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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 11h

Meanwhile, the economics are looking much better in China doing the same with renewables. But it's never really about what's more economic, is it?

Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 1d

Finally something new to aspire to!

Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 1d

Always wondered why restaurant food often seemed so disappointing across North America. I had suspected Sysco had something to do with it. Spot on!

The Hidden Reason So Many Restaurants Taste the Same

YouTube video by More Perfect Union

www.youtube.com

Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 1d

It's so funny because the economics are clear as day. Collectively investing in the well-being and education of the next generation offers a great return on investment. But everyone is too busy investing into the latest pyramid scheme or bubble I suppose.

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 2d

Today we were talking about busses, and my daughter worried that if less people buy cars, car factory workers will lose their jobs. I gave her a handwavy explanation that public transit generates jobs, but I don't actually know the labor economics of that. Anyone care to weigh in?

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 4d

ExxonMobil's "What we do section" opens like this:

> Creating energy and sustainable solutions that improve quality of life and meet society’s evolving needs

Now that's a sentence I would love to see cited in a greenwashing lawsuit in Canada...

What we do | ExxonMobil

Creating sustainable energy and product solutions that improve quality of life and meet society’s evolving needs.

corporate.exxonmobil.com

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 7d

> edge closer to the 1.5 limit

Quite the understatement

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 8d

> No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans.

Hegseth... Always impressed by their range. Managing to insult such a broad variety of people. Too bad I can't grow a good beard.

Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 10d

Just for the record, here is another subsidy for combustion engines.

UK government will underwrite £1.5bn loan guarantee to Jaguar Land Rover after cyber-attack

Britain’s largest automotive employer plans to restart engine manufacturing in early October, report says

www.theguardian.com

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 11d

The amazon turning from carbon sink to carbon source is terrifying. Really driving home the climate feedback/tipping points thing.

> a growing fire-climate feedback, demonstrating how regional extremes increasingly shape the global carbon budget and complicate pathways to climate stabilization.

Unprecedented role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO₂ growth in 2024

In 2024, the global mean surface temperature rose above 1.5°C for the first sustained year, coinciding with a record atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) growth rate of 3.2 ppm. Satellite-constrained inve...

essopenarchive.org

Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 13d

That's great news!

Reposted by Julian Barg

Evan George @evanlgeorge.bsky.social · 14d

The U.S. Energy Secretary just said on stage at @nytimes.com Climate Forward event that “there are not oil and gas subsidies" in response to a good question from David Gelles. “It’s not a subsidized industry.” Uh. @oilchange.bsky.social @oilchangeus.bsky.social

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 14d

Just saw my profile among the list of contributors to ggplot2 4.0.0 - that is a project I want to be affiliated with for sure. Pretty sure it's just for a ticket I opened. It was resolved within a record two days or something, too. The beauty of a well-running free and open-source software project.

ggplot2 4.0.0

A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

www.tidyverse.org

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 14d

Utilities really are not rising to the occasion, maybe energy demand from new data centers (AI anyone?) is to blame? Tons of new commitments to build gas power plants - 118 GW capacity planned by 2035. Only 29% of coal capacity poised to be retired by 2030.

www.sierraclub.org

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 14d

I live in one of the red areas, hope that narrows it down!

Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 14d

This map shows temperature departures averaged over the last 3 months. What's it like in your area?

🟥 warmer than average
🟦 colder than average

Data from data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

Global map showing surface air temperature anomalies for the June to August 2025. Most all areas are warmer than average, except for parts of the southern Ocean and Antarctica. Anomalies are relative to 1951-1980 from NASA/GISS GISTEMPv4 data.

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 14d

I live in one of the red areas, hope that narrows it down!

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 14d

CapitalOne has almost $19B invested in fossil fuel companies, and only about $100M in renewables. Maybe I should rethink who I bank with...

reclaimfinance.org

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 18d

I'm hearing lots about insurance companies absorbing meteorologists/recent grads. This industry is in a math war, and the math says things are getting much worse by the year. That's the real economics of climate catastrophy/adaptation were facing.

Home Insurance as You Know It Is Doomed. You’re Not Ready.

