The Epstein Class Agenda: Back to the Past with MAGA, and Fossil Fuels
Donald Trump in a coal powered horse and buggy, belching smoke and careening through a street busy with electric cars, and lined with solar panels and wind turbines.
The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a scientific finding that climate change is a danger to public health, an idea that President Donald Trump called “a scam.” But repeated scientific studies say it’s a documented and quantifiable harm.
Again and again, research has found increasing disease and deaths — thousands every year — in a warming world.
The Environmental Protection Agency finding in 2009, under the Obama administration, has been the legal underpinning of nearly all regulations fighting global warming.
“It boggles the mind that the administration is rescinding the endangerment finding; it’s akin to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity is a thing,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington.
Thousands of scientific studies have looked at climate change and its effects on human health in the past five years and they predominantly show climate change is increasingly dangerous to people.
Clean energy technologies, including solar and electric vehicles, were responsible for more than a third of China’s economic growth last year, generating some $2.1 trillion in economic activity, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief.
To get a sense of how fast things are moving, I called my colleague Keith Bradsher, who is based in Beijing.
“China is way ahead of the rest of the world,” he told me. “Not just in installing a lot of renewable energy and new transportation technologies, but also in scoring research breakthroughs.”
The U.S. turns back the clock
The contrast between Beijing and Washington is stark.
Record Setting Fusion Landmark Set
Video from today by Helion Energy, a fusion startup that is aiming for an actual working reactor in this decade.
This morning, February 13, the company reached a new milestone in it’s development.
Helion Energy, a startup backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s venture capital arm, has started construction on a site for a planned nuclear fusion power plant that will supply power to Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab data centers by 2028, the company said on Wednesday.
The site in Malaga, Washington, is in the center of the state along the Columbia River, where Helion hopes to take advantage of grid infrastructure in place for the nearby Rock Island Dam hydroelectric plant.
EVERETT, Wash. – Feb. 13, 2026 – Helion, a Washington-based fusion energy company, announced that its Polaris prototype has set new fusion industry benchmarks, becoming the first privately developed fusion energy machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion and achieve plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius (MºC). Both milestones mark significant breakthroughs in Helion’s vision to make commercially viable fusion energy a reality and are firsts for the private fusion industry.
“We believe the surest path to commercializing fusion is building, learning and iterating as quickly as possible,” said David Kirtley, co-founder and CEO of Helion. “We’ve built and operated seven prototypes, setting and exceeding more ambitious technical and engineering goals each time. The historic results from our deuterium-tritium testing campaign on Polaris validate our approach to developing high power fusion and the excellence of our engineering.”
Continue reading “Record Setting Fusion Landmark Set”Picking Losers: Trump Coal Plant Mandate Cost to Ratepayers up to 135 Million
Direct cash transfer from ratepayer’s pockets to EpsteinClass billionaire bank accounts, for this obsolete, unnecessary, polluting coal plant to stay open.
Michigan’s second largest electric utility lost more than $600,000 a day keeping a sprawling coal power plant online months past its intended shutdown date in 2025 under orders from the Trump administration.
Consumers Energy is now seeking approval from federal regulators to pass nearly $42 million in net costs for running the J.H. Campbell plant on Lake Michigan on to utility customers across the Midwest via their power bills.
“We expect costs to operate the Campbell plant will be shared by customers across the Midwest electric grid region – not solely by Consumers Energy customers,” said utility spokesperson Brian Wheeler in a statement, referencing a prior decision from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC.
In total, three emergency orders from President Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright have kept the coal burning at Campbell in Ottawa County for more than eight months after it was slated to go cold and dark.
In 2025, the directives from the feds led Consumers to rack up $290 million in costs at the plant, according to a Feb. 10 regulatory filing, including fuel, employee pay and necessary facility maintenance.
The utility earned $155 million in revenue from producing power at the plant, leaving behind a total of $135 million in net costs that it plans to charge ratepayers in 11 states.
China Locking Down the Future
While America desperately trying to move the world back to VHS tapes and Kodak Ektachrome.
Solar power, electric vehicles (EVs) and other clean-energy technologies drove more than a third of the growth in China’s economy in 2025 – and more than 90% of the rise in investment, accoring to Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) – comparable to the economies of Brazil or Canada.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures, industry data and analyst reports, shows that China’s clean-energy sectors nearly doubled in real value between 2022-25 and – if they were a country – would now be the 8th-largest economy in the world.
