iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Related - for grid-connected power stations, the EIA's new projection shows that in 2027, emissions cuts from coal will be offset by rising gas consumption to meet data centre demand growth www.eia.gov/outlooks/ste...

We forecast U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to decrease by 1.5% in 2026 relative to 2025 and remain flat in in 2027. In 2026, decreases in CO2 emissions primarily reflect expected declines in coal consumption and, to a lesser extent, declines in consumption of various petroleum products, most notably motor gasoline and distillate fuel oil. Declines in coal-related emissions are expected to continue in 2027 but are offset by rising natural gas-related emissions, largely from consumption growth in the commercial and industrial sectors.

150

gosh who could have predicted this www.afr.com/technology/f...

Firmus’ float on the precipice as investor scepticism grows
Paul Smith, Jonathan Shapiro, Alex Gluyas and Kanika Sood
Oct 8, 2026 – 5.21pm

Save

Share

Gift this article

Add comment
New
Introducing commenting

Share your thoughts and join the discussion.

Got it

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Listen to this article
7 min
The biggest Australian sharemarket listing in a generation has buckled, with Firmus Technologies and its heavyweight advisers scrambling to find a path for the artificial intelligence infrastructure play to go public in the face of lukewarm interest from major investors and local super funds.

In a dramatic turn early on Thursday, bankers working on the proposed $44 billion listing veered from discussing the need to rework the float, cutting the company’s market capitalisation, to considering pulling the deal altogether.

2210

Look at this amazing graphic. When left to their own devices, data centre developers bring gas, rather than renewables. This is the inverse of the capacity ratio for the broader US pipeline of planned projects - data centre developers **LOVE FOSSIL FUELS** more than most github.com/Better-Data-...

2317

"The gas power buildout for AI could cost over $5.6 billion every year in health impacts Texas and Pennsylvania alone would make up almost a third of the health costs from gas burning plants" (this is the LOWER end estimate) earthjustice.org/feature/data...

12216

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 2h

V v good new @earthjustice.org report on the genuinely nutty numbers behind the data centre fossil fuel boom in the US This new update shows emissions from off-grid gas plants for data centres are WAY worse than previously estimated earthjustice.org/feature/data...

Climate & Public Health
▪ Massive scale and impact: The scale of both total
and individual BYOP proposals is massive. As of
August 2026, there are nine proposed gas BYOP
projects that are 4.5 GW or larger. If all are built,
nine of the top 10 largest power plants in the U.S.
would be data center gas BYOP.
Altogether, the current 177 GW of gas proposals
would emit over 400 million metric tons of carbon
dioxide equivalent ( MTCO 2e) annually, increasing
the U.S. power sector’s total emissions by 23% .
Ozone and particulate matter pollution from
these projects could cause an estimated $5 –10B
in monetized health damages each year. 1
▪ Majority gas: Building on prior reports, we
estimate that for current BYOP proposals,
approximately 80% of energy generation will
come from gas.
▪ Inefficient gas technologies with more air
pollution: More than half of disclosed gas BYOP
capacity uses technologies that are less efficient
and more polluting than typical gas power plants.

Majority gas: Building on prior reports, we estimate that for current BYOP proposals, approximately 80% of energy generation will come from gas.

Massive scale and impact: The scale of both total and individual BYOP proposals is massive. As of August 2026, there are nine proposed gas BYOP projects that are 4.5 GW or larger. If all are built, nine of the top 10 largest power plants in the U.S. would be data center gas BYOP.

Altogether, the current 177 GW of gas proposals would emit over 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (mtCO2e) annually, increasing the U.S. power sector’s total emissions by 23%. Ozone and particulate matter pollution from these projects could cause an estimated $5–10B in monetized health damages each year.

15534

They're still pushing for this, omg

070

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 2h

Can I just say because it probably isn't said enough: @timnitgebru.blacksky.app @emilymbender.bsky.social were specifically extremely correct in their "stochastic parrots" paper on their environmental risk warnings and narrowly, on the unjust burden of impacts: s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-ben...

