 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Gas turbines at xAI's Colossus 2 data center have drawn a lawsuit over the company's use of "mobile" gas turbines as power plants. Elon Musk’s xAI is running nearly 50 natural gas turbines at its Mississippi data center, power plants that the state is currently not regulating thanks to a loophole. The power plants are considered “mobile” by the state of Mississippi because they are sitting on flatbed trailers, thus allowing them to dodge air pollution regulations for one year. The NAACP, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of residents in the area, says the unchecked emissions from the turbines is worsening air quality in an already polluted region. This week, it asked the court for an injunction against xAI.
Diplomats in Vietnam warned Washington that halting USAID’s efforts to clean up the massive deposit of postwar pesticides would be a catastrophe for public health and relations with a key strategic partner in Asia. Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind. And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.
The Defense Department has stopped once-routine reviews that even wind projects on private land need to pass, jeopardizing a power source that could help meet skyrocketing demand.
With the launch of the first 16 satellites, Russia begins construction of a network for satellite internet that aims to cover the entire country by 2030. But getting there won’t be easy. In late March, Russian company Bureau 1440 brought into low orbit the first 16 broadband internet satellites of the new Rassvet constellation, already dubbed by observers and local media the Russian answer to SpaceX's Starlink. It's an ambitious global internet project that experts say could conceal much broader strategic goals, with functions including military and communications control. The launch took place on March 23 at 8:24 pm Moscow time from the military's Plesetsk Cosmodrome using the Soyuz-2.1B launcher, and marked the first step in building an infrastructure that is expected to have at least 300 satellites by 2030.
Even as Ocean Winds abandons two U.S. offshore wind leases, it’s staying the course on projects elsewhere, including a floating French array that flicked on this week. The developer Ocean Winds cut controversial deals with the Trump administration last week to abandon two U.S. offshore wind developments. But across the Atlantic, it’s making big strides — especially with floating wind. On Monday, Ocean Winds said its 30-megawatt project in the south of France has started delivering power to the country’s grid.
While local lawmakers obsess over how to keep Democrats in majority-Black districts from governing, their state is literally shrinking. In the coming century,* New Orleans will be surrounded by ocean. That’s the contention of a paper published this week in Nature Sustainability. It finds that the city has already passed a “point of no return.” The authors recommend taking immediate action to start relocating the more than one million residents there and across coastal Louisiana who are being placed “in harm’s way” by the rapid loss of coastal wetlands, a loss increasingly driven by rising sea levels. The study suggests that the “widespread conversion” of low-elevation coastal zones in the Mississippi Delta into “open water” is “probably unavoidable.” “Between the chronic stress of land loss and sea level rise, New Orleans’s days are numbered—at least as we know it today,” said Jesse Keenan, a co-author of the paper and an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University.
The analytic company IDC says the U.S. economy will be generating 394 trillion zettabytes of data annually by 2028 (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes). The majority of the energy used in data centers today is for storing some of this data in an accessible format. We don’t try to make all data available, and about 20% of the data we generate today is considered to be “hot data” that AI systems might want to draw on quickly. The remaining 80% of data is “cold data”, which we don’t put in data center storage, but which we also don’t discard, since it might still be of use in the future. Today, hot data is largely stored on hard drives in data centers.
Construction of an advanced nuclear power plant partly funded by the U.S. government -billed as the first of its kind this century, is now underway in Wyoming. The Bill Gates-backed company says its technology is proven but there are still hurdles to nuclear.
“I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn’t really ready,” one police official told federal regulators last month. Emergency first-responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets—that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them “a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims.” WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting. Officials from San Francisco and Austin, where Waymo has been ferrying passengers without drivers for more than a year, said the vehicles’ performance is getting worse. “We are actually seeing something interesting: backsliding of some things that had improved upon,” Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, told officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees self-driving vehicle safety in the US. “They are committing more traffic violations.”
Record low winter snows mean insufficient water in the Colorado River. Here's how a city that's first in line to be cut off is handling it. On the outer edges of the Phoenix metro area, the small town of Cave Creek, Arizona sits nestled among the cactus-dotted hills. It's home to about 5,000 people and known mostly for its quiet residential neighborhoods, art galleries and an annual rodeo. It's also on the front lines of the Colorado River crisis. Climate change and a 26-year megadrought have crippled the river, which supplies nearly 40 million people across seven Western states and Mexico. Negotiations about how to share its shrinking supply are at an impasse, and the federal government has proposed steep cutbacks to protect the nation's largest reservoirs.
