All blogs / Society / politics / economy
Distilled
Visual stories to help you understand the world. Click to read Distilled, by Michael Thomas, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
- Posts
- 144 from 14 Oct 2022 to 29 Oct 2026
- Posting
- weekly (36 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://www.distilled.earth/feed
2026 24
- New Look, New Tools
- Data Center Developers Have Announced More Than 100 GW of Their Own Power Plants
- Voters Will Soon Decide the Fate of America’s Trillion Dollar AI Buildout
- Data Center Development Is Booming in States That Voted For Trump
- Eight New Gas Plants Will Power Amazon's Next Wave of Data Centers
- Amazon is building 44 GW of data centers. Here's how it plans to power them.
- Why Amazon Is Building One of the Largest Solar Projects in America
- Scoop: Amazon Is Behind One of the Largest Planned Gas Power Plants in the US
- OpenAI's Stargate Data Centers Are Taking Longer and Costing More Than Its Competitors'
- Meta's Data Center Strategy and the Mad Max Phase of the AI Boom
- Data Center Developers Want to Build Their Own Power Plants. How Many Actually Will?
- The World's Largest Planned Data Center Is Running Into Trouble
- Google Is Considering Natural Gas Without Carbon Capture in Its AI Data Center Strategy
- Microsoft's Latest Data Center Project Could Boost It's Emissions by 40%
- Google Is Proving You Don't Need On-Site Gas to Build Large Data Centers Quickly
- Bypassing the Grid: How Data Centers Are Building Their Own Power Plants
- We're Closing Our Doors Tomorrow
- Data Centers Ditching the Power Grid, Mark Carney's Viral Speech, and Some Joy
- We Should All Be Talking About What's Happening in Minneapolis
- Solar and Batteries Are Squeezing Out Natural Gas in California
- Data Centers Are Pushing Arizona's Grid to a Breaking Point
- Clean Energy Keeps Growing In China
- AI Is Coming for High Income Earners First
- The US Power Grid Had A Dirty Year in 2025
2025 36
- An Annual Update and What You Can Expect From This Newsletter Going Forward
- The Man Who Killed Offshore Wind, Ford's Pivot Away From EVs, and Jet Engine-Powered GPUs
- What Happens When NIMBYism and AI Collide?
- America is Losing Power Projects When It Needs Them Most
- OpenAI's Zero-Carbon Loophole, Billionaire Political Donations, and AI's 97% Cost Decline
- Why Canada Wants New Oil Pipelines, the Return of Gas Power, and a New Plan to Build Housing
- An Argument for Free Buses, AI's Bad Week, and the Beginning of the End for Gas Cars
- A Global EV Boom, America’s Distributed Energy Moment, and Wall Street’s Data Center Jitters
- Sierra Club's Downward Spiral, Trump's Everything Tariff Strategy, and Some Good News
- The Trump Rejection Election of 2025
- Is This How Data Centers Break the Power Grid?
- A hopeful poll, hot dog memes, and America's weird economy
- Rooftop Solar Could Save Americans $1 Trillion Dollars
- Why Are Electricity Prices Rising?
- These Data Centers Are Getting Really, Really Big
- While U.S. Clean Energy Growth Stalls, Africa’s Solar Revolution Surges Ahead
- America Isn't Pivoting To Natural Gas
- New Clean Energy Tax Rules and Trump's Policy of Energy Scarcity
- Trump's Latest Policy Could Threaten Every Wind Project in America
- How Many Gas Power Plants Is America Going To Build?
- Balcony Solar Is Booming In Germany
- The Latest Senate Bill Is Worse Than Climate Advocates Thought Possible
- The Latest Senate Bill Puts Thousands of Clean Energy Projects At Risk
- The Senate Just Dropped a Sledgehammer on Clean Energy
- Which States Would Lose the Most if the IRA is Repealed?
- Democracy and Climate Policy in the Dark
- Can a Story Change Someone's Mind?
- Where Clean Energy Projects Are at Risk
- The Most Important 30 Days of This Decade Are Ahead of Us
- A Wave of Clean Energy Project Cancellations May Be Coming
- The Republicans Who Could Save The IRA
- America's Grid Battery Boom is Just Getting Started
- Clean Energy's Boom and Perilous Moment
- Enhanced Geothermal's Breakthroughs Are the Good News We All Need Right Now
- DeepSeek and the Challenge of Predicting AI Power Demand
- The Hidden Risks of Overestimating AI's Power Needs
2024 26
- Be Careful of the Lessons You Learn In Texas
- How Big Tech Is Helping Elect Climate Deniers to Congress
- A Simple Way to Mobilize Voters This Week
- Why EV Sales Are Growing Again
- How Norway Became the EV Capital of the World
- Is JD Vance Actually a Huge Biden-Harris Climate Policy Stan?
