Josh Lappen
@jlappen1.bsky.social
energy historian | postdoc at Notre Dame, PhD at Oxford | infrastructure, decarbonization, and landscapes | Angeleno | always on the lookout for a good fun fact views my own, at best
Once again renewing my call to make graduate history coursework a graduation requirement at law schools.
Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · yesterday"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.
I never feel quite as tired as when I receive an annual "CA Climate Credit" on my fossil gas bill. Solidarity to the advocates who have been fighting this transparent bullshit for over a decade!
anecdotal, but I've noticed a significant jump in the price of hard-to-find used books I need for my research over the past ~year.
Wolfgang Blau@wblau.bsky.social · 5d ago“With much of the content available online now exhausted - and increasingly polluted with poor-quality, AI-generated writing - AI labs are turning to uncorrupted texts published pre-2022.” www.news.com.au/technology/o...
I find it telling that the industry's new ad campaign is built on AI-generated content, but doesn't highlight or even disclose that fact. Not exactly comfortable owning the product they're selling! @jael.bsky.social w/ another great piece on the data center beat heatmap.news/plus/the-fig...
Inside the Data Center Lobby’s Quiet Ad Blitz
What’s the deal with all those “America Connects” videos?
heatmap.news
Bordeaux, France, has now recorded more days above 40°C in 2026 alone than during the entire 105-year period from 1920 (when observations began) to 2025. This is deeply shocking.
Not to platform the Telegraph, but having just returned from a part of the Mediterranean where it was 105 F and smoky and 200,000 people were being evacuated from their homes, I actually just don't think this political message will resonate with people any more!
Roland Smith@rolandmcs.bsky.social · 7d agoNighty night.
For those seeking another reason to oppose #Anthropic (or #AI more broadly): "Anthropic described the project as 'our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books' in an internal memo, which noted 'we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project'." #booksky #speccolls 🗃️📜📚
AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books
If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.
news.com.au
Full of despair today. Massive lay offs in social sciences and humanities across the country, Burnham puts out a video saying 'AI can write an essay', and my university is busy integrating co-pilot into all staff and student computers. We are being told we're defunct and there's no resistance.
That underground injection sites are observably leaking this much fracking wastewater - visible radioactive liquids laced with heavy metals - raises pretty significant questions about how reliable underground CO2 sequestration could be. CO2 is invisible and odorless. How would we even catch leaks?
In Ohio, Toxic Wastewater Is Bubbling Up Out of the Ground (Gift Article)
The state is a major importer of fracking wastewater, which gets pumped underground but doesn’t always stay there. The city of Marietta is fighting back.
nytimes.com
I dare the writer of this op-ed to try to sleep within a block of a 100 MW data center's backup power generators, as tens of thousands of Americans do. They're as loud as fighter jets - and produce far, far more asthma- and heart-attack-causing particulates.
John Kostyack@kostyack.bsky.social · 2w agoThis is entitled The Environmental Case Against Data Centers Is Misguided, but the author, calling himself an "experimental psychologist,' never discusses the environmental case against data centers. Instead he says the ":real" worry is over what role AI should play in our lives. Really, NYT?
What happens when the forest behind a carbon offset project burns down? Most carbon crediting programs have an insurance program; few use real numbers, so most aren't prepared for actual forest risks. The Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism might change that with a proposed empirical approach.
An Empirical Approach to Quantifying Forest Carbon Risks
Energy policy research from the University of Pennsylvania
kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu
Never forget that some powerful people are in fact almost incomprehensibly stupid
Jeremy Diamond ☕️@dmnd.me · 4w agoAaaah. AAAAAAAAAAHHHH
This ad is perfect bc: - The modern fortune cookie was invented by Americans. Nativist racism hurts us more than "them". - The fortune cookie only became "Chinese" in American culture during Japanese internment. Nativism leads to crimes of collective punishment. - Fortune cookies are awesome.
Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 4w agoMarsha Blackburn's new ad is so racist that it makes me wonder if mainstream Republicans could have gotten away with something like this back in the 1980s or 90s.