"The oil companies, they allow them to just come out here and do whatever the hell they want.” Some Texas oil wells gush hundreds of barrels of oil a day. But many are like the wells on Jackie Chesnutt’s ranch in West Texas that only trickle out a couple barrels a month. Chesnutt, a retired engineer, claims the five wells operating on her ranch are out of compliance with state rules and should be shut down. The company, CORE Petro, says that it’s struggling to break even, let alone pay to plug the wells. But it says that all its wells are in compliance. There are thousands of oil and gas wells around Texas like these: low-producing wells leased by companies operating on a shoestring. About two-thirds of the active oil wells in Texas, or 99,000 wells, produce less than 10 barrels of oil a day, according to the state regulator. To remain active, oil wells in Texas must produce at least five barrels for three consecutive months or at least one barrel for 12 consecutive months.
A 100% renewable energy grid isn’t realistic in New England, given increased demand, weather and other factors, writes Frederick Hewett. We need an approach that includes nuclear power.
Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again. The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.
|
In a weird stroke of good fortune, Trump’s misrule provides a perfect context to press the correct argument about climate change. In the second Trump administration, Democrats have been backing away from climate change messaging. Joe Biden apparently got no credit for the Inflation Reduction Act, his marquee climate policy bill, and Trump has since unceremoniously disposed of it. The Searchlight Institute, a centrist think tank, presented polling last September indicating that while most Americans think climate change is a problem, they don’t think it’s a major one. Therefore, the first step to solving climate change is “don’t say climate change.” Luckily, as Matt Huber points out at The New York Times, tremendous progress in renewable energy means one can accomplish a lot, emissions-wise, without mentioning climate change at all. The “heart of any affordability agenda—housing, energy, transportation—overlaps with the sectors we must decarbonize,” he writes. “When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.”
The FCC's abrupt move to reconsider the licenses of eight ABC-owned television stations is the agency's first real effort to carry out a frequent threat of President Donald Trump. Brendan Carr’s embrace of President Donald Trump’s media criticism reached new heights Tuesday — showing a willingness to target broadcasters’ most valuable assets. The Federal Communications Commission chair’s abrupt move to reconsider the broadcasting licenses of Disney’s eight television stations marks an escalation of conservatives’ many complaints about the mammoth entertainment company’s diversity policies and programming on ABC. It was also the first real move by the FCC toward carrying out Trump’s frequent threats over the years to revoke the licenses of networks whose programs have angered him. Carr issued an order Tuesday calling in the stations’ licenses for “early renewal” years ahead of their due dates — and suggesting the action was spurred by Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices. The commission has been investigating the company for “unlawful discrimination,” the order said. But the announcement also came a day after Trump and first lady Melania Trump demanded that Disney-owned ABC fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he had made during his show last week.
In what is the 11th Cybertruck recall, certain models of Elon Musk’s embattled pickup could experience a sudden, unexpected wheel separation, thanks to the wrong grease and loose nuts. Last year, nearly all Cybertrucks had to be recalled because Tesla used the wrong glue on a steel trim panel that the carmaker said could become detached while driving. Now, yet another embarrassing recall exposes that the electric pickup could see wheels come off certain models due to the use of the wrong grease. In what is the 11th Cybertruck recall so far, alongside concerns that the stainless steel trucks could be rusting, Tesla is recalling its Rear Wheel Drive (RWD) Cybertruck Long Range over faulty brake rotors. In a notice posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Tesla states that “brake rotor stud holes may crack and allow the stud to separate from the wheel hub.” Tesla's description of the defect is as follows: “On affected vehicles, higher severity road perturbations and cornering may strain the stud hole in the wheel rotor, causing cracks to form. If cracking propagates with continued use and strain, the wheel stud could eventually separate from the wheel hub.” In which case, some RWD Cybertruck owners merrily driving along could be disconcertingly overtaken by their own wheels. Poor Cybertruckers have enough to contend with without worrying about the wheels on their “apocalypse-proof” pickups falling off, so thankfully, Tesla says it will completely replace the wheel hubs, rotors, and lug nuts free of charge for all 173 trucks affected by the recall.
Using existing backup generators as regular sources of electricity would emit lots of pollution into American skies and endanger people’s health. With U.S. electricity demand starting to rise quickly and expected to continue rising, largely because of the power needed for data centers that process artificial intelligence, people are looking for almost any potential solution. And people are warning that the full projected demand may not actually develop, which could make massive investments in power plants unnecessary, raising Americans’ electricity rates even more. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is among those who have been promoting what might seem to be an attractive idea: “We have 35 gigawatts of backup generators that are sitting there,” he told an audience of natural gas industry leaders in December 2025. He was referring to diesel-fired engines at hospitals, office complexes, corporate campuses and even data centers to provide electricity if the grid goes down. That amount of power would be a significant step toward meeting the nation’s expected energy needs, without needing new long-term investments in power plants or transmission lines. But it’s also vital to know, as Wright went on to note, that “emissions rules or whatever” mean those generators can’t just be turned on and left running when there’s not a power outage or other emergency.
