I’ve been thinking about the idea that the massive data center expansion needed to drive the current AI boom is increasing energy demand, and in the near to medium term may be limited by energy supply. It is also apparently competing for the energy supply we have currently, driving up prices for consumers and businesses across the board, along with toxic air pollution and greenhouse gas pollution. The big technology companies are trying to tell a story that this short term pain will go away when AI “solves climate change” with its superior intelligence. That seems like a longer-term thing that will not solve our short term issues, although the tech-bro-cracy will tell us we are just not smart enough to think exponentially like them, and what we think is long term is in fact just around the corner.
I’ve been thinking about the Kardashev Scale. This is the idea that the level of sophistication of a civilization can be linked to the amount of energy it uses – just the energy striking the surface of the planet, all the energy of its star, all the energy of all the stars in its galaxy, etc. (we are just off the left end, trying to get onto this scale). This might seem not to square with the idea that more energy use means more pollution, negative health and environmental impacts for us at our current level of technology. The way you square that logically is to say that we have to get over the hump from dirty to clean energy technology before we can take the next step to a higher order of civilization. If AI can increase our rate of scientific and technology advancement, maybe it can help us get there sooner. Currently we are at the stage where we are turning decommissioned coal plants back on to fuel the AI, without seeing any measurable benefits so far. Realists/cynics (don’t cynics always consider themselves realists?) might also point out that there is a lot of friction built into human institutions and sociopolitical systems, and that this tends to set a speed limit on the rate we can progress, even if the state of science and technology could allow us to progress faster.
One thing I always wondered was what came first – the coal chicken or the steam engine egg? It turns out, this is a true chicken and egg story that went something like this (citation: Gemini for the background, not fact checked – the words are from my human brain):
The ancient Romans, Chinese, and other cultures were aware of coal and burned it to heat buildings. There isn’t really a record of when it was “discovered”, you can imagine deposits of it were first found just lying around on or very near the surface, and people found it burned hotter and longer than wood.
By the 1700-1800s, London grew to the point that England started to run out of accessible coal to heat all the buildings. They were digging deeper and deeper to get at the coal, and starting to hit the water table. So the first steam engine was invented in 1712 to power pumps to lower the groundwater table in coal mines. This was a dirty, inefficient machine but they didn’t care because it was literally at the mine.
From there, the steam engine technology was refined (famously by James Watt in the 1760s) and gave rise to railroads and steam ships (both of which could move coal), and coal-powered factories. From there, the feedback loop of economic growth and energy demand (and localized toxic air pollution and global greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention labor exploitation and industrial war) took off.
So an analogous process today, we might want to think, is that the sharp increase in energy demand for the data centers will incentivize innovation around clean energy, or at least cheaper energy than what fossil fuels are currently providing. Fossil fuels seem to be pretty close to the limit of how much power they can reasonably supply our civilization, both economically and in terms of pollution we are willing to tolerate. It is almost an iron law of economics that this will fuel innovation. So AI is on the energy demand side of the equation – there is no requirement that it also has to be on the innovation side of the equation because humans are doing pretty well advancing clean energy technology (contrary to the fossil fuel industry-funded propaganda we are being force-fed in the U.S.). But humans will figure out ways to use the AI technology to innovate, and at some point maybe AI will be able to do some innovation on its own with high-level human oversight. It will make a big difference whether this process takes years or decades to unfold (I am not buying the “months” time frame being pushed by the tech-bro-cracy). If it’s decades, the ecological impacts and human suffering are going to be enormous.
What kinds of technologies could possibly be boosted by AI? This is just me brain storming:
Somewhat obviously, we can continue refining/scaling up the solar, wind, and battery technology we have today. Electrification of buildings, industry, and transportation are important here too, and a smarter/more resilient electric grid is also a big part of this equation. Scaling these involves the high-friction human institution-mediated processes where AI can probably point out how we can do things more rationally and efficiently, but our human inefficiency and irrationality are going to limit the pace for the foreseeable future. AI can probably design much better institutions for us, but we would have to come to some consensus and then successfully implement them. This may happen very slowly – but I see this taking decades for sure, and not much AI will be able to do about it.
