Chris Turner

@theturner.bsky.social

2755 Followers 680 Following

Author of HOW TO BE A CLIMATE OPTIMIST. Writer & talker about the energy transition. Baseball (in season). Nova Scotia resident.

Screenshot of the second paragraph of the linked story, reading: " Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/2ba4f93d-f258-49cf-9e1e-c3c79e06461d?syn-25a6b1a6=1 The “easy to drink” brand with a blue and white label was the best-selling beer in America until 2023, when the company engaged transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to talk it up in an online video. Wearing necklaces and fashion gloves, Mulvaney showed off a can specially printed with her portrait."
A GOP Cabinet secretary on CNN above a chyron reading "WHAT IS NEXT FOR THE REFLECTING POOL?," pretending it's totally normal and serious big-time government shit to be on CNN trying to explain that the President of the United States couldn't successfully manage a single pool reno
A young whippersnapper in a hooded sweatshirt displaying a Sub Pop Records logo of seemingly recent vintage from long after Sub Pop was the hub of indie cool because it sure didn’t look like that on Bleach when it came out wonders what is on his grandfather’s turntable today and he should probably stop right there
Drunk Don Draper standing in front of a white board with the Alberta-Ontario pipeline proposal map on it, because sure buddy
Still from the scene from Star Wars in which Luke, Han and Leia attempt to escape the Death Star's trash compactor
Screencap of a Facebook post of an entirely made-up story about Teoscar Hernandez, a beloved former Blue Jays outfielder, rejoining the team to retire as a Blue Jay, despite being on the IL for the LA Dodgers and very much not about to retire
Two triangular-shaped line graphs on "the two deployment races" in electrotech, one showing "the electric fast track" taken by Asian countries compared to the "the fossil detour" of the industrial west, the other showing the rapid growth of solar and wind in Asia
Several players in parkas and jerseys play a road hockey game on the street outside Dawson City's beloved bar the Pit with a crowd looking on festively at the Thaw Di Gras festival in 2013
Saskatchewan's lion: fierce, despite having recently eaten a blue freezie and got it everywhere
Screencap of three bullet points summarizing an Ember Energy study, reading "Clean power met all demand growth in 2025, keeping fossil generation flat / Solar alone met three-quarters of the increase in electricity demand, while solar plus wind met almost all of it / Renewables overtook coal for the first time in modern era
A still from the movie Death of Stalin with Stalin lying dead surrounded by his toadies
Angry goose meme asking “wheee will they go to learn to self-regulate”
Screencap from Ember Energy report reads: "Peak fossil demand. The era of peaking fossil fuels began before the 2020s twin shocks. OECD fossil fuel demand peaked in 2007. Global fossil energy use in industry plateaued in 2014. In buildings, 2018. In road transport, 2019. Fossil fuel demand in the world outside China has been flat since 2019, and China’s own fossil consumption is now plateauing. Growth in fossil-fuelled power generation has stalled: in the first three quarters of 2025, solar and wind grew fast enough to exceed new demand. With solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries growing exponentially, decline is near. The twin shocks pull the peaks forward, shorten the plateaus, and steepen the declines."
Screencap of this line from a story about a bear that has been living off trash in exurban Halifax for 15 years: "He’s also been using the community to rest, with sightings of him sleeping in yards and under decks and being pretty apathetic about things that might scare him off."
Screencap of the grink tweet
Trump back in 2019 holding up a poster board with an image of the projected track of Hurricane Dorian that some poor sap in the White House had to alter with a Sharpie to conform to some offhand lie Trump had made about what was happening
Screencap of slide from a presentation on the energy transition showing new solar installations (600+ GW), EV sales worldwide (1/4 of all new cars) and share of fossil fuel use from electricity, transport and building heat (70 percent)
Two entirely separate Bluesky posts of Trump allies variously wrestling a person in a Twinkie costume (RFK) and lying about the economic savvy of the war in Iran while dressed like a carnival promoter from the faraway land of Tacky Bullshitia (Kevin O’Leary)
Screencap from the opening paragraph of Paul Wells' newsletter, reads: "The bookshelves in Pierre Poilievre’s Stornaway office hold two volumes, the first I’ve seen, from Conrad Black’s upcoming three-million-word (!) history of the world, sent to Poilievre by the author. There’s also a complete set of Winston Churchill’s works, donated by a Conservative Party supporter to be held in trust — at Stornoway, 24 Sussex, or whatever replaces that beleaguered residence — by each Conservative Party leader in turn."
Bixi rental bikes in their stall at Parc Jean-Drapeau in downtown Montreal
Screencap of a middle eastern map with guys in maga caps carrying buckets of oil across the Arabian desert to avoid the Strait of Hormuz
Michael Myers half hidden by lines of laundry blowing in the breeze in the first Halloween movie
A crowd of protesters outside the MLA’s office in Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Screencap of Washington Post email with headline "We texted 1,000 Americans about U.S. strikes in Iran. Here's what they said."
