Simon Schulte

Unsplash image of the Earth, mostly the nightside with a tracery of city lights on every continent.

OK, this is wild.

In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them.

It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*.

What the HELL?

1/

German Chancellor Merz today in parliament on climate policy.

The media is already heralding this as a radical new course in climate policy, but really it's just one of the most trite "discourses of climate delay": whataboutism.

Tax on ultra-rich: 'France has the opportunity to lead the way,' say Nobel Prize-winning economists OP-ED. As public deficits balloon and extreme wealth explode, creating a minimum tax on the assets of billionaires should be a priority, argue seven Nobel Prize-winning economists in an op-ed for Le M...

An international call for action just got louder:

Today, 7 Nobel Laureates have issued a powerful call for a minimum tax on the ultra-wealthy in Le Monde

Here’s a quick breakdown of the debate—and where things stand globally

🧵

www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/a...

Mit der Aussage, dass ein klimaneutrales Deutschland bis 2045 mit der derzeitigen Politik nicht realistisch ist, hat Friedrich Merz ja völlig recht.

Aber das Ziel aufzugeben, ist ja nicht die einzige Konsequenz, die man aus dieser Erkenntnis ziehen kann.

“ This bill will raise your electricity costs and cook the planet to give tax cuts to the richest people ever.” - Sen Schatz

“Trump is jamming through a bill that rips away health care, closes hospitals, raises grocery and utility bills to give tax breaks to billionaires.” - Sen Warren

Chinese companies installed 93 GW of solar and 27 GW of wind in a single month in May. That's about 230 million solar panels and 5300 wind turbines. That's almost 100 solar panels every second, and a wind turbine every 10 minutes.

We knew China's rush to install solar and wind was going to be wild but WOW😮. The solar panels & wind turbines China installed in May alone, in a single month, will generarate as much electricity as:
-Poland
-Sweden
-Norway
-the UAE
-North Carolina&Maryland or
-Washington&Wyoming

Chart – Near-constant solar power is possible in many cities for around $100/MWh: Share of the time when a 6GW solar plus 17GWh storage system would deliver 1GW of power across 12 cities, %, based on average weather conditions over 2005-23. Source: Ember.

NEW – Guest post: How solar panels and batteries can now run ‘close to 24/365’ in some cities | @cleanpowerdave.bsky.social‬ Kostantsa Rangelova

Read here: buff.ly/QqxebJM

San Diego neighborhood makes ICE agents retreat

Gibt es durch das neue Sondervermögen tatsächlich zusätzliches Geld für den Klimaschutz? Das Aufstellungsschreiben zum Haushalt 2025, das das @bmf-bund.de gestern verschickt hat, lässt Zweifel daran aufkommen. (1/x)

Anyways, as most calculations are basically Activity Data X Emission Factor and AD is mostly positively correlated with GDP, overreporting GDP implies overreporting emissions (not underreporting)

There is probably a huge uncertainty on those numbers, but unlike GDP, the emissions were not reported by Chinese national statistics but are based on independent calculations (which of course partly use official statistics).

Just released: Huge revision in Germany's official estimates of emissions/uptake from the land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector, now reflecting the spruce bark beetle outbreaks that started in 2018. 1/2

Today I'll be more provocative. If we put meaningless modeling results into reports like IPCCs and position them as scientific findings, how can we expect people to trust the other findings, that are based on very good science, in these same reports?
rdcu.be/ecSMX

Joking aside, European governments could collectively start de-Microsofting public sector IT: it would be a net cost saving. And the private sector would follow simply to capture those same cost savings.

Two maps of US unemployment rates by county. They are identical except that the legend in the second has been converted into a histogram.

Your map’s legend can be turned into a histogram, helping your audience understand the distribution in addition to decoding the colours.

