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David Roberts Profile picture
@drvolts
Feb 24, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Worth noting: the Texas mess wasn't a "grid crisis." The grid did just fine distributing the power it had available. It was a *generation crisis* -- thanks to inadequately weatherized natgas production facilities & power plants, there just wasn't enough power to go around.
The Texas grid certainly would have benefited from being bigger, from being connected to the other two US grids, but you would need a truly epic amount of line capacity to import enough power to cover that shortfall. Generation failure was the heart of the crisis.
Everyone keeps RTing these tweets, so I'll add to this thread: I wrote a post on all this! See here: volts.wtf/p/lessons-from…
Great thread showing how various sources performed (relative to expectations for both normal & "extreme" scenarios) in the Texas crisis. Weirdly, only solar clearly outperformed (albeit against a tiny baseline).
A graph to give grid operators nightmares.

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More from @drvolts

David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 20
🧵 Let me, in the spirit of bipartisanship, make a genuinely bipartisan point: most politicians, even politicians who are excellent at other parts of the job, are bad at giving big speeches. Most *people* are bad at it & politicians are just people.
What's weird about it to me is that it's similar to PowerPoint presentations, in that everyone makes the same mistakes. The mistakes have been documented & discussed at *immense* length, and yet everyone keeps making them! Something about the mistakes is "sticky."
One big mistake: people think when they give a "big" speech, they need to use their "big" voice. So they just ... talk loud. They yell. But loud speech is monotonic & somewhat grating, especially at length. (Hillary Clinton does this, bless her heart.) They key thing is ...
Read 13 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 13
I come out somewhere between @Sulliview and @jeffjarvis on this one. A short 🧵.

Let's distinguish between two reasons Harris might need to speak specifically with the US political press corps.

The first reason is: to inform the public what she's about.
On that I'd say two things. First, political reporters hate hearing this, but the public doesn't actually care that much about policy specifics. They want vibes. If she wants to *win*, she'll stay focused on vibes.

But second, if the goal is genuinely to *inform* ...
... then an interview w/ an MSM political reporter is one of the *worst* ways to do it. They'll ask about personal dramas & court intrigue. They'll try to get her to say something that can be spun as controversial, to get clicks. Their primary goal is not to inform!
Read 13 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 12
The "cars = freedom" discourse seems to have kicked up again. It makes me think about the first time I visited Paris (on my honeymoon). I remember we walked out of our hotel & were discussing what to do & it sort of just hit me: we don't really need to plan. We can just go!
We didn't need to think about how to get a car from A to B, or how to park, or whether there was overnight parking at the hotel, etc. Anywhere you go, there's transit fairly accessible. Go wherever you want, whenever you want! It's always right there. Just go.
It was the first time I really felt, in my gut, the freedom that good transit brings. The freedom of unburdened, spontaneous movement through a city. It was revelatory.

Like so many things related to good urbanism, you really can't capture it in words. You have to feel it.
Read 4 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 12
So, there are these "tipping points" -- points at which natural systems can, after a period of slow incremental change, suddenly "flip" to a new state. Scientists have identified a range, from coral bleaching to the collapse of various ice sheets. What they have in common ...
... is that crossing them would be *devastating* for humanity. Sci-fi apocalypse stuff, far beyond the damages projected from "normal" climate change (which are already cumulatively devastating).

Now, scientists have long cautioned against confident predictions ...
... about these tipping points. There's an element of stochasticity; it's very, very difficult to say exactly when they might happen. We *think* they're still a ways away, but we're definitely in the zone of danger & uncertainty. See this NYT piece:
nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 10
It might seem like kind of a trivial thing, but I think you can tell a *ton* about a person from how they interact with children. When you see Harris (and before her, Obama) interact with children or young people, you see a lot of what psychologists call "mirroring."
Mirroring is a fundamental part of child-rearing. The kid widens their eyes; you widen your eyes. The kid laughs; you laugh. What this teaches kids is that they are agents in the world. They can communicate their mental state & others will recognize & respond. Basic stuff!
It's most important when they are little babies, just learning about the world, but it's never *not* important. Even when they get older, it's incredibly important to emphasize that they have agency, that their mental states are significant, that they matter.
Read 11 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
Aug 7
OK, one last 🧵on the Walz pick. To me, the question of why Harris chose Walz isn't that mysterious. He offered her something that none of the other candidates could offer. (This Politico story gets closest to it.) politico.com/news/2024/08/0…
All the other candidates are up-and-comers. They're plotting for their political futures. They would spend the campaign, and the presidency, *at least in part* trying to build their own independent power bases, prepping for when they step into the main spotlight.
There's nothing particularly nefarious about that, it's just the name of the game -- the same awkward position Harris herself has been in for the last four years. A VP who is thinking about their political ambitions, their future, is never 100% an ally.
Read 8 tweets

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