The radical belief that ordinary people deserve nice things
Vic Thorstenson@vthorstenson.bsky.social · 4w agoMan, nobody could build a shithouse like the WPA.
This is straight out of 1921. The Second Klan would be impressed.
Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 4w agoMarsha Blackburn's new ad is so racist that it makes me wonder if mainstream Republicans could have gotten away with something like this back in the 1980s or 90s.
"Reports of this ilk reveal less about the museums they target than about the anxieties of their authors." The OAH rightly connects the attack on the Smithsonian with the closure of National Archive branches - both driven by the same authoritarian fears. www.oah.org/2026/07/06/s...
oah.org
They say: “American History is Worth Learning” [Posts picture from British history].
An obscene leading indicator - but also another demonstration of how the institutional structure of American airport funding produces regressive outcomes. Transferring funds from airports to other public transit systems is a crucial climate action. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...
SFO wants to let travelers skip TSA lines with a new luxury private terminal
San Francisco International Airport’s exclusive terminal calls for private TSA and customs screening, a luxury lounge and a car-to-plane valet service.
sfchronicle.com
Sure is good to have independent, nonprofit local media outfits!
Amanda Carpenter@amandacarpenter.bsky.social · 4w ago"The Texas attorney general appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years — despite his warning voters that 'it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records.'" www.texastribune.org/2026/07/07/k...
A short Library Commission agenda with a mighty big scoop: LAPL seeks to purchase a perpetual license for the digital version of the Herald-Examiner newspaper (1873-1989). ens.lacity.org/lapl/agendas... It's available through Genealogy Bank, but LAPL is free! www.genealogybank.com/explore/news...
I knew record amounts of glyphosate were being sprayed in California’s forests, much of it in the wake of the megafires that have hit the state in recent years. But it was hard to fully get a sense of the scale of the destruction until I saw it from the sky.
I'd seen it from the ground, but wait until you see it from the sky
A birds-eye view of California’s Roundup-sprayed timberland.
motherjones.com
A really unpleasant professional anxiety that I’ve just realized I have is that I don‘t know how to think about collaborations now that I’m so mismatched with peers on acceptable AI use. I expected this problem with students but I’m shocked at how everyone in their 40s/50s is just casually using it
I think this is a really elegant approach
isaac@sevier.io · last mo.We basically adjusted some standard clauses to make the clear observation that LLMs constitute a third party and as such sharing our information with them isn't kosher with those first two things. Since you're in a different country maybe i'll just describe the process/logic!
I am once again asking you to consider how AVs affect sprawl, congestion and emissions. This study of Boston found that AVs would increase total driving ~40% & reduce transit use by ~10%. (Many people would switch to AVs from transit and/or move away from the CBD.) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Very cool post-doc opportunity to work with @samuel-bagg.bsky.social on anti-corruption institutional design. Tight deadline! @lpeproject.bsky.social @lpeblog.bsky.social #lawsky apply.interfolio.com/188955
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Today's the 10,000th occasion of me seeing someone with zero historical training or output interviewed as a "historical expert", so to be more explicit: Most people would never accept this level of blatant malpractice in engineering or medicine. Don't accept it in history - it can be just as deadly.
Josh Lappen@jlappen1.bsky.social · last mo.That Klein agrees with Rufo here is yet another instance of his blindness - willful? - to the fact that the right's Herrenvolk movement is built on a vast infrastructure of free-enterprise foundations. I dare Klein to have on a US political, labor, or business historian next.
Actually a laughable claim - the US right has been more institutionally robust than the US left for much of the last century, thanks to waves of corporate and lassez-faire institutionalization in the Progressive and post-Hoover decades, and union-busting starting in the 70s.
Larry Glickman@larryglickman.bsky.social · last mo.To start, Rufo says, "The left is over-institutionalized, and the right is under-institutionalized." Klein chips in with, "I say this all the time, man. The left is overformed by institutions, the right is underformed." What? Where is the left wing Federalist Society, Fox News, or Turning Point?/4