Fusion – Let’s try to pick up the pace of basic research leading to safe commercialization.
Fission – I don’t think we should give up on it. The small modular reactors seem to hold out some promise even if there is also a certain amount of industry exaggeration. There is also a big push-pull between industry, government regulation, and public acceptance, and I am not sure this is something we want to speed up. It may need to just take its course to find solutions we agree are both effective and safe enough – again, decades. If we actually get fusion figured out, maybe this technology will be obsolete before it can be scaled.
Space-based solar technology – The energy from just our one Sun is unlimited in any practical near-term sense. There must be lots of technical problems to be worked out here – straightforward mechanical/electrical/chemical engineering stuff. Let’s get to it! The private sector may actually take care of this one without much prompting. No, I don’t want to make Elon Musk even richer, but he is a leader on this so how about some real competition. Even if a few people get unreasonably rich, there are plenty of policy options to share the wealth. AI can easily point these out for us, but again this is one of those human socio-political institutional friction areas where any progress at all is going to be painfully slow, even if we can reverse current trends and get it moving back in the right direction.
Applied research on energy storage, materials science, etc – there are plenty of ideas for storing energy beyond our current battery technologies. You can simply pump water up a hill while the sun is out and let it flow back down, turning a turbine when the sun goes in. You can take advantage of pressure/temperature/salinity gradients in the ocean, or electrolyze water to charge hydrogen fuel cells, just to name a few. Intelligent AIs should be able to work on problems involving materials and chemicals, first using numerical (differential equation based) simulations, and later bringing robots in real laboratories into the mix to test out the most promising ideas.
Fundamental research to unlock the things we can’t even think of yet – Physicists are forever searching for the holy grail of understanding gravity, relativity, quantum physics, dark matter, and probably other things I have not heard of. I have heard some of them say that new branches of mathematics may need to be invented (discovered? a philosophical question) before the right questions can even be asked. Then new instruments to collect new forms of data may need to be invented before experiments can even be designed to begin answering the new questions. This seems like an area where if AIs are eventually as capable as a leading human physicist, you can have a team of a million or billion or trillion leading physicists working on a problem 24 hours a day, without ever getting tired. One tiny little detail – we need ethical frameworks and nation-state regulations and enforceable international agreements to control the dangerous stuff that could result.
Well, I seemed to be in a political mood in January. I try to stay on the policy side of the line, but that is hard when bad politics makes good policy impossible. Inspired by a Nate Silver post, I took a look back at what I see as key moments in the last 25 years of U.S. history, and there were just so many that were on a knife edge and ended up going the wrong way, in my view. Maybe there are other universes where things went better, but remember my scientific theory that once they make a Spiderman movie about a scientific theory, it is almost certainly wrong. I find it depressing how we got here, but there is no sense crying over it. We need to learn from the past yes, but then face up to the present moment and start picking up the pieces from where we are.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Evidence is crystal clear that sabotaging R&D spending is a very effective way to sabotage economic growth and progress. Attaboy to the fools, assholes and traitors currently in nominal charge of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, if a more rational administration ever takes hold, research on learning curves might provide some clues on where to concentrate our efforts for the greatest gains.
Most hopeful story: New York City congestion pricing was a hard-won U.S. transportation policy win in 2025. This is just good, economically sound urban policy that would be apolitical in a more rational world.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I reviewed book reviews from 2025, one of which was Ezra Klein’s Abundance (not the 2012 book Abundance by Peter Diamandis, which while I am not a huge fan I continue to be puzzled how Ezra Klein could either not be aware of that book or intentionally choose to name his book the same thing.) I still find it hard to summarize that book in a sound bite, which would need to be done if it were ever going to serve as the basis for a political campaign. But here is an attempt: (1) Continuously review and streamline federal regulations, (2) increase public and private investments in critical technology and infrastructure, including recommitting to clean energy, and (3) address market failures in housing, health care, and education. #3 is a doozy of course, but the un-sexy answer just has to be understand and implement the latest evidence-backed policies. I would think ramp up housing supply, Medicare for All, and free (tax-funded) college or trade school for all. And um, if we want a chance for any domestic agenda to succeed, we also need serious plans to manage international risks including war, ecosystem collapse, famine, and massive refugee flows that may be coming. Now, I just want to acknowledge that there is a rosy future scenario where AI magically solves all these problems. The way that could work is that technological progress and economic growth suddenly pick up so drastically that we are awash in cash and resources to the point that even the wildly suboptimal operations of our dysfunctional political system are adequate to solve the problems. I don’t think it is safe to put all our eggs in that basket! We better assume that we will need to continue doing the hard work of allocating scarce resources to manage difficult problems for the foreseeable future.