ENVIRONMENTAL AND FINANCIAL COST
Strubell et al. recently benchmarked model training and development costs in terms of dollars and estimated 퐶푂2 emissions [129].
While the average human is responsible for an estimated 5t 퐶푂2푒
per year,2
the authors trained a Transformer (big) model [136] with
neural architecture search and estimated that the training procedure
emitted 284t of 퐶푂2. Training a single BERT base model (without
hyperparameter tuning) on GPUs was estimated to require as much
energy as a trans-American flight.
While some of this energy comes from renewable sources, or
cloud compute companies’ use of carbon credit-offset sources, the
authors note that the majority of cloud compute providers’ energy is
not sourced from renewable sources and many energy sources in the
world are not carbon neutral. In addition, renewable energy sources
are still costly to the environment,3
and data centers with increasing
computation requirements take away from other potential uses of

green energy,4 underscoring the need for energy efficient model
architectures and training paradigms.
Strubell et al. also examine the cost of these models vs. their
accuracy gains. For the task of machine translation where large
LMs have resulted in performance gains, they estimate that an
increase in 0.1 BLEU score using neural architecture search for
English to German translation results in an increase of $150,000
compute cost in addition to the carbon emissions. To encourage
more equitable access to NLP research and reduce carbon footprint,
the authors give recommendations to report training time and
sensitivity to hyperparameters when the released model is meant
to be re-trained for downstream use. They also urge governments to
invest in compute clouds to provide equitable access to researchers.

When we perform risk/benefit analyses of language technology,
we must keep in mind how the risks and benefits are distributed,
because they do not accrue to the same people. On the one hand, it
is well documented in the literature on environmental racism that
the negative effects of climate change are reaching and impacting
the world’s most marginalized communities first [1, 27].6
Is it fair or
just to ask, for example, that the residents of the Maldives (likely to
be underwater by 2100 [6]) or the 800,000 people in Sudan affected

These models are being developed at a time when unprecedented environmental changes are being witnessed around the
world. From monsoons caused by changes in rainfall patterns due
to climate change affecting more than 8 million people in India,9
to the worst fire season on record in Australia killing or displacing
nearly three billion animals and at least 400 people,10 the effect
of climate change continues to set new records every year. It is
past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost
to reduce negative environmental impact and inequitable access
to resources — both of which disproportionately affect people who
are already in marginalized positions.

319068

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 3h

Something interesting I noticed - a photo of a billboard mentions blackbird AI as a sponsor (vomit, btw) - but they're gone from the website and they've deleted their social posts www.linkedin.com/posts/blackb... See archive; they were on the site a few days ago web.archive.org/web/20261006...

9C*6CV€D
"storyzy
gerulata
D Surfshark
PGI

1155

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 4h

Norway (#1 on this list by an almost-silly margin) is currently ahead for passenger-car-only climate targets, but behind for overall transport emissions Lots of useful stats here if you can understand norsk or you can machine translate www.tilnull.no/klima/klimag...

a chart showing emissions trends in norway

0111

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 11h

The finns are justifiably very pissed about Google razing a forest to erect a chatbot building lnkd.in/p/eKFXmtE9

Q Search
Bram Vranken likes this
Esa Mäkinen
3rd+
Executive editor at Helsingin Sanomat. Working with ... 19h
+ Follow
Google refuses to answer why they cut down 1,8×1,8km of forest for data center even Finnish authorities said not to do it. So our journalist went to Google offices to demand answers. None were given, guard was summoned.
18.10a valvontavirasto kehotti Good
◄ Slackskeyttämään kaikki luontoon vaikuttavat
ät.
<
Tilaajille
☐ Û
HS
Käy Googlen pääkonttorilla, mutta yhtiö kieltäytyy vastaa...
CO Olivier Hoedeman and 39 others
1 comment
•
1 repost
3
+
Home
My Network
Post
Notifications
Jobs

