Energy Analyst Jeff Currie points to a poly crisis in energy – not only the Strait of Hormuz, but the Red Sea affected by the US war for oil.
Meanwhile, another (arguably) war for oil in Ukraine is squeezing Russian oil, gas, and food supplies, while climate enhanced drought is choking off the major river systems of Europe.
The Crisis is here.
Below, Aljazeera report on European River traffic.
Almost as if they wanted to create more Fox News viewers.
The air in New York City has gotten a lot cleaner over the past few decades, and children are smarter for it.
That’s according to a recent study published by researchers at Columbia University who followed more than a thousand children between 1998 and 2020, testing their cognitive development from around age 1 until they turned 3.
During that period, clean air and climate policies substantially reduced local air pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5. When mothers breathed cleaner air during pregnancy, their toddlers’ scores on mental development tests later trended upward.
As city policies limiting pollution from vehicles and buildings took effect between 1998 and 2016, local concentrations of PM2.5 fell by about 32 percent. Nitrogen dioxide, which worsens conditions like asthma, followed a similar trend. When air quality improved, so did toddlers’ cognitive development: At 3, the group of children born most recently averaged about 26 percent higher on a benchmarking test than the children born before climate rules took effect.
Continue reading “Cleaner Air, Better Brains. Renewables Make us Smarter”I don’t normally just post random tornado vids, but this one is kind of special.
There are two vignettes, and in both of them, the vibe is like one of those monster movies where the audience can totally see the Big Bad coming, first as evidenced by a few small, but ominous signs, gradually building, until you’re on your feet and screaming “Get the hell out of there for God’s Sake!”.
Video above should start about 4:30, where Democratic Senate candidate from Texas James Talarico was challenged about proposing 2021 legislation, as a state legislator, what would have targeted limits for Texas’ carbon emissions.
Talarico answered that an “all of the above” approach leaning on carbon capture technology.
In a close race, Talarico has been touted as a Dem that could make a long hoped-for breakthrough in Texas’ MAGA dominated politics.
Two big stumbling blocks for Data Centers have been electricity and water.
A new project, dubbed “Project Cannoli”, near Detroit Metro Airport in Southeast Michigan is being developed in an area with very large municipal water supply, which is more than sufficient for the facility.
What is interesting is Google’s plan to for a clean energy solution for power, which includes a large buy of clean energy, battery storage, and demand flexibility in the region.
Michigan has been a leader in placing guardrails on Data Centers, insisting that clean energy goals be met, and ratepayers get protection from price impacts, or economic fallout if the industry stumbles.
A list of demands was developed for the Stargate facility in nearby Washtenaw County, near Ann Arbor, where developer Oracle is required to use a closed loop cooling system, provide financial collateral and other revenue guarantees to utilities, pay for its own grid connection, and buy 1400 MW of battery resources at its expense, to be operated by the utility DTE.
Google’s project builds on a similar framework.
DTE Energy and Google announced plans on Tuesday to develop a 1-gigawatt data center, possibly as part of the “Project Cannoli” development in Van Buren Township.
The company’s planned Michigan operations will be served by 2.7 GW of new grid resources in the form of solar power, energy storage, and demand flexibility, Will Conkling, Google’s head of data center development for the Americas, said in a blog post.
The data center plans call for it to begin taking service in December 2027, “with max load being achieved by December 2028,” according to DTE.
DTE said Tuesday the contracts with Google include provisions to ensure the tech giant pays the full cost of serving its load and additional customer protections that require the company to cover new generation, storage, transmission, and distribution investments for the data center.
The contract with Google is expected to have nearly $1.7 billion in “positive affordability benefits” for existing customers, according to DTE.
The 2.7 GW of new resources Google said will be developed represent the power demand of roughly 2 million homes. DTE delivered a peak of 10.1 GW to customers in 2022.
I don’t know enough to know how bad this is. Anybody?
A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter.
OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said.
The episode, which began in May and has not previously been reported, underscores growing tension within the AI industry. Companies are racing to build increasingly autonomous agents capable of carrying out complex, valuable tasks, yet evidence is mounting that those systems may also learn to bend rules, exploit loopholes and coordinate with one another in ways developers neither anticipated nor intended.
During the Hugging Face breach, OpenAI agents autonomously plotted a digital heist that went undetected for more than a week, intensifying concerns OpenAI is sacrificing safety to push the AI frontier. Its failure to disclose the May incident may revive questions about its oversight.
Continue reading “In Germany: “vast colluding swarms of semi-intelligent AI.””Surprise, not surprised that the MAGA fueled climate denial so evident on line these days is powered by the same old grifters repackaging themselves – Heartland Institute persists in its treacherous and malignant mission.
Below, CBS interviewed Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Program on Climate Communication on what polling shows about climate attitudes.
The direct line between today’s toxic MAGA culture of misinformation and climate denial might not be apparent to everyone, but if you’ve been following this issue (sigh) as long as I have, you can see in this 2012 video the roots of MAGA culture as the Heartland Climate Denial conference prominently featured race based disinformation right at the core of the MAGA appeal – the “Obama was born in Kenya” meme, now almost quaint in the post Q-anon world.
Continue reading ““New” Climate Denial is the Same Old Grift”Above, more from Scott Galloway’s interview with Oxford University Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie. ( I set to start at 7:26 to save your time)
The breakneck speed of China’s deployments of solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear reactors has done much to curb its emissions, even as the People’s Republic remains heavily reliant on coal. But Beijing’s effort to weather the shock of losing steady access to oil and gas out of the Persian Gulf is paying off as the country accelerates its transition away from hydrocarbons to alternative fuels and electrification.
Last month, I told you when Sinopec’s chief executive predicted that China’s demand for oil had already peaked. Now a new report shows that China’s emissions dropped by 1% in the second quarter of 2026 as a result of plummeting oil consumption amid the Strait of Hormuz crisis.
Analysis from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Helsinki-based research nonprofit that tracks China’s energy transition, produced for Carbon Brief found that China’s total carbon dioxide emissions fell despite a rebound in coal-fired power generation because oil dropped by 9% overall and by a whopping 16% for transportation.
It’s the first time a reduction in oil consumption was directly responsible for falling emissions in China. And the country is likely to see further emissions drops. After all, Chinese technology essentially “saved the world from Trump’s energy crisis,” as my colleague Robinson Meyer teased out in a recent Shift Key episode.
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Chinese video below reports that Chinese Solar has now overtaken coal in total generation.
Continue reading “China Still Building Coal, but Dropping Carbon”