Ana Unruh Cohen, PhD

👻 Happy Halloween! 👻

"That is a challenging outlook for an industry investing heavily in new export capacity on the assumption that tomorrow's power sector will burn substantially more ⁠gas than today's."

Dolores Huerta, who rose to national prominence as the co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, and was known for her advocacy for women farmworkers, has died. She was 96. Huerta coined the ¡Sí Se Puede! chant and came to define the farmworker movement.

Meanwhile, global natgas demand is expected to decline in 2026. “Global gas demand is expected to fall by around 0.5% (or 20 bcm) in 2026, the third annual decline this decade following previous decreases in 2020 and 2022.”

The techno-dystopia I fear is not one where an LLM becomes sentient, developing both a desire and means to wipe out humanity, but one where people come to believe that truth is whatever Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, or Grok say, and the few very rich people who own them use that to manipulate the public.

"BAAJA undermines bedrock environmental laws while granting the fossil fuel industry more power, more access to public lands, and less accountability. In return, the package includes tenuous renewable energy and transmission provisions, many of which could be achieved under current law."

This is an excellent question and one that IMO everyone should ask about all BAAJA modeling. The asymmetry Nat points out is real and the value judgments modelers make about whether/how to account for impacts from fossil fuel exports really matter.

A thread about another reason people are justified in skepticism about AI.

Thanks to President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill (that Republicans voted against but tried to take credit for) remote locations on the Navajo Nation Reservation finally have access to electricity and broadband for the first time, ever.

Since 🌡️was invented,there had never been anything comparable to what we are seeing now in West Asia. Still MINIMUMS >30C in Middle East and tropical nights in The Caucasus at 43N. This won't end anytime soon: Thousands of November records will be pulverized allover the area.

Developers are proposing gargantuan hyperscalers on public lands, anticipating #BAAJA's elimination of legal protections for the land, water, and wildlife.

Once I met with some researchers who worked on agri-voltaics and they said you could have any animals around solar panels except goats. Goats jump on the panels and break them and tear out the wiring and generally cause problems. So no 🐐 with the GOAT of energy technology 🌞

WaPo reports this no-bill was the Cassidy Hutchinson case www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

SCOOP: Former Biden senior climate advisor John Podesta said senators should renegotiate the bipartisan permitting deal & he believes the bill’s permit certainty language hands Trump a “loaded Howitzer” to go after public lands. For @heatmap.news

Hard to believe the 'lower costs by wasting more of the product' narrative remains live in the shale patch

I dug into Anthropic's 240,000-word prospectus so you don't have to. The AI giant said data centers are likely to increase gas prices, it's not interested in nuclear or renewables, and it's looking to expand abroad in part due to U.S. data center backlash. subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter/2...

Reading: Trump’s cuts have exposed US to ‘cascade’ of El Niño dangers, experts warn www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Two firefighters died in Yosemite battling a remote blaze that they might have been better off leaving alone — but thanks to the Trump administration’s new policies, letting it burn wasn’t an option: www.theatlantic.com/science/2026...

NEPA for the win

A student-led opposition movement that spent two years protesting the Serbian government has won in the country's general election. Aleksandar Vučić's Progressive Party, in power for 14 years, conceded defeat on Sunday night. https://cnn.it/4zhej7Y

New from me: The US has faced a higher cost than any other country from the global Hormuz oil shock, with the crisis adding $160 billion to its fuel bill — or $471 per person on average — despite being the world’s largest oil producer.

October 26, 1975 – “The Endangered Atmosphere” conference begins… allouryesterdays.info/2022/10/25/o...

Cornell Lab's Wild Birds Revealed. The 5th video in the series explores Brown and American White #Pelicans, two similar-looking birds each with unique flying and hunting styles. Brown Pelicans prefer coastal marine habitats, hunting with a breathtaking dive from high above the waters...

🎶 His name is Lula. He is the winner 🎶

Ancient plants reveal that the vestiges of the North American ice sheet started expanding a few thousand years ago, but that climate change caused it to reverse course.

I just finished Retro, a really fun & thought provoking novel by & @jessicagolds.bsky.social! You can read an excerpt but really you should just get the book & read it. Enjoy!

Peak application of dendrochronology. 10/10, no notes.

People's courage in Minneapolis was a clear turning point, maybe the most important pivot, in Trump 2 so far.

"The U.S. military over-relied on AI for targeting in Iran and as a result bombed an elementary school, killing over 100 children. We have disturbing testimony from Israeli military officers that AI target selection made them feel morally absolved when they killed civilians."

In court filings, wind companies say the Defense Department has perpetuated delays on projects instead of restarting a review process they were ordered to resume. https://www.washingtonsun.com/energy-environment/pentagon-wind-projects-review-frozen-court-filings

"Between 2023 and 2025, the gas share of MISO’s queued capacity increased by about a factor of five." As of this September, "fast-tracked capacity additions are 54% gas by total capacity, 84% gas by generation capacity, and 93% gas by anticipated annual energy generation."

In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web.

The Trump administration has given some of the country's biggest sources of toxic pollution a free pass, according to an investigation out today by @ericlipton.nytimes.com and me. @nytimes.com gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated deep-sea life—and it hasn’t recovered according to a recent 13-year study. ALSO a cautionary tale about other industrial activities such as #deepseamining. www.science.org/content/arti...

“The proportion of estimated heat deaths attributable to human-induced climate change shows a marked rise over time, increasing from 39% in 2000 to 68% in 2025.”

JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

Solar has become “the obvious choice” for consumers, said Nsitem. “As the US-Iran war pushed up global fuel prices, the cost of operating these generators has risen, making solar systems much more attractive overnight.” Gift link

Beam me up!

Trump has made more stock trades in his second term than all 535 members of Congress combined.

JUST POSTED: A Russian energy giant has secretly moved to acquire a position in a massive Alaska gas project. Its part of talks between Witkoff/Kushner & Putin. But CEO of US company resigns after learning of Russian money in the project. A wowzer of a story. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

Early flood cost estimates: $4.7 billion UN Loss & Damage Climate Fund payment: $20 million The world isn't ready for climate risks hitting home now, let alone the orders of magnitude increase coming down the line www.reuters.com/business/env...

The battle to keep the Roadless Rule goes on. Thank you to the hundreds of thousands who submitted public comment. American Rivers wrote a good overview of where things stand & why the Roadless Rule is so important for conservation, water supply, & wildfire prevention. @americanrivers.bsky.social