20480177

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 12h

That aside: the idea open models are "better" in terms of sustainability is wildly overplayed. There's *some* difference but it's small Ecosia are scamming a huge, huge number of eco-minded people and pushing them into wasteful, private-jet-esque search habits cleerdash.sustainableaigroup.com

a scatter plot showing open vs closed makes no difference to climate impacts

46423

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 13h

Looking forward to speaking at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design today, about technosolutionist wish-casting within the climate movement and how that disconnects us from our goals 🥰 (with heavy reference to AI / data centres, of course) www.aho.no/english/

Apartment building facade blanketed in bright red autumn ivy climbing around rows of windows, forming a fiery patchwork; two pedestrians walk on the sidewalk and a tarped object rests near the curb beneath a pale sky.

1595

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 07/10/2026

We have published now two full reports both debunking this claim and shining a new light on the climate impacts of companies like NVIDIA and others who insist on this without evidence. Public control won't fix this problem - not at all. ketanjoshi.co/2026/02/17/b... ketanjoshi.co/2026/09/16/n...

a graphic showing the difference bw energy consumption and climate benefit claims

the rising energy consumption of hyperscalers

814257

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 07/10/2026

The EIA includes batteries in its "Electric Generator Inventory" It probably sounds like nitpicking but the distinction is really important when you care about replacing coal n' gas! www.eia.gov/electricity/...

161

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 07/10/2026

I'm curious - what happens in practice when an enviro court 'considers' scope 3 emissions in planning decisions or imposes conditions to minimise them? www.theguardian.com/environment/...

n a 3-2 split ruling, the high court dismissed the coal company’s appeal, with a majority of judges finding the state’s planning commission was required to consider how to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions that would be generated by the mine when the coal is sold and burnt overseas, and failed to do so.

A majority of the court found the Independent Planning Commission failed to consider imposing conditions aimed at minimising these emissions – known as scope 3 emissions – to the greatest extent possible.

The Mount Pleasant expansion would double the mine’s coal output to 21m tonnes per annum until 2048. Some 98% of the projected emissions are scope 3 emissions.

3234

Left this out but Homer City also claimed in their presentation that the site is "cleaner" than the coal plant. Nope - it's the same level of greenhouse gas emissions even if you ignore all the upstream pollution of methane. bsky.app/profile/keta... www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/00zjk...

Revised Project Narrative: Homer City Energy Campus
The Homer City Energy Campus represents a once-in-a
-generation opportunity to transform former
coal-fired power generation land in Indiana County,
Pennsylvania into one of the nation's premier digi
tal
infrastructure and energy hubs. Amazon Data Service
s, Inc. (“AWS”) proposes to acquire approximately
1,100 acres situated in Center and Blacklick Townsh
ips (collectively, the “Townships”), Indiana County
(the
“County”), and to develop an integrated data center
campus across six sites: Bruner, Helen, Green, Wes
t,
Harvey/Gaston, and Rura (the “Project”). When fully
constructed, the Project will include 36 data cent
ers
together with ancillary office and storage space, e
lectrical substation infrastructure, occupied and
unoccupied security features, and redundant electri
cal generation.
The Project will be a significant economic engine f
or Indiana County and the surrounding region.
At full build-out, AWS anticipates the project will
create approximately 1,500 to 2,000 new full-time
jobs,
with average salaries ranging from $80,000 to $100,
000. The majority of these positions require up to
an
associate’s degree. AWS is committed to investing i
n local talent and anticipates partnering with Indi
ana
County’s colleges, career and technical education p
rograms, and high schools to develop workforce
pipelines, mirroring successful programs AWS has la
unched in other Pennsylvania communities.
The AWS data center campus is a key component of a
broader Energy Campus vision being
advanced in partnership with Homer City Redevelopme
nt (“HCR”). HCR is actively redeveloping the former
Homer City Generating Station, once one of the larg
est coal-fired power plants in the eastern United S
tates,
into a modern energy and technology campus. The Pro
ject and HCR’s broader redevelopment efforts are
mutually reinforcing, creating a campus ecosystem t
hat will attract sustained private investment and
employment to Indiana County for d…

1122

Amazon is building 33 data centre buildings at the site of the 'Homer City gas plant' - one of the biggest planned fossil fuelled power stations on the planet. Yet Amazon keeps claiming they're bastions of 'energy efficiency'........

