Several years ago the UK had their first day of net-zero emissions, in large part because of huge offshore wind capacity in the North Sea

More and more we heard about these days here and there where demand was lowish and wind was highish and the UK was a net energy exporter.

Now it's routine enough it's no longer news.

By all means though, please keep clawing rocks and sludge from the guts of the earth to burn for power because you associate wanton destructiveness and a lack of empathy with masculinity

... The following day, Stevenson laid out his case in an expansive and mostly empty ballroom. It’s too expensive, he argued from a lectern, and the United States was not effectively assessing its environmental impact. He suggested a plan to get the public to care about this issue: putting whales front and center.

Stevenson stopped short of blaming wind companies for the spate of whale carcasses that had washed up on New Jersey and New York beaches just weeks prior. He agreed with the scientific evidence that ​“vessel strikes” — not wind development — were the biggest threat in that region. Still, the potential for harm to whales could be a powerful tool in federal court, he speculated, as well as in the court of public opinion.

This paper paints a pretty grim picture of how fragile our situation in Low Earth Orbit has become, arguing that the whole orbital house of cards is one bad day away from collapsing. The authors introduce a new metric called the CRASH Clock which estimates how long it would take for a major collision to happen if we suddenly stopped doing active avoidance maneuvers. Back in 2018 that clock sat at a comfortable 121 days, meaning we had months of buffer if things went wrong. As of June 2025 that number has plummeted to just 2.8 days. That is a terrifyingly thin margin because it implies that if a massive solar storm knocked out communications or tracking for just a weekend we’d be looking at a 30% chance of a catastrophic collision.

The data shows that Starlink is the primary driver here with their 550 km shell now being denser than the debris fields from historical anti-satellite tests. The authors found that in this specific shell you’d expect a close approach of less than one kilometer every 11 minutes. It’s not just theoretical either since Starlink satellites are already performing collision avoidance maneuvers roughly every 1.8 minutes across the whole constellation. The system is basically relying on perfect operation and zero errors to keep functioning, which is exactly why the authors compare it to a house of cards.

What makes this really concerning is that we are likely already past the point of stability in some regions. The paper suggests that altitudes above 600 km and specifically the main Starlink shell are already dense enough to support a runaway chain reaction of collisions. Even if a full Kessler Syndrome event takes decades to play out a single major collision now would be like an Exxon Valdez moment for space, creating a mess that forces everyone to operate in a much riskier environment immediately. The 2.8-day buffer is barely enough time to recover from a major geomagnetic storm, let alone a systemic failure, and the fact that we let the margin for error shrink from four months to three days in just seven years is a massive failure of orbital management.

First: fuck this bullshit. This is such a common problem with market-based solutions. I'm a big proponent of them, but you really need to keep politicians from doing this. The goal is phasing out fossil fuels. The money absolutely should be going to projects that fulfill that goal. This is not a piggy bank.

Second:

"While supporters ballyhoo the bullet train as something that would have a major impact on emissions by reducing auto traffic, the High Speed Rail Authority’s own projections indicate that, were it to be fully completed, it would reduce automobile emissions by scarcely 1%. Meanwhile construction actually increases emissions."

This doesn't quite pass the sniff test. You're telling me that if you built a zero-emissions mode of high speed transit along one of the most trafficked routes in the state that there would be no change in emissions? Are the ridership projections zero? Did the model say that for every driver who choses to take the train instead of driving, a new driver will take their place? Is this factoring in the effect on airline emissions from people who train instead of fly? This just sounds like that monologue from Landman where Billy Bob Thorton's character confidently declares a bunch of facts about climate reduction that the writer thought sounded good.

"The Commission has identified solutions for a simple and predictable implementation," the Commission document said.

One option would let companies comply using certificates bought from a third-party verifier, which would assign the imported gas an emissions value at its production location.

The second option is a "trace and claim" method, in which volumes of fuel are assigned a digital ID, which is attached to all sale and purchase agreements as the oil or gas moves through the value chain from producer to, eventually, the final buyer.

The changes do not amend the main requirements of the methane law - which will become increasingly strict over time. From 2027, it will make compliance with methane rules equivalent to those of the EU a requirement for new gas supply contracts.

I don't really read this as "offering simpler rules". It looks like they're explaining how to verify the origin of methane after the US falsely claims it would be impossible.