P.S. this thread introduces the first 3 papers in the thesis. bsky.app/profile/emil...

My last PhD work is now a preprint! Feedback welcome!

How should governments choose climate policies in second-best power markets with incomplete long-term contracting?

We see some surprises: wind & solar subsidies can be more cost-effective than CO2 pricing...

ceepr.mit.edu/workingpaper... 🔌💡

Ridership Of Bay Area Caltrain Is Up Drastically Following A Transition To New Electric Trains It’s not due to return-to-office mandates, either. Better trains and service are just more appealing

Less pollution, more service, quieter trains. Everyone is happy! jalopnik.com/ridership-of...

Awesome to see Notre Dame repaired and re-opened.

just a few little satanic mills many an epsilon makes a delta

"precisely because, for the longest time, the online economy seemed to have marginal costs as close to zero as made no odds, it expanded until the constraints became impossible to ignore." backofmind.substack.com/p/just-a-few...

How We Got the Lithium-Ion Battery It took decades of research, performed around the world, before a practical lithium-ion battery was possible.

"It’s more appropriate to think of the lithium-ion battery not as a single invention, but as a steady accumulation of many inventions that were needed to both make a battery practical and to unlock its full potential."

This is true of all innovation.
www.construction-physics.com/p/how-we-got...

These two papers, taken together, really cause a rethinking of behavioral economies.

Rather than having anomalous risk preferences; it looks like people have complexity aversion to "hard" decisions, especially on valuation, which drives behavioral anomalies. Herbert Simon ftw.