David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 03/10/2026I think this was also to do with an expiring tax credit! 110
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 03/10/2026This seems to be the situation in Indonesia too? 121
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 29/09/2026In “Rich Girl” Hall and Oates literally switched the gender of the obnoxious rich dude it was based on! 000
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Seriously, look in that link about how the construction slowdown has continued and even accelerated in 2026. Housing starts normally rise quite a bit from March to August, this year they are almost flat. That represents a lot of idled site equipment. 200
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Two things that might factor into a broad “transport fuel” metric that may not show up in the CEC data: 1. Home charging generally doesn’t show, I think — though perhaps they are trying to capture this? 2. The construction bust is huge even without an EV switch: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...bloomberg.comChina’s Building Crash Helps Ease the Hormuz PainJust how little diesel can China get away with using? We’re in the process of finding out. 100
Reposted by David FicklingRobbie Andrew @robbieandrew.bsky.social · 23/09/2026The US EIA is currently forecasting US fossil-fuel emissions to drop by 1.7% in 2026. robbieandrew.github.io/USA/ 58113
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026EV charging in China was 17.2 TWh in August, up 51.2% year-on-year. That's equivalent to ~1.3 million barrels of oil a day, in a global oil market that shifts about 100m bpd. Just the change from last year cuts global oil demand by 0.5m bpd. english.cec.org.cn#/newsdetails...english.cec.org.cncec 422559
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026But generally the thing that is healthy for stable rural communities is to maximise the amount of income that is not correlated directly to this season’s weather. This is also why we have polytunnels and crop insurance! 020
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Was watching Ransom Canyon on Netflix recently and getting a reminder of how, in a small community where everyone grew up together, your neighbour selling out to outside capital can be not just jealousy-inducing, but feel like a manifestation of evil. 210
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026There is a separate point about this that gets ignored, too. Farmers lease land to solar because it MAKES them money. And provides income that is not correlated to seasonal weather — the same reason they do AirBnbs and farm shops. Opposition is often from neighbours who resent their luck! 121
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 23/09/2026it’s funny how *just last week* I wrote an elaborate scenario for how the politics of US petroleum export bans could flip some day, and this week the Trump administration is just … tweeting it out www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...bloomberg.comHow the Great Gas Crisis of 2030 Will Play OutIt’s October 2030. In hindsight, the vulnerabilities that triggered the third great natural gas crisis in eight years seem painfully obvious. 0124
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 21/09/2026*Uncanny-valley face ✅ *Aggressive inferiority complex ✅ *Obsessed with pseudo-genetic supremacist ideas ✅ *Plans to destroy the world to fulfil interstellar ambitions ✅ 020
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Agree, but it’s important IMO that there is such a fundamental difference between the two AI superpowers. Does it entrench existing power (China’s view)? Or is it so massively disruptive to existing power that the dominance of humanity itself is at risk (SV view)? Huge gulf between these. 000
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 19/09/2026But if a correct understanding is “LLMs will help the CPC maintain power” then “LLMs will conquer humanity” must be false! FWIW I agree it is probably the more correct take but I am far from an expert. 110
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I reckon we need a @beijingpalmer.bsky.social take on China vs SV cultures of sex as yucky male bonding ritual. 141
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026To reiterate before people get mad: to reflect on this, you don’t need to believe the CPC is good or even not-evil. You just need to believe it is a. Paranoid about threats to its power b. Aware of Chinese AI and c. Not completely stupid. I think it’s pretty easy to believe that! Hard not to, TBH. 2274
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I am not asking you to subscribe, because not every news site is for every person. But don’t diss paywalls! They are the things that keep most journalists in a job, and ensure the rest of us can get access to honest and timely information, rather than just propaganda. 111
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Maybe the CPC are naive or insouciant, but I think we should take seriously the possibility that it’s actually the EA/AI/SV rationalist sex cult people who have got out over their skis and are getting distracted by bad sci-fi rather than just regulating the industry they run. 3516
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026To continue the @faineg.com dog metaphor, this is to me a bit of a dog-that-didn’t-bark moment. Why is this incredibly-paranoid-about-control organization not worried about losing *mere political control to AI*, the way SV culture is paranoid about losing control of the entire future of humanity? 2379
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026It should be pause for thought that the Communist Party of China, one of the world’s most paranoid organizations about threats to its power, doesn’t appear to be having a SV-style millennarian/apocalyptic freakout *despite* overseeing lots of frontier AI development. 46818
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026You should also be reading @thorbecke.bsky.social to get a sense of how in Asia, outside the SF thought bubble, lots of what “everybody thinks” about AI just doesn’t exist or is very different: bloomberg.com/opinion/auth... bloomberg.com/opinion/auth...bloomberg.comCatherine Thorbecke - Bloomberg Opinion Columnist | BloombergCatherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. Previously she was a tech reporter at CNN and ABC News. 2307
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026The whole thread is worth reading and makes much more serious points about cultish aspects of SF AI, but this one made me LOL 27217