Antitrust law could threaten to hobble AI labs’ attempts to stop foreign developers from pilfering their technology. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google all released strikingly similar reports earlier this year of Chinese developers launching distillation attacks — a high-tech maneuver for extracting key information to train other models. Distillation involves a “student” model submitting a large number of prompts to a “teacher” model to figure out what’s going on under the hood. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios then published a memo late last month disclosing that the government has evidence of Chinese entities conducting “industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems.” (The Chinese embassy in Washington previously told DFD that the allegations are “groundless.”)
Intervention for farming and flood risk change the unique systems as communities grapple with how to live alongside the vital waterways. When British settlers started building Christchurch city 170 years ago, they largely ignored the nearby Waimakariri River, which twists from the South Island’s alps towards the eastern shore. But rain and glacial shifts compelled the braided river – a globally rare form of river with many woven channels – to take on a new shape, occasionally flooding land and depositing tonnes of shingle in its wake. By the 1920s, the Waimakariri was described as a “flood menace” in a report to authorities, one that showed a “deficiency of nature, which must be made good by the art of man”. With that, the river was brought into submission, slowly hemmed in with stopbanks, exotic tree planting and gravel extraction. Now it requires endless maintenance to tame the river and prevent the risks of flooding to homes, infrastructure and the nearby airport.
A new study shows that iron-bearing rocks that formed at the ocean floor 3.2 billion years ago carry unmistakable evidence of oxygen. The only logical source for that oxygen is the earliest known example of photosynthesis by living organisms, say University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscientists.
A possible super El Niño could bring extreme heat, heavy rainfall, and rare weather patterns across the globe. The tropical Pacific is starting to look restless again, and forecasters are paying close attention. El Niño, a recurring ocean pattern tied to floods, droughts, and heat, appears increasingly likely to develop later in 2026. The latest U.S. outlook, issued April 9, 2026, puts the chance of El Niño forming during June to August 2026 at 62% and says it could persist through the end of 2026. It also highlights about a one in four chance the event reaches the “very strong” category, the zone where headlines start using the phrase “super El Niño.”
In this week’s newsletter: Forecasts suggest a stronger version of the climate phenomenon could supercharge extreme weather events, putting the world on track to again breach a 1.5C average temperature rise. Scientists and officials are keeping a close eye on conditions brewing in the Pacific Ocean that could spike temperatures and smash global heat records in the year ahead. It’s still too early to get a definitive picture, but there are signs that a so-called super El Niño could develop this year, supercharging extreme weather events around the world. Some forecasts are suggesting it could become one of the strongest ever recorded. Alongside heating from the human-caused climate crisis, this could put the world on track to once again temporarily breach the 1.5C average temperature rise over preindustrial levels – the critical climate threshold that experts have warned comes with a host of catastrophic consequences. Some models show that temperature anomalies could even push past that point next year and go beyond a 2C increase for the first time in recorded history. What would a super El Niño look like and what would it mean for the global climate? I’ll explain, after this week’s most important reads.
Trump administration pays energy firms $885M to cancel wind projects, favoring fossil fuels. Backlash grows as gas prices surge. President Donald Trump’s administration this week shelled out even more US taxpayer money to get energy firms to cancel planned renewable energy projects. As The New York Times reported, the US Department of the Interior on Monday announced plans to reimburse energy companies a combined $885 million in exchange for forfeiting their leases to build wind farms in federal waters off the coasts of New York, New Jersey, and California.
The powerhouse of American citrus is suffering a brutal decline. Everyone has a theory about why. uiet fell over the room, which was neither full nor very loud to begin with, and the 2026 Florida Citrus Show began. “It should be a great day,” began the event’s first speaker. “Rain should hold off today, even though we definitely need more rain.” No one laughed. There was no need to say that things were bad. Everyone knew it. The mood wasn’t sour—citrus farmers could handle sour. It was something else. Postapocalyptic. Florida is in the midst of its worst drought in 25 years, but the dry spell actually ranked far down on the list of challenges these bedraggled growers were facing. In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.
The European Commission has adopted industry-drafted language shielding data center emissions data from public view, report Nico Schmidt and Ella Joyner.
|
