Jenny Chase

Generalize your skeets. What's your most typical, most average skeet?

Here's some data showing solar power is doing well. Obviously this doesn't mean solar power is the whole solution to climate change on its own.

Yeah, the main impact of not flying for fun is just that you end up holidaying closer to home. And it's harder for some people than others - I live in a well-connected place and can reach my family abroad in 10 hours by train.

There's also the implication here that splitting up the companies into smaller ones, and buying artisanal fossil fuels, would help.

It might, but only in that smaller firms would have less political power and influence.

In any case, blaming the fossil fuel companies for climate change is a lot like blaming drug dealers for drug addiction. It's not *wrong*, they sure do encourage it, but the buyers have agency too.

(Alternatively, X's Scope 3 emissions are Y's Scope 1 emissions and both are responsible).

I don't think you have to be perfect to want everything to be better, but it does exasperate me a bit that, while many forms of climate action (wind farms, bike lanes, etc) need high-level coordination, others do depend on people not getting what they're used to having.

Ideally at the country level, not the individual level. But governments won't do it if individuals won't!

(I always see the high polling numbers for climate action and they're great, but how many people in favour of climate action still want to fly off regularly on holiday?)

The best thing to do about this is to reduce our dependence until we can say to the big fossil firms: "no thank you, we do not want or need what you are selling", and walk (or cycle, take an electric bus or drive an electric car) away.

It's a good question, and I personally get that impression from the battery industry (commodity! Rapidly advancing tech!). But I don't think it's something the battery team are explicitly saying, perhaps due to cowardice.

And, well, nobody successfully argued it was incorrect.

In Indonesia, 35% of new car sales were battery-electric models last month. Quite extraordinary. But let's see what the next few months bring.

A photo of a snow-covered farm landscape with the Jura hills behind. Mist is rising from the ground.

The view from nursery pickup today.

I especially like slide 132, about data center electricity consumption change since 2020. It's up, but maybe not as much as you might have thought from the more alarming headlines.

Do you like charts? Oh yes you do. I've just published hundreds of them, as I do every year. www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

This is very interesting.

(My personal crank level on microplastics-in-own-body worry is 'bought some steel tins instead of plastic ones to put hot food in').

NEW: Coal-fired power generation fell in both China and India in 2025, for the first time since 1973. The drop came after record clean energy additions in both countries, and was the first time that clean energy was a major driver of falling coal power use.

Photovoltaics fed about 16.9% of German-generated electricity into the grid in 2025, according to the Bundesnetzagentur (this excludes selfconsumption). Renewables at 58.8% overall.

www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/P...

Yeah, but, I mean, Earth did become uninhabitable. That feels important in the context...

I adore the Children of Time series, but I'm not sure "utopian" is quite right; Children of Memory, in particular, is an absolute tearjerker. (Though it's true that it has multiple intelligent species cooperating rather nicely).

No (at least not while washing nappies).

Honestly, I'm not neurotypical enough to understand why, but hope it goes/ went well.

Why bring him along at all?

(Okay so my husband missed the extremely scheduled c-section of our second child because he had to take Child 1 to school. I mean... how else were we meant to play it? Child 2 won't remember!)

To me (and I know I wasn't asked), Chambers and Doctorow are not compelling at all. While in the Murderbot stories and in Star Trek, the conflict comes from outside the desirable society.

A group of young kestrels is startled by the presence of a butterfly. 🤣🤣🤣

Yeah, my personal fantasy is writing a publishable solarpunk-ish story that is not boring. But it might get kicked out of solarpunk circles because I do think it would need setting-based conflict.

There's a problem when settings that aren't utopias, and have interesting structural problems that the plot explores and that are different from those in our present world, are considered to be The Torment Nexus.

True, but I've also seen fiction referred to as dystopian when it isn't really worse than today (often it seems like it's dystopian when the problems of the setting affect the protagonists). Like, I'm not sure Gattaca is, for most people living in it; nor is The Caves of Steel.

For a standard TOPCon module made in 2025, BNEF assumes 8.96mg of silver per W, so it's more like 9g per 1kW of panels (which is roughly 2 panels) due to material use gains since this paper was researched.

Oh, it's not production, just capacity. And nobody else would pay US prices for it.

Yes, aside from the polysilicon plants which are pretty old, nearly all the wafer, cell and module plants are built in the last two years.

I thought this had to be wrong on US PV manufacturing capacity, but checked my team's work, and yeah for module manufacturing capacity it's about right.