the river runs through my heart

Cleistocactus sepium

This short-columnar cactus makes a cluster of stems, and it produces flushes of spectacular flowers at intervals during the warm part of the year. As can be seen, the flowers have a hairy tubular lower part, with a flared red or pinkish-red mouth. It is native to Ecuador. While many classifiers have included this species in Cleistocactus, others have favored keeping that genus for the more southerly-occurring species that do not have flared mouths, while recognizing a separate genus Borzicactus for the northern ones such as the species shown here.

The spirit of Grandpa Mechanical:

When people discuss "energy," they're often thinking about electricity, but most of the energy consumption in the US is from fuel burned for heat or transportation, not to generate electricity.

This chart is from 2023; it's a little outdated, but it's still reasonably accurate in 2026. It's published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; it shows the flow from generation of energy to consumption (or waste). It estimates the total energy production from not just power plants but stoves, cars, trucks, jets, industrial boilers, etc, and aims to encompass everything in the US. Note that the units are in quadrillion BTUs; BTUs are a unit of heat, and direct electricity production has a conversion factor applied here.

The four bottom categories are greenhouse gas generators.

A couple things that are notable to me:

Transportation is the biggest sector for consumption. Within that sector, personal vehicles account for more than half of energy use. Note that "light trucks" includes SUVs - this is a "personal vehicle" category. Shipping-type trucks are next, followed by airplanes. As a fraction of total energy, individual people's cars make up 15% of energy use in the nation.

Similarly, the industrial sector's energy is almost entirely fuel- and heat-based. The most recent manufacturing energy study is from 2022, when the consumption was around 20 quadrillion BTU vs the current 26 quadrillion BTU. About 35% of the energy use in that sector is turning fossil fuels into feedstocks for plastics, other chemicals, and/or fertilizer; much of the rest is process heat.

it's crazy to me how much of the energy use is paper products!

Another note is on residential energy consumption. It's a pretty small sector and it's about half electricity, half direct heat. I often hear electricity production in the press described in terms of "number of homes powered", usually assuming the ~1 kilowatt of electricity being used on average by the average home, but that doesn't capture the actual energy use across the nation (which is about 2x higher). It also isn't necessarily a great mental benchmark for overall energy impact, because electricity for homes is only about 5% of total energy consumption in the US.

The other big note is on the "rejected energy" vs "energy services" on the right. Most of the energy released when fossil fuels are burned is wasted as unused heat! This is especially true for cars, for which only around 12-30% of the energy actually goes towards moving the car (and only ~4-20% of that goes towards moving the passengers). It's also true, though, for things like gas stoves, water heaters, and thermal power plants - much of the energy is just waste heat.

All together, there's significant potential to reduce emissions in the US by addressing residential/commercial/industrial heating (whether by improving efficiency with heat pumps, electrifying, or improved equipment) and electrifying transportation.

One other note: datacenters. They don't show up in any of these categories as notable because on a nationwide energy scale, they're not as significant as cars or residential heating or paper (yet). (For completeness, they fall under the Commercial sector by this accounting method). Estimates of power consumption I've found include ~30 GW for 2025, which would be ~262 TWh, or approx 280 TWh in 2025. That's about 0.89 quadrillion BTUs, coincidentally the same amount as the solar contributions to the energy mix in 2023, and less than 1% of total energy use in the US. The best I can say is that it's both a little and a lot - a small fraction of a very very large number.