Chris Bataille

"She". Her name is Anita Anand, and like everyone else in Nova Scotia, my parents in law seem to know her family.🙃

The Middle East is far more developed than a generation ago, producing far more than oil, gas and LNG. If this carries on for more than a few weeks the cascading economic hits will be global.

Industrial Accelerator Act Industrial Accelerator Act Regulation

Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA).

"Proposal for a Regulation on establishing a framework of measures for accelerating industrial capacity and decarbonisation in strategic sectors (Industrial Accelerator Act)"

Link to the proposal ⬇️
single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/publications...

I just want spellcheck to stop changing my intentional spelling to something else, which I always seem to miss until after I've posted it.

The range of useless and poorly installed bike racks is amazing, when the simple, very useful designs that are easy to install. But seriously, REI should know better.

So you start a war for which the clearest objectives are 1) eliminating Iran's nuclear weapons capacity & 2) regime change, but you keep killing leadership candidates, expecting a viable contender to emerge with no ground support. Meanwhile, you're running out of anti-ballistic missile defences.

The politics of American clean energy and climate policy: Why the Inflation Reduction Act passed - Climatic Change Climatic Change - When President Biden won the 2020 election and Democrats gained control of Congress, a climate policy window opened. Many voters, activists, and lawmakers wondered: after...

Excited to share my newly published article with Olivia Quinn in Climatic Change, which explains why the Inflation Reduction Act passed Congress when the Waxman-Markey bill failed.

It's open access so anyone can read it!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

One cannot overstate the importance that while the US used to show up on these "Straight of Hormuz" vulnerability charts, & high on the chart up to >15 years ago, it just doesn't anymore because of shale fracking. The US coupling to the Middle East is completely political now, not energy physical.

Seems good.

February 2026 was the 5th warmest February on record, at 1.5C above preindustrial levels in the ERA5 dataset.

This is not that surprising given weak La Nina conditions at the start of the year; February tends to be one of the months most sensitive to ENSO.

That’s a longer run story. Tobacco and alcohol used to sponsor most sport and cultural events. It’s always something. On a fairly deep level we’re an imbalanced culture floating from one distracting drug hit to another.

No kidding. I kind of need to walk away from my phone for awhile.

The US must be awfully sure Taiwan isn’t happening anytime soon.

Here be the doors to nihilism. Betting markets on war and war outcomes, bet on by those with pre-knowledge of the decision. Insider trading in death. 😞

Agreed, and that’s all well and good, but batteries don’t get within a quanta of the energy density of hydrocarbons and alcohols. It doesn’t matter in most applications, but it does in some.

I genuinely value and wonder at Chappell Roan referring to Saskatchewan 🙃

A gift to the timeline

Obviously solar fusion drives the formation of natural hydrocarbons and alcohols.

Hydrocarbons and alcohols are by far nature’s most efficient, energy dense and accessible energy forms. Ever seen salmon oil burn? It’s a problem when they are fossil sourced and add to atmospheric CO2 ppm. So how do we work our way out of this conundrum?

I sometime wonder what the Middle East would be like if we’d skipped the whole internal combustion with crude oil refined products development stage, and gone straight to electric transport as we could have done.

Canada needs a strategic olive oil, coffee and chocolate reserve until such time as climate change makes it possible to grow these things here 🙃.

Outokumpu and Boston Metal sign a Memorandum of Understanding to optimize metals production Outokumpu and Boston Metal sign a Memorandum of Understanding to optimize metals production

Som positive news from Boston Metals after their recent layoffs. For the time being they may survive (which is a big deal) as a consultant to forward thinking metal processors. www.outokumpu.com/en/news/2025...

Credit where credit is due, the instincts of the right wing base were on to the Epstein files being real and scarily important long before everyone else. Unfortunately, they were looking in the wrong direction.

Breaking: China's official statistics report a 0.3% drop in CO2 emissions from energy&industry in 2025, the third time that annual emissions have fallen this century and the first fall predominantly driven by clean energy growth. 🧵

Trump says U.S. discussing ‘friendly takeover’ of Cuba U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday suggested a “friendly takeover” of communist-led Cuba, as the longtime U.S. nemesis suffers an economic crisis.

Between this and the Epstein files, he really has no concept of personal nor national sovereignty, does he? www.ctvnews.ca/world/articl...

uh-oh. A billion years ago I volunteered on Parliament Hill, and we used to count 1 letter as 10,000 opinions. That's obviously a broken relationship now.

👇 The US economy is basically on Keynesian fiscally stimulated growth high without the subsequent cost recovery rise in taxation to compensate. The current round of tariffs are mostly basically disguised and regressive taxes on their own consumers.

To coast mountain folk - the accumulated pack is meters and meters lower than normal (doesn't bode well for summer and fall), but there's a hard potential "stick, accumulate, and slip" layer there that could be really problematic if there is one last big dump. Careful out there.