At least since reading some early Singularity-adjacent publications by Vernor Vinge, RayKurzweil, and Bill Joy, I’ve been interested in learning curves. (And for the record, the topic and these authors were were not considered politically “right wing” or even political at all at the time.) Progress, at least in certain technologies, tends to be exponential over time. This clearly applies to computer technology, where there are short product cycles, the needed infrastructure is more or less in place and/or can adapt as the technology is scaled/commercialized, and legal and institutional barriers to change are relatively low. Technologies with “recipes”, like chemicals, drugs, seeds and other agricultural technologies, might be other examples. For these we have the patent system to actually try to slow down scaling and commercialization to the pace of innovation. With energy technology, learning curves seem to play out over much longer periods of time because while available technology changes rapidly, our system tends to be locked into long-lived infrastructure that can only change slowly. So new energy technology rolls out slowly as it is scaled up and commercialized over decades. There are also entities with enormous political and propaganda power that fight tooth and nail to keep us locked into obsolete technologies and infrastructure that fit into their historical (and profitable) business models. Now when you get to other technologies, like transportation and housing, public policy, legal and institutional barriers are dominant and tend to retard or even prevent progress. Rollout is so hard that while there are pockets of innovation, many don’t see the light of day or don’t spread from the local/pilot scale, even if they are successful at this scale. These also vary by location and jurisdiction, so that progress is very uneven geographically. These are my thoughts anyway. As for what’s new, here’s a journal article from Advances in Applied Energy.
Climate and energy policy analysts and researchers often forecast the cost of low-carbon energy technologies using Wright’s model of technological innovation. The learning rate, i.e., the percentage cost reduction per doubling of cumulative production, is assumed constant in this model. Here, we analyze the relationship between cost and scale of production for 87 technologies in the Performance Curve Database spanning multiple sectors. We find that stepwise changes in learning rates provide a better fit for 58 of these technologies and produce forecasts with equal or significantly lower errors compared to constant learning rates for 36 and 30 technologies, respectively. While costs generally decrease with increasing production, past learning rates are not good predictors of future learning rates. We show that these results affect technological change projections in the short and long term, focusing on three key mitigation technologies: solar photovoltaics, wind power, and lithium-ion batteries. We suggest that investment in early-stage technologies nearing cost-competitiveness, combined with techno-economic analysis and decision-making under uncertainty methods, can help mitigate the impact of uncertainty in projections of future technology cost.
This blog in Construction Physics has a deeper dive across more industries, and discusses at least one large data set that is available for analysis. If you could accurately predict learning rates (and successful scaling/commercialization rates) for specific technologies based on known factors, then theoretically you could fine-tune policies and incentives to increase the rate of progress in the technologies you want. So this is an area of research that could boost all other areas of research and progress.
Now is the time on the show when I summarize my monthly wrap-up posts and try to draw some conclusions.
2025 Post Roundup
Most frightening and/or depressing story of each month:
JANUARY: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.
FEBRUARY: Donald Shoup died in February. He was a pioneer in parking economics, which doesn’t sound all that sexy, but his clear explanations really helped me see the light of what walkable, livable, healthy and low environmental impact cities can potentially be. What they can’t be is low-density and automobile-oriented. I put this in the depressing category both because I am sad at his passing, and because I do not see these trends going in the right direction.
MARCH: The U.S. might be headed forrecession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competentadvice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.
