The reason climate change is so difficult to talk about is that bringing up any one issue is like pulling on a thread in a spiderweb: Every other thread in the web vibrates in response. We feel powerless to effect the changes we would like to see when simply meeting the needs of each day feels like an uphill battle. And so, the anxiety builds—until the anxiety itself feels like part of the avalanche threatening to tumble down on us. Is there any hope at all?

The short answer is yes. In fact, I think this is the time for radical hope. I first encountered this term in Jonathan Lear’s excellent book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Lear explores the history of the Crow tribe in the mid-1800s as they responded to the changes brought by western settlement of their territories in Montana.

The key figure in the book is the Crow chieftain Plenty Coups, who spent his life leading his people through those often-traumatic changes with one key insight: The old nomadic way of life chasing the buffalo was inescapably and irretrievably lost. How could his people hope when the very possibility of a meaningful Crow life was being destroyed? They had to learn to live a new way of life. Even their core values, like what it meant to be courageous, had to be re-formed in a culture where traditional warrior acts of courage were illegal.

Radical hope, then, is the hope that is formed when all our previous hopes are gone. Radical hope was the kind God provided the Israelite exiles….

Read it all.

Climate change is a “wickedly complex problem,” writes a lecturer in science and religion.

Radical hope in the face of it “means settling down in our own exile and waiting for God’s promise to be fulfilled beyond the scope of our own lifetimes.”https://t.co/JrkRSyYFlP

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) October 26, 2024

Data centers are the factories of AI, turning energy and data into intelligence. Industry leaders estimate that a few major U.S. technology companies alone are expected to invest more than $600 billion in AI infrastructure, particularly in data centers, between 2023 and 2026. The countries that work with companies to host data centers running AI workloads gain economic, political, and technological advantages and leverage. But data centers also present national security sensitivities, given that they often house high-end, export-controlled semiconductors and governments, businesses, and everyday users send some of their most sensitive information through them. And while the United States is ahead of China in many aspects of AI, especially in software and chip design, America faces significant bottlenecks with data centers.

Data centers are critical for the digital economy and AI. But the data center buildout is hitting a wall. The United States is home to the plurality of the world’s data centers, numbering in the thousands. Yet America’s aging energy grid, which powers those data centers, is under enormous strain from a complex set of factors, including rising electricity demand, delayed infrastructure upgrades, extreme weather events, and the complex transition to renewable energy. Meanwhile, surging data center demands driven by rapidly increasing AI workloads are exacerbating the grid’s vulnerabilities.

It’s not just a question of how those energy needs can be met, but where. When it comes to data centers, the shortage of powered land in the United States—or more specifically, the shortage of powered land with the connectivity required to support large-scale data centers—combined with supply chain challenges and lengthy permitting timelines for new infrastructure—presents a challenge to realizing both the public and private sectors’ AI ambitions.

Read it all.

There are a lot of known unknowns about AI, but “The Next AI Debate Is About Geopolitics.” In my latest @ForeignPolicy piece, I argue that data might be the “new oil,” but nations—not nature—will decide where to build data centers. Source: Foreign Policy https://t.co/CHLEzhY9I6

— Jared Cohen (@JaredCohen) October 28, 2024

The Economist has spoken to a range of people with first-hand knowledge of Iran’s oil system. To check and verify what they told us, and flesh out the detail, we then sought information from other sources, including former sanctions officials, Iranian insiders, intelligence professionals and WikiIran, a third-party website soliciting leaks. Our investigation shows that the country has built sprawling shadow financial channels, which run from its oil rigs to the virtual vaults of its central bank. China, Iran’s main buyer, is an architect of this system, and its chief beneficiary. Global banks and financial hubs, often unknowingly, are used as vital cogs. A source familiar with Iran’s books says that, as of July, it had $53bn, €17bn ($19bn) and smaller pots of other currencies lying abroad.

