China marches on in deploying renewables. More battery storage needed. No problem, China is the leading manufacturer of Batteries. In addition, new transmission and transformer technology making renewables “more reliable and predictable at scale.”
China’s mostly coal-based thermal power generation fell in 2025 for the first time in 10 years, government data showed on Monday, as growing renewable generation met growth in electricity demand even as overall power usage hit a record.
The data is a positive signal for the decarbonisation of China’s power sector as the country sets a course for carbon emissions to peak by 2030. Still, coal output edged up to a record high last year.
Thermal electricity, generated mostly by coal-fired capacity with a small amount from natural gas, fell 1% in 2025 to 6.29 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh), according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
It fell more sharply in December, down by 3.2%, from a year earlier, the data showed.
President Trump is now claiming that one reason he is pushing to acquire Greenland is that he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, according to a text message he sent to Norway’s prime minister over the weekend.
Jonas Gahr Store, Norway’s leader, received the text message on Sunday, an official in the prime minister’s office said on Monday.
“Freeze-offs” refer to interruptions in natural gas production and transport caused by freezing water or gas hydrates blocking flow during cold snaps, leading to supply issues. This was a huge part of the problem in Texas’ Valentine’s Day blackout of 2021.
Big polar vortex freeze coming. In my part of central Michigan, we are expecting single digits, and below zero F temperatures by next weekend.
President Donald Trump has made it his mission to banish offshore wind farms from America. He has derided wind energy as unreliable and expensive while freezing permitting and halting projects already under construction.
Yet a new report suggests that the president’s moves could be working against grid reliability in key parts of the country. Along the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, offshore wind can play a critical role in keeping the lights on year-round, especially through the winter, according to a study published this month by New York City–based consultancy Charles River Associates.
But offshore wind is well suited to “meeting the moment,” in part because gas plants are reliable in the summer but can buckle under winter weather, according to the study. Ocean winds in the Northeast are at their strongest and steadiest in winter months, making turbines there a way to boost the reliability of power grids connected to underperforming gas plants.
Oliver Stover, a coauthor of the study, called offshore wind farms a “near-term solution,” saying that turbines at sea and gas plants on land complement each other throughout the Northeast’s changing seasons: “They’re stronger together.”
Stover explained that if grid reliability is the goal, it makes sense for planned offshore wind farms to reach completion. Those projects will help regional grids burdened by extreme winter weather and data-center demands “buy time” as more infrastructure is built.
“Every megawatt is a good megawatt,” he said.
The periods in which offshore wind performs best also align with the time of increasing grid strain: winter mornings and evenings, when people tend to crank up the heat. While peak electricity demand has historically happened during the summer months, it is shifting to these winter moments in many parts of the country, largely due to the mass electrification of space-heating systems.
That means securing power generation during colder months must be, according to Stover, “a priority going forward.”
Not just stupid, short sighted, mean spirited, treacherous and strategically catastrophic. Massively unpopular. Like, head lice, yeast infection, Ebola, Brain eating amoeba unpopular.
President Donald Trump’s push to seize Greenland might be the least popular idea in American political history.
Is that hyperbole? If so, that’s only because reliable and fast public polling is a relatively recent development within our 250-year experiment in self-governance.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found a staggering 4 percent of Americans favor the idea of seizing Greenland with military force. Among Republicans, the idea is actually twice as popular: 8 percent say taking the island is a “good idea.”
Even if the Trump administration is using the threat of military force as a bluff, the idea of acquiring Greenland at all remains deeply unpopular. The same poll found that just 17 percent of Americans (and just 40 percent of Republicans) support the effort.
That poll does not appear to be an outlier. A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday found similarly striking results, with 86 percent of respondents opposing a military takeover of Greenland and just 9 percent favoring it.
BREAKING: In a stunning rebuke of Donald Trump, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney just made clear Canada would militarily fight against the US should Trump invade Greenland. Wow. pic.twitter.com/V0GGdeuKPy
But it’s the 4 percent figure in the Reuters/Ipsos poll that really stands out to me, for two reasons.
First, do you know how hard it is to get such a minuscule percentage on a public opinion survey? Congress’ approval rating typically hovers in the high single-digits, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who is happy about how Congress is conducting itself—which is, of course, very different from how people feel about their own representatives.
Secondly, there’s the Lizardman’s Constant. That’s a term coined by Scott Alexander in 2013 to describe the surprisingly consistent finding that 4 percent of people will say they believe utterly outlandish things when polled—things like “human-sized lizards wearing skin suits control the world.”
A movement that wanted to merge North America into one nation and extend its borders as far as the Panama Canal might sound incredibly familiar. But this group, called the “technocracy movement”, was a group of 1930s nonconformists with big ideas about how to rearrange US society. They proposed a vision that would get rid of waste and make North America highly productive by using technology and science.
