Good news: US CO2 emissions continue to decline!

More problematic: All those declines are more or less concentrated in the power sector, and we need to make more rapid progress with transportation, industry, and buildings (as well as non-energy emissions from agriculture).

This is downright silly. Banning discussion of CIs will only result in blind overconfidence in our central estimates 😉

Happy 70th birthday to the photovoltaic cell, demonstrated on April 25, 1954.

NYT: 'the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind's most cherished dreams - the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun' nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/…

Vaccines are miraculous.

A “digital twin” is just a pretentious name for a model.

Good news on permitting reform!

The Department of Energy is giving a categorical exclusion from NEPA environmental review to:

- transmission projects that use existing rights of way

- solar projects on disturbed lands

- energy storage projects on disturbed lands

We've got a new paper in Communications Earth & Environment led by Jan Esper and Jason Smerdon. We argue that the IPCC's focus on a single Common Era temperature reconstruction was an 'insufficient summary of our understanding of temperature variability' and we provide a broader context

To supply low-carbon power to a grid via nuclear, solar, wind, or grid batteries, how much material must we dig up to build those power plants?
Answer: far less than for fossil fuels, with nuclear needing the least mining. New Breakthrough report by my team:
thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/…

In scenarios that 'limit warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot', to use IPCC speak, most scenarios go over 1.5°C and return later...

These scenarios also have radical emission reductions starting in 2020 & large-scale use of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

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To be clear: rooftop solar PV is NOT the problem. The problem is BAD RATE DESIGN that does not convey what electricity actually costs—and thus what the value of self-generating with solar or saving energy with efficiency or shifting consumption with smart devices is worth! Fix…

CDR talk and eggplant pizza at Modern Apizza with Freya Chay Zeke Hausfather and Mike Tyka (@[email protected]). 😋

.Severin Borenstein 🇺🇦 estimates that soaring retail rates, poor rate design & rapidly growing rooftop solar adoption in California combine to shift ~$3.8 billion from bills of solar adopters to those without solar, increasing their rates 5.7-7¢/kWh. 😯
energyathaas.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/cal…

Since a lot of folks seem to be misinterpreting this Carbon Brief graph, a quick explainer:

Yellow line is the Biden administration target.

Blue line is the modeled effects of policies (e.g. the IRA) passed in Biden’s first term.

We need stronger policy to bridge the gap.

NEW – State of the climate: 2024 off to a record-warm start | Zeke Hausfather

Read here ➡️ buff.ly/4ddZrfZ

Biden already officially set the US target to zero by 2050. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law & Inflation Reduction Act doubled expected emissions reductions by 2030 & moved us from the red line to the blue line. Now we need more action to get us to the target yellow zero line.

Summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest 'was 59% longer, 34% larger and had 6% higher maximum amplitude than the same event' without climate change nature.com/articles/s4324…