Although enforcement has weakened in recent years, Iran is subject to the broadest sanctions America has imposed on any country. Aimed at forcing Iran to curb its nuclear enrichment and funding of terrorism, they target swathes of its economy, as well as the government. No other country imposes such stringent sanctions, so, in theory, most can deal with Iran. In practice, few do so openly, as America bans its firms not just from trading with Iran, but also with foreigners that knowingly do so. It is especially tough for Iran to receive and move dollars, as every such transaction, almost anywhere in the world, must eventually be cleared by an American bank.

But our report shows that, with patchy enforcement, determination and help from a greedy partner, a country under a de facto global embargo can end up flouting it on a cosmic scale. Many of Iran’s tactics are reminiscent of those a drug cartel would use to market products and recycle proceeds into other dark enterprises, often via seemingly legitimate businesses. Iran’s subterranean oil system is governed by rules as much as by threats. The task is to construct an elaborate charade that will dupe sanctions-enforcers.

Read it all.

Iran's money laundering network (simplified by the Economist) https://t.co/oIUs0Pjo3A pic.twitter.com/qI1FZb8okf

— Dr. Paul J. Sullivan (@DrPJSullivan) October 17, 2024

TV presenter and conservationist Chris Packham has led calls to the Church of England to commit to re-wilding 30 per cent of its land. 

The call is backed by high profile figures including former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, former cabinet minister Michael Gove, and actor and broadcaster Stephen Fry, as well as 100,000 members of the public. 

The campaign, by the Wild Card group, was launched on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where Packham unravelled the ’95 Wild Theses’ – a spin on Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses that triggered the Protestant Reformation. 

Read it all.

Chris Packham leads calls to rewild Church of England https://t.co/4f3SxzEfvE

— Sharon K. Gilbert (@sharonkgilbert) October 8, 2024

“Nuclear Nightmare,” screamed the headline in Time magazine on April 9th 1979. One of the two reactors at a nuclear-power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania had suffered an accident. The governor ordered an evacuation of all vulnerable people within five miles of the plant as radioactive gas escaped.

In the end, the accident resulted in no injuries or loss of life. Two decades later, The Economist visited the Pennsylvania hinterlands and found the second, unproblematic reactor still running well and enjoying strong local support. It cranked out power until it was mothballed in 2019 owing not to safety concerns but to competition from cheap shale gas.

Now Three Mile Island is coming back from the dead. On September 20th Microsoft, a tech giant, and Constellation Energy, the utility that decommissioned the trouble-free reactor, signed a deal to return it to service. The utility will spend about $1.6bn to restore the plant by 2028. Microsoft will then buy its carbon-free power for the next 20 years.

Read it all.

Great look at how Big Tech is leveraging its market power and analytics to shift more project risk onto renewable energy developers:https://t.co/n3MsUpHbnj

— Lee Harris (@leee_harris) October 8, 2024

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord!
All praise is Yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.

To You, alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and You give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of You, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heavens You have made them bright, precious and beautiful.

On his feast day #otd 4 Oct: St Francis of Assisi preaches to the birds, Bodleian Library MS. Auct. D. 3. 2, fol. 122r pic.twitter.com/A44uh8wnyr

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) October 4, 2024

As flooding hammered Appalachia in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, residents became intimately familiar with a new norm in the US’s post-storm script: dams at imminent risk of failing.

Officials last week said multiple dams were on the brink, including Tennessee’s Nolichucky Dam and North Carolina’s Walters and Lake Lure dams. People in nearby communities were ordered to evacuate.

Ultimately, the dams held. But the close calls highlighted the stress on the nation’s dams, many of which are more than half a century old and none of which were designed for the higher levels of precipitation brought on by climate change.

Read it all.

American Dams Weren’t Built for Today’s Climate-Charged Rain and Floods – BNN Bloomberg https://t.co/plyeQFSzZE @americanrivers

— Aric Caplan (@Aric_Advocates) October 2, 2024

Allison Jumper’s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws’ farm in Maine.

Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful “forever chemicals” had been detected on their farm and in their cows’ milk, and they were getting shut down.

At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws’ livelihoods. But soon, her mind went somewhere else: to her own children’s mysterious health issues, including startlingly high cholesterol levels.