- America's Billion Dollar Disasters
- Hurricane Helene Revealed the Deep Flaws in American Disaster Insurance
- What Skeptical Climate Voters Need to Know About Kamala Harris
- Climate voters, Chinese overcapacity, and more
- Are renewables actually replacing fossil fuels?
- New to Distilled? Start here.
- Why Not Just Build a Bunch of Batteries?
- Why Wind Energy Is in a State of Crisis
- Why Texas Will Add More Clean Energy Than Any State This Year
- An exciting announcement
- The Rise of the Clean Energy Megaproject
- Biden Keeps Passing Smart Climate Policies
- I'd love your feedback
- Is America Running Out of Electricity?
- America Is Finally Building a Nationwide EV Charging Network
- What Americans Need to Hear About Biden's Climate Record
- Severe Drought Erased Climate Progress in the Northwest in 2023
- Heat Pumps Outsold Gas Furnaces in 2023—Here’s Why
- The Biden Administration Just Made One of Its Most Important Climate Decisions
- How Republicans Are Trying to Kill One of Biden's Most Successful Climate Programs
2023 48
- The Most Hopeful Climate Stories of 2023
- How CATL Became the Biggest EV Battery Producer in the World
- The Latest Methane Agreement at COP28 Is “A Smokescreen”
- How Virtual Power Plants Can Accelerate Clean Energy Adoption
- The Long Duration Storage Technologies That Could Help Decarbonize the Power Grid
- Is Solar Waste a Problem?
- The Rise of the 'Bike Bus' Movement
- How Many Birds Do Wind Turbines Kill?
- Iowa Was a Wind Energy Leader—Then Memes Slowed Its Clean Energy Transition
- Enhanced Geothermal, Explained
- The Climate Bill That Keeps On Giving
- How LED Lights Became So Cheap
- America Needs To Install A Lot More Heat Pumps
- Why Rooftop Solar Is So Much Cheaper in Australia Than America
- Why Heat Pumps Are Such an Important Climate Solution
- The Growth of Grid-Scale Battery Storage in America, Explained
- A fun milestone and new video
- 7 charts that show the remarkable growth of solar energy
- The Decline of Coal Power in Every State, Visualized
- The Problem With Big Electric Trucks and SUVs
- How Paris Is Taking Back Its Streets From Cars
- The Loophole That Made Cars in America So Big
- How Companies Like Shell and Delta Use Carbon Offsets to Pollute More
- A Fossil Fuel Economy Requires 535x More Mining Than a Clean Energy Economy
- Last Week's Climate News — 3/27/23
- How Meat and Fossil Fuel Producers Watered Down the Latest IPCC Report
- Last Week's Climate News — 3/20/23
- 90% of Homes in Israel Have A Solar Water Heater. Why Don't More Americans Use Them?
- Last Week's Climate News – 3/13/23
- How The Netherlands Built a Biking Utopia
- Last Week's Climate News - March 6th, 2023
- The Wind Turbine Payback Period Myth
- Biden Picks Wall Street CEO to Lead World Bank and Spring Arrives Early on the East Coast
- 5 Takeaways From the IEA’s Annual Methane Report
- World Bank Climate Denier Steps Down and Biden Regulates Power Plants
- Deforestation in Brazil Falls by 61% in First Month Under Lula
- We Need To Dispel the Myth That Fossil Fuel Power Plants Are Reliable
- Big Oil Pivots Away From Clean Energy And Minnesota Proves Elections Matter
- Meet the Man Fueling Clean Energy Opposition in the Midwest
- Tucker Carlson Is Spreading a Fossil Fuel Industry-Funded Lie About Offshore Wind
- How PragerU Built a Climate Disinformation Empire
- Reducing Methane Emissions Is One of the Most Effective Ways to Avoid Climate Disaster
- Internal Documents Reveal the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Latest Greenwashing Campaign
- Gas Stove Video and Interview
- Ventilation Isn’t Enough To Make Gas Stoves Safe
- I Measured the Pollution From My Gas Stove. It Was Bad.
- The Man Trying to Kill America's Offshore Wind Industry
- How Republicans Plan To Use Their House Majority To Delay Climate Action
2022 10
- The Most Hopeful Climate Stories of the Year
- A Few Reading Recommendations
- How A Nonprofit Spread Climate Misinformation to 100 Million People
- We Reached 20 Million People Last Month
- The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Deceptive Campaign to Kill Offshore Wind
- Amazon Has Spent $138,000 To Elect Climate Deniers This Election Cycle
- The Man Who Is Teaching Thousands of People How to Block Clean Energy Projects
- I Joined 40 Clean Energy Opposition Groups on Facebook. Here's What I Learned.
- The Koch-Connected Think Tank Funding Local Opposition to Offshore Wind
- How Crypto Is Keeping Coal Power Plants Alive