19635

The now-deleted older videos can't be viewed on wayback, but you can see the chapter thumbnails - clearly a very different "host" (I assume this one actually was just AI generated and it didn't work) web.archive.org/web/20260725...

a screenshot of the fuzzy thumbnail of a host with a green shirt at a desk

260

They're adding a few thousand new subscribers a week, which seems really weird. They're probably paying to promote their videos quite widely. I think this is probably an AI advertising operation *but* with an actual human host. They're soliciting donations + selling AI-generated 'survival guides'

The Emergency Preparedness Guide — Printable Bundle
US$17.00
Add to wishlist
Most emergency advice is scattered, alarming, or written for able-bodied 30-year-olds. This is different.

It's a calm, plain-language guide that walks you through exactly what to do — before, during, and after — for every disaster that can reach your home, plus the fill-in worksheets that turn "I should get ready" into "I'm ready."

140

The channel page has existed since 2016, but only has videos from a few months ago. The wayback machine shows now-deleted and blatantly 100% AI slop content from July, with a WILD range of view counts web.archive.org/web/20260729...

120

This is a good illustration of how so much of AI theft isn't indirect (ie, data sucked into a model to train the chatbot) - it's actually **direct** copying, but *enabled* by GenAI. Of course it is: chatbots absolutely suck at creating good, new stuff.

25950422

Simon Stålenhag is the best www.instagram.com/p/C3j9F6kq6p5/

29532

lots to dislike about the world of video-based social media but i really love being able to drop in stuff like this

a graphic from the video showing various decline rates for fossil exports in norway, with the shallow decline rate marked with a happy usn and a fast decline rate marked with a sad crying face and cross

0160

The LOVELY people at Klimakultur had me in to write about the unfathomable amount of death and destruction that can still be avoided if Norway + Equinor decide to allow a wind down of fossil fuel production A lot to lose here....but we are already saving lives!!! www.klimakultur.no/nyheter/esti...

18424

I get what this is getting at but it is 100% not what we want to happen

kaysee.96
19h
Why aren't robots cleaning oceans and rivers? Why aren't they planting trees?

8320

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 05/10/2026

me looking at my own top posts

020

A reminder not to ever really take a fossil fuel company's word RE their adoption of AI as part of their business. They tend to glom onto the latest buzzword and just keep doing everything like they've always done it, underneath the hood This is from 2020......

coindesk
NEWS
LEARN
TV
VIDEOS
PODCASTS
RESEARCH
EVENTS
Bitcoin 24h
$46,872.94 -0.66%
Ethereum 24h
$1,804.05 -1.12%
XRP 24h
$0.616112 +6.98%
Stellar 24h
$0.555730 +14.83%
Chainlink 24h
$31.18 +2.44%
Story from Business
Energy Giant Equinor to Cut Gas Flaring With Bitcoin Mining:
Report

15414

It's so wild to see repeats of the line that US gas exports are 'decarbonising the world'. Europe, the top destination for American gas exports, in on the verge of causing more power sector climate pollution from gas than from coal. Fossil fuels make climate worse ember-energy.org/data/electri...

310032

open up X and it's basically just posts like this. Very clearly being served this stuff on my old account because it fits the bill for what would be the best rage-bait (plus there's a huge number of this Type Of Guy on there anyway). You can see why it's so persistently ugly over there

Jeremiah Johnson 🌐
@JeremiahDJohns
It's hard for people who aren't plugged in to understand how thoroughly anti-climate a lot of 'environmental' groups are today

In practice, a large chunk of the environmental movement is working to make climate change worse. They're one of the biggest obstacles to clean energy.
3:12 PM · Oct 3, 2026
·
31.8K
Views

10626

Fun example from just a few days ago www.aboutamazon.com/news/company...

