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David Fickling

@davidfickling.bsky.social
11K followers 688 following 854 posts

Climate columnist at @opinion.bloomberg.com. Migrant from London to Warrane/Sydney. These are my views. If you don't like them, well, I have others.

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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I think this was also to do with an expiring tax credit!
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
This seems to be the situation in Indonesia too?
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
In “Rich Girl” Hall and Oates literally switched the gender of the obnoxious rich dude it was based on!
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Seriously, 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Two 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.com
China’s Building Crash Helps Ease the Hormuz Pain
Just how little diesel can China get away with using? We’re in the process of finding out.
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Reposted by David Fickling
Robbie Andrew @robbieandrew.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The US EIA is currently forecasting US fossil-fuel emissions to drop by 1.7% in 2026. robbieandrew.github.io/USA/
Graph showing: Changing EIA forecasts for US CO2 emissions in 2026 (Source: https://robbieandrew.github.io/USA/)
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
EV 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.cn
cec
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
But 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!
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Was 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
There 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!
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
it’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.com
How the Great Gas Crisis of 2030 Will Play Out
It’s October 2030. In hindsight, the vulnerabilities that triggered the third great natural gas crisis in eight years seem painfully obvious.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
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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 ✅
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Agree, 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
But 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I reckon we need a @beijingpalmer.bsky.social take on China vs SV cultures of sex as yucky male bonding ritual.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
To 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
“Better than A.I.” is a pretty low bar!
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Maybe 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
To 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?
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
You 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.com
Catherine Thorbecke - Bloomberg Opinion Columnist | Bloomberg
Catherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. Previously she was a tech reporter at CNN and ABC News.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The whole thread is worth reading and makes much more serious points about cultish aspects of SF AI, but this one made me LOL
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Data 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
If you are using diesel for baseload power I don’t know how to help you
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Come on into the renewables hot tub, DC pushers, you’ll be surprised how warm (and cheap!) the water is
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
This 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…
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Above 1% the economics look even grimmer for diesel of course
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Batteries probably beat diesel at about 1% utilization for the foreseeable future, but we can’t use them because they are girly and foreign!
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It’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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
African 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Actually 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Disease 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.au
Impact of colonisation on First Nations people far greater than previous estimates, research finds
Australia'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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Imagine a visit to Spahn Ranch, except the Family happen to be in possession of The Bomb
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Reposted by David Fickling
David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I 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).
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Seems 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
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Just install a firewall FFS
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A modern vehicle that supports OTA software updates, what devilry is this? www.yahoo.com/news/politic...
yahoo.com
Norway Found a Cure for China's Bus 'Kill Switch' — Bringing Back the Diesel Engine
Two 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 ...
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Totally 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!
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It would be very fitting in a “God created man in His own image” if AI bots turned out to be death cult
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It’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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Just 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/davi...
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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?
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
When 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
That 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.
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David Fickling @davidfickling.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
A 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.
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