APRIL: Maybe an irreversible methane tipping point is happening. This could be the scariest thing out there short of nuclear war.
MAY: The India-Pakistan conflict seems to have died down a bit (or did the media outlets I pay attention to just lose interest?). But both the potential nuclear conflict and the long-term loss of glacial ice billions of people depend on are terrifying.
JULY: In case we still don’t have enough feedback loops to worry about, loss of Antarctic ice could also trigger volcanoes under Antarctica.
AUGUST: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.
SEPTEMBER: We are most likely on a path to the AMOC tipping point. I distinguished between the tipping point, which is when collapse becomes inevitable, and the actual collapse itself. These are separated in time, which means the tipping point may only be called in retrospect when it is too late to prevent the collapse. This is why being “on the path to the tipping point” is important, because we can still do something.
OCTOBER: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!
NOVEMBER: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.
JANUARY: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).
FEBRUARY: The fool in the White House and the devils whispering in his ear can weaken enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, but they can’t actually make laws go away. They can try to ignore them, and then we will see how effective our court system and third party legal action can be at activating the checks and balances we are supposed to have. The other potential players are congress and widespread public action, and these do not seem to be active at the moment.
APRIL: 3-30-300 is a nice, simple idea. “you can see 3 trees from your window, your neighborhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and you are within 300 m of a half-hectare park.” Sure, you have to figure out some details and make some sustained effort over time to implement simple ideas. Still, not rocket science. Combined with the “15 minute city”, this is a pretty good urban planning philosophy that should be communicable.
MAY: I came up with four keys to my personal happiness in the moment: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. What, no family, community, career accomplishment, or making a lasting difference in the world you ask? No, those are about reflecting on life satisfaction, not being in the moment. No “fun”? Well, my idea of fun may be different than your idea of fun. I wish you joy and happiness as you pursue your idea of fun, only try to have some empathy and don’t force your own idea of fun on others. So there.
JUNE: This is the best I can do – Biden wasn’t able to take political credit for his infrastructure and energy transition accomplishments because his accomplishment was getting money appropriated for them, whereas implementation of these will be painfully hard and painfully slow. (Yes, I believe based on evidence and logic that investments in infrastructure and energy production that do not destroy the biosphere are good ideas.) But at least part of this agenda will be implemented over time, and Trump is spending substantial energy of his own only partially rolling back these programs.
SEPTEMBER: Spain has been so successful at rolling out solar power that the price of solar power has “collapsed”. I’ve been beating a drum lately that economic incentives have tipped in favor of renewable energy worldwide and this fact is being largely hidden from us in the US by propaganda.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.
DECEMBER: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.
Most interesting story of each month, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
FEBRUARY: I continued to follow the emergence of AI agents in February. Outside the bananas state of U.S. and global geopolitics, this is one of the biggest things going on, or at least a big change playing out quickly. Even a “singularity watch” item – I’m going to give a 5% chance this is the start of the singularity. Hopefully not the Terminator version. But has anyone noticed we now have Starlink and Stargate – these even sound like Skynet. We already had Operation Warp Speed of course. What puzzles me is that conservatives usually don’t like science fiction because they lack imagination. So either somebody is a science fiction fan, or more likely they have these words in the backs of their minds from indirect exposure to science fiction, and now they think they thought of them.
MARCH: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.
APRIL: I made what I would consider a “common sense” trade policy proposal. “I generally support…free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders.”
MAY: The U.S. approach to R&D is a partnership between government (through both grants and procurement power), universities, and the private sector (historically, including regulated monopolies like Bell Labs). Other countries including China have copied this model somewhat successfully, and our own government taking a monkey wrench to our own system that has worked so well seems like a really stupid idea. First we need to stop the damage and then let’s hope it can be repaired.
JUNE: A Minimal Quality of Life index has been developed which is intended to better capture the cost of living real working families and parents are experiencing.
