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Emily Grubert

@gruberte.bsky.social
16K followers 318 following 1.4K posts

civil engineer / environmental sociologist. energy, water, climate, buildings, justice. fossil phaseout / universal programs. she / her. bunnies.

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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 13h
We get this all.the.time with our arguments for nationalizing the fossil fuel industry for phase-out. At least in that case the argument is "Trump nationalizing this kind of stuff is already literally the status quo"
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 22h
My solar panels clicked over to 10000 kWh produced this year LIVE projected TO MY CLASS and I have never felt so cool (No one else noticed)
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This is the paper that embodies the thing I do where I walk around with a felt bag of coal labeled "Coal" that is full of coal and say ~beware~ big thanks to @jlappen1.bsky.social for leading and to @jmijin.bsky.social for continuing to be one of the most correct people about coal transitions
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Josh Lappen @jlappen1.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This one's a cri de coeur from @gruberte.bsky.social, @jmijin.bsky.social, and I: The coal sector's decline has created strong empirical evidence about how energy transitions play out, but most decarb scholarship and policymaking ignore it. That has to change. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DJ88Z...
tandfonline.com
How to Save the Energy Transition: What Coal Scholars Can See Coming, and What to Do About It
The energy transition requires rapid, coordinated retirement of essentially all fossil fuel infrastructure with careful attention to impacts on workers and affected communities. Experience with the...
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
We (civil engineers) take this shit *extremely* seriously. My grumpiest, most disciplinary take is that I've always been deeply uncomfortable with CS calling itself "engineering" because -- individuals as exceptions, of course -- it does /not/ have a safety and ethics culture.
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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The ring's whole point is to remind you "People will die in incredible pain if I stop giving a fuck about even the small, boring details of what I do" Because you *can't* grandly think about systems if you can't fucking think in the first place.
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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Reminder that in Canada upon becoming an engineer you get an iron ring made of a collapsed bridge, purposely designed to be uncomfortable, to remind you that your ethics demand you give a fuck even about the boring grudgework of such as double-checking your math. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
en.wikipedia.org
Iron Ring - Wikipedia
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I’m only 3 chapters in since my preorder dropped while I was at a no-device conference but: no shock here that this is an absolute must-read
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Antonia Juhasz @antoniajuhasz.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
At Climate & Energy conference @volts.wtf criticizes the climate movement for becoming an "everything movement," citing the inclusion of "environmental justice" and "labor." If those of us online could ask questions, I'd ask David to expand on how EJ and labor are "other" to the climate crisis?
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AAUP chapter @UT Austin @utaustinaaup.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
We know that the motivation is political. That is why we are hearing no academic justification. This is censorship, pure and simple.
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I think I’ve underestimated how radical it is to be an “actually, we don’t need more data” guy in the age of AI
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Dylan McConnell @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Just FYI - there is a cost curve for RE projects ( a fairly basic / uncontroversial point I think!) New loads (...looking at you data centers) necessarily push you along the cost curve. All else being equal, RE used for data centers means more expensive RE for everyone else. Not rocket science.
Wind cost curve  (for wind in different REZ's in the NEM, FY30), based on ISP input assumptions. 

