Christoph Bertram

Screenshot from https://climatewedges.com/build.html?50~000011112222aabuuyxwzsrcc334 a completely unrealistic pathway that achieves peak temperature below 1.6C (completely impossible according large body of literature), and furthermore achieves 0.2 C temperature drawdown without any carbon dioxide removal.... Also giving illusion there are 1.5 strategies only doing energy transition, without any landuse transformation

I would say the old 8 out of 15 is also preferable because everyone will understand this is a super simplified analysis framework to schematically discuss trade-offs, not an exploration of realistic strategies... this tool gives you two decimals on T outcomes in 2050 and 2100... irresponsible imho

I agree that it can be a great educational tool. In its current form, it however requires a lot of additional knowledge to distinguish between unfortunately 'too good to be true' pathways, and actual science-consistent strategies
bsky.app/profile/chri...

The online version only contains the new wedge figure, I like your figure with the evolution from the 2004 wedges better.
I guess you did not get to see the webtool as part of the review, but I wish both articles would more clearly highlight the huge risks of simplifying bsky.app/profile/chri...

Screenshot from webtool https://climatewedges.com/build.html?50~00001111plokogggfhijee showing how supposedly, wind and solar scale-up and adjustment in the land sector (without any dietary changes, pure land management adjustments) alone would suffice to limit peak temperature to 1.64C (already impossible), and also set world on track to 1.46C in 2100

A user of the webtool willl come up with the impression that there are 'pain-free' 1.5C pathways, using a combination of 8 solar + wind wedges in power sector, and 14 in land-use sector that according to the web tool suffice to bring GHG close to zero by 2050. Unfortunately not in the real world!

Congratulations to a large comprehensive effort, that contains a lot of important improvements beyond the original 'mitigation wedge' approach. On the other hand, there is a reason nobody else tried doing this, as it is bound to mislead:
See e.g. this 1.5C 'strategy' without any consumer changes: 👇

Important to note that there was an earlier threat that already was effective in bringing back a "Current Policies Scenario" (CPS) in WEO2025 that basically takes unrealistic, already now counterfactual assumptions to arrive at very high oil demand (more detail in thread bsky.app/profile/chri... )

Excerpt from IEA's World Energy Outlook 2025, page 126: " In the CPS, the share of the market taken by EVs continues to rise, though not as rapid as in recent years, with EVs accounting for around 40% of the over 100 million passenger cars sold worldwide in 2035. China accounts for more than 50% of total electric cars sold globally in 2035, and Europe for another 30%. EV deployment is much more subdued elsewhere, with sales shares remaining close to current levels through to 2050.

Furthermore, the pod very clearly made the point that EV growth outside China and EU is bound to increase strongly based on economics (the pod mentioned Jordan, I would add Brazil but there are many), and in that aspect the new 'Current Policies' scenario is really counterfactual, 'frozen world'

I enjoyed listening to this conversation on my bike commute this morning, and was very happy that @shastingssimon.bsky.social you corrected the take on the IEA 'backtracking' on peak oil... and seeing today's news illustrates that this is an important difference.
bsky.app/profile/andr...

A fundamental tension:

Robotaxi services can make the most money in dense urban neighborhoods—which are precisely the places that need them least.

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

Indeed cool to have more countries and the interactivity, but the original with longer historic time series (more than 100 years, 1900-2023) for India, China and the US is also absolutely brilliant, and makes it even clearer how countries do not follow old trajectories
bsky.app/profile/embe...

NEW | India is forging a different #energytransition path to China 🇮🇳⚡

Where China built first on coal and gas, India is taking a shortcut — using cheap solar to meet rising demand, relying far less on fossil fuels, and electrifying transport earlier.

https://loom.ly/UFDLamw

Great ternary plot, great idea to put the 100% fossil on bottom!

A timely (long) read, both because of the birthday last Thursday (see below), and MLK day on Monday, and because the thoughts on non-violent protest against 'legal' injustices are very much on-point also with respect to the current situation:
www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen...

The US is a great place to live for the super rich and super famous. For everyone else, plenty of other places would offer a better life. And yet, a big chunk of the latter group doesn't demand better from the US, because the former group convinced them that they too could be rich or famous someday.

Renee Macklin Good’s wife says she nurtured kindness On Wednesday, Renee Macklin Good was fatally shot by a federal ICE agent. Becca Good, her wife, shared the following statement with MPR News.

Please read this.

www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Peaceful protest in DC right now

There is a growing network of faith communities across the US who are organizing & speaking out against the Trump administration's use of government powers for cruelty and repression. Tender green shoots of civil society resistance, but important ones.

So when authorities say “she tried to run over an officer,” that is not a neutral description. It is a claim of intent that can be used to justify lethal force after the fact.

When the state kills first and invents the threat afterward, it is not policing, it is death squad behavior. /end

🧵In my expert opinion as a researcher of vehicle ramming attacks, what has been publicly described in the video evidence does not support the claim that Renee Nicole Good was attempting a deliberate ramming attack when she was shot in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. 1/7

Electric vs. Gas Car Calculator: Which Is the Better Deal? There’s no more federal subsidy. But our calculator lets you see if an E.V. might still be cheaper in the long-run.

Absolutely not, Arvind, good choice! But spending more on oil than in the alternative case on electricity really seems a weird choice for you. This calculator comes to break-even for BEV compact SUV in Texas after less than 5 years... And you absolutely do road trips without superchargers now...

Oh wow, I had no idea how big these claws are. Have seen a bald eagle in the wild before, but never paid attention to their claws. And crazy story about the fish, seems this could be an unpleasant timely parable here...

What is the eagle holding in their left claw, do you know? (Great thread!)

I just actually read the news for the first time in a week.

Do not recommend.

Tim-und-Struppi-Meme: "What a year, huh?", sagt der Kapitän. "Captain, it's January 5", sagt Tim.

Experience: I cycled the length of the UK on a wooden bike With no plans, I set off from John O’Groats to travel down south to Dover. Friends and family didn’t think I’d last a mile

❤️ every moment of this story

Days start getting longer on Monday

For everyone traveling home from #AGU25, here something fitting to listen to, the final message dovetails nicely with one of my highlight take-home messages from this year:
"If you don’t stop, they really can’t stop you."
bsky.app/profile/agu....
And if you need a perfect nerd present:

Introducing the U.S. Climate Collection: Connecting Climate Science for a Brighter Future YouTube video by WebsEdgeScience

On #AGVTV at #AGU25, Dr. Melissa Kenney and I talked about the opportunity for the entire scientific community to contribute towards climate assessment research. Submit your papers at USclimatecollection.org. youtu.be/7Kb-hfwIUxQ?...

Wide, frontal view of a large, white marble modernist building under a clear blue sky. The façade is symmetrical, with a deep overhanging roof supported by tall, slender white columns evenly spaced across the front. Near the top of the wall, a horizontal row of narrow vertical slits forms a decorative grille. Centered across the façade is black lettering that reads on the bottom “THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS,” with part of the text on top obscured by a black rectangle, redacting Donald Trump's name that was just added to the building. The building sits above a broad, dark platform, and the foreground shows light stone walkways and rectangular planters filled with neatly trimmed shrubs. Two small human figures stand near the base of the building.

Summary of the news today