This is Not Cool

Microsoft signed a contract with a fusion start-up, Helion, in 2023, purportedly to produce fusion power at scale in 2028. Stick a pin in that.
Meanwhile, other start-ups beginning to attract serious investment as buzz grows around this forever-30-years-away technology.

Bloomberg:

Fusion energy startup Inertia Enterprises has raised $450 million to start developing a power plant that hinges on building the world’s most powerful lasers. 

The Series A funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and includes Threshold Ventures, Long Journey Ventures and GV (formerly Google Ventures). The Livermore, California-based company expects to begin construction in 2030 on a commercial power plant. It also plans to build a facility to make the lasers and a production line to supply millions of tiny pellets made of special materials that they intend to blast to trigger fusion reactions.

The scale of the funding reflects the growing interest in fusion, which holds the promise of abundant clean energy but also comes with daunting engineering and physics challenges. The industry attracted more than $9.7 billion in backing through the middle of last year, according to a Fusion Industry Association report released in July.

Major deals have continued since then, led by an $863 millionfunding round announced by Commonwealth Fusion Systems in August. Dozens of companies are pursuing the technology, which involves replicating the conditions at the heart of stars, but none has yet demonstrated a viable commercial system.

Continue reading “Laser Focused Fusion Start-Up Draws Big Investments”

Washington Post:

According to a Washington Post analysis, the fastest warming rate on record occurred in the last 30 years. The Post used a dataset from NASA to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2025.

“We’re not continuing on the same path we had before,” said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth. “Something has changed.”

For about 40 years — from 1970 to 2010 — global warming proceeded at a fairly steady rate. As humans continued to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world warmed at about 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade, or around 0.34 degrees Fahrenheit.

Then, that rate began to shift. The warming rate ticked up a notch. Temperatures over the past decade have increased by close to 0.27 degrees C per decade — about a 42 percent increase.

Those data — combined with the last few years of record heat — have convinced many researchers that the world is seeing a decisive shift in how temperatures are rising. The last 11 years have been the warmest years on record; according to an analysis by Berkeley Earth, if we assume a constant rate of warming since the 1970s, the last three years have a less than 1-in-100 chance of occurring solely due to natural variability.

“There is greater acceptance now that there is a detectable acceleration of warming,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the research lead at the payments company Stripe.

Even as the United States languishes under a frigid cold snap, the rest of the world is still experiencing unusually warm temperatures. Nuuk, Greenland, for example, saw temperatures in January more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average. Parts of Australia, meanwhile, have seen temperatures push past 120 degrees Fahrenheit amid a record heat wave.

Some of that change was predicted by climate models. For decades, a portion of the warming unleashed by greenhouse gas emissions was “masked” by sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles cause heart and lung disease when people inhale polluted air, but they also deflect the sun’s rays. Over the entire planet, those aerosols can create a significant cooling effect — scientists estimate that they have canceled out about half a degree Celsius of warming so far.

Continue reading “Is Global Temperature Rise Accelerating?”

Quincy Lee on X:

2002: The U.S. added ~58 GW of new power capacity. Nearly all of it was natural gas.

2025: The U.S. is adding ~63 GW. Nearly all of it is solar and BESS.

Same scale of buildout. Completely different fuel. The grid is reinventing itself

Trump: I was recently in Europe. Those beautiful scenic areas, they put wind turbines all over the place. They are chugging, chugging, chugging. I wonder why they don't like me over there. The people like me over there

— Headquarters (@headquartersnews.bsky.social) 2026-02-11T22:02:31.551Z

Another way for taxpayers to subsidize fossil fuels, – load them into the military budget.

Politico:

Dozens of coal plants, including those slated for retirement, could supply the military under President Donald Trump’s latest plan to save the embattled coal industry.

Trump will sign an executive order Wednesday directing the Department of Defense to enter into power contracts with coal plants, according to a White House official. It wasn’t exactly clear how the administration intends to achieve that goal, but an Energy Department official said DOE had identified more than three dozen coal plants that could supply electricity to military installations.

The administration’s stated goal is to provide a reliable source of power to the military and support coal plants that would otherwise retire, said the DOE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

Continue reading “Call Out the Troops, and Taxpayers, to Protect Coal”

Attorney General Bondi, tell me what a great job you’ve been doing helping fossil fuel companies emit more planet warming, toxic pollution.

It just runs so damn deep with these people.

I missed “Avenue 5” when it aired, sounds like I shouldn’t have.

HBO:

Set 40 years in the future, Avenue 5 follows the captain and crew of a luxury space cruise ship as they navigate disgruntled passengers and unexpected events after experiencing technical difficulties onboard.

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In the clip above, some of the passengers refuse to accept the situation, and convince themselves that they are being lied to, and that home and safety lie right outside the airlock.
Pretty apt metaphor for the situation, and all the more horrifyingly credible now that we’ve been thru covid.