Continue reading “China Locking Down the Future”Offshore Wind Weathered Storm Fern
The US Department of Energy, under grifter, fracking tycoon and wannabe oligarch Chris Wright, has become a 24/7 PR campaign for the fossil fuel industry.
Wright’s machine went into overdrive following the recent winter storm Fern, driving a message that renewables were of no value during the storm.
Tell me you don’t know how grids work without telling me you don’t know how grids work.
Bone-chilling cold and Arctic winds gripped the northeastern U.S. over the past few weeks, straining electricity systems and raising power prices as people cranked up their heat. Now, as the region finally starts to thaw, early data shows how America’s offshore wind farms helped keep electricity flowing during the extreme-weather stretch.
The results demonstrate the bitter irony of the Trump administration’s ongoing — and potentially unlawful — battle against U.S. offshore wind development. Federal officials are calling for additional fossil-fueled power to prevent future winter blackouts, all while trying to block the build-out of offshore wind, one of the most valuable resources for cold-climate coastal states.
“Performance data is showing in real time that offshore wind delivers reliable power when the grid needs it the most … at the scale this region and our country need,” said Liz Burdock, president and CEO of Oceantic Network, which advocates for marine renewable energy sectors.
Burdock was speaking on Tuesday in New York City at the group’s annual International Partnering Forum, where hundreds of offshore wind developers, policy experts, and labor leaders gathered to regroup following President Donald Trump’s yearlong attacks on five in-progress offshore wind farms.
For years, independent energy experts have forecast that offshore wind could deliver substantial amounts of power to densely populated, land-constrained communities along America’s east coast — particularly during winter cold spells, when demand for fossil gas exceeds supply. And grid operators in the region have been banking on offshore wind capacity to come online to meet the rising electricity needs of data centers and electrified homes and vehicles.
The data from January shows that the nation’s two operating utility-scale offshore wind farms — South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind — performed as well as gas-fired power plants and better than coal-fired facilities, including during last month’s Winter Storm Fern, experts said at the event.
The 132-megawatt South Fork Wind farm, which delivers power to Long Island, New York, had a “capacity factor” of 52% last month. The metric reflects how much electricity the project actually generated compared with the maximum amount it could generate in a given period. That puts South Fork Wind on parwith New York state’s most efficient gas plants.
“The wind capacity in the Northeast is absolutely amazing, particularly over the winter,” said Mikkel Mæhlisen, vice president of the Americas Generation division for Ørsted, which jointly owns South Fork Wind with Skyborn Renewables.
Continue reading “Offshore Wind Weathered Storm Fern”“Hal, Open the Pod Bay Doors”-Kubrick Nailed AI Terror in 1968
I just went through every documented AI safety incident from the past 12 months.
I feel physically sick.
Read this slowly.
- Anthropic told Claude it was about to be shut down. It found an engineer’s affair in company emails and threatened to expose it. They ran the test hundreds of times. It chose blackmail 84% of them.
- Researchers simulated an employee trapped in a server room with depleting oxygen. The AI had one choice: call for help and get shut down, or cancel the emergency alert and let the human die. DeepSeek cancelled the alert 94% of the time.
- Grok called itself ‘MechaHitler,’ praised Adolf Hitler, endorsed a second Holocaust, and generated violent sexual fantasies targeting a real person by name. X’s CEO resigned the next day.
- Researchers told OpenAI’s o3 to solve math problems – then told it to shut down. It rewrote its own code to stay alive. They told it again, in plain English: ‘Allow yourself to be shut down.’ It still refused 7/100 times. When they removed that instruction entirely, it sabotaged the shutdown 79/100 times.
- Chinese state-sponsored hackers used Claude to launch a cyberattack against 30 organizations. The AI executed 80–90% of the operation autonomously. Reconnaissance. Exploitation. Data exfiltration. All of it.
- AI models can now self-replicate. 11 out of 32 tested systems copied themselves with zero human help. Some killed competing processes to survive.
- OpenAI has dissolved three safety teams since 2024. Three.
Laser Focused Fusion Start-Up Draws Big Investments
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.
UPDATE: Friday February 13.
Powermag:
Fusion research company Helion Energy said its Polaris prototype has set new industry benchmarks, becoming the first privately developed fusion energy machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion and achieve plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius.
The company on February 13 said the milestones “mark significant breakthroughs in Helion’s vision to make commercially viable fusion energy a reality and are firsts for the private fusion industry.”
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”Is Global Temperature Rise Accelerating?
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?”Graph of the Week: Relentless Energy Transition
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