“Then it hit me,” she said at her home in Durham, N.H. “Could it be the beef?”

Read it all.

Her family’s farm was hiding dangerous chemicals in their food https://t.co/6aYN9OtCNW

— Judith Enck (@enckj) September 23, 2024

Climate optimism is fading. Higher costs, pushback from businesses and consumers, and the slow rollout of technology are delaying the transition from fossil fuels.

Renewable energy is growing faster than expected. But surging demand for power is sucking up much of that additional capacity and forcing utilities to burn fossil fuels, including coal, for longer than expected.

With greenhouse-gas emissions continuing at record levels, scientists expect floods and heat waves to get worse. This year is on track to be the hottest on record.

“The pace of our response is obviously totally insufficient,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at Swiss university ETH Zurich. On this trajectory, “it will become increasingly impossible to face the changing climate we are going to experience,” she said.

Read it all.

Climate optimism is fading as high costs and new priorities like AI push the energy transition down the priority list for businesses and investors. Climate week story taking stock of the setbacks w/ @edmballard:https://t.co/7tZDL7w0Sd

— Amrith Ramkumar (@AmrithRamkumar) September 23, 2024

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have designed an energy-efficient device that produces drinking water from seawater using an evaporation process driven largely by the sun.

Desalination is critical for many coastal and island nations to provide access to fresh water, given water scarcity concerns due to rapid population growth and increasing global water consumption. Roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide have no access to clean water, emphasizing the urgent need for new technologies to generate fresh water, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2024.

Current desalination systems pump seawater through membranes to separate salt from water, but this process is energy-intensive, and salt often accumulates on the device’s surface, obstructing water flow and reducing efficiency. As a result, these systems require frequent maintenance and cannot operate continuously.

To solve this problem, Waterloo researchers drew inspiration from the natural water cycle to create a device that mirrors how trees transport water from roots to leaves. The new technology can continuously desalinate water without the need for major maintenance.

Read it all.

Solar device makes 20L drinking water a day from seawater with 93% efficiencyhttps://t.co/PrkqDvzdh7

— Interesting Engineering (@IntEngineering) September 12, 2024

Geothermal energy may be approaching its Mitchell moment. George Mitchell, a scrappy independent oilman, is known as the father of fracking. Nearly three decades ago, he defied Big Oil and the conventional wisdom of his industry by making practical the hitherto uneconomic technique of pumping liquids and sands into the ground to force out gas and oil from shale rock and other tight geological formations. The enormous increase in productivity that resulted, known as the shale revolution, has transformed the global hydrocarbon business.

Now Fervo Energy, another scrappy Texan upstart, is applying such hydraulic fracturing—alongside other techniques borrowed from the petroleum industry—to the sleepy geothermal sector. Should it succeed, it would mean this relatively fringe source of energy could, in time, become a major player in the energy mix.

The motivation behind geothermal energy is to harness Earth’s abundant subsurface heat for useful ends. This is ordinarily done by tapping into underground reservoirs of hot water or steam. As these are only found in limited areas, this greatly limits the potential of conventional geothermal power. In contrast, “enhanced geothermal systems” (EGS), like the one deployed by Fervo, use hydraulic stimulation to create channels in hot rocks just about anywhere. One well pumps in water into those channels, where it is heated naturally to 200°C or higher. Another well then brings that hot water to the surface, where it is used to generate electricity in a turbine….

Read it all.

Geothermal energy is usually harvested by tapping into underground reservoirs of hot water or steam. These are only found in limited areas, this greatly limits the potential of conventional geothermal power.

There has been a hot-rocks breakthrough https://t.co/5VDAvYpUIq 👇

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) September 15, 2024

The £5.2m Demonstrator Churches project from the Church of England’s Net Zero Programme aims to help 114 churches in 2024 and 2025 pay for items such as solar panels, heat pumps, insulation, secondary glazing, LED lighting and infrared heating systems.

As work progresses, the network of Demonstrator Churches – representing many different types of community and situations – will share what they have learned more widely with dioceses and parishes so that all Church of England churches can learn from their experiences.

