Choose your adventure! A: Poison the rain, soil, and groundwater with endocrine-disrupting/fertility-lowering/cancer-causing toxins for generations to come. BUT! You don’t have to preheat your pan. Worth it?

Eh, corporations are people at the top, people in the middle, and people on the bottom. Someone had the idea, someone OK’d it, and someone carried it out. Incorporating just frees up a little responsibility/liability.

Yeah, Kim Stanley Robinson likely did his homework on which parts of the world were most likely to experience the first heat wave with mass casualties.

Fears that the rapid adoption of AI will destroy hopes of tackling the climate crisis have been “overstated”, according to the report, which was published on Thursday. That is because harnessing AI to make energy use and other activities more efficient could result in savings that reduce greenhouse gas emissions overall. (Bolded the key word there.)

They go on to list some potential uses for AI, such as improving efficiency in the energy grid & manufacturing (ignoring the fact that increasing efficiency increases consumption), optimizing traffic, finding more critical mineral reserves, etc.

These uses could offset some of the massive demands that AI will place on the world’s energy systems. But that is likely to require greater direction from governments, the IEA report found. Left alone, the rapid growth of AI could prove a severe problem for energy systems and the environment.

Hm, wonder which path we’re going to choose.

Claude Turmes, a former Green MEP and energy minister for Luxembourg, said the disadvantages of AI were more likely to materialise than the optimistic projections of the IEA, and governments needed much more help to avoid the pitfalls. He accused the IEA of painting too rosy a picture and failing to spell out harsh truths to policymakers.

I see this less as a reference to value, and more as a reference to scarcity. The two are linked, of course, but for most of recent history we’ve been thinking of water as a free/abundant public resource that (literally) falls out of the sky. Now that water rights, water futures, and pipelines are in the picture, we’re starting to treat water more as a private commodity. And yes, the implications of that are very scary.

Thank you for sharing and summarizing! A few more takeaways relating to climate change:

• Emissions growth (0.8%) is lower than GDP growth (3.2%) for 2025, which could be seen as evidence of decoupling. Growth in electricity demand (4.3%) outpaced GDP.
• Renewables made up nearly 40% of new energy production, but coal, oil and natural gas use has continued to increase to record highs.
• Total & per-capita emissions are decreasing in the US & EU, but increasing in China and India.