JULY: Policies to increase housing supply in the most economically dynamic cities can theoretically accelerate economic growth, since housing supply is not expanding fast enough and is therefore holding economic growth back. A lot of discussion has been focused around zoning, which is a local matter. But I offered some additional suggestions: investment in better transportation and communication infrastructure to reduce the friction of working across distances between homes and offices, effectively enlarging housing markets. And serious investments in construction productivity, which has been flat in the U.S. for decades. Ideas include more factory-based modular components. The U.S. has tried and failed at this before, but of course China is now leading the way. AI should also be pretty good at construction scheduling and logistics. The U.S. is somewhat successfully partnering with Korean ship-building expertise, at least on a small scale.
AUGUST: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.
DECEMBER: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.
Brilliant(?) Synthesis
The world is slowly bending the curve on emissions and energy. One theme that emerges is the clear arrival of economically viable renewable energy technology. All the international treaty-making and policy hand-wringing might have accelerated us toward this point, but it is now technology and markets that are finally in the driver’s seat. I was surprised to learn that peak emissions have already occurred in the U.S. and other developed countries. Emissions are still high and growing in developing and middle income countries including China and India. This makes sense – for all we hear about China being so advanced, their levels of income, consumption, and pollution at the individual level are still catching up to western countries. This is both good for them and terrifying for the world because China and India (add Indonesia, Brazil, others here if you want to) have such vast populations that their impact is going to dwarf anything the rest of the world does going forward. They are going through the same transition that the US, UK, Germany, Japan, or whatever western countries you want to name went through, just later in history, on a vaster scale, and when our planet’s ability to absorb the impact is mostly used up. So this is how China can simultaneously be the world leader on clean technology and the world’s largest creator of world-destroying pollution. Now, we want Africa to eventually develop and lift another 1.5 (headed to 3!) billion people out of poverty, but clearly we have to find lower-impact ways to develop if our civilization is going to survive.
But we could end up calling 2025 as the tipping point to disaster in retrospect. Getting over that technology and cost-effectiveness hump is nice, but it may still be too little too late to avoid disaster. An important concept I discovered/reminded myself about in 2025 is that a tipping point is not the point where a system changes drastically, but the point where that change becomes inevitable. As such, we may call the tipping point only in retrospect. The gradual increases in heat and sea level – overlaid with extreme events like heat waves, floods, fires, and storms – may have put us on a path towards unavoidable destruction of our food supply and our urban areas. That’s my elevator pitch for how climate change is hitting home – climate change is coming for our food and it’s coming for our houses. Add to the trends and extreme events the possibility that we have crossed a threshold leading to runaway methane releases and major shifts in ocean circulation patterns. We may look back and determine that the 2020s were when these outcomes became inevitable due to our failure to act quickly enough or on a broad enough scale. And if we decide the 2020s or mid-2020s are when this outcome became inevitable, why not pick 2025 as a nice round number when the climate shit hit the fan?
Earth’s ecosystems are past the tipping point. Yesterday’s environmentalism has sort of evolved to focus almost fully on climate change, but intertwined with the climate crisis is the destruction and destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems, from the oceans to tropical forests. It is hard to make that elevator pitch that draws a straight line from ecosystem and biodiversity collapse to human wellbeing. A reliable food supply is certainly part of it, and yet our industrial food system is somewhat decoupled from natural ecosystems. To me this is a moral failing of our species and civilization, and it is just deeply sad. While there still might be a theoretical possibility to head off the worst possible damage to our climate, the damage to our ecosystems cannot be reversed at this point. Of course, this does not mean we should give up. We can always take action to make the outcome less bad than it could have been. We have a moral responsibility to do so, but I do not see much public or political energy directed at this issue. And maybe it makes sense to focus on the relatively simple to understand issue and relatively straightforward solutions (which is not to say easy!) to greenhouse gas emissions. Getting emissions under control is certainly necessary to protect ecosystems though not sufficient.