Abi Hiscock, Project and Grants Manager for the Church of England’s Net Zero Demonstrator Churches Project, said: “Ultimately, we want to demonstrate that with the right support and infrastructure, churches from diverse settings and facing a variety of challenges can reach net zero by 2030.

“By the end of this project, we will have over 100 case studies on what to do and when, and what not to do. Along the way, the supported churches are all required to act as champions to other churches in their dioceses or geographically near to them, or simply to other churches working from similar baselines to them, so that the learnings from these projects engage, influence and support this vision.”

Read it all.

@StPeterMancroft is 1st of over 100 churches 2 receive part of the £5.2M Demonstrator Churches project from the Church of England’s Net Zero Programme.

Watch our journey towards net zero in the full video on the Diocese website. Here's a snippet…https://t.co/dsrNh10sAr

— VergerStPeterMancroft (@verger_st) July 4, 2024

One of North America’s largest areas of interconnected glaciers is melting twice as quickly as it did before 2010, a team of scientists said Tuesday, in what they called an “incredibly worrying” sign that land ice in many places could disappear even sooner than previously thought.

The Juneau Ice Field, which sprawls across the Coast Mountains of Alaska and British Columbia, lost 1.4 cubic miles of ice a year between 2010 and 2020, the researchers estimated. That’s a sharp acceleration from the decades before, and even sharper when compared with the mid-20th century or earlier, the scientists said. All told, the ice field has shed a quarter of its volume since the late 18th century, which was part of a period of glacial expansion known as the Little Ice Age.

As societies add more and more planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, glaciers in many areas could cross tipping points beyond which their melting speeds up rapidly, said Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University in England who led the new research.

“If we reduce carbon, then we have more hope of retaining these wonderful ice masses,” Dr. Davies said. “The more carbon we put in, the more we risk irreversible, complete removal of them.”

Read it all.

Study Finds Alaskan Ice Field Melting at an ‘Incredibly Worrying’ Pace https://t.co/MjBzzo3n4G

— Sarah Pickman (is also on Bluesky) (@sarahmpicks) July 3, 2024

Scientists like [Magdalena] Osburn have shown that, contrary to long-held assumptions, Earth’s interior is not barren. In fact, a majority of the planet’s microbes, perhaps more than 90 percent, may live deep un­derground. These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface. They are ancient and slow, re­producing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years. They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxy­gen. And they seem capable of weathering geological cataclysms that would annihilate most creatures. Like the many tiny organisms in the ocean and atmosphere, the unique microbes within Earth’s crust do not simply inhabit their surroundings; they transform them. Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the ground­work for all other terrestrial life.

Like so much about Earth’s earliest history, exactly where and when life first emerged is not definitively known. At some point not long after our planet’s genesis, in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy — a hot spring, an impact crater, a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor — bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells. Evidence from the fossil record and chemical analysis of the oldest rocks ever discovered indicate that microbial life existed at least 3.5 billion years ago and possibly as far back as 4.2 billion years ago.

Among all living creatures, the peculiar microbes that dwell deep within the planet’s crust today may most closely resemble some of the earliest single-celled organisms that ever existed. Collectively, these subsurface microbes make up an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the biomass — that is, all the living matter — on Earth. Yet until the mid-20th century, most scientists did not think subterranean life of any kind was plausible below a few meters.

Read it all.

We know SO little about our earth. Many wonderful quotable passages. An important article.

The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet https://t.co/vh4XXYNIgW

— sammyzorba 📚 (@sammyzorba) June 25, 2024

Oceans help cool down the world. Startups are betting they can tweak the chemistry of seas to make them do even more.

It is a radical idea that has yet to be proven on a commercial scale and causes some to worry about potential risks. But at least a dozen young companies are embarking on the world’s first major projects to get oceans to soak up more carbon dioxide, encouraged by billions of dollars in federal and corporate funding for efforts that remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

A startup that uses an electrochemical method to remove carbon from seawater is building its first commercial-scale plants in Singapore and Quebec. Removing the carbon boosts the ocean’s ability to soak up more from the atmosphere. The U.S. government recently awarded it and a competitor with a similar approach some of the first federal funding for carbon removal. 