Myths vs Facts
Myth #1: Data centers are taking all of our water.
This is false. Data centers actually use very little water relative to other industries. Direct data center water consumption is about 0.5% of total U.S. direct industrial water use—orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries. For instance, U.S. golf courses alone use ~200x more water than all of Amazon’s data centers—more in about two days than we use in a full year. And, in a recent study of major U.S. industries that collectively account for ~50% of U.S. industrial GDP, data centers ranked lowest in water withdrawals while delivering the highest economic value per gallon.
One of the most common soundbites repeated about water is that a typical data center uses five million gallons per day. This is also false. The reality is that a typical data center uses, on average, about 170,000 gallons per day. And at Amazon, our average data center uses less than 13,000 gallons per day (the equivalent of just 42 U.S. households).

120

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 03/10/2026

eg this preserves the thrust of Hanson's statement, but it's worded differently and presented as a verbatim quote (it was in 2016, not 2015) kidspot.news.com.au/news/pauline...

I'd think twice about vaccinating my children these days. We haven't done the research enough, what is causing these kids to have autism, what is having all the cancer in our community.

Sunrise television interview, 2015. No credible scientific evidence links vaccination to autism or cancer. A University of Sydney review in 2014 found no such link.

020

Something I haven't really seen touched on very much is that, compared to previous permitting reform debates in the US, a much higher %'age of new clean power is servicing data centre growth rather than fossil fuel elimination. www.woodmac.com/blogs/energy...

There are also sections designed to help development in specific energy sectors, including electricity transmission, solar and geothermal power. Another key provision would compel data centre developers to cover the cost of any transmission investment needed to support their facilities.

The political impetus behind the bill has been a bipartisan recognition that the current permitting system makes it too difficult to develop both fossil fuel and low-carbon energy infrastructure in the US. Surging electricity demand from new data centres for AI has made the case for reform more urgent.

“America is entering a new era of energy demand,” said Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, one of the Democratic sponsors of the bill. “It should not take decades to build the infrastructure our country needs.”

1468

How on Earth did I not read this yet? really interesting and honestly kind of brazen modelling of the entire lifecycle - downstream, data centres, upstream use - of AI. Puts AI industry at 1.1% of total global energy, about the same for global emissions. More than 10x previously stated estimates

Final Results and Concluding Thoughts
Adding it all up, we estimate that the AI sector is responsible for almost 1,900 TWh of global energy consumption in 2026. And after accounting for additional factors that we did not explicitly analyze, like the construction of new electrical substations, robotic-centric warehouses, water reclamation facilities, and other infrastructure specifically designed to support the data center buildout, it’s likely that total AI-driven global energy demand is already closer to 2,000 TWh. Even at 1,900 TWh, the AI share of total global energy use in 2026 would be roughly 1.1%. We also estimate, after adding up all the sectoral numbers and landing at roughly 650 million metric tons of AI-driven CO2 emissions, that the AI share of global GHG emissions in 2026 stands at about 1.2%, with total annual global emissions sitting at roughly 55 gigatons of CO2-eq, albeit with a wide range of figures from EDGAR to UNEP (anywhere from 53 gigatons to 58 gigatons depending on a broad array of different assumptions). As we’ve discussed already, these numbers are much higher than many others in the media and academia have guessed on the basis of simplistic calculations and naïve assumptions.

The projections up to 2030 are obviously far worse and imply a catastrophic impact to global ecological stability. ChatGPT alone “processes approximately 2.5 billion prompts per day worldwide.”122 The scale of AI growth and diffusion globally is truly astounding, and the industry’s corresponding ecological footprint will soon rival that of major countries like India. It's not farfetched at all to think that the AI share of total global energy demand could rise to something like 5% by 2030, rivaling and in some cases surpassing the footprint of established dominant industries. The potential consequences of this extra resource pressure on biodiversity, global warming, freshwater scarcity, and biogeochemical cycles could be absolutely staggering and devastating for the…

311557

As I suspected!!! bsky.app/profile/oilc...