The remedies for homeowners so far aren’t preparing them for a financially stable existence as the risk of disaster increases.

www.bloomberg.com

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 19d

Unrelated, but my favorite German word is "vorauseilender Gehorsam" or anticipatory compliance. When you take action in expectation of orders that haven't even been given to you or even if you're not in the line of command, to avoid trouble or even opportunistically. For examples see German history.

Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior.bsky.social · 20d

My first academic article was on the dictatorship of Uzbekistan inventing a group called "Akromiya" that did not really exist but which they used to arrest anyone with whom they disagreed under the pretext of "terrorism". Just bringing this up for no reason whatsoever!

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 21d

We/many countries could have easily adopted renewable energy 2/3/x times as fast, it's really sad. In many ways it feels like a half-assed attempt by a high school student who is mostly just whining. Drop in the bucket compared to the cost of new submarines, jet fighters, and other vanity projects.

Timmons Roberts @timmonsroberts.bsky.social · 21d

Now there's a "doomism" of fatalistic acceptance that we're too late and it's just "too hard." We cannot afford that. It's the death throes of the largest industry in human history. Without the story of intentional obstruction, this piece is true but only as far as it goes. Sad. 4/4

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 22d

Vaccine tourism (to Canada) was already a a thing during COVID, but this is on an other level. I'm having to wait two weeks for things to get sorted, and that's with a big asterisks, others will not be able to get the shot at all in Florida.

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 22d

This is what we refer to as futurewashing in our green washing paper. Guess what you can claim anything you want about the future, how could anyone know. Without specific plans it has to be considered an empty promise. I didn't anticipate fossil fuel to fill that rhetorical void but makes sense.

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 22d

okay this is getting silly now. An 11 gigawatt (!!!!!!!!!!) data centred, powered by fossil fuels but an obviously shallow, bad-faith empty promise to eventually build some nukes (only there to justify the new fossil fuelled power station they're building)

www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ferm...

Fermi America files for IPO amid plans for 11GW data center campus in Texas
Developer of 11GW data center campus in Amarillo, Texas

September 08, 2025 By Zachary Skidmore Comment
The company behind a gargantuan 11GW planned energy and data center campus in Amarillo, Texas, has filed for an initial public offering (IPO).

Fermi III
Artist rendering of campus
– Fermi America
Fermi America, a company co-founded by former US Energy Secretary Rick Perry, filed a Registration Statement on Form S-11 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission related to the proposed IPO on Monday (8 September). Fermi intends to list its common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "FRMI."

The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have yet to be determined.

According to Fermi, UBS Investment Bank, Cantor, and Mizuho have been selected as the joint lead book-running managers for the proposed offering. Macquarie Capital, Stifel, and Truist Securities will act as additional book-running managers.

Fermi is developing “Project Matador,” a planned 11GW hyperscale data center complex expected to span 18 million sq ft (1.67 million sqm). The project is being developed in partnership with the Texas Tech University System, with the campus set to be built on land at Texas Tech University.

To power the campus, Fermi plans to utilize a range of on-site power sources, including natural gas, solar, wind, and nuclear energy. The company has already signed several deals to acquire the necessary power.

In July, the company acquired more than 600MW of natural gas generation assets across two deals. The acquired assets include nine natural gas turbines, which the company stated will support its goal of delivering 1GW of AI power at the site by 2026.

While natural gas will be the primary source of power in the short term, Fermi expects that in the long term, nuclear will become the primary supplier of energy to the campus.

The company has stated its intention to deploy four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors on-site. The AP1000 is an advanced Generation III+ Pressurized Water Reactor, with a capacity of between 1,100MWe to 1,117MWe. In an attempt to streamline the permitting process, Fermi has partnered with Westinghouse to finalize the Combined Operating License Application to deploy the reactors at the site.

However, concerns remain over whether Fermi will be able to deploy the reactors on time and within budget. The last set of AP1000 units installed in the US was at the Vogtle nuclear plant in 2023, coming in $17 billion over budget and more than seven years behind schedule.

Fermi has also signed two other agreements to support its nuclear ambit

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 24d

The language police at it again...

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Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 25d

I did not have "America going full cultural revolution" on my bingo card.

Julian Barg @jbarg.bsky.social · 26d

Seems like car companies have normalized lying about your gas mileage so much that most consumers just take it for granted... That and plug-in hybrid SUVs are somehow a thing now...