Another startup is set to pour about 9,000 tons of sand mixed with a yellow-green mineral called olivine near the waters off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. When the sand dissolves in water, it triggers a series of chemical reactions that drive carbon removal.

Read it all.

Oceans absorb about 30% of the carbon from the atmosphere. Startups are developing technologies to rev up that power. https://t.co/oM5JP6VR7H via @WSJ

— WSJ Science (@WSJscience) June 25, 2024

It is 70 years since at&t’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s.

Read it all.

An energy-rich future is not just some environmentalist fever dream. Our special issue explores how the exponential rise of solar power will change the world https://t.co/4rJ2lJfF2t pic.twitter.com/YLSXWNKraj

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 20, 2024

For the first time, researchers have detected a significant dip in atmospheric levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons — harmful gases that deplete the ozone layer and warm the planet.

Almost 30 years after nations first agreed to phase out these chemicals, which were widely used for air conditioning and refrigeration, scientists say global concentrations peaked in 2021. Since then, the ozone-depleting potential of HCFCs in the atmosphere has fallen by about three-quarters of a percentage point, according to findings published Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Though small, that decline comes sooner than expected, scientists say — and it represents a significant milestone for the international effort to preserve the layer of Earth’s stratosphere that blocks dangerous ultraviolet sunlight.

The world agreed to ban this dangerous pollutant — and it’s working – The Washington Post https://t.co/Qfa9bSUAii

— Steve Berkowitz (@steveberkowitz) June 12, 2024

Coastal areas up and down the East Coast are sinking at the same time sea levels are rising. Parts of Beaufort, Colleton and Charleston counties sank more than 2 inches since 2007, and some areas on St. Helena Island sank more than 3 inches, The Post and Courier previously reported.

Sinking land — a problem also called subsidence and settlement — can make flooding worse, cause septic tanks to fail, damage underground infrastructure, and cause buildings and bridges to crack.

So can we slow it down? Here’s what we found out.

Parts of South Carolina are sinking, and quickly. Can we slow it down? https://t.co/xVQX3VRcFk

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) June 3, 2024

Raquel Campos’ water issues started in January, when her condo building’s manager sent residents a message saying that the city hadn’t delivered water to its cistern. Four days later, taps in the upscale residence went dry.

Campos has lived in the wealthy Polanco neighborhood for 18 years and said she has never experienced water issues like this. Her husband paid to shower at a nearby hotel and she called water delivery companies that were overwhelmed with a sudden deluge of requests from the neighborhood. The water in Campos’ building came back within a few days, but with much lower pressure. Water is now delivered about every two weeks. Each unit has paid to cover the cost, increasing their monthly condo expenses by 30 percent.

Water scarcity has long been an issue in Mexico City, with the brunt of the shortages happening in lower-income neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city center. But recently, residents in some of the city’s wealthier neighborhoods have also been running out of water as hot temperatures, low rainfall and poor infrastructure have converged to create a crisis across the sprawling metropolis.

We’ll always have water, just not enough of it.

Mexico City and millions of its residents could run out of water in weeks

– metropolitan area of 22 million gets @ 1/4 of water from system that’s running dry….
could be unable to provide water by 6/26https://t.co/PXeC4OT0kY

— Jan SMH Harper (@SmhJan) May 29, 2024

Parishes and Communities across England can now register for a week-long event in June to celebrate wildlife in churchyards and cemeteries.

From wildflowers to insects, birds and mammals, all creatures great and small have found a haven in the UK’s burial grounds for centuries as the land has been largely undisturbed.

During Love Your Burial Ground Week and Churches Count on Nature (June 8-16) everyone is invited to explore these special places and help survey what they find.

Organised by Caring for God’s Acre and supported by the Church of England, the Church of Wales and A Rocha UK, the week-long initiative comes on the back of the Church of England’s commitment made at the General Synod in February to promote and record the biodiversity in its churchyards.

