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!”.
CEO Says Hyperscalers HyperInterested in Geothermal
In Texas, Talarico Tiptoes Tightrope with Carbon Capture
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.
Can Data Centers be Done Right? Google will Try in Michigan
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.
In Germany: “vast colluding swarms of semi-intelligent AI.”
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.””Could Distributed Data Centers Work?
“New” Climate Denial is the Same Old Grift
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”China Still Building Coal, but Dropping Carbon
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.
—
Chinese video below reports that Chinese Solar has now overtaken coal in total generation.
Continue reading “China Still Building Coal, but Dropping Carbon”War for Oil Drives Costs for Energy, and Food
During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls.
Some might attribute this disaster to Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, ignoring what appear to have been near-unanimous warnings by experienced military and intelligence officials that such a war would, in addition to disrupting oil supplies, overstretch the U.S. military and dangerously deplete stocks of munitions — which is exactly what happened.
But Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, has found someone else to blame: Ukraine.
Yesterday Bessent went on “Fox & Friends,” where he pinned the blame for high energy prices largely on Kyiv:
We are going through an energy shock right now due to both the war in Ukraine, because Ukraine has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets and refined properties, so that is creating upward price pressure on a global basis, and the conflict in Iran.
Now, Bessent isn’t wrong to say that bottlenecks in refining capacity are playing a major role in the current energy shock. The chart at the top of this post shows changes in the price of crude oil and diesel, both measured in dollars per barrel, since the beginning of this year. Crude oil is up a lot, although off its peak in early April. But diesel is up much more (so is gasoline, although not quite as much.) And Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil facilities are certainly playing a role in reducing global refining capacity.
But note Bessent’s wording: Ukraine “has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets.” Gosh, why would the Ukrainians want to do such a thing? Might it have something to do with the fact that they are engaged in an existential struggle against Vladimir Putin’s regime, which is in its fifth year of a war aimed at destroying their nation, and they need to hit back at Putin’s military and economic base?
Notice, also, that Bessent didn’t point out that these attacks on Russian oil would end if Russia were to end its attempted war of conquest. But far from demanding an end to Russian aggression, the Trump administration infuriated the democratic nations of Europe by inviting Russia’s finance minister, for the first time since the Ukraine war began, to Monday’s meeting of the Group of 20 major economies.
Continue reading “War for Oil Drives Costs for Energy, and Food”Is Giant El Niño Evidence of a Climate Change Trend?
The current El Niño could become the strongest ever, according the World Meteorological Organization – but are El Niños in general getting stronger due to climate change? New evidence suggests.. maybe.
The Pacific El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) generates climate extremes that endanger ecosystems, infrastructure, and human well-being worldwide. The response of this system to climate warming is poorly constrained, due both to data scarcity and uncertainties in climate models. The geochemistry of Galápagos coral skeletons across the past millennium reveals a large recent increase in interannual variability of sea surface temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific compared to existing paleorecords that exceeds simulated natural variability. This increase parallels rising global temperature and results from stronger El Niño events. Central Pacific coral data also show increased variability, although less distinctly than in the Galápagos. Our results provide long-term context for understanding ENSO variability trends, with troubling implications for climate extremes.
The vibrant biodiversity of the Galápagos Islands has helped biologists from Charles Darwin onward unlock the mysteries of evolution. Now, corals growing around the archipelago in the tropical Pacific Ocean are providing clues to another enduring puzzle: whether global warming is changing El Niño, the recurring Pacific climate cycle that drives extreme weather around the world.
Climate models have offered conflicting answers so far. Historical El Niño records are too short to reveal a clear trend. And El Niño’s own large natural swings have made it difficult to tease out any human influence.
But a 1000-year archive preserved in fossil corals from the Galápagos offers some of the strongest evidence yet that global warming is already making El Niño stronger. Reporting today online in Science, researchers found that temperature swings recorded in Galápagos corals—a place where the El Niño signal is strong—have intensified by 36% over the past 4 decades, far beyond anything seen in previous centuries. Along with other coral results elsewhere in the Pacific, the findings suggest “there’s something about this important source of climate extremes that has already changed in recent decades,” says Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University who was not part of the study.
Continue reading “Is Giant El Niño Evidence of a Climate Change Trend?”