As far as global energy economy impacts of the Hormuz closure go, this is a much, much bigger deal than some politicians here in Canada, for example, are making of the need to build more pipelines
There’s a real disconnect in anglosphere discourse because a lot of it centres in the US where people aren’t seeing Chinese EVs at all, while much of the rest of the world is
It’s a well-known story now but still pretty wild that these Syrian folks who started showing up at the Antigonish Farmers’ Market 10 or so years back with a folding card table and little clamshell packages of chocolate are now all but an official symbol of Nova Scotia
If you’re in a political comms type profession, this is a pretty stark lesson in just how likely people are to see what they want to see no matter how you craft your message and such
In the last days of the first dotcom boom ca. 2000, some media companies (including the one I worked for) threw up half-assed "shopping" portals and such loosely attached to their core work in the hope of catching some of the millions in venture capital being thrown around. Feels familiar
Screencap from Ember Energy report reads: "Peak fossil demand. The era of peaking fossil fuels began before the 2020s twin shocks. OECD fossil fuel demand peaked in 2007. Global fossil energy use in industry plateaued in 2014. In buildings, 2018. In road transport, 2019. Fossil fuel demand in the world outside China has been flat since 2019, and China’s own fossil consumption is now plateauing. Growth in fossil-fuelled power generation has stalled: in the first three quarters of 2025, solar and wind grew fast enough to exceed new demand. With solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries growing exponentially, decline is near. The twin shocks pull the peaks forward, shorten the plateaus, and steepen the declines."
I'd hope this paragraph would give pause to Canadian business and political leaders whose immediate response to the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has been to howl for more pipelines
Vital read from @ember-energy.org on the "twin fossil shock" and booming electrotech.
"The temptation will be to reach for the familiar playbook – more drilling, more subsidies, more supply diversification. These reflexes were built for a world without alternatives"
ember-energy.org/latest-insig...
"One pleads for resolution, while the other reflexively increases the temperature."
Tremendous analysis, folks. You should dig into their respective points of view on moral questions next, you'll be amazed at the size of the gap there
NY Times headline:
In defiant statement, Trump pushes for narrower guardrails on scope of religious authority
The bulk of my work for the first 10 years of my career was long-form magazine journalism. Then the industry, uh, kinda imploded. Delighted that @be-giant.bsky.social has let me dip a toe back in those waters with this short feature on antacids for the ocean www.begiant.ca/stories/idea...
Great clarification 🧵 here on recent "coal comeback" news.
The news media loves to report on coal's comeback(s), often framed as hard-headed correctives to "over-hyped" renewables. For at least a decade, these comebacks have been massively overstated each time
This website skews American and those people get weird about the pineapple on pizza thing
Pineapple is totally fine on a pizza but only on a Hawaiian, just ham, pineapple, cheese. Anything else upsets the essential tiki-bar balance of this pizza
Learned a lot reporting on this short feature for the ambitious new Canadian media outlet @be-giant.bsky.social
Whenever I hear anyone going off about future "baseload" or "firm power" needs or whatever, I wonder to myself (and sometimes out loud): What problem would this other system solve in 15 years that solar and batteries can't solve?
Interesting point -- and maybe a further Sopranos parallel. You get the sense Tony enjoyed running a crew a lot more than he ever does as boss of the whole family
If your timeline here could use the occasional sort of Zen intervention, I highly recommend following @coralcitycamera.bsky.social
Beyond that, there are very few moments in The Sopranos where Tony enjoys the spoils of being the boss of North Jersey. He's rarely relaxed, his mind on the job even at a feast or mobster bacchanal. Boardwalk Empire goes even further on this theme -- Nucky basically never has any fun being king
Screencap of this line from a story about a bear that has been living off trash in exurban Halifax for 15 years: "He’s also been using the community to rest, with sightings of him sleeping in yards and under decks and being pretty apathetic about things that might scare him off."
Because this is a Halifax paper, I'm going to go ahead and assume that this is a sly but completely intentional reference to one of the best lines in Sloan's flawless pop gem "Coax Me," which is just 🤌
I'm a sucker for a light-hearted, carefully reported wildlife story (Banff's Rocky Mountain Outlook used to do it really well). Even more of a sucker for tales of a bear "living large on compost" on the outskirts of Halifax
Probably quite a few Jays fans could use this reminder after a very messy seven-game stretch
Just gonna go ahead and click send on this email with my invoice attached
“It feels out there. I mean, it's a major rush. I mean it doesn't just feel out there, I mean it feels out there. You know? Um, kinda radical in a kinda tubular way. You know? But most of all it's out there."
62 percent of Canadians, welcome to the War on Cars (cc @thewaroncars.bsky.social )
NYT scrutiny on this site is often a bit much but this is legit sanewashing being called out. Even by overly fussy "objective journalism" standards, the proper way to cover this would be to describe it not as an "ultimatum" but as a "profane and inflammatory statement without precedent" or similar
Anything else of headline-worthy note in that statement, Bloomberg?
Wilco at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto on the Being There tour, when they were still playing like a scrappy punk band. One of the best live shows I’ve ever seen
This is not a Jays thing. This is a baseball thing. There are never enough lefties