The Technocrats, sometimes also called Technocracy Inc, proposed merging Canada, Greenland, Mexico, the US and parts of central America into a single continental unit. This they called a “Technate”. It was to be governed by technocratic principles, rather than by national borders and traditional political divisions.
These ideas seem to resonate with some recent statements from the Trump administration about merging the US with Canada. Meanwhile, the US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) set up by Trump and led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has also outlined a vision of efficiency cuts by slashing bureaucracy, jobs and getting rid of leaders of organisations and civil servants he thinks are advancing “woke” values (such as diversity initiatives). This slash-and-burn approach also fits with some of the ideas of the Technocrats.
In February, Musk said: “We really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people — democracy”. The Technocrats viewed elected politicians as incompetent. They advocated replacing them with experts in science and engineering, who would “objectively” manage resources for the benefit of society.
“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk told reporters after visiting the White House last month.
An awful lot of Auto workers in the upper midwest drank the kool aid and voted for Trump. But, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who lives at an intellectual level several orders of magnitude above the current US administration, understands the seriousness of the current crisis, and the need to meet Donald Trump’s mad initiatives with clear counter moves, came back from a precedent shattering visit to China with new agreements designed harmonize with, in his words, “a new world order” – he says the words very slowly and distinctly, so that even the most dementia addled narcissistic brain might hear them.
The agreements include large exports of Canadian Liquified Natural Gas to China and Asia generally, and, critically, an opening for China to begin exporting affordable Electric Vehicles to Canada, and enter talks to begin manufacturing those vehicles here in North America. Currently, Chinese EVs have been subject to 100 percent tariffs by Canada, which has bent over backwards to support the US auto industry, and the historically friendly relationship with the US. The new agreement slashes those tariffs to 6.1%, essentially opening the door to what may be a flood.
Canada will initially allow in up to 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles at a tariff of 6.1% on most-favoured-nation terms, Carney said after talks with Chinese leaders including President Xi Jinping.
That compares with the 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles imposed under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2024, following similar U.S. penalties. In 2023, China exported 41,678 EVs to Canada.
“For Canada to build its own competitive EV sector, we will need to learn from innovative partners, access their supply chains, and increase local demand,” Carney said, turning away from Trudeau’s rationale that tariffs were needed to protect domestic producers against subsidised Chinese manufacturers.
Relaxing EV tariffs diverged from U.S. policy, and some members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s cabinet criticised the decision ahead of an expected review of the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade deal.
Prime Minister Mark Carney reached what he described as a “landmark” trade deal with China on Friday, breaking from the U.S. to forge a new trade relationship between the two countries.
The deal will allow tens of thousands of Chinese electric vehicles into the country in exchange for a break on tariffs for Canadian agricultural products, like canola seeds.
Canadian politicians had mixed responses to the agreement. Ontario’s premier said the EV deal would cost Canadian workers, while his counterparts in the Prairies said it was a positive step.
Workers were equally divided. Some welcomed the news, others said they weren’t celebrating just yet.
U.S. President Donald Trump expressed support for the deal, but another administration official said Canada would “surely regret” its decision.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford isn’t mincing words about Canada’s new electric vehicle deal with China, saying Friday that Chinese manufacturers are gaining a foothold in the country’s auto market at the expense of workers in this country.
“The federal government is inviting a flood of cheap made-in-China electric vehicles without any real guarantee of equal or immediate investments in Canada’s economy, auto sector or supply chain,” Ford said in a statement issued shortly after news of the deal broke.
“Worse, by lowering tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles this lopsided deal risks closing the door on Canadian automakers to the American market, our largest export destination, which would hurt our economy and lead to job losses.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney reached an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, in a move that marks a major shift in the relationship between the two countries.
Reminder: ocean heat content is a BETTER metric of global heating than surface temperatures (which are far more prone to fluctuations due to El Nino/La Nina), and unlike surface temperatures, it set a NEW RECORD THIS PAST YEAR: https://t.co/Gd88TeF3jXpic.twitter.com/SgHv1GnccR
Global ocean warming continued unabated in 2025 in response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations and recent reductions in sulfate aerosols, reflecting the long-term accumulation of heat within the climate system, with conditions evolving toward La Niña during the year. In 2025, global upper 2000 m ocean heat content (OHC) increased by ∼23 ± 8 ZJ relative to 2024 according to IAP/CAS estimates. CIGAR-RT, and Copernicus Marine data confirm the continued ocean heat gain. Regionally, about 33% of the global ocean area ranked among its historical (1958–2025) top three warmest conditions, while about 57% fell within the top five, including the tropical and South Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, North Indian Ocean, and Southern Oceans, underscoring the broad ocean warming across basins.
Another author on the same study, well known to readers here, Zeke Hausfather, posted more on this.
Military YouTuber Ryan McBeth gives a useful checklist of reasons why an attack on Greenland won’t happen because it makes no sense and is instantly devastating to United States power and influence. I think he has altogether too much confidence that we are dealing with a rational actor here, instead of a wounded, confused, and desperate animal.
