Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 1d

weird for a justice40 program, huh?

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 1d

Oh shit you’re right, how could I have overlooked this

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Adrienne Marshall @hydro-adrienne.bsky.social · 2d

🌧️ Correlation distances of precipitation gauges vary in both space and time! New work out in @agu.org's GRL, led by @alexayeo.bsky.social (with @lakeographer.bsky.social and me) examines precip correlation distances over the US. Check it out: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Maps of the US, showing trends in precipitation correlation distances over a 70-year observational record in each season. Summer correlation distances are decreasing.

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Nathaniel William Horadam @horadam.bsky.social · 2d

It’s a good thing Texas installed so much reliable solar, wind, and battery capacity to shoulder the load in the event the state’s unreliable coal generation suffered a catastrophic failure.

Because apparently it did.

🔌💡

ieefa.org/resources/ne...

Newest big U.S. coal-plant offline until 2027

The newest major coal-fired power plant in the U.S. is expected to be offline until March 2027 after a major failure in April.

ieefa.org

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 2d

I mean, this is basically just plagiarizing my website with a few minor issues. I'm not too fussed about this particular characterization (but also is "what Emily says about herself" what searchers are looking for?) -- I'm more worried about characterization of my findings than my focus

Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 2d

At the risk of angry-posting, I hope we learn something from this given the *extensive* environmental justice and environmental concessions that were made to "protect" the programs

Emily Pontecorvo @emilypont.bsky.social · 2d

🚨 Breaking: Heatmap has obtained a new internal DOE grant termination list that includes the two major DAC hub awards — Oxy/1PointFive's South Texas DAC Hub and Heirloom/Climeworks' Project Cypress in Louisiana.
heatmap.news/politics/doe...

Trump to Cancel Direct Air Capture Hubs in Texas, Louisiana

A new list of grant cancellations obtained by Heatmap includes Climeworks and Heirloom projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

heatmap.news

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James Temple @jtemple.bsky.social · 2d

DOE appears set to terminate tens of millions in funding for Project Cypress and South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub, the two big projects in the US DAC Hubs program.

The US is set to cancel funding for two major direct-air capture plants

he terminations cut tens of millions of dollars that Climeworks, Heirloom, Oxy and others were depending on to develop carbon removal projects in Louisiana and Texas.

www.technologyreview.com

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Emily Pontecorvo @emilypont.bsky.social · 2d

🚨 Breaking: Heatmap has obtained a new internal DOE grant termination list that includes the two major DAC hub awards — Oxy/1PointFive's South Texas DAC Hub and Heirloom/Climeworks' Project Cypress in Louisiana.
heatmap.news/politics/doe...

Trump to Cancel Direct Air Capture Hubs in Texas, Louisiana

A new list of grant cancellations obtained by Heatmap includes Climeworks and Heirloom projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

heatmap.news

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 3d

An actual quote from the shitty summary that popped up when I was looking for a link to my RNG paper, which is basically purely a model with no societal components and is pretty forcefully against RNG:
"Her work...advocat[es] for RNG systems that support essential services and protect people."

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 3d

This is a privileged complaint, but one thing I find really, really insidious about search-embedded LLMs that affects my life is that summaries make me sound way less technical than I am, and also basically claim that I advocate for really problematic technologies as social justice tools.

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Prof. Ian Walker @ianwalker.bsky.social · 3d

Will I be the first to suggest the carbon offsets worked exactly as planned: they delayed real action for another 25 years

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 3d

Carbon offsets fail to cut global heating due to ‘intractable’ systemic problems, study says

Analysis of 25 years of evidence shows most schemes are poor quality and fail to lower emissions The failure of carbon offsets to cut planet-heating pollution is “not due to a few bad apples”, a review paper has found, but down to deep-seated systemic problems that incremental change will not solve. Research over two decades has found “intractable” problems that have made carbon credits in most big programmes poor quality, according to the study. While the industry and diplomats have made efforts to improve the system, it found much-awaited rules agreed at a UN climate summit last year “did not substantially address the quality problem”. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 4d

Genuinely I just taught my undergrads that — as neutrally as I can possibly say this — the fact that lots of our legislators remember the 70s oil crisis explains some unfortunately high proportion of our energy policy

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 4d

my kingdom for the research community to stop bemoaning the need to "overbuild" renewables while smiling magnanimously upon the economically efficient choice to have peaker gas plants running at 10% cap factors.

it's not overbuilding if we need that much to meet demand!