Starts from just below $80/MWh on the left  to  more than $120/MWh on the right.
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
my first intense encounter with corporate PR was during the frac boom, when companies made it sound like you were a naive dunce bc we’ve done this exact thing for decades — while failing to comment on scale and key differences. Same thing w AI now, w data centers getting orders of magnitude bigger
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
My version of sportsposting is being now very curious if they wash Touchdown Jesus (Google suggests: yes, not often)
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
When the powerful playact powerlessness it is always a ploy to avoid accountability.
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
if you are reviewing an unpublished manuscript and you have the sheer unmitigated audacity, cheek, gall and laziness to upload it into an LLM to generate a review, let me tell you, you should be shunned and tarred and feathered
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Aastha पास्ता @aasthauprety.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"Should we not dream of something more for ourselves? Of safe and sustainable union jobs that build infrastructure serving the many, not the few?" Applies to a lot of industries... www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Labor unions must unite against AI datacenters | Tyler Turner
Workers should start with a moratorium against building until our livelihoods and communities are protected
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advait @advaitarun.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
NEW CPE REPORT on the urgency of building an interregional transmission macrogrid! @cthelala.bsky.social and I argue that only the federal government can get it built; no other actor on the grid is capable of doing so! Really, this is a paper about the theory of transmission as an asset class:
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Amy Westervelt @amywestervelt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Don't want to be a buzz kill and I love a good "we stopped a data center" as much as the next guy, but I fully expect there to be AI "sacrifice zones" just as there have been for oil, chemicals, etc and stopping this shit shouldn't rely solely on communities having the energy, time, money to protest
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
If you didn’t know a lot of recycling is manual, now you do (This is not a Berkeley thing)
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Justin Mikulka @justinmikulka.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
"Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s new restrictions on data center development threaten a key source of demand growth for shale gas producers in the state, according to an industry trade group." well...duh. The gas industry needs the AI industry. Do we need them?
bloomberg.com
Pennsylvania Data Center Limits Are a Threat to Gas Firms, Trade Group Says
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s new restrictions on data center development threaten a key source of demand growth for shale gas producers in the state, according to an industry trade group.
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/09/2026
If you showed up at Defcon and gave talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?"
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
We (Notre Dame's policy school) are hiring an Assistant Prof in Tech Ethics and Global Security: open to ABD candidates, open discipline. This person will also be affiliated with our Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, which also supports my work on energy transition ethics: due 9 Oct!
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Super excited about this new one, with Baxter Kamana-Williams (you should hire him): We investigate what electrifying heat means from a grid design and management perspective, finding that we could see up to ~1.6 TW of coincident, non-deferrable loads that would need winter resourcing
iopscience.iop.org
Climate change and electrification could fundamentally alter grid planning paradigms
Climate change and electrification could fundamentally alter grid planning paradigms, Kamana-Williams, Baxter, Grubert, Emily
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Preeti Chhibber @runwithskizzers.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
i love that this has had literally no impact on my day lol
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
My office at 11 pm, folks
A thermometer showing an indoor temp of 90.3 degrees Fahrenheit and 59% humidity
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
So is the part of the day we spend face down on our office floors research, teaching, or service for effort reporting purposes
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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 31/08/2026
Angel Cabrera, a Spanish immigrant and GMU president at the time, later became my president at Georgia Tech. He allowed his VPs to censor my work, and rollbacks to anti-discrimination protections for sexual orientation, gender identity, and pregnancy. He's the incoming CEO of the Aspen Institute.
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Josh Lappen @jlappen1.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
High-tech or low-tech, what matters is proactive enforcement, and the political will to enforce against the rich. The LA Air Pollution Control District (officers in training below, c. 1947) got proactive enforcement, but lost its momentum and mandate when it deprioritized corporate enforcement.
Patrol officers of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control District training to categorize different types of tailpipe and smokestack exhaust using Ringgold Charts in 1947. Courtesy USC Special Collections
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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 29/08/2026
"This is how a corporation crosses the line from doing business with a state to becoming inseparable from it; how the state, once the corporation is large enough, finds itself legislating on the company’s behalf; and how the bill, when it arrives, is paid by the country rather than the shareholders"
nytimes.com
Opinion | What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World (Gift Article)
A playbook to curb the growing power of Big Tech.
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donoteat @donoteat.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
frustrating that nyt doesn't talk to a single railway maintenance-of-way expert when publishing this puff piece on the world's most expensive dragging equipment detector
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
bill gates claiming to be "sort of the first one" to be worried about the societal impacts of AI is the funniest thing i've seen in a while
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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Scientists have been warning for forty years that continued carbon emissions will lead to deadly heatwaves and glacier collapses and uncontainable wildfires. Still, the vested interests have continued extracting and burning fossil fuels. Every climate-related disaster is a massacre.
bbc.co.uk
Collapsed glacier likely caused devastating Nepal-Tibet floods, scientists say
Preliminary investigations by scientists have pointed to a collapsed glacier as the cause, highlighting the issue of rapidly melting Himalayan ice.
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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
NSF will no longer fund graduate students in political science or public policy (though keeps anthropology, sociology, and geography) Personal to me -- I owe my career to being awarded an NSF fellowship when I started graudate school
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
One of my proudest bike commuting moments is that I yelled at a car that pulled across my crosswalk on the city’s official bike path to turn right in red and my kid is now parroting “HEY!!! EXCUSE ME!“ rather than other things I could have said She also yells BIKE ON YOUR LEFT at people
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 26/08/2026
nothing has made more of a radical anti-car extremists than being a guy whose primary form of transportation is a bike
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
big change to my material conditions: I am a bike commuter now. I will be updating my transportation opinions dialectically (I am already 27% more opinionated about bike lanes and our school crossing guard comrades)
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Bill Lukens @paleosol.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Dudes. Friends. Comrades. Brothers, sisters, and others. #MinCup26 starts next week. ⚒️🧪 #geology #mineral #getready www.mineralcup.org
mineralcup.org
Mineral Cup & Ore Cup
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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 26/08/2026
And as I've been tracking, it's been eight months since Trump admitted a single refugee into the United States (Biden admitted 100,060 in 2024; white people from South Africa don't count.) There is now no longer a legal path for non-white people to become a U.S. permanent resident or citizen.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 24/08/2026
When you blurt out stuff like "we need to get good at building things" but you don't assign a moral and environmental valence to WHAT we need to build, this is where you end up: unlimited energy abundance and reformed permitting, exactly how we predicted. heatmap.news/energy/trump...
Scoop: Trump to Permit Largest-Ever Gas Project in Just 7 Months
The facility will power OpenAI’s 10-gigawatt data center in Pike County, Ohio.
Jael Holzman
•
August 21, 2026he Trump administration aims to complete its environmental review
of what would be the biggest fossil fuel power project in the country
injust a few months, Heatmap has learned.
This news follows Monday's announcement from OpenAI that it intends to
lease a new 10-gigawatt data center under development in Pike County,
Ohio, financed by a mixture of money from a SoftBank subsidiary and the
chip company Nvidia. This AI hyperscale facility — known as the PORTS-
Pike project — is expected to draw power from the largest gas power facility
ever built in the United States, a 9.2-gigawatt facility sited on federal lands
that would be built and owned bv the Energy Department.
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Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
anytime people raise concerns about land use for solar projects or anything like that i just want to point out that half the corn we grow in this country gets used to make gasoline slightly worse
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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 20/08/2026
What? No. Why would you even ask that in the year of our lord 2026. That question was vaguely interesting for two weeks, four years ago, before people widely understood the context. Then we did, and now it's not. Stop wasting people's time.
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Daniel Aldana Cohen @aldasky.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
A very cool new thing from @cplusc.bsky.social: a toolkit to help communities negotiate the best possible community benefit agreements. cbatoolkit.climateandcommunity.org
CBA Toolkit: Leveraging Community Power in the Energy
Transition