While we are focused on emerging artificial intelligence technology, biotechnology has matured all around us. We are hearing that artificial intelligence may be a bubble waiting to pop in the near term, a promising boost to productivity that will raise all boats in the medium term, and either a ticket to utopia or an existential threat in the (somewhat?) long(er?) term. But while so much attention is focused on this emerging technology, biotechnology has sort of matured and arrived fully all around us. We can now edit the genes of embryonic and adult humans, grow genetically engineered human body parts in pigs and then implant them back in humans, and genetically engineer vaccines. In agriculture, genetic technology has some promise to overcome the downward pressure on our food supply caused by global heating and extreme weather. The fact that all this technology is available doesn’t mean it will automatically applied morally or that it will be accessible evenly across countries and demographic groups, of course. Biotechnology is improving many of our lives and has potential to improve all human lives, but reaching that potential and managing the risks is going to vary depending on where you are and who you are.
It’s crystal clear the United States is in decline. The child poverty metric (13% in 2023) alone is damning. The state of Native Americans. Entrenched resistance to rational energy, transportation, housing, trade, and immigration policies with solid evidence of success in leading countries elsewhere in the world. Active, intentional weakening of Civil Rights Act enforcement. Corruption and propaganda (as I write this on January 4, it appears the US has invaded a sovereign UN nation-state to make it safe for US-headquartered multinational oil companies, who bankroll our elections). Intentionally destroying our research and development system which got us to the level of prosperity we enjoy today. The ineffectiveness of our legislative branch. We’re lucky at the moment that the stock market and incomes of top earners are allowing our economy to keep bumping along. If there is a financial panic or some external shock, I can envision the country going into a tailspin the current clowns and amateurs in charge will not be able to competently manage. Let’s hope we are lucky enough to bumble through the next three years without a major crisis, and then able to get better leadership in place. Chillingly, I probably said something like this in January 2018, and we only made it to the two year mark.
Whither war and peace? The stories that have come out about Israel using algorithms to target suspected Hamas associates and their families are chilling to me. As the use of big data and artificial intelligence becomes more and more widespread in all aspects of our economy and lives, this is one cautionary tale of how it can be used by governments in immoral ways. I see the technology as neutral, but we clearly need safeguards on how it is applied in the worlds of surveillance, social control, and outright war. We also had several examples of direct military confrontations between nuclear-armed nation-states in 2025 – India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, the U.S. and Iran; and by proxy the U.S. and western Europe vs. Russia. This is clearly very risky for the future of the whole world. I would also note that in all these cases except the Russia one, the supposed liberal democracy appears to be the more aggressive party. (The U.S. has also illegally invaded Venezuela as I write this.) So the parliamentary and presidential democratic systems we have in place are not acting as safeguards against cross-border aggression like we might have hoped they would. Luckily none of these conflicts seemed to come close to a nuclear exchange in 2025, but we can’t continue to rely on luck. We need renewed respect for sovereignty as a bedrock principle. We need to reverse the recent expansion of nuclear arsenals, and we need new talks and treaties on arms control and non-proliferation. And we need to get serious about the risks of biological and AI-powered cyberwarfare.
2025 is in the books! I covered a number of “best of” posts by others in December so I will highlight a few of those below. I still have some “best of” posts queued up so they will continue to roll out in January.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global progress on poverty reduction stalled around 2020. Gains in Asia are offset by losses in Africa. Meanwhile, gains in crop yields may have plateaued and are expected to decline as climate change drives increasingly extreme weather.
Most hopeful story: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these and adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.
One thing that’s new, according to the New York Times, is massive investment in R&D by the government of China. Meanwhile in the U.S., it’s more about startups and public-private partnerships. In at least one anecdotal case mentioned in the article, top scientists from China who have been based at top U.S. universities for decades are choosing to go home. The article suggests that American firms are often the first to achieve breakthroughs, but the Chinese system is better at scaling and commercializing them.
It seems like there is an opportunity to cooperate for the greater good here, no? That is not the way the political winds are blowing at the moment, of course. At least in this case, if our countries aren’t actually cooperating, they are not competing to weaponize the technology first. This technology was weaponized more than half a century ago, of course, and the quest ever since has been to learn how to control it for peaceful purposes. Of course, the joke is always that commercial fusion is two decades away, no matter what decade we are currently in. This article declines to give a clear time table for widespread commercialization, but it talks about a “pilot plant in the 2030s and 2040s”, so yep the rolling two decade projection seems to be holding.
