Kerry Burke

Yes to this thread, but specifically also this comment. And not just in Australia.

“If only climate people were *for* stuff not just *against* stuff” is not my experience at all.

A post by James Gerber from Project Drawdown stating that as CO2 emissions from coffee itself are relatively small, drink as much as you want then go learn about heat pumps.

@jorkussmellington.bsky.social On coffee (and really, I would say most other food-related questions OTHER than unchecked consumption of red meat, which the biggest single food-related source of emissions and unsustainable use of land/water resources), this post makes an excellent point!

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

Have you and @cstross.bsky.social read each other's work?

oncoming lights have started producing a lot more strain on my eyes as I age, but the difference between being up in a pickup or down in a low sports car is night and day

this is an underrated aspect of the vehicle size arms war dynamic

If we reduce global CO2 emissions over the next ten years at the rate at which we increased them from 2000 to 2010, we will be pretty close to aligning with the 2C budget

robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/

www.structuredprocrastination.com

Also relevant to one of Tim Nelson's recent points. Paraphrased: "The problem is everyone who might invest has smart analysts telling them that power prices are going to be cheaper in the future."

What's the deal with sodium-ion batteries? Landon Mossburg on beating lithium-ion on cost and safety with a grid storage system that has no moving parts.

One thing I learnt from this episode is that sodium-ion batteries can be built without active cooling.
That's interesting for cost, but also maybe for locating grid-scale projects near residential areas.

Episode webpage: www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-...

Media file: api.substack.com/feed/podcast...

I'm at All Energy for the third time.

My reflection is that it's so much more boring than 7 or 14 years ago.

There are few crazy ideas. Just stuff that works and is being deployed at scale.

EVs, BESS, flexible retail, policy, REZs etc. It's all just happening and growing.

Do any Aus research students want to see if this replicates in Australia and figure out what the policy implications are if it does?

This cheeky thing has learnt to ride the mower looking for bugs.

Although rooftop solar offsets hydro in Tas, that water doesn't just disappear. Water can be stored and used as clean firming for Victoria and the rest of the NEM.

26. BNEF’s New Energy Outlook model doesn’t want to just solve the intermittency problem with loads of batteries. This is because the batteries get lower utilization rates the more you build. Batteries cannibalize batteries long before you get 100% clean power.

21. Everyone is defining long-duration storage technology wrong. It's not about 6 or 8 hours — you can do that with lithium-ion and probably would — it's about having the capex to add more GWh of capacity decoupled from the capex of adding more GW.

13. By 2030 most countries will have spot power prices of zero in sunny hours. This will be passed on to end consumers, to encourage them to shift power demand to sunny periods by electric vehicle and battery charging, preheating, precooling, etc.

This is something people who are chatbot-curious should be doing by default: ask it about something you *do know about*, not something you *don't know about*.

And since we call all machine learning "AI" now - even vanilla stuff like time-series forecasting for wind power, solar power, or electricity demand - it may actually look to a casual observer like "AI" adoption stays flat or goes up even as the LLM hype cools down.

australia's transport emissions rising consistently until 2020

look at what covid lockdowns did to Australia's transport emissions

Pocock booted from pollie sports club after criticising gambling lobby sponsor The former star Wallabies player turned independent senator was kicked out of the social sports club after raising concerns about its links to the gambling industry.

Surely we have to consider the possibility they kicked him out bc he was winning all the footy matches

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

"A tipping point towards solar dominance however does not solve climate change mitigation or achieve climate targets, as it does not ensure a zero-carbon energy system. Solar-dominated electricity systems could become locked into configurations that are neither resilient nor sustainable with a reliance on fossil fuel for dispatchable power"

you get a lot of useful information when you follow links and read the actual papers being reported on :)

Tapping the sign. Also, power emissions stopped falling.

Tom Studans now going door-to-door asking media organisations to substantively cover welfare rights issues

How to Be an “Electrostate” The term has two meanings, and policymakers risk picking the wrong one.

"The sun may not always shine and the wind may not always blow, but neither can they be halted by an embargo or balance-of-payments crisis." lines I wish I'd thought of
carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...

I’m sure this point has been made elsewhere but not only did they openly lie about how many recommendations were in the robodebt final report, the one they erased was to reform FOI and now they’re heading in the opposite direction. Surprise is not a feature of my reaction.

People are singing the praises of induction in the comments, as they should, but no one has yet called out how *easy they are to clean*, especially relative to gas. As the kitchen cleaner in the Volts household, this is quite meaningful for me.

This is the plot from Charles Stross's Accelerando, written 20 years ago.

Exclusive: Government warned over ‘legal basis’ of welfare system Despite being warned in 2018 that jobseekers were being exposed to unfair and excessive decisions, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations ‘chose to continue with the status quo’.

Commonwealth Ombudsman already smashed them and now not even govt's chosen auditing firm can say if the house of cards system of punitive mutual obligations is legal. Quite literally, they say, it is indefensible. Yet it persists. Even after Robodebt. www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politic...