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Distilled

distilled.earth

Visual stories to help you understand the world. Click to read Distilled, by Michael Thomas, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Society / politics / economyScienceTech news / industry

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

  1. New Look, New Tools
  2. Data Center Developers Have Announced More Than 100 GW of Their Own Power Plants
  3. Voters Will Soon Decide the Fate of America’s Trillion Dollar AI Buildout
  4. Data Center Development Is Booming in States That Voted For Trump
  5. Eight New Gas Plants Will Power Amazon's Next Wave of Data Centers
  6. Amazon is building 44 GW of data centers. Here's how it plans to power them.
  7. Why Amazon Is Building One of the Largest Solar Projects in America
  8. Scoop: Amazon Is Behind One of the Largest Planned Gas Power Plants in the US
  9. OpenAI's Stargate Data Centers Are Taking Longer and Costing More Than Its Competitors'
  10. Meta's Data Center Strategy and the Mad Max Phase of the AI Boom
  11. Data Center Developers Want to Build Their Own Power Plants. How Many Actually Will?
  12. The World's Largest Planned Data Center Is Running Into Trouble
  13. Google Is Considering Natural Gas Without Carbon Capture in Its AI Data Center Strategy
  14. Microsoft's Latest Data Center Project Could Boost It's Emissions by 40%
  15. Google Is Proving You Don't Need On-Site Gas to Build Large Data Centers Quickly
  16. Bypassing the Grid: How Data Centers Are Building Their Own Power Plants
  17. We're Closing Our Doors Tomorrow
  18. Data Centers Ditching the Power Grid, Mark Carney's Viral Speech, and Some Joy
  19. We Should All Be Talking About What's Happening in Minneapolis
  20. Solar and Batteries Are Squeezing Out Natural Gas in California
  21. Data Centers Are Pushing Arizona's Grid to a Breaking Point
  22. Clean Energy Keeps Growing In China
  23. AI Is Coming for High Income Earners First
  24. The US Power Grid Had A Dirty Year in 2025

2025 36

  1. An Annual Update and What You Can Expect From This Newsletter Going Forward
  2. The Man Who Killed Offshore Wind, Ford's Pivot Away From EVs, and Jet Engine-Powered GPUs
  3. What Happens When NIMBYism and AI Collide?
  4. America is Losing Power Projects When It Needs Them Most
  5. OpenAI's Zero-Carbon Loophole, Billionaire Political Donations, and AI's 97% Cost Decline
  6. Why Canada Wants New Oil Pipelines, the Return of Gas Power, and a New Plan to Build Housing
  7. An Argument for Free Buses, AI's Bad Week, and the Beginning of the End for Gas Cars
  8. A Global EV Boom, America’s Distributed Energy Moment, and Wall Street’s Data Center Jitters
  9. Sierra Club's Downward Spiral, Trump's Everything Tariff Strategy, and Some Good News
  10. The Trump Rejection Election of 2025
  11. Is This How Data Centers Break the Power Grid?
  12. A hopeful poll, hot dog memes, and America's weird economy
  13. Rooftop Solar Could Save Americans $1 Trillion Dollars
  14. Why Are Electricity Prices Rising?
  15. These Data Centers Are Getting Really, Really Big
  16. While U.S. Clean Energy Growth Stalls, Africa’s Solar Revolution Surges Ahead
  17. America Isn't Pivoting To Natural Gas
  18. New Clean Energy Tax Rules and Trump's Policy of Energy Scarcity
  19. Trump's Latest Policy Could Threaten Every Wind Project in America
  20. How Many Gas Power Plants Is America Going To Build?
  21. Balcony Solar Is Booming In Germany
  22. The Latest Senate Bill Is Worse Than Climate Advocates Thought Possible
  23. The Latest Senate Bill Puts Thousands of Clean Energy Projects At Risk
  24. The Senate Just Dropped a Sledgehammer on Clean Energy
  25. Which States Would Lose the Most if the IRA is Repealed?
  26. Democracy and Climate Policy in the Dark
  27. Can a Story Change Someone's Mind?
  28. Where Clean Energy Projects Are at Risk
  29. The Most Important 30 Days of This Decade Are Ahead of Us
  30. A Wave of Clean Energy Project Cancellations May Be Coming
  31. The Republicans Who Could Save The IRA
  32. America's Grid Battery Boom is Just Getting Started
  33. Clean Energy's Boom and Perilous Moment
  34. Enhanced Geothermal's Breakthroughs Are the Good News We All Need Right Now
  35. DeepSeek and the Challenge of Predicting AI Power Demand
  36. The Hidden Risks of Overestimating AI's Power Needs