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 5d

It’s not, phew!

Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 5d

I mean I am calling for nationalization of a number of critical industries, so no, but yes

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 5d

Give all research faculty support for 1 student/year challenge

Kevin J. CREATURE @kevinjkircher.com · 5d

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

sites.stat.columbia.edu

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 5d

So I assumed this was coming and/or happening but I just found my first actual record of using LLMs instead of people in a participatory decision making process. Tbc I support doing work to figure out what likely problems are before using people's time, but actually *subbing* the people...smdh

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Kevin J. CREATURE @kevinjkircher.com · 5d

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

sites.stat.columbia.edu

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 9d

Coal recommissioning 🙃

Relatedly, what was that again about how EPA didn’t need to regulate new build coal because no one would do that? I heard proposals for new coal under Biden and I hear them more now.

Energy Department Announces $625 Million Investment to Reinvigorate and Expand America’s Coal Industry

The U.S. Department of Energy today announced a $625 million investment to expand and reinvigorate America’s coal industry, aiming to boost energy production and support coal communities nationwide.

www.energy.gov

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 13d

Oh, for sure. this is still a huge issue we need to work on — dialysis also comes up a lot in more modern settings — but seeing the casual reference to an iron lung was pretty wild.

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 13d

congrats, sara!! super cool!

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 13d

NotThatLongAgo.gif

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 13d

welp tonight i'm reading a 1975 paper that uses iron lung patients as an example group of people who care a lot about electricity reliability and just...thank fuck I haven't had to worry about polio in my life, and also bloody hell, do we need to worry about polio again???

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 15d

I would not have gotten the direction of this chart right (US petrochemical feedstock supply, specifically from petroleum) but as soon as I thought about it, it clicked. Pretty sure this shows the big shift from oil to ngas-derived feedstocks for plastics &c -- but check me?

chart using EIA data showing 1995-2024 "US Product Supplied of Petrochemical Feedstocks (Mbbl)" with a steady decline starting around 2006; current use is 27% of peak

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isaac @sevier.io · 16d

In a convo today i was reflecting on the sheer level of detailed analysis that the fossil fuel corporations put into their planning and execution work. If we are going to put them out of business for good, why would it be possible with less strategy or analysis than they put into their reproduction?

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 17d

but directionally we're talking about "it would be hard to fund the schools if this coal-fired power plant shuts down" and economic dependence specifically -- jobs and revenue. work on e.g. "Los Angeles is car-dependent" is important but not in scope for us.

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 17d

It's not something we define quantitatively (one of our leadership team, Daniel Raimi, has some research on this), but generally we'd like to see some evidence of dependence on pre-consumer fossil systems

www.resilientenergyeconomies.org/research-pro... will give you a sense of past funding!

Research Projects

www.resilientenergyeconomies.org

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 17d

Very excited to announce our* $450k RFP for ~$25-100k proposals on research for economic resilience in fossil fuel-dependent communities in the United States as they transition. Hit us with your preproposals, due 31 October 👻

*Resilient Energy Economies Initiative! This one sponsored by Sloan

Grants

www.resilientenergyeconomies.org

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 22d

(extremely Žižek voice)

::sniff:: that…is ideology

Silvia Secchi @profsecchi.bsky.social · 22d

One thing I learned in almost 30 years of work in US ag policy is that people self censoring their scholarship & doing work within the parameters of what they think big ag will accept resulted in a world where nobody knows how to think meaningfully about alternative choices & argues for them. My 2¢.

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Silvia Secchi @profsecchi.bsky.social · 22d

One thing I learned in almost 30 years of work in US ag policy is that people self censoring their scholarship & doing work within the parameters of what they think big ag will accept resulted in a world where nobody knows how to think meaningfully about alternative choices & argues for them. My 2¢.

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