There is so much here you could spend all of 2026 digging into the data from 2025 and not get through it. This is a pretty amazing organization! I attempted a top 10 list and only got to 7 because I lumped together some similar things.
Carbon dioxide emissions in the US and other developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Meanwhile they have skyrocketed in China and India and continue to increase more or less exponentially. Per capita emissions follow similar trends. Global sales of internal combustion engine cars appear to have peaked in 2018, and are very slowly declining while sales of electric vehicles are very slowly rising. Overall, the sale of cars in general appears to have declined slightly over the past decade or so. Interesting – does this represent other forms of mobility slowly coming to the fore? The world also appears to have passed “peak air pollution” a few years ago, with the one exception being ammonia from agricultural intensification. (I am not aware of ammonia as an air pollutant being a major human health risk, other than those exposed on or near farms. It is however a critical water pollutant and the intensification bodes badly for our surface and coastal waters. There may also be a connection between ammonia and nitrous oxide as a greenhouse gas that I do not fully understand.)
Two different stories show a democracy index by country for the world and GDP per capita by country for the world. The two maps look about the same. Coincidence?
Does the News Reflect What we Die From? The answer is no, of course. People die from heart attacks, cancer, and strokes, while the news focuses on homicide and other violence. I understand “If it bleeds, it leads” but I have always thought if they just put the anecdotal news in the context of some running statistics, it might help people put things in context. At the same time, another story shows that death rates from heart attacks and strokes have come down dramatically over the past century or so.
Men commit suicide at higher rates than women in every country studied. In the US, the ratio is about 4 to 1 (access to guns, I wonder). In South Korea, only 2 to 1 but the overall rate of suicide is one of the world’s highest. In general, women live longer than men in most countries, but the gap is shocking in Russia. The Covid-19 death rate was also shocking in Russia. Now, part of the issue is the old one where choropleth maps draw your eye to the biggest countries.
Overall, the world has made striking gains in poverty reduction because rates have gone from very high to very low in East Asia and South Asia between about 1990 and 2020. (But notably, Pakistan is lumped with the Middle East rather than South Asia and I am not sure about Bangladesh.) However, the progress stalled around then and has been reversed by increasing poverty in Africa.
The map of where same sex marriage is legal looks a lot like the map of democracy and per capita income. One interesting thing is that many countries recognize foreign same sex marriages even if they do not allow their own citizens to marry. Homophobic attitudes have dropped dramatically in western countries between 1984 (75% in the United States) and 2022 (28%) although they are still higher than in Europe. (The way I look at it, trans-phobia is sort of the new homophobia, now that straight-up homophobia does not represent a viable political stance. Kind of like singling out Haitian or Somali immigrants is the mutated form of racism, now that straight-up anti-black racism is mostly out of style. So ugly as these things are, you could see them as indicators of progress.)
Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially, led by solar energy.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.
Most hopeful story: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!
Most hopeful story: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I mused about what it was like to be a child in the distant past of novels I have read, during my own youth, for my own children today, and for young adults I have interacted recently. We hear children are “anxious” and experiencing various crises, and I am not denying there is hard evidence of this, but with my own eyes I also see kids being somewhat safer, kinder, and gentler to each other than in the past. I hope it is possible to mitigate some of the negative effects of technology and other negative influences on kids today while also building on the positive trends.
Yes, Charlie Stross continues to rant, enjoyably and correctly, in my view. I’ll share a brief quote and then encourage you to read his long post. And I’m still bothered by the idea that he is 61 and “never expected to get to be this old”. That is not that old, dude! Possibly I feel that way because it is not all that much older than I am! And I am not yet ready to concede that I am old.
The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it’s cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.
The idea of fossil fuels as “stranded assets” has faded from the US press, but he is surer than ever. And I think he is right, and it is industry and political propaganda (which are, of course, one thing at the moment, or maybe always one thing but different industries get the upper hand depending on the politics) that is hiding this fact from us here in the United States, which is rapidly downshifting to developing country status relative to the world’s most advanced countries.