Primary Authors: Toni Symonds, Reva Butensky

Contributing authors and editors: Emmett Hopkins, Tai Kondo Koester James J. A. Blair, Thea Riofrancos, Kate Berry
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Shocked, shocked I tell you that the company that started out as a way to rate how hot girls were in a manner that fairly explicitly violated privacy rules is behind this
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
has anyone written about the point that renewable electricity producers have pretty strong incentives to support (expensive) natural gas as the marginal producer for merit order pricing reasons?
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Literally the only people who didn’t expect this to be extremely hard to the point of foolishness are the people who decided they were willing to do it, which is exactly the story of risk increasing through transfer to lower info or more risk tolerant owners everywhere else
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Alaa Al Khourdajie @dralaaclimate.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
New publication in Environmental Research Letters: overshooting 1.5°C then cooling back down does not undo the damage. We map where, for whom, and through what mechanisms temporary overshoot becomes permanent loss. Paper (OA): iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... 1/12
"Three stacked panels sharing a time axis. Top: global temperature rises past 1.5°C, peaks, then declines (the overshoot pathway), with a flat permanent-exceedance line at the peak for comparison. Middle: biophysical responses to the same trajectory diverge; some track temperature down, some recover with a lag, one keeps intensifying. Bottom: socioeconomic impacts of the same biophysical change diverge by adaptive capacity; high-capacity systems recover, while one crosses a dashed adaptive-capacity threshold and never recovers: the permanent overshoot legacy.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 17/08/2026
4. These emails violate that compact — and the consequences that they force me to stop doing something that I’ve always done for my colleagues. If someone I’ve never met writes me a long letter, asks me to look at their work, and it’s actually relevant, I do. But not anymore.
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Emily Grubert @gruberte.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
I didn’t actually realize how much work my solar panels are doing to keep my house cooler
Thermal image of my attic roof, pattern of solar panels is visible as a cool spot
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