Building behind the fence, or off the grid, means the data centers will not be subject to the transmission cost reforms proposed in the bill, which are intended to ensure data centers pay the full cost of the transmission line upgrades they require. But if interstate gas pipelines are needed to bring the massive increases in gas consumption that these facilities will require, they will benefit from the bill provisions that gut environmental and community protections.

Take, for example, the planned Desert Southwest Expansion project, a $5 billion, 520-mile, 48-inch gas pipeline proposed to run from Texas through New Mexico to Arizona, where several large data centers are planned. The project is meeting resistance along its route. This bill would take away communities’ ability to participate in the permitting process, including the crucial Clean Water Act 401 permit that states use to protect their water resources, a vital issue in the arid Southwest, and to challenge the project in court. It will all but ensure that another 2.3 billion cubic feet per day of gas, an amount similar to the entire gas consumption of the Netherlands, will be extracted from the Permian Basin and burned to generate power for AI.

Across the country, pipeline developers are planning expansions to supply gas to new data centers. Some of these projects will cross state lines and require federal certificates and permits, which this bill will only make easier and faster by removing states’ ability to protect their water resources, land, and communities.

If the current slate of data centers and associated gas power plants goes ahead, data center gas demand will rise by over 15 billion cubic feet per day by 2035, according to an analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This is more than 40% of the power sector’s gas consumption in 2025 and equals Central and South America’s total gas consumption in that year.

0195

Right - I mean, you can see the fundamental tone of the broader movement in the post that was being quoted 'I don't care' I think speaks to the values of the broader centre-right 'abundance' movement a fair bit. I think it's true and genuine, they really don't care.

Jeremiah Johnson 🌐
@JeremiahDJohns
·
4h
The problem with wreckers like Guenther is

* They see fossil fuels as ontologically evil rather than useful but with a harmful byproduct
* They reject the idea of tradeoffs or compromise
* They exist to wreck feasible solutions in favor of some future, perfect, impossible plan
Quote
Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they) 🪬
@DoctorVive
·
6h
Replying to @mattyglesias
Why? Because climate change is real, Matt. And unfortunately to halt global heating we need to phase out fossil fuels. And we should do that before the planet gets much hotter & tipping points tip, etc. And we have the solutions: we can replace oil with heat pumps. And and and...
Jeremiah Johnson 🌐
@JeremiahDJohns
"this bill will let fossil fuels..." I don't care, it's going to lead to a net reduction in emissions. It will make the green energy transition faster and it's better than whatever your imagined utopian alternative is.

The climate groups are explicitly saying they don't care bout the emissions analysis, they just want to wreck the bill anyways.

Please just eject them from the party, these are wreckers and nothing else.
4:45 PM · Oct 2, 2026
·
2,537
Views

110

It didn't seem relevant but sure, in case it somehow buttresses your claim there's certainty behind the bill's climate impacts, here it is for anyone who wants to see it

@haustath
Actual climate scientist here- The permitting reform bill was introduced
by Senate climate champions like@SenWhitehouse. It will reduce US
emissions.
We don't have the luxury to make the perfect the enemy Of the good —
which time and time again has led to doing nothing at all.
Dr. Genevieve Guerther (she/they)
@DoctorVive • 4h
The problem with invectiæ-spewing Abundance bros like Johnson is that they
disrniss the science of clirnate change — which rnakes assessing trade-offs in
policymaking so much easier, of course.
Jcrcmiah Johnson @JeremiahDJohns 4t-,
The problem with wre&rs (h•enther is

030

I am not an Actual Climate Scientist Here but I think this is an irresponsibly strongly worded statement from @zekehausfather.com, implying that there's some sort of scientific consensus or authoritative certainty this reform or types of reforms always lead to a good climate outcome.