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Data centers are being built in countries with electricity grids! Generating sources aren’t scarce, *peaking capacity* is, and that’s what diesel generators are being built to support. But batteries provide it much more cheaply in almost all scenarios. 030
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026If you are using diesel for baseload power I don’t know how to help you 110
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Come on into the renewables hot tub, DC pushers, you’ll be surprised how warm (and cheap!) the water is 100
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026This is the bit where a data center dude breaks in with the killer riposte that they will just spark to a few gigawatts of fusion generators if the engineering and economics of diesel proves too challenging… 170
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Above 1% the economics look even grimmer for diesel of course 170
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Batteries probably beat diesel at about 1% utilization for the foreseeable future, but we can’t use them because they are girly and foreign! 370
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026It’s darkly funny that data center bros are all installing gigawatts of diesel generators because batteries are girly and foreign, just at the moment the entire global diesel production system is breaking apart. 4215
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026African colonialism seems more similar to Indian colonialism, in that Europeans exploited their control of ocean trade and existing divisions between well-established local polities to establish political dominance. European colonists themselves were the main disease victims. 020
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Actually no, because disease played a big part in it and African people hadn’t been isolated from old world epidemics for millennia. There is an interesting argument that the rinderpest livestock epidemic in East Africa in the late c19th had similar effects, though not sure about numbers. 120
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Disease and massacres from European invasion resulted in the deaths of 93% of Indigenous people in Australia, per a new study. Sadly, this should not be surprising — it’s consistent with the numbers seen in the Americas after invasion. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09...abc.net.auImpact of colonisation on First Nations people far greater than previous estimates, research findsAustralia's Indigenous population was up to seven times larger before colonisation than previously estimated, but was devastated following the arrival of Europeans, new research reveals. 22512
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Imagine a visit to Spahn Ranch, except the Family happen to be in possession of The Bomb 040
Reposted by David FicklingDavid Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 12/09/2026I wrote this quickly at a bus stop and didn't realize it would go viral, or else I would have worded it better. But the point is that the media is too credulous about AI killing everyone in 10 years (how?) when climate change is killing people now and will only get worse (we know exactly how). 4156791561
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 13/09/2026Seems perfectly sensible. The Leader sleeps in the main bedroom with whichever follower has been selected that night, the second bedroom is reserved for isolation of those Spreading Negative Energies through the group, the other dozen camp out in sleeping bags in front of the lectern 040
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026A modern vehicle that supports OTA software updates, what devilry is this? www.yahoo.com/news/politic...yahoo.comNorway Found a Cure for China's Bus 'Kill Switch' — Bringing Back the Diesel EngineTwo governments got handed the exact same discovery. One called it a managed risk and moved on. The other used it to rewrite its own emissions law. That gap says more about where this story is headed ... 150
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Totally agree. The structural factors pushing coal higher in China, India, Indonesia are clear. But I think it is that much more than LNG substitution which is driving things. Which is potentially a grimmer picture, as you say! 121
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026It would be very fitting in a “God created man in His own image” if AI bots turned out to be death cult 011
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026It’s worth thinking of these numbers when you get freaked out about the terrifying scale of the swarm of 1000-odd agents involved in the HuggingFace hack. 050
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Just to underline this point a bit, because “one sextillion” just sounds like “a bit bigger than a billion”: A sextillion is a larger number, by more than an order of magnitude, than the number of grains of sand on our planet. Carbon is already waaaay ahead of silicon on this measure. 130
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026I reckon someone finds out and shuts it down quite a bit before we get to the “billion trillion AI viral designs” stage, and the resulting CO2 emissions. 030
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026“Amid Hormuz” as opposed to “due to Hormuz” seems to be doing a lot of work in the report. I would love to see their breakdown of Hormuz vs renewable curtailment vs hot weather factors. For India and Vietnam, it’s almost entirely a weather story IMO, while China is largely curtailment. Maybe Korea? 171
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026When you have a viral infection, pretty much any viral infection, you have more virions in your body than there are people on the planet. Many of them evolving novel mutations. To believe the “AI supervirus” thing you have to drastically underestimate how good viruses are at what they do. 3162
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026That is a billion trillion goes at coming up with a recipe to overwhelm our immune systems. And it required no GPUs, server racks, ACs or power grids, just the biochemical machinery of our own cells. And (though it is slightly silly to frame it this way) the virus lost. 1101
David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026A thing that people need to reckon with when they theorize that AI swarms could brute-force engineer superviruses is that *this is what viruses do anyway*. There have likely been roughly a sextillion — a billion trillion — Covid virions generated since 2019. 3199