2024 26

  1. Be Careful of the Lessons You Learn In Texas
  2. How Big Tech Is Helping Elect Climate Deniers to Congress
  3. A Simple Way to Mobilize Voters This Week
  4. Why EV Sales Are Growing Again
  5. How Norway Became the EV Capital of the World
  6. Is JD Vance Actually a Huge Biden-Harris Climate Policy Stan?
  7. America's Billion Dollar Disasters
  8. Hurricane Helene Revealed the Deep Flaws in American Disaster Insurance
  9. What Skeptical Climate Voters Need to Know About Kamala Harris
  10. Climate voters, Chinese overcapacity, and more
  11. Are renewables actually replacing fossil fuels?
  12. New to Distilled? Start here.
  13. Why Not Just Build a Bunch of Batteries?
  14. Why Wind Energy Is in a State of Crisis
  15. Why Texas Will Add More Clean Energy Than Any State This Year
  16. An exciting announcement
  17. The Rise of the Clean Energy Megaproject
  18. Biden Keeps Passing Smart Climate Policies
  19. I'd love your feedback
  20. Is America Running Out of Electricity?
  21. America Is Finally Building a Nationwide EV Charging Network
  22. What Americans Need to Hear About Biden's Climate Record
  23. Severe Drought Erased Climate Progress in the Northwest in 2023
  24. Heat Pumps Outsold Gas Furnaces in 2023—Here’s Why
  25. The Biden Administration Just Made One of Its Most Important Climate Decisions
  26. How Republicans Are Trying to Kill One of Biden's Most Successful Climate Programs

2023 48

  1. The Most Hopeful Climate Stories of 2023
  2. How CATL Became the Biggest EV Battery Producer in the World
  3. The Latest Methane Agreement at COP28 Is “A Smokescreen”
  4. How Virtual Power Plants Can Accelerate Clean Energy Adoption
  5. The Long Duration Storage Technologies That Could Help Decarbonize the Power Grid
  6. Is Solar Waste a Problem?
  7. The Rise of the 'Bike Bus' Movement
  8. How Many Birds Do Wind Turbines Kill?
  9. Iowa Was a Wind Energy Leader—Then Memes Slowed Its Clean Energy Transition
  10. Enhanced Geothermal, Explained
  11. The Climate Bill That Keeps On Giving
  12. How LED Lights Became So Cheap
  13. America Needs To Install A Lot More Heat Pumps
  14. Why Rooftop Solar Is So Much Cheaper in Australia Than America
  15. Why Heat Pumps Are Such an Important Climate Solution
  16. The Growth of Grid-Scale Battery Storage in America, Explained
  17. A fun milestone and new video
  18. 7 charts that show the remarkable growth of solar energy
  19. The Decline of Coal Power in Every State, Visualized
  20. The Problem With Big Electric Trucks and SUVs
  21. How Paris Is Taking Back Its Streets From Cars
  22. The Loophole That Made Cars in America So Big
  23. How Companies Like Shell and Delta Use Carbon Offsets to Pollute More
  24. A Fossil Fuel Economy Requires 535x More Mining Than a Clean Energy Economy
  25. Last Week's Climate News — 3/27/23
  26. How Meat and Fossil Fuel Producers Watered Down the Latest IPCC Report
  27. Last Week's Climate News — 3/20/23
  28. 90% of Homes in Israel Have A Solar Water Heater. Why Don't More Americans Use Them?
  29. Last Week's Climate News – 3/13/23
  30. How The Netherlands Built a Biking Utopia
  31. Last Week's Climate News - March 6th, 2023
  32. The Wind Turbine Payback Period Myth
  33. Biden Picks Wall Street CEO to Lead World Bank and Spring Arrives Early on the East Coast
  34. 5 Takeaways From the IEA’s Annual Methane Report
  35. World Bank Climate Denier Steps Down and Biden Regulates Power Plants
  36. Deforestation in Brazil Falls by 61% in First Month Under Lula
  37. We Need To Dispel the Myth That Fossil Fuel Power Plants Are Reliable
  38. Big Oil Pivots Away From Clean Energy And Minnesota Proves Elections Matter
  39. Meet the Man Fueling Clean Energy Opposition in the Midwest
  40. Tucker Carlson Is Spreading a Fossil Fuel Industry-Funded Lie About Offshore Wind
  41. How PragerU Built a Climate Disinformation Empire
  42. Reducing Methane Emissions Is One of the Most Effective Ways to Avoid Climate Disaster
  43. Internal Documents Reveal the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Latest Greenwashing Campaign
  44. Gas Stove Video and Interview
  45. Ventilation Isn’t Enough To Make Gas Stoves Safe
  46. I Measured the Pollution From My Gas Stove. It Was Bad.
  47. The Man Trying to Kill America's Offshore Wind Industry
  48. How Republicans Plan To Use Their House Majority To Delay Climate Action

2022 10

  1. The Most Hopeful Climate Stories of the Year
  2. A Few Reading Recommendations
  3. How A Nonprofit Spread Climate Misinformation to 100 Million People
  4. We Reached 20 Million People Last Month
  5. The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Deceptive Campaign to Kill Offshore Wind
  6. Amazon Has Spent $138,000 To Elect Climate Deniers This Election Cycle
  7. The Man Who Is Teaching Thousands of People How to Block Clean Energy Projects
  8. I Joined 40 Clean Energy Opposition Groups on Facebook. Here's What I Learned.
  9. The Koch-Connected Think Tank Funding Local Opposition to Offshore Wind
  10. How Crypto Is Keeping Coal Power Plants Alive