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Isak Kvam

@isakkvam.bsky.social

MN writer interested in climate, decarb, and wild places. DM me bird, typewriter, & electricity grid fuel mix photos. Posts are mine, my own, my precious. 🔌💡

1045 Posts408 Follower741 Folgt
Isak Kvam@isakkvam.bsky.social · 4h ago

Interesting context for this story is that MN Valley Co-op absorbed the world's first electric co-op, which formed when farmers wanted to access local hydropower. Now it is fighting a member for building local solar power instead of purchasing its out-of-state coal. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Upper Sioux Community wins solar array fight, utility says it will likely appeal

The Upper Sioux Community’s case before the Public Utilities Commission ended with a sharp rebuke of Minnesota Valley Cooperative Light and Power Association, a referral to the attorney general and an...

mprnews.org

Isak Kvam@isakkvam.bsky.social · last wk.

Wild climate headlines today: - Satellite imagery shows methane super emitters are polluting *a lot* and making v large political donations - EPA poised to gut climate pollution regulations - Big Oil asking for total immunity for changing climate (while spending $$$ saying climate change isn't real)

Isak Kvam@isakkvam.bsky.social · 2w ago

Great news for Midwesterners! We've all paid an unnecessary $259 million to keep this Michigan coal plant open and polluting over the last year. A win for affordability and our climate news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-...

Court Rejects Trump Order to Keep Michigan Coal Plant Open (1)

The Energy Department doesn’t have the authority to use emergency powers under federal law to block the closure of the J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in Michigan, the DC Circuit said Friday.

news.bloomberglaw.com

Isak Kvam@isakkvam.bsky.social · 2w ago

If some EV conversion company wants to pay me, a guy who knows next to nothing about auto mechanics, to buy a Subaru Baja and convert it into an EV and document the entire experience for laughs, lmk

Isak Kvam@isakkvam.bsky.social · 2w ago

The near future of Minnesota's electric grid is looking cleaner. Yesterday the MN PUC decided to NOT yet approve a 750-MW (very big) gas plant, saying Minnesota Power should continue investigating cleaner, affordable alternatives. fresh-energy.org/regulatory-u...

Regulatory Update: Minnesota Power ordered to continue investigating alternatives to new gas plant - Fresh Energy

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission rejected Minnesota Power’s request to build a costly new gas plant.

fresh-energy.org

John Farrell@johnffarrell.bsky.social · 3w ago

Wish I'd had this option when Centerpoint did my line in Minneapolis two years ago... Instead of forcing gas customers to pay for distribution line replacements, offer them the same amount of money to swap our their polluting gas appliances. vist.ly/5h74t

AB 2313: Gas corporations: gas distribution service line replacements: alternatives. | Digital Democracy

Digital Democracy overview of bill AB 2313: Gas corporations: gas distribution service line replacements: alternatives.

calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org

Isak Kvam@isakkvam.bsky.social · 3w ago

I wish we'd stop lumping sci-fi and fantasy into the same genre, they feel different enough to me to be separated! I want to read about spaceships, not knights!

Ethan Freedman@ethanpfreedman.com · 3w ago

One of my favorite bits from Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America, 1977 — that you have to be with others, be in the world, connect to your surroundings, to really know yourself

The so-called identity crisis, tor instance, is a disease that seems to have become prevalent after the disconnection of body and soul and the other piece-mealings of the modern period. One's "identity" is apparently the immaterial part of one's being — also known as psyche, soul, spirit, self, mind, etc. The dividing of this principle from the body and from any particular worldly locality would seem reason enough for a crisis. Treatment, it might be thought, would logically consist in the restoration of these connections: the lost identity would find itself by recognizing physical landmarks, by connecting itself responsibly to practical circumstances; it would learn to stay put in the body to which it belongs and in the place to which preference or history or accident has brought it; it would, in short, find itself in finding its work. But "finding your-self, the pseudo-ritual by which the identity crisis is supposed to be resolved, makes use of no such immediate references. Leaving aside the obvious, and ancient, realities of doubt and self-doubt, as well as the authentic madness that is often the result of cultural disintegration, it seems likely that the identity crisis is a conventional illusion, one of the genres of self-indulgence. It can be an excuse for irresponsibility or a fashionable mode of self-dramatization. It is the easiest form of self-flattery — a way to construe procrastination as a virtue - based on the romantic assumption that "who I really am" is better in some fundamental way than the available evidence would suggest. The fashionable cure for this condition, if I understand the lore of it cor-rectly, has nothing to do with the assumption of responsibilities or the renewal of connections. The cure is "autonomy," another illusory condition, suggestingthat the self can be self-determining and independent without regard for any determining circumstance or any of the obvious dependences. This seems little more than a jargon term for indifference to the opinions and feelings of other people. There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence. Inevitably failing this impossible standard of autonomy, the modern self-seeker becomes a tourist of cures, submitting his quest to the guidance of one guru after another. The "cure" thus preserves the disease.
Rebecca Solnit@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 3w ago

Thank you for so many strong essays, poems, ideas, stands, principles, examples, Wendell Berry. Thank you for loving the land, the country, the language. Thank you for living your principles. Quoted you in my talk yesterday, pulled these from my quotes collections.

Wendell Berry, Writer Who Extolled America’s Agrarian Past, Dies at 92

A Kentucky farmer, he railed against agribusiness and championed small family farms and the environment, winning widespread acclaim.

nytimes.com

Rebecca Solnit@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 3w ago

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence. Wendell Berry, What Are People For?