What I thought was a pretty December sky turned out to be something stranger Early on the morning of December 16th, 2022, something appeared in the sky above West Sonoma County that looked, with a little imagination, like Douglas Adams's whale materialising out of thin air above an
Both sides of this argument are right, and both are missing the point It's a familiar exchange by now, playing out somewhere on social media most weeks. Someone posts that EVs should make noise, because silent cars are a hazard for blind pedestrians. Someone else replies that EVs
The Federal Aviation Administration has spent two and a half years telling West Sonoma County that returning to a wider, higher departure path out of Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport (STS) is not possible. For three weeks in July, without announcing it as such, the agency did exactly that.
The claim comes up constantly: solar provides zero baseload capacity. It must be backed up with coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydro. Without those, the lights go out. Worth looking at more carefully. Because "baseload" is doing two different jobs in that sentence, and the argument depends on
Apple Park's primary design goal was to foster collaboration and serendipitous interaction — almost the exact words Apple's own head of industrial design used to describe the building years after it opened, and consistent with what Jobs pitched to Cupertino's city council in 2011: a
It's a familiar photo. Rows of crops under a greenhouse roof, a CO2 injection line running along the gutter, a claim underneath: "CO2 is plant food — more of it makes plants grow bigger." It's usually posted as a rebuttal to climate concern, carrying an
The AC grid made sense when power travelled from central plants to passive loads. Distributed solar, home batteries, and electric vehicles have changed all three of those conditions. A DC distribution architecture — from the landscaping cart to the living room to the international standard — is not a speculative future. It
Every siting refusal has a price. Nobody itemises it. Refusal is also a decision An objection to a solar farm is a document of remarkable precision. It counts acres. It surveys the birds. It maps the wetlands, measures the distance to the nearest historic district, and works out the percentage
Every planning refusal has a price. Nobody itemises it. Refusal is also a decision A planning objection to a solar farm is a document of remarkable precision. It counts acres. It commissions glint-and-glare studies. It maps skylark territories, measures the distance to the nearest listed building, and works
On Closer Inspection The video runs 51 seconds. It's labelled "Solar Farm SECRET." In it, Michigan Republican state Rep. Dave Prestin delivers the key line: "Any field that had solar panels installed on it will never be allowed to grow potatoes for human consumption due
On Closer Inspection examines claims about clean energy that generate more heat than light. Solar farm proposals attract a predictable pair of objections. They appear at planning inquiries in England and in public debates across the United States, stated with apparent concern for the natural world. The first holds that
On Closer Inspection examines claims about clean energy that generate more heat than light. Some criticisms of renewable energy don't survive contact with the evidence. That solar panels leach toxins into the soil is simply false; "wind turbines kill more birds than any other human activity"
On Closer Inspection examines claims about clean energy that generate more heat than light. Over the weekend, The Sunday Times published a story about asbestos found in wind turbines. It's generated considerable heat online — worth a closer look. First, though: this isn't a new issue globally.
Environmentalism needs a full accounting "Think global, act local" has been environmentalism's working instruction for half a century. But it has had a structural flaw built into it from the start: a decision made locally is by definition judged locally — against whether this project, on its
If you spend any time working alongside programmers, you'll probably encounter words like "push," "pull," "branch," and — accompanied by a visible wince — "merge conflict." These are the everyday terms of working with git. For anyone who isn't a
A polemic Every generation of environmental progress has had to overcome the same defensive posture: the person being asked to stop doing something harmful who reframes the request as an attack on themselves. The factory owner who called clean air regulation an assault on their livelihood. The smoker who framed
"Labour bans traditional tumble dryers to impose Brussels Net Zero madness on Britain." The Express (June 8th, 2026), unsurprisingly. It won't get a link. The policy is worth defending. There's also a real problem with it — just not the one the Express is worried
There is a particular type of social media post doing the rounds. It arrives as a video — often a reel, often several minutes long — in which the creator explains, in evident good faith, that artificial intelligence is consuming unconscionable quantities of water and electricity, and that this makes it an
A Field Guide If you spend any time arguing for clean energy online, you will encounter this pattern repeatedly. Having a name for it — and a compact reference to point to — is more useful than relitigating the same selective concerns from scratch every time. This guide is intended for exactly
EV
If it weren't so tragic, it'd be ironic. One of the main canards about EVs has been "it's just a longer tailpipe". It turns out the length of the tailpipe matters — the difference is measurable in children's lungs, brains, and
The title is intended to some extent for rhetorical effect, but you also need to read it with the right intonation. For context, someone else (and unfortunately I don't know who to credit) observed: "EVs have an infrastructure problem, not a range problem". Infrastructure, range, and