Actual clirnate scientist here. The permitting reform bill was introduced
by Senate climate champions like @SenWhitehouse. It will reduce US
emissions.
We don't have the luxury to make the perfect the enemy of the good —
which time and time again has led to doing nothing at all.

3130

We tried our best in Vampires but.....it's an ongoing process, haha

two charts showing the impact of additional demand

150

We have known for an extremely long time that enabling the growth of transmission infrastructure enables more emissions reductions from renewable energy! www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/s...

4.5.1. Energy Systems
Rapid and deep reductions in GHG emissions require major
energy system transitions (high confidence). Adaptation options
can help reduce climate-related risks to the energy system
(very high confidence). Net zero CO2 energy systems entail: a
substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use, minimal use of
unabated fossil fuels153, and use of Carbon Capture and Storage in
the remaining fossil fuel systems; electricity systems that emit no
net CO2; widespread electrification; alternative energy carriers in
applications less amenable to electrification; energy conservation
and efficiency; and greater integration across the energy system
(high confidence). Large contributions to emissions reductions can
come from options costing less than USD 20 tCO2-eq–1, including
solar and wind energy, energy efficiency improvements, and CH4
(methane) emissions reductions (from coal mining, oil and gas, and
waste) (medium confidence).
154 Many of these response options are
technically viable and are supported by the public (high confidence).
Maintaining emission-intensive systems may, in some regions and
sectors, be more expensive than transitioning to low emission
systems (high confidence). {WGII SPM C.2.10; WGIII SPM C.4.1,
WGIII SPM C.4.2, WGIII SPM C.12.1, WGIII SPM E.1.1, WGIII TS.5.1}
Climate change and related extreme events will affect future energy
systems, including hydropower production, bioenergy yields, thermal
power plant efficiencies, and demands for heating and cooling (high
153 In this context, ‘unabated fossil fuels’ refers to fossil fuels produced and used without interventions that substantially reduce the amount of GHG emitted throughout the life
cycle; for example, capturing 90% or more CO2 from power plants, or 50–80% of fugitive methane emissions from energy supply. {WGIII SPM footnote 54}
154 The mitigation potentials and mitigation costs of individual technologies in a specific context or region may differ greatly from the provided esti…

1192

Also an analysis that explicitly excludes the climate-worsening impacts of more-easily-permitted fossil fuel projects is always going to give a big old thumbs up as a result? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

One new analysis published this week offers a sense of the potential climate payoff from an important piece of the legislation: transmission reform. Streamlined rules making it faster to connect energy projects to the grid and expand energy connection, or transmission, between regions could cut carbon dioxide emissions by 71 million metric tons, or 9%, in 2035 compared to a non-reform scenario.

The modeling, conducted by the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) and consulting company Greenline Insights, does not comprehensively address the bill’s laundry list of proposed reforms. It’s only focused on the transmission piece and on how changes would affect four regions of the country that account for about half of US electricity demand.

Despite those limitations, C2ES president Nathaniel Keohane told Bloomberg News he’s confident the bill “on net is good for the economy, it’s good for consumers, and it’s good for climate.” The estimated impact on power-sector emissions is particularly notable, he added: “We’re talking gigaton-scale emissions reductions over time.”

3243

If data centres have an easier time connecting to the grid rather than using off-grid gas, that doesn't make their climate impacts immediately zero or even beneficial somehow? Increasing grid demand still predominantly leads to worse climate impacts in the US.... www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Rob Gramlich, president of the consulting firm Grid Strategies LLC, said that although the package is technology neutral — meaning it doesn’t favor specific types of energy generation — it “enables a clean energy future” that’s “just going to be very hard to get” otherwise.

Consider data centers. One way to power them quickly is to build gas infrastructure on site. “This bill would open up a lot more options,” Gramlich said, adding that there are many states, utilities and technology companies looking to clean up their power supply.

