This segment went up quickly and is already generating electricity across a wide span of canal. It also includes enough vertical clearance to accommodate a small backhoe, as requested by the canal maintenance team.
#SolarCanals💧☀️🔌💡

I’ll loop you in as soon as you get here or earlier if you would like - work starts in earnest this summer.

I said SCOTUS will use a modified obscenity test - they will know it when they see it (or rather it is convenient for them to “see”it).

a man in a military uniform has medals on his chest ALT: a man in a military uniform has medals on his chest

Me when students today asked exactly to which laws and regulations the major questions doctrine applies.

Claim clubs or squatters clubs to protect squatters against “legal” land claimed were a thing - Iowa was notorious for them. Settlers claimed land before treaties were signed (let’s not go to the legality of those treaties) or land was made available and authorities largely ignored the whole thing.

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

Estate gift fuels bold vision for SEES and interdisciplinary discovery The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences received a gift of over $12 million from the estate of Ira L. Sorenson (BA, 1928), establishing the Ira L. and Vera S. Sorenson Fund in support of the School o...

👀👀👀👀👀

so the western canon is political, after all

Amen

Banned but not silenced: Gerry Flynn’s commitment to uncovering the truth across the Mekong In a region where independent environmental journalism is often unwelcome, one Mongabay journalist has made a career of tackling often inconvenient truths while accepting personal risks as a necessary...

Investigative reporter Gerry Flynn @geraldrflynn.bsky.social:

"Remember that you’re likely better to be the cause of informing people and inspiring change if you’re alive and free to write. So while we need to be brave in holding the powerful to account, we need to be smart too."

BTW I graduated from a land grant university and then worked there for almost a decade so I have had extensive exposure to these issues.

One more thing that worries me about this is that the people staying might be doing so b/c of outside option issues - they likely would have a very hard time finding employment elsewhere. So the quality of their work will suffer too. They will do things they would not otherwise do to stay employed.

Quite happy that my kid was one of the booers.

In Detroit of all places…

Foreground: empty parking lot Mid: train tracks Back: large new single family homes on small lots, all with rooftop solar

This is a picture from on top of a parking garage in Sacramento. I see so much about climate and energy in this scene. What stands out for you?

Rusting Rivers: Alarm Grows Over Uptick in Acidic Arctic Waters Climate change has thawed permafrost and increased rainfall in the Far North, producing sulfuric acid that is turning rivers and lakes yellow or rusty orange. Scientists are scrambling to parse the im...

Climate change is increasing the acidity of northern rivers, causing low pH values and orange rivers. Ed Struzik in Yale E360 e360.yale.edu/features/rus...

We all do

Just occurred to me that the Prophet Muhammad's injunction against destroying fruit-bearing trees during war (and the exceptions he ordered) takes on new meaning in this context

Destroying an oasis' palm trees doesn't just take out the tree

It destroys the ecology that allows the oasis to exist

i'm pretty sure this is the literal nightmare of every suburban republican

I would of course argue that Ames and Urbana produce way more metaphorical 💩 than their actual size - pooping above their weight as it were.

More from my talk, focused on the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB): you see the increases in hog numbers and also in the concentration of their production. Keep in mind that a 🐖 produces the waste equivalent of 3-5 people.
These operations produce waste on par with Mankato, Ames or Urbana.

The Strait of Hormuz is open but only if you can save the Kobayashi Maru.

The Strait of Hormuz is open but only ships whose crews have their ears plugged with wax may pass through.

Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired? The school’s $100m project to examine its slave ownership in Antigua is mired with controversy as academics allege obstruction

If the so-called free speech purists and “diversity of thought” crusaders cared about anything but promoting conservative nonsense, this reporting, which shows the most powerful university in the world suppressing research on their ties to slavery, would be a massive scandal.

The University of Iowa Powwow is returning to campus, in spite of state's anti-DEI push - Little Village The University of Iowa’s inaugural powwow was held at Iowa City’s Robert A. Lee Recreation Center in April 1990. Organized by the American Indian Student Association — renamed the Native American Stud...

The powwow is back on campus in Iowa City this Saturday, with a very apt theme: “Here: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow”.
It was canceled last year because of the war on DEI by the administration and its minions - BTW that’s the kind of canceling that we actually should care about, not the fake RW stuff.

On a cloudy sky, close up of juneberry branches with oak buds and an already green maple tree in the background.

Hope for things to come
- our juneberry on the front, then the oak by the sidewalk and the maple on the other side of the street.

This is probably the main reason why we will never truly get clean water... despite what the various state agencies, especially Departments of Agriculture, tell you.

Not regulating manure that is spread on millions of acres means that we will likely never get nitrate in water under control.

If you don't follow Dr. Secchi, you are missing out on some real top notch content!

Iowa is "fun" because there are so many CAFOs that are barely regulated. Smaller CAFOs need fewer regulations than big. But even the bigger ones are not well regulated.

States try to follow the Iowa model 😬

🧵👇

CAFOs: What We Don’t Know Is Hurting Us Corporate livestock facilities, known as concentrated animal feeding operations (or CAFOs), can threaten the health of communities and pollute our air and water. A decade of NRDC research reveals that...

Oh and also the feds won't say where those operations (can't bring myself to call them farms) are b/c in 2017 scott pruitt limited access to the information. It is good these huge facilities are theoretically regulated, in practice it's a different story. In large part a Midwest pollution story. 3/3

Congress in its infinite wisdom in 1972 decided that manure applications are exempt from the Clean Water Act & the courts in 2005 determined that CAFOs are presumed zero emitters of pollution in our waters so they just need permits it they're caught polluting, otherwise the feds are good without 2/