Das ist spannend: "Free our Feeds" will auf Grundlage von Blueskys AT Protocol ein offenes Social-Media-Ökosystem bauen, das sicher vor der Einflussnahme von Milliardären ist (auch Bluesky ist ein privates Unternehmen). Die Initiatorinnen und Unterstützer klingen vielversprechend.

freeourfeeds.com

Neuer Rekord erreicht: Bundesnetzagentur genehmigt 2024 rund 1400 Kilometer Stromleitungen Laut dem Vorsitzenden Klaus Müller kommt man so bei der Energiewende weiter gut voran. Ein erneuter Anstieg der genehmigten Leitungskilometer im kommenden Jahr ist bereits in Planung.

Planning permissions to build out the energy grid double in 2024 in Germany, to 1400 km. (The country had eased planning laws considerably for renewables and grid.)

It does seem to matter who is in government. www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/n...

Engpass in der Wasserstoffversorgung der Firma Enertrag führt zu Einschränkungen im #Netz #Ostbrandenburg. Um den Betrieb der RB27 zu sichern, fahren auf der #Heidekrautbahn Batteriezüge und Dieselzüge. Die Suche nach weiteren Wasserstoffquellen läuft! Translation: A bottleneck in the supply of hydrogen to Enertrag is leading to restrictions in the #network #Ostbrandenburg. To ensure the operation of the RB27, battery trains and diesel trains run on the #Heidekrautbahn. The search for further sources of hydrogen is ongoing!

Two weeks into the operation of hydrogen trains and 🥁

They have run out of hydrogen

Who could POSSIBLY have imagined this*?

* - yeah, well, anyone who has had half an eye on this could have foreseen this

How to cheat at Codenames; cheating at board games more generally
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/25/h...

Edgar Hertwich on LinkedIn: #carbonfootprint #exiobase | 11 comments Fifteen years after we published the Carbon Footprint of Nations study, Glen Peters and I have been recognized as leading researchers in the field of… | 11 comments on LinkedIn

Fifteen years after @glenpeters.bsky.social and I published the first quantification of the #carbon_footprint of nations, the concept has become widely used and our method has become the standard for footprint calculations. Footprints are declining in Europe, but not fast enough.

Wealth, shown to scale Wealth inequality in the United States is out of control. Here we visualize the issue in a unique way.

the fact that we have "serious" convos about whether billionaires are okay suggests public consciousness that is totally divorced from the 1) actual scale of private wealth accumulation 2) its political implications. helpful data visualization:

eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-weal...

A thread for those who think we're going to be importing lots of hydrogen over vast distances.

1. Shipping liquid hydrogen is not going to be a thing. To understand why, you need to understand that hydrogen is basically liquid, -253C escapey, explodey expanded polystyrene.

This is probably the most important story of year in the energy transition. ~600 gigawatts of new solar added to world grids today. That will produce ~1,000 terawatt-hours of clean electricity, or ~25% of all US electricity use or 2/3 of India's. In one year! Simply massive & it's accelerating. 🔌💡

Dass die Strompreise an der Börse am 6.11. und am 12.12. kurzzeitig extrem hoch waren, liegt nicht nur daran, dass es zu diesem Zeitpunkt kaum Wind gab. Entscheidend war, dass gleichzeitig auch zahlreiche konventionelle Kraftwerke keinen Strom produziert haben. Dazu ein längerer Thread: (1/12)

Here is a first version: github.com/lambwf/Tidy-...

Any feedback welcome!

My technical climate policy advising advice:

What are the skills you should try to graduate with?

-Advanced statistics & uncertainty analysis

-Scientific computing & data science with Python

-Mapping with GIS

-Technoeconomic analysis

-Life cycle & equity assessment

-Report writing & comms 🔌💡

Nope, only 64,999. @ingwarpero.bsky.social reached Baku by bike (from Germany)

We strongly suspect that the private equity box in the sankey chart should be bigger, but Orbis data just isn’t good enough to reliably track PE holdings. There’s much more in the paper, as @isabellamweber.bsky.social explains 👇

NEW PAPER: The 2022 fossil fuel price jumps caused an oil and gas profit explosion. We show the US reaped the largest profit increase (USD 275bn) of any country. Big Oil claims this benefits the American people. In fact, 51% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A 🧵