Above is the so-called “Airlock” Scene. Some passengers decide that the powers that be are lying to them, they are actually still on earth, fresh air and freedom are just outside the airlock, and resolve to expose the fraud.

There is actually a short clip that gives a little more lead-in context.

Continue reading “Clip: Avenue 5 Airlock Scene”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fracking millionaire, grifter, and wannabe oligarch, purchased his cabinet seat with a million dollar donation to the Trump campaign, and is working it hard to the best advantage of himself, his industry cronies, and wealthy oil/gas tycoon donors.

Wall Street Journal:

A big promise of the American shale-drilling boom was cheap, plentiful natural gas that would give U.S. manufacturers an edge against global competitors. 

Fifteen years in, U.S. gas production continues to reach new highs, the country has become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas and yet domestic manufacturers say they are increasingly cut off from fuel during the coldest winter days. 

As frigid weather swept over the mid-Atlantic region late last month, Evonik Industries’ EVK 1.01%increase; green up pointing triangle plant in Havre de Grace, Md., received notice from its local utility: Shut off the gas or risk huge financial penalties.

In many parts of the country, there isn’t enough pipeline capacity to guarantee manufacturers a flow of gas when heating and cooling demand surges. That doesn’t happen to power plants and homes, where gas is needed to keep people from freezing. Nor are firms that ship gas to overseas buyers cut off, thanks to long-term supply deals guaranteeing them space on pipelines.

Workers at the Evonik plant were dispatched to close the gas supply valve into the factory, where the German chemical maker produces silica for toothpaste and food products. 

Without gas for its manufacturing process, the plant ceased production. Emergency heaters were fired up so equipment didn’t freeze. Workers were assigned maintenance tasks until the gas could flow again. The outage lasted seven days.

“It literally goes into mothball mode,” said Len Kientz, Evonik’s director of energy management in North America. “It really hurt because we lost a week of production time.”

Soaring on-the-spot gas prices hit Evonik facilities in Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee and Nebraska this winter, too.

Continue reading “Chris Wright’s Gas Grift Chokes US Industry to Feed Export Pipeline”

New York Times:

China is quickly becoming the global leader in nuclear power, with nearly as many reactors under construction as the rest of the world combined. While its dominance of solar panels and electric vehicles is well known, China is also building nuclear plants at an extraordinary pace. By 2030, China’s nuclear capacity is set to surpass that of the United States, the first country to split atoms to make electricity.

Many of China’s reactors are derived from American and French designs, yet China has overcome the construction delays and cost overruns that have bogged down Western efforts to expand nuclear power.

At the same time, China is pushing the envelope, making breakthroughs in next-generation nuclear technologies that have eluded the West. The country is also investing heavily in fusion, a potentially limitless source of clean power if anyone can figure out how to tame it.

Beijing’s ultimate objective is to become a supplier of nuclear power to the world, joining the rare few nations — including the United States, Russia, France and South Korea — that can design and export some of the most sophisticated machines ever invented.

“The Chinese are moving very, very fast,” said Mark Hibbs, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has written a book on China’s nuclear program. “They are very keen to show the world that their program is unstoppable.”

As the United States and China compete for global supremacy, energy has become a geopolitical battleground. The United States, particularly under President Trump, has positioned itself as the leading supplier of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. China, by contrast, dominates the manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, seeing renewable power as the multi-trillion-dollar market of the future.

Nuclear power is enjoying a resurgence of global interest, especially as concerns about climate change mount. That’s because nuclear reactors don’t spew planet-warming emissions, unlike coal and gas plants, and can produce electricity around the clock, unlike wind and solar power.

Utterly brilliant Epstein primer from Never Stop Asking on TikTok.

Sounds like European Law enforcement about to get “spicy” on Elon Musk’s sorry ass.

Euronews:

The formal investigation into X comes after outcry at the platform’s failure to prevent the creation of sexually explicit images of real people – including children.

The European Commission has launched a formal investigation into Grok, X’s chatbot, after the image-editing function of its built-in AI tool was widely used to virtually undress pictures of real women and underage girls without their consent.

As first reported by Handelsblatt, the probe will look at whether or not the social media platform did enough to mitigate the risk of the images being created and disseminated.

If X is found to have breached EU online platform rules under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the Commission could fine the company up to 6% of its global annual turnover.

Last December, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s social network €120 million over its account verification tick marks and advertising practices.

The concerns emerged last summer after the platform’s built-in AI tool, Grok, was enhanced with a paid feature known as “Spicy Mode”, which allowed users to prompt it to create explicit content.

Elon Musk mocked the ensuing outcry in post on his X account.

Continue reading “In Europe: Elon Musk Must Answer for Grok’s “Spicy” Algorithm”