So to summarise, there’s more land dedicated to golf courses than to solar farms in the UK.

Britain breaks solar energy record twice as UK’s biggest solar farm gets approval Record high set on Monday and raised on Tuesday, with 14.4GW of electricity generated in sunny spring weather

A single line in this piece just made my day:

“The electricity system operator is understood to be preparing to run the grid without any gas for short periods as soon as this summer, in a first for the UK energy system.”

Renewables *work*. And progress matters🎉
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Love this work. It’s so important to point out that measuring social issues is not the same as measuring physical ones. If only we could measure attitudes like we measure body temperature!

Predicting relationship quality with itself? A single general factor captures most of the variance across 34 common relationship measures In relationship science, researchers have generated a wide array of constructs and corresponding self-report measures to characterize, explain, and predict relationship quality – the foremost studied ...

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Greek utility completes 2.13 GW solar cluster at former coal mine Greece’s PPC Group has finished construction of its 2.13 GW solar portfolio in northern Greece. The company is now working on its third large-scale battery storage facility in the area, with plans for...

There's something just so brilliant about coal mines being directly replaced with solar farms
www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/07/g...

Online hostility is predicted by economic & political inequality

Inequality breeds online hostility because people crave status in unequal societies and status-seekers constitute the main perpetrators of hostility in political settings, whether online or offline.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

a new article from Nature called: "Investigating the analytical robustness of the social and behavioural sciences." highlighted section says: "Of the reanalyses conducted, 74% reached the same conclusion as the original investigation, 24% yielded no effects or inconclusive results and 2% reported the opposite effect."

my hot take is that this is a *fantastic* result & reason for optimism:

A wooden toy horse on for wheels. Its surface bears incised vertical lines, chips, cracks from age. There is hole in the head, likely for attaching a string to pull it along.

Adorable wooden horses on wheels were pulled around by little ones in the past, too. A timeless reminder that play has been part of the human experience for millennia.

From Egypt, Roman period, 30 BC-150 AD.

📷 Julia Thorne/Manchester Museum

🏺

While social media shows you extreme content, AI is more likely to show people more moderate content

This means the technology, on average, could have very different effects on polarization.
www.ft.com/content/3880...

For me tabs are like books on a bookshelf. Every now and then I’ll need to refer to something I’ve read online, know it’s somewhere amongst my tabs, and hunt it down as if I were browsing a library with no reference system.

What the EU can — and can’t — learn from Spain’s low energy bills Madrid says a renewables boom is shielding its citizens from soaring fossil fuel costs. But that’s not the full story.

Gas only sets Spain's electricity price 15% of the time. When gas costs spike it barely registers on the electricity bill. In countries like Italy and the UK gas sets the price 90% of the time. The difference is enormous.

I spoke to @politico.com about this.

www.politico.eu/article/spai...

People have really lost trust in their social media feed--algorithms have amplified the worst voices.

Out of interest why do you expect most research to be bad?

A man pushed me in the street, he wanted to teach me a lesson. Is that OK now? | Lucy Pasha-Robinson Many women reading this will have experienced something similar: a warning that sharing public space isn’t a man’s job, it’s a woman’s, says Lucy Pasha-Robinson, a Guardian assistant Opinion editor

Only last night I was with a woman who I just met who told me she was shoved my a random man in a park in broad daylight. A similar thing happened to me in Hyde park last summer. She told me it was part of this trend: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

@steveakehurst.bsky.social if I were to guess, I’d say it’s not necessarily that extreme misogynistic attitudes have risen a lot, but that it may be seen as “safer” or more socially acceptable to voice them or act on them due to some loud voices online like Tate and others.

profiles.ucl.ac.uk/88177-kaitly...

profiles.ucl.ac.uk/48638-jessic...

Also Prof Jens Madsen at LSE does v interesting work on the manosphere www.lse.ac.uk/people/jens-...

I agree- definitely a good question to use. Some good people who work on this are Prof Kaitlyn Regehr at UCL and Prof Jessica Ringrose.

All sorts of issues with social desirability bias in questions and the fact you can only measure, at least in polling, what you think it’s important to measure. So you can miss an awful lot. Also our standards for what is acceptable have thankfully changed - even if misogyny was worse in the past.

I think the issue is that it’s hard to track misogynistic attitudes just from one question in a survey. Also you’d need to look at misogynistic behaviours too, and that can be even harder to track. Also averages can mask spikes in specific sub groups.

Yes! That’s why ideally we’d have a calculator right now that anyone with oil could use to determine what’s cheaper now vs what would be cheaper under different future oil scenarios. Ie so they don’t have to understand the ins and outs of SCOPs and how to translate litres of oil into kWh.

So the problem is the unobserved counterfactual. Prices would be higher if we didn’t have such a high % of renewables but what people often need to see is an actual reduction relative to current prices.

Yes and pre 2022 or thereabouts, the average unit rate for electricity was 14p kWh and the peak rate on a time of use tariff was closer to the average price we’ve got now!

Yeah that makes sense as with a HP you’d use less as they’re much more efficient. I think that’s key to point out because the unit rate of electricity is still higher, esp if you’re paying a standing charge. But that’s quite a lot to calculate if you’re not HP savvy. We need a good calculator!

My octopus electricity tariff is currently 28p per kWh and 45.7p daily standing charge. Obviously with a HP you’d want a different tariff.

It’s a good question. I know that for my partner’s family who use oil in rural Norfolk a £500 supply now costs £1,800. They were about to run out when the crisis happened. They can’t get an order. So they’re restricting heating. Their neighbour with a HP and solar will avoid this issue ofc.

Yes and also I don’t know if they’d absolutely need solar to make a HP cheaper or the same as oil pre crisis. For those rural families who are very budget constrained, cost is key consideration no matter how much they’d like to get off fossil fuels.

And when I say can’t afford, I don’t mean they’re prioritising things like holidays - all of them are pensioners on state pension. No idea how representative they are ofc.

All keen to get a heat pump but can’t afford the extras to make it financially do-able - eg a neighbour says they needed to install solar to make it economically viable given cost of electricity (not suggesting these issues are insurmountable but would need considering to make HPs work in a crisis).

Hi @acjsissons.bsky.social ! I knew quite a few people in this situation with oil. One of the big issues is that people have different amounts of oil left. One household thinks they can last 2 weeks. Another was about to get oil delivered, got cancelled & now have none at all, so no heating.

Why Are Oil Benchmark Prices so Subdued? And a few things to watch/read on the continuing conflict.

Rachel Ziemba in this post / interview discusses the effects.
rziemba.substack.com/p/why-are-oi...