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Sean Casten @SeanCasten

US Rep, IL-06. Engineer. Former CEO. Dad. Husband. Born at 326 ppm. Official tweets @RepCasten. Also: SeanCasten at Mastodon & Bluesky.

Joined August 2009
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Sean Casten @SeanCasten
7 Nov 2024
"The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious… garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them." - Frederick Douglass
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Apologies. England.
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Holy cow. This Mexico/UK game may be the best game of the World Cup so far
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A gold pendant is tasteful. Bedazzling your entire office is tacky. A few fireworks to symbolize the rockets' red glare that showed our flag was still there is tasteful. This, on the other hand...
Jo
 @JoJoFromJerz
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What the literal fuck is this?!? 👀
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One final postscript: anyone arguing that Europe is going to cripple their economy by imposing fees on pollution should invite their neighbor to come defecate in their yard. Stand up for your principles and help them slash their sewage bills to grow the economy.
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Anyway, that was a part of our message in Brussels last month, and informed why we wrote this letter. May you take it as inspiration to Next Man Up wherever you have agency as well. /fin
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…this is a Next Man Up moment. If Brunson goes down, the rest of the Knicks don’t quit. As long as the US federal government isn’t going to carry our weight on science, economics or morality, it falls to the rest of us - states, private actors and foreign nations - to step up.
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The US should do better. We should not ignore science. We should not put the interests of NG producers over energy consumers. We should be moral actors and leave this campsite better than we found it. We should press US leaders to change and vote out those who don’t. BUT…
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The laws of thermodynamics of course do not give a damn about our politics. More GHG emissions = more heat, higher sea levels, more wildfires, lost property values, more tropical disease & more death. If you doubt that, ask someone who spent yesterday on the Mall about their day.
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The Trump administration meanwhile is pressuring them to weaken those rules to sustain US natural gas export volumes (and incidentally, boosting domestic NG prices), science be damned. BECAUSE POLITICS. That’s bad.
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They have an emissions trading system to use markets to solve problems, and there are real time discussions underway about enhancing the way that upstream methane leaks are treated. BECAUSE SCIENCE. That’s good.
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HOWEVER… Europe (unlike us) generally doesn’t view the laws of physics as negotiable. They understand and seek to avoid the economic costs of climate change. They hear echoes of Russia/UKR in our Greenlandic saber-rattling. And they use markets to solve environmental problems.
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Europe, by contrast is a gas consumer but not a producer. Historically, they depended on Russia but post the Ukraine invasion have increasingly depended on us.
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So now let’s pivot to how that affects US/European energy policy. In the US, the fastest growing demand for natural gas is for exports. The industry - and their shills in the WH - are keen to protect that golden goose. reuters.com/markets/commodit…
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If you want the math, I’d recommend Jeremy Symons’ work. The TL;DR is that US LNG is ~33% worse than coal. IOW, if you care about global warming and the choice is between a Polish power plant running on domestic coal or US LNG, choose the former. symonspa.com/post/lng-spread…
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That is especially true for US LNG. It takes A LOT of energy to compress, cool and liquefy natural gas. That consumes >10% of the feed gas, magnifying the impact of any upstream leaks. Significant additional leaks happen on the ships carrying that LNG to foreign markets.
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In theory, the nat gas industry has a $ incentive to minimize leaks (so they can sell more gas). But the sector is rife with split incentives; gov’t subsidization, tolling agreements that aren’t tied to downstream value and the simple fact that some investments don’t pencil out.
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Which means that any greenhouse gas regulation HAS to address methane emissions. In countries (like the US, and Russia) that have natural gas export industries, that’s a problem; unless total leakage is <3% they are worse for the climate than coal.
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Methane (CH4) is a massively more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It eventually degrades into CO2 in the atmosphere but until then traps 100x as much heat. It is also the primary component of natural gas, so even small leaks rapidly offset any GHG benefit for gas vs coal.
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Greenhouse gases are global pollutants. What happens in Detroit matters in Singapore in a way that isn’t true for most regulated pollutants. Denialism at the WH affects everyone - but everyone can also help to counter their sins. euronews.com/my-europe/2026/…

US Democrats urge Brussels to stick to methane rules

US lawmakers have presented a united front in defence of predictable market rules, arguing that any rollback of methane regulations would send a damaging signal to global investors who have already...

euronews.com
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On the nation’s 250th birthday the President of the United States gave a speech that was delayed by global warming he ignores in a capital that was crawling with white nationalists he encourages where he called to make it harder for married women to vote.
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