DAILY TRIFECTA: Forecasting The Superheated World
AI will leave us SOL
THE SET-UP: There’s a nifty little provision tucked into Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and it has nothing to do with Medicaid or taxes. If signed into law, it would forbid states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade. It made it out of the House largely because the 1000+ page bill was released shortly before it came to a vote. Leadership knows most will just skim through the bill. All the nits will be picked after the vote’s taken. It’s a well-worn way to slip-in controversial laws, pet projects and horse-traded provisions.
And so it was with tech’s regulatory ban.
A number of Representatives saw it days after the vote and stated their objections. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said she wouldn’t have voted for it had she known it was buried in the bill. It’s since survived a review by the Senate parliamentarian and, it seems, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is its champion in the Senate’s version … although there does appear to be lingering trepidation about giving Our Tech Overlords such an extraordinary gift.
It’s no secret that Our Tech Overlords seek absolute freedom from regulation. That’s probably because A.I. is as much peril as it is promise. As MTG noted when expressing her displeasure about the bill, “[E]ven the experts warn they have no idea what it may be capable of.” Paging Skynet? Although, we don’t need science fiction to paint us a bleak picture of the future when we have science fact … and the fact is that it’s going to take a lot of electricity to find out what A.I. is capable of doing to us … or for us. Per Scientific American:
The International Energy Agency projects that by 2030 data centers will consume twice as much electricity as they do today. Growing energy demands are already challenging the U.S. grid, and oil companies are using AI to find new areas to drill. BloombergNEF has said fossil fuels will provide most of the new power for data centers over the next decade, imperiling efforts to cut carbon pollution.
Based on my recent DATA DUMP on data centers, I do wonder if that estimate is a bit conservative. Either way, the spike in demand for power is coming at the same time the rapidly changing climate is making itself felt around the US. Alaska just experienced its first-ever heat advisory and it’s grappling with wildfires. Right now, most of the lower forty-eight is sweltering under a heat dome. No one will be left untouched by this thing we’ve unleashed. And that may explain why Our Tech Overlords cozied-up to Trump. In him, the power-hungry purveyors of A.I. have the perfect President. He doesn’t give a damn about climate pollution. He’s scrubbed climate from the federal government and eliminated most of its climate-related research.
Hell, he’s even talked about marrying data centers and coal-burning electricity plants!
Because that’s the power Big Tech really wants … gigawatts of it. Unfortunately, what they want is the last thing this warming world needs. The explosive growth of A.I. is going to pump out a lot of climate pollution. And although Scientific American also explained how A.I. could “cut global climate pollution by up to 5.4 billion metric tons a year over the next decade if it’s harnessed in ways that would improve transportation, energy and food production” … it’s hard for me to get past the “if it’s harnessed in ways” clause in that sentence. That’s a big “if.”
And if we’ve learned anything about Our Tech Overlords, it’s that they are likely to harness anything and everything for … profit and market share and attention. They are not in it for the good of humankind. That’s why Trump is such a perfect fit for them at this key moment when the warming climate’s mounting impact could threaten Our Tech Overlords’ plan to replace anything and everything with artificial intelligence.
Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Peter Thiel and Alex Karp welcome the warming world’s chaos, migration and struggle over water or food or both. Palantir is already making a killing off tracking immigrants (among many other things) and we’ve only just begun to double-down on burning hydrocarbons. The hotter it gets, the better Palantir will probably do. And note that I wrote they’ll do “better” because they sure as Hell ain’t gonna do “good.” - jp
TITLE: The Heat Dome Wants a Word With Climate-Change Deniers
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-06-24/how-hot-will-it-get-heat-dome-has-a-rebuttal-for-climate-change-deniers
EXCERPTS: The heat dome gripping the US this week is partly due to a mundane weather phenomenon — stalled high pressure — but it was made up to five times more likely by the fact that the atmosphere is simply hotter, according to the nonprofit research group Climate Central. It’s only been a year since the “heat blob” that tormented 150 million Americans. Earlier this month, Alaska experienced its first-ever heat advisory.
And if these are the summer scorchers we can expect when the world has only warmed, say, 1.3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages, then just imagine what they’ll be like if and when we reach 3C of heating, the course we’re currently on. Merely hitting 2C would turn “1000-year” heat waves like the one that hit the Pacific Northwest four years ago into events that happen once every five to 10 years, the nonprofit research group World Weather Attribution has estimated.
“One of easiest ways to see climate change’s impact is in how it’s increasing the chance these types of heat waves will occur,” Climate Central climate scientist Zachary Labe told me. “By the middle of this century, these types of heat waves will be normal. The extremes will be even higher.”
Most alarming to Labe and other scientists is the rise in the number of nights when the temperature fails to cool enough to give overheated human bodies, buildings and infrastructure any relief — a misery many parts of the country will experience firsthand this week. Here again, climate change’s influence is strong. Between 1970 and 2023, average summer minimum temperatures rose by 3 degrees Fahrenheit, on average, in 230 US locations studied by Climate Central.
Temperatures that stay so high for so long impose heavy costs on human health and prosperity. Deaths, illnesses and emergency-room visits surge. Nearly 22,000 people died from heat between 1999 and 2023, according to a study last year in the journal of the American Medical Association, with the death rate spiking since 2016, reversing years of relative stability. Heat takes more lives every year than any other weather-related disaster.
