The Great Salt Lake is in trouble.

So I went to another lake that the Los Angeles aqueduct dried up 100 years ago, and eventually turned into the *single largest source of dust pollution in the United States,* to find out what might be coming.

grid.news/story/climate/… The day I visited, the air at Owens Lake was pristine. 20 years ago or so, there were days when the PM10 pollution level was more than 130 TIMES the federal limit. I asked Phill Kiddoo, the region's pollution control officer, what that would do to a person:

"Instant death."

NYT leadership still seems to be insisting that the GLAAD letter is the same as the contributors' letter?

https://twitter.com/maxwelltani/status/1626324277422133253

Plenty of fundamental differences between them, but let's start here -- GLAAD demands, contributor demands:

A really good way to let conspiracy theories continue to proliferate is to let the EPA train derailment response page break entirely Anyway, here's this again

grid.news/story/misinfor…

Russia has drained a reservoir in Ukraine, joining a tradition of using/attacking water in wars that dates to antiquity.

And climate change will make it worse.

My latest for @gridnews:

grid.news/story/climate/… "Where demand for water exceeds water supply are places where we see more likelihood of violence associated with water.... I do believe that climate change is going to make this problem worse." -- @PeterGleick

Biden is speaking at #COP27 now. He started by mentioning Veterans Day and in particular special envoy for climate John Kerry. Biden says the actions his admin has taken has put the US on track to meet its Paris Agreement goal of 50-52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Which... do they? I thought we were at like 41-43 at this point...

Draft of the 5th US National Climate Assessment, now open for comment:

"While US greenhouse gas emissions are decreasing, the current rate of decline is not sufficient to meet current national and international commitments designed to avoid the worst harms from climate change." "US emissions remain substantial and would have to decline by more than 6% per year on average to meet current national goals of reaching net-zero emissions around 2050."

lol we're screwed

nytimes.com/2022/11/07/cli… I guess a bright spot is that Switzerland actually already has lower total emissions than some of the countries they're contracting with, and even lower per-capita emissions than one or two.

But if bigger rich countries start doing this en masse...

Already almost 200K customers without power in Florida Now more than 300K

piddly-ass asteroid

nasa.gov/content/live-c… Increasingly less piddly-ass asteroid

Infuriating stuff

nytimes.com/2022/09/24/bus… The sheer gall on display, my god

Someone please tell me if I'm wrong, but I have the impression that the best climate models and projections didn't really have "all the rivers are gonna dry up, like now-ish" in there Like yes the Colorado, for a variety of reasons (grid.news/story/climate/…). But the Rhine, the Yangtze, the Po -- shit's bad!

"Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified."

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… moving trucks lol

UPDATED: California has now approved its plan to ban sales of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Huge news, but a tough climb ahead.

grid.news/story/climate/… Fun fact, that deadline is only one more year distant from now than is the release of the original Nissan Leaf, the first mass-marketed modern EV.

Biden speaking now before the signing

https://twitter.com/davelevitan/status/1559577500044431362

12,471 days since this

Biden will sign the #InflationReductionAct into law a bit later today.

Some of @gridnews coverage of the bill and what it means:

First, @MaggieSeverns and I looked at some of the consumer rebates and tax incentives related to energy and health care:

grid.news/story/politics… Also, @evolambert and @MaggieSeverns looked at what's in the bill specifically to bring prescription drug prices down: grid.news/story/politics…

Then @evolambert also wrote about how the cap on insulin for those under private insurance is NOT in there:

grid.news/story/politics…

Every sentence of this is more embarrassing than the last.

nytimes.com/2022/07/01/sty… There's a million to choose from but for my money this probably wins

Russian shelling of Kharkiv destroyed a neutron generator, used in scientific experiments. Because it did have nuclear material, it was under @iaeaorg safeguards.

We gave the targeting/takeover of nuclear facilities in Ukraine the 360 treatment: grid.news/story/360/2022… By taking the Zaporizhzhia plant, Russia took 20 percent of Ukraine's electricity capacity.

There are reports that the Yuzhnoukrainsk (South Ukraine) plant may be next. If it takes all four nuclear plants, Russia would control half the country's electricity generation.

What if, instead of gas prices going up for everybody, oil companies simply made less money We all just have to make sacrifices sometimes

This Thomas Friedman paragraph is... something This piece has a whole section on the idea that climate change adaptation is the "worst idea" and holy shit have you met like 125 countries, Mr. World is Flat???

Adaptation does not mean "giving up" on mitigation! How did I end up in 1998! What the hell!

I mean yes pulling out of Paris was bad but it's pretty rich to paint the previous eight years as some utopia of climate progress