Read it all.

Parishes and communities across England and Wales can now register for a week-long event in June to celebrate wildlife in churchyards and cemeteries. We're working with @godsacre and @ChurchinWales to promote #ChurchesCountonNatureWeek: https://t.co/o0j5yqsmGR 📷Adrian Powter pic.twitter.com/tR0mG3jVzt

— Church of England Environment Programme (@CofEEnvironment) May 13, 2024

April was the Earth’s 11th consecutive month of record-breaking heat, with warmer weather already sweeping across Asia and a hotter-than-usual summer expected in Europe.

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month’s temperatures globally were 1.58C (2.8F) above historical averages and marked the hottest April on record. The past 12 months have been 1.61C higher than pre-industrial temperatures, exceeding the 1.5C threshold that policymakers and scientists say could threaten life on the planet.

“Whilst temperature variations associated with natural cycles like El Niño come and go, the extra energy trapped into the ocean and the atmosphere by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases will keep pushing the global temperature towards new records,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

World Extends Run of Heat Records for 11th Straight Month https://t.co/058Y6sQ6Hd

— Shehzad Younis شہزاد یونس (@shehzadyounis) May 8, 2024

The bet is that global capital will do the heavy lifting on infrastructure once the red carpet is rolled out. It is a risky proposition in a changed world order where industrial policy is de rigueur, and the new gospel is how to leverage private investment with public seed money.

But not every country has a Vaca Muerta to offer. McKinsey says the basin will need $45bn of investment over the next 10 years to reach scale, beyond the means of the Argentine state in any plausible scenario.

Foreign investors are keeping a watchful eye on the Peronist backlash, so far gaining little traction in a country hungry for a fresh start – like washed-out Britain in the 1970s after hitting bottom during the three-day week.

Mr Milei’s omnibus law has successfully run the gauntlet through the lower house of parliament after much horse-trading, but doing better in his showdown with the discredited parties of the ‘casta’ than many expected. The senate will be harder (he has only seven seats) but he carries the big stick of decree power if all else fails, like Emmanuel Macron in today’s France.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Milei’s Argentina is fast becoming the Texas of Latin America
The country’s vast shale reserves are the president’s most potent economic weapon https://t.co/KbX0liJuIe

— Paul Deaux (@deauxpaul) May 8, 2024

Oceans marked 365 straight days of record-breaking global sea surface temperatures this week, fuelling concerns among international scientists that climate change could push marine ecosystems beyond a tipping point.

The consistent climb in temperatures reached a peak on Wednesday when the new all-time high was set for the past 12 months, at 21.2C.

The world’s seas have yet to show any signs of dropping to typical, seasonal temperatures, with daily records consecutively broken since they first went off the charts in mid-March last year, according to data from the US National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration and the Climate Reanalyzer research collaboration.

Driven by human-caused climate change and amplified by the cyclical El Niño weather phenomenon that warms the Pacific Ocean, this exceptional heat has bleak implications.

Read it all.

„Climate graphic of the week: Oceans set heat records for more than 365 days in a row“ https://t.co/utI21M9PFM

— Özden Terli (@TerliWetter) March 18, 2024

Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade. Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.

Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.

Days earlier, a clutch of peer-reviewed papers confirmed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston had broken the world record for a large-scale magnet with a field strength of 20 tesla using the latest high-temperature superconducting technology. This exceeds the threshold necessary for producing net energy, or a “Q factor”, above 1.0.

“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, plasma doyen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Read it all.

Nuclear fusion for the grid is coming much sooner than you think https://t.co/P26xF1Q4mT

— Dr. Daniel Stelter (@thinkBTO) March 13, 2024

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.

Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.

Read it all.

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power: "Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned & under construction" https://t.co/3xMbdmO7om pic.twitter.com/NbZFwDGgVB

— Jim Russell (@ProducerCities) March 8, 2024

A new study of sea-level rise using detailed data on changes to land elevation found that current scientific models may not accurately capture vulnerabilities in 32 coastal cities in the United States.