Extreme heat that lasts all night also strains power supplies as people blast air-conditioners and fans around the clock. The nation’s biggest power utility, PJM Interconnection LLC, which serves 65 million people across a swath of the eastern US, has warned this heat wave could push energy demand to its highest levels since at least July 2013. That will keep boosting prices for already expensive electricity. It also increases the risk of brownouts and blackouts, compounding the danger. A heat wave coupled with power failures after Hurricane Beryl last year left Houston-area ERs packed with patients in a grim echo of the early days of the Covid pandemic.
If we were taking this issue seriously, we would stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible, curbing the emissions of greenhouse gases cooking the atmosphere. Meanwhile, we would help states, towns, power suppliers and businesses better prepare for heat waves by planting green spaces, opening cooling centers, hardening infrastructure, conserving energy and checking on vulnerable people to make sure they’re safe.
In our current harsh reality, the climate-change deniers running the US government are doing none of the above. In fact, as part of his whole-of-government attack on climate action, President Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to make heat waves more brutal and costly.
TITLE: The new lies spreading about climate change
https://www.theverge.com/news/691183/climate-change-misinformation-synthesis-report-renewable-energy-solutions
EXCERPTS: Rather than flat-out denying the mountains of evidence that show that humans are causing climate change, more recent talking points aim to mislead people by casting doubt on potential solutions. Renewable energy has started to take off as a more affordable and sustainable alternative to coal, oil, and gas. Fossil fuel industry leaders and their allies — perhaps seeing themselves backed into a corner — have pivoted to more sly ways to keep selling their products and stymie the competition.
One of the clearest pictures yet of how this is all going down was just published by the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE). “What emerges is a picture of strategic disruption—carefully designed to appear moderate, reasonable, and data-driven, while quietly obstructing action,” IPIE says in its summary for policymakers.
“Strategic disruption—carefully designed to appear moderate, reasonable, and data-driven, while quietly obstructing action.”
Delay tactics can be considered the “new denial,” the report notes. It might manifest as inaccurate claims about renewable energy’s impact on the environment, or falsely blaming power outages on renewables. And we’re not just talking about trolls on social media — misinformation can stem from even the highest levels of power. The report names President Donald Trump, whose campaign accepted $74 million in contributions from oil and gas interests, as a “key influencer” when it comes to climate misinformation.
Trump was already calling climate change a “hoax” during his first term in office, and has more recently fixated on stopping any new windmills from being built in the US. Since his inauguration this year, he’s attempted to undo progress toward his predecessor’s commitment to reach 100 percent carbon-pollution-free electricity in the US. He’s described wind farms as “bird cemeter[ies],” even though they’re far less deadly to birds in the US than collisions with buildings or vehicles. The president similarly repeats misinformation inaccurately linking whale deaths to offshore wind turbines without any evidence.
“We are dealing with an information environment that has been deliberately distorted,” Klaus Bruhn Jensen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and chair of IPIE’s Scientific Panel on Information Integrity about Climate Science, said in a June 20th press release. “When corporations, governments, and media platforms obscure climate realities, the result is paralysis.”
TITLE: Is there a silver lining for climate under Donald Trump?
https://www.corporateknights.com/category-climate/is-there-a-silver-lining-for-climate-under-donald-trump/
EXCERPTS: In an increasing number of electoral contests that have occurred around the world since January 20, there has been a palpable anti-Trump backlash. This will have significant – and positive – consequences with respect to climate change progress.
We know what happened in Canada, of course. This anti-Trump sentiment was so strong, it enabled Mark Carney and the Liberal Party to close a 20-point gap with the Conservatives and propelled them to one of the least likely electoral victories in recent Canadian history. The Liberal platform, as opposed to the Conservatives’, was quite detailed in terms of its aspirations for continuing progress on climate change.
A few days later, something very similar happened in the Australian election. The Australian Labor Party achieved a dramatic come-from-behind victory because of the electorate’s Trump concerns. Improved climate-change policy will be one of the beneficiaries of this unlikely turn of events: the ALP platform is very strong – for instance – on continuing Australia’s clean energy transition.
A few European examples: in Germany, despite overt support from Elon Musk for the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, the February election was won by the Christian Democratic Union. The impact on climate-change policy will be profound and positive: not only has the CDU agreed to press for German carbon neutrality by 2045, but it remains supportive of 90% decarbonization in Europe by 2040.
In the Romanian election less than a month ago, the Trump-backed candidate unexpectedly lost and the new President Nicuşor Dan has pledged continued support for decarbonization. And a similar result was delivered a few days later in tiny Albania.
As Canadians, because we are inundated with U.S. news on a minute-by-minute basis, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is still accelerating in the rest of the world. You can take your pick of good news: sales of electric vehicles continue to climb and will make up one out of every four cars sold worldwide this year, according to the International Energy Association. By 2030, that proportion is set to reach 40%, which will help shave off more than five million barrels of oil per day from global demand.
In China, wind and solar power have taken market share from coal in a big way. Over the past decade, coal electricity has fallen from nearly 75% of the market in 2015 to 54% this April. Wind and solar have skyrocketed by more than 20 points over that same period. China’s president insists the country will not slow down – it’s massively expanding its carbon market to include steel, cement and aluminum.
Add all of this up and it starts to paint a positive picture of opportunity and hope amidst the chaos of climate retrenchment that continues south of the border.