24811

Not that Google Trends is actually a meaningful indicator of adoption, but if we take it to be, there have been many cloud-based services that been adopted fast in the past few decades. trends.google.com/explore?q=fa...

a chart showing a huge burst of interest in my space and facebook, compared to relatively low indexed interest in chatgpt and AI

4244

This is a good @billmckibben.bsky.social post - and this specific part is extremely important and touches on a tension right deep at the heart of all this It is worth repeating this point persistently, because it has been forgotten in so many spaces billmckibben.substack.com/p/reform-or-...

The first thing to remember is, the real goal for people who care about the climate above all is not to build more renewables, it’s to drive down the amount of carbon flowing into the atmosphere. Building more renewables is a key way of doing that—but only if they displace fossil fuel.

And here is an important divergence: for many people working in the clean energy industry, victory looks like doubling or tripling their output, even if fossil fuel is growing fast at the same time. Even if they got into this fight for the right reasons, their commitment is—because, capitalism—to their bottom line. It’s important not to confuse the two motivations, because physics only cares about the carbon. If transmission corridors are matched by new gas pipelines, we haven’t made much progress.

33315

2nd place was seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeb

2nd place

@sSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeebbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb (???)

0180

2 gigawatts of fossil gas power for data centres in the US. Every day there are just a whole bunch of announcements like this www.enerdata.net/publications...

AB Energy USA announced it secured about 2 GW of on-site power for five data-centre projects in Texas and Oklahoma (01 Oct 2026), describing ECOMAX modular units, waste-heat recovery cooling, and battery energy storage to increase flexibility.

3259

The other reason the ITI is happy because the draft bill encourages the use of inaccurate, error-prone AI slop to engage with hard scientific questions of environmental permitting!!! Which also seems extremely bad! bsky.app/profile/kevi...

ITI: Permitting Reform is Essential to Maintain America’s Technology Leadership

September 30, 2026
WASHINGTON – Following release of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, global tech trade association ITI President and CEO Jason Oxman issued the following statement:

“Comprehensive permitting reform is essential to America’s ability to build, compete, and lead – especially in the AI era. Greater certainty, lower costs, and faster deployment of critical infrastructure will help power the next era of American growth while maintaining important environmental safeguards.

“The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is an encouraging step forward and offers a strong foundation to shorten environmental review timelines, streamline transmission permitting and planning, enable deployment of advanced transmission technologies, and leverage AI to address interconnection delays.

“Congress should act to deliver lasting permitting reform that allows America to build at the speed and scale our economic security demands.”

1255

The other crucial thing is that this is a provision to just 'open up the space' for this type of cost imposition. Doesn't mean it'll happen. In fact the Democrats want *mandatory* rules in place, and blocked a recent bill for data centre costs on those grounds! www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/...

The Ratepayer Protection Act, a first-of-its-kind bipartisan bill, was aimed at addressing the economic concerns linked to the expansion of data centres.

It passed the House of Representatives earlier this month in a landslide vote of 417 to three.

But Democrats in the Senate argued the bill does not go far enough to protect consumers from high electricity bills. Rather than requiring states to “consider” a federal utility rate standard, some senators advocated instead for mandatory enforcement to guarantee consumer relief.

Other critics described the bill as a last-ditch Republican effort to secure a legislative victory ahead of the November midterm elections.

Senate Democratic Party leader Chuck Schumer, for instance, dismissed the legislation as “toothless”. He noted that the bill failed to require data centres to cover the costs they incur in upgrades to electricity infrastructure.

“We need real action on data centres, and what do Republicans decide all of a sudden to push forward? A bill that is totally optional,” said Schumer.

He challenged Republicans to prove their commitment to the issue by passing a Democratic alternative that “has teeth”.

Despite widespread pushback, thousands of data centres already span the US, with construction underway for dozens more. While the states of Virginia and Texas lead the nation in operating facilities, California, Ohio and New York follow behind closely as top digital infrastructure hubs.

According to a September poll, 53 percent of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of data centres on electricity prices or water supplies in the communities where they are built.

1161