Diego Maradona's legendary uncalled handball goal from the 1986 World Cup quarter-final
Image from today's Canada-Czechia Olympic hockey quarterfinal, clearly showing six Czech position players hugging each other after their go-ahead goal in the third period
Screencap of the latest Cathal Kelly column for the Globe & Mail, which might break an Olympic record in coping: "Despite recent wins, Milan is failing Canada’s Olympic vibe test"
Screencap of a May 2015 column by Globe and Mail sports columnist Cathal Kelly in which he argues that the team's season is all but over because their utility infielder that year, Munenori Kawasaki, was kind of a lovable goofball. The Jays won their division that year and came within 2 wins of the World Series
Screenshot of Globe & Mail headline from 14 February reading "8 days, O golds: Canada's Olympic program heads off a cliff," with the byline and headshot of Cathal Kelly, who has been spectacularly wrong about many sports for many years with no evident consequences for his career arc
Canada’s best hockey players, including Connor McDavid, pile out of the Milan metro to attend an Olympic event
Screenshot of the Times Spelling Bee puzzle rejecting “airwolf” as a word
Simpsons screencap with Bart and Milhouse reading an old magazine and Milhouse saying “Boy, they're really socking it to that Spiro Agnew guy again. He must work there or something,” which only hints at how often Danielle Smith uses Trudeau as her explanation for everything wrong with the known universe
Coffee mug with the ATN News logo from the TV show Succession with the gibberish catchphrase “We here for you”
A glib quote from Jason Kenney in 2020: ""If you really think the billion people in India who are all desperately moving toward a higher standard of living are going to be driving Teslas 15 years from now, then you're disconnected from reality," he said. "There are billions of people living around the world living in extreme energy poverty. They don't have the luxury of repeating all these California-style pieties. They want to stop burning cow dung."
Screencap reads “Climate also illuminates something else: the shift in what constitutes political legitimacy in the 21st century. If legitimacy once rested primarily on procedures and forms—constitutions, elections, parliaments—it now rests increasingly (though by no means exclusively) on performance. What could matter more than the ability to safeguard the very habitability of the planet? Here, the China paradox becomes instructive. China is simultaneously the world’s largest emitter of carbon and the largest builder of renewable energy capacity; it installs more solar and wind power each year than the rest of the world. That contradiction contains a lesson: Legitimacy in this century will not flow from ideological purity but from the messy, uneven, urgent capacity to deliver. Systems will be judged not by the elegance of their theories but by their ability to meet existential challenges.”
A landscape photo of one of the many huge camouflaged wind farms in China, which has more wind power than any other nation on earth by a wide margin
Snapshot of Heaven on Earth (Aurora borealis turning the sky pink and purple above a chairlift at Lake Louise ski resort in the Canadian Rockies)
Stock image of rum barrels on the deck of an old sailing ship
The spread of cheap electrotech is good news for the world. It enables more resilient energy systems, creates new opportunities for AI deployment, and maintains momentum for the global energy transition. But on current trends, the United States is positioned to capture few of those benefits and bear substantial costs: commercial losses as Chinese exports displace American fossil fuels, geopolitical setbacks as emerging markets build on Beijing’s platforms, and growing doubts about whether America is running the right AI race at all. China bet on electrons. The US bet on molecules. In 2026, we’ll start to see who was right.
Cover art for the Fugazi album In on the Killtaker, depicting the Washington Monument in a hazy golden light
screencap of quote from Hugh Maclennan's novel The Watch That Ends the Night, reading: “But that night as I drove back to Montreal I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.”
Hans Moleman in the episode where he claims he was chanting "Boo-urns," only instead it's "I was saying 'Blue'ns'" because that's the team that AI slop below claims won the 1992 World Series
Screencap of the pitch to join the waiting list for the Trump Platinum Card, which will cost $5 million and make a foreign national feel particularly well conned
Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch and Sam Elliott smiling for a camera as they peer out from the alternate universe known as Road House
Burger King's puffed up and freakishly shiny mascot puppet thing, looking freakishly shiny and all
Screencap of exchange on Bluesky in which Akshat Rathi links to an interview with Al Gove where he says the focus of climate action should be "re-establishing our ability as humans on a planet floating in empty space to reason together," followed by Michael Liebreich's one-word reply that the focus should instead be "electrification"
Screencap of NY Times Spelling Bee game showing the word DONAIR and the response “not in word list”
The Chicago Pope, appearing to be crooning into a microphone
Sock-puppet mascot of a spectacular dot-com flameout, Pets-dot-com
Vivid red and green northern lights
Pair of line graphs showing five consecutive record years of growth for wind and solar capacity in China
Promotional still from the TV adaptation of Ferris Bueller, featuring overwrought 80s fashion galore