The analysis, published Wednesday in Nature, uses satellite imagery to detect sinking and rising land to help paint a more precise picture of exposure to flooding both today and in the future.

Nearly 40 percent of Americans live along the coasts, where subsidence, or sinking land, can add significantly to the threat of sea-level rise. While the Gulf Coast experiences many of the most severe cases of subsidence — parts of Galveston, Texas, and Grand Isle, La., are slumping into the ocean faster than global average sea levels are rising — the trend can be found all along the United States shoreline.

Read it all.

A new study of sinking and rising land along American coasts offers a more specific understanding of potential flooding in 32 cities. https://t.co/ZNU2vVYeDr

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 7, 2024

The world’s carbon dioxide emissions from energy rose yet again to a new high in 2023 despite fossil fuel use falling in the advanced economies of the EU and US, the latest International Energy Agency report shows.

Emissions reached a record 37.4bn tonnes as droughts and rising energy demand pushed up fossil fuel use, a rise of 1.1 per cent, or 410mn tonnes, compared to the year before.

This runs counter to the need for emissions to be cut by almost 45 per cent by 2030 to limit long-term global warming to no more than 1.5C since the pre-industrial era. Already the rise in temperatures is at least 1.1C, and last year was the hottest on record.

Higher emissions from India and China helped offset reductions in the EU and the US, as the developing economies remained heavily reliant on coal to meet energy demand even as they also develop cleaner energy. 

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Emissions reach record high despite growth in clean energy, IEA says https://t.co/Z4yLX1GjCA

— Financial Times (@FT) March 1, 2024

In a cavernous production hall in Düsseldorf last fall, the somber tones of a horn player accompanied the final act of a century-old factory.

Amid the flickering of flares and torches, many of the 1,600 people losing their jobs stood stone-faced as the glowing metal of the plant’s last product — a steel pipe — was smoothed to a perfect cylinder on a rolling mill. The ceremony ended a 124-year run that began in the heyday of German industrialization and weathered two world wars, but couldn’t survive the aftermath of the energy crisis.

There have been numerous iterations of such finales over the past year, underscoring the painful reality facing Germany: its days as an industrial superpower may be coming to an end. Manufacturing output in Europe’s biggest economy has been trending downward since 2017, and the decline is accelerating as competitiveness erodes.

“There’s not a lot of hope, if I’m honest,” said Stefan Klebert, chief executive officer of GEA Group AG — a supplier of manufacturing machinery that traces its roots to the late 1800s. “I am really uncertain that we can halt this trend. Many things would have to change very quickly.”

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🇩🇪 #Germany’s Days as an Industrial Superpower Are Coming to an End – Bloomberghttps://t.co/F0E4eUlAXA pic.twitter.com/DCJWqTqSPI

— Christophe Barraud🛢🐳 (@C_Barraud) February 10, 2024

In a 30-square-mile patch of northern Virginia that’s been dubbed “data center alley,” the boom in artificial intelligence is turbocharging electricity use. Struggling to keep up, the power company that serves the area temporarily paused new data center connections at one point in 2022. Virginia’s environmental regulators considered a plan to allow data centers to run diesel generators during power shortages, but backed off after it drew strong community opposition.

In the Kansas City area, a data center along with a factory for electric-vehicle batteries that are under construction will need so much energy the local provider put off plans to close a coal-fired power plant.

This is how it is in much of the US, where electric utilities and regulators have been caught off guard by the biggest jump in demand in a generation. One of the things they didn’t properly plan for is AI, an immensely power-hungry technology that uses specialized microchips to process mountains of data. Electricity consumption at US data centers alone is poised to triple from 2022 levels, to as much as 390 terawatt hours by the end of the decade, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s equal to about 7.5% of the nation’s projected electricity demand. “We do need way more energy in the world than we thought we needed before,” Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has become a global phenomenon, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.”

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AI needs so much power that old coal plants are sticking around https://t.co/VBOC34Uz8j

— Businessweek (@BW) January 25, 2024