a chart showing rising emissions after each crisis

The 2020s have already seen two major fossil fuel shocks. In 2022, Russia, the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter, invaded Ukraine. In 2026, the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s largest oil and LNG supply route, was shut by the US-Israel war with Iran. The parallels with the 1970s oil shocks are striking. But so too is the difference. For the first time, there are scalable, cost-competitive alternatives. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs and other electrotech offer a permanent route out of fossil dependence. The shock has jolted the electric age forward. But the response is a choice: lean into local, electric security, or reach back to the old fossil playbook.

Something we need to make really clear is that there is no guarantee that fossil fuel crises end up as a net benefit for climate action, emissions reductions or even just simple technological growth

ie - "The response is a choice" @ember-energy.org

ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

important news:

Tenn. library director fired over refusal to move LGBTQ+ books to adult section A county board near Nashville voted to dismiss Luanne James, who said she stands by her decision, in the latest clash in a national debate over access to books.

“‘All I’m going to say is that I stand by my decision,’ she said…

“Much of the audience at the board meeting broke into cheers and applause after her statement.

Chants of ‘shame’ were heard as board members voted to fire her...”

www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...

Big fan of our combination of compulsory voting, ranked choice voting anddddd a kind of proportional representation in the upper house

Exclusive: Why (and how) everyone is cold-calling the president Plus, what happened when Semafor’s Max Tani gave him a ring.

I went on a journey to get Trump's personal cell phone number. It took me about five minutes.

My piece on the media's new favorite Trump gimmick, and how the White House feels about the endless stream of "exclusive" 30 second phone interviews w/Trump www.semafor.com/article/03/1...

How Meta Made Alabama So Mad It’s Threatening to Ban Solar A proposed solar projected in a small, unincorporated town is gearing up to be a big problem for renewables in the state.

SCOOP: Alabama might be the first state to ever ban new solar farms.

Why? People are upset about a gigantic solar project that would power a Meta data center.

Turns out when you tie solar to data centers, it can quickly become less popular!

How Fossil Fuel Disruptions Lead to Booms in Solar and Batteries Past oil crises forced countries to cut fuel use and pay high prices, but now falling prices of clean tech offer another solution.

Past fossil-fuel price spikes left import-dependent countries with two options: pay up or cut fuel use. Now there is an alternative in solar and batteries.

I looked at recent examples in Europe, Pakistan, Cuba to glean what might happen with the war on Iran.

🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

France and Spain run their HSR on dedicated tracks too.

Germany runs HSR on the existing network because the country (the population, institutions and economic activity) is so decentralised that it would be a nightmare to to build anew and still reach everyone who needed to be served

"It's not artificial intelligence. It's African intelligence."

Michael Geoffrey Asia, the secretary general of the Data Labelers Association in Kenya tells @jasonkoebler.bsky.social about the notoriously brutal and underpaid work of training AI.

Watch now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH65...

Getting some similarly weird traffic on @opennewswire.bsky.social too, it's so annoying

Screenshot of text from University of Edinburgh library services: Like many academic libraries, we have been experiencing slowness and outages on some of our open access platforms over the last few months. We have identified that this is the result of poorly behaved Gen AI crawling activity. As such we have had to try to disable the ability for AI -harvesters to access content from our repositories, via IP range blocking, geographical blacklisting, implementing limits to throttle bots and using robots.txt files to limit access. We acknowledge that this approach is not consistent with our open access policy which should require us to permit machine access to our content. Our limiting activity is not 100% fool-proof, and is a temporary measure to give services breathing space to perform while a longer termn solution is worked out by software providers and the community. This approach also has the added benefit of helping to assuage authors fear of losing control of their works.

The "AI revolution" in science is going so smoothly that my instititutional library is having to deploy multiple technical protection measures against "poorly behaved Gen AI crawling" just to maintain its timely service library.ed.ac.uk/research-sup...

I Traveled 800 Miles To Eat Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza At Criss Angel’s Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza | Defector When I was a very depressed British teenager, I had an unhealthy fascination with America. I found a way to love its contradictions, to explain away the obvious sins not by excusing them directly but ...

by the end of this weekend my phone had learned "cablp" without autocorrecting it. please enjoy my trip report: defector.com/criss-angel-...

A world map that features the times Relooted is launched in different African countries. Only Africa is highlighted.

WORLDWIDE release times for Relooted’s launch tomorrow!

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

I have a 30 minute oration about how Au defo laws shape everything you see and hear in this country's media landscape. If some organisation or group of organisations cannot use *Epstein plotting to weaponise Au defo law to kill inquiry into his wrongdoing* to push for reform, we have no hope.

Silence on Invasion Day Perth Bombing Speaks Volumes Silence on Invasion Day Perth Bombing Speaks Volumes

My first piece for Junkee went up yesterday, dipping into the lack political and media response to the bomb thrown at an Invasion Day rally in Perth last week. (A man was charged with a terror offence today)

junkee.com/articles/per...

ICE Deportation Flights Are Getting Longer and Crueler A private equity-owned airline profits off Trump’s migrant crackdown.

NEW: Meet the private-equity firm -- and its billionaire immigrant CEO -- making millions off some of ICE's cruelest deportation flights.

After a five-month investigation, my story for @motherjones.com:

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Older women ‘disappear’ from BBC presenting roles, internal review finds Older men seen as ‘gaining wisdom’ but women must keep looking younger or be ‘idiosyncratic’, review hears

NEW: Older women disappear from BBC presenting roles - while older men seen as gaining “gravitas”, an internal review has found.

It hears older women either have to look younger or adopt “idiosyncratic personas”.

No surprise to some women in TV I spoke to…

www.theguardian.com/media/2026/j...

same with "Afghanis"

List and Shout | Lydia Kiesling The labor involved in making lists was as close to the opposite of a transcendent reading experience as a disillusioned culture worker could get.

When the AI slop summer reading list dropped last year I knew I had to write about making book lists. Thanks to @thebaffler.com for letting me go long with bewildered nostalgia & regret on 20 years of Internet book culture & how we made the slop book list inevitable. thebaffler.com/after-the-fa...

A family member reacts after a federal immigration officer used a battering ram to break down a door before making an arrest on January 11, 2026, in Minneapolis.

Stunning photos from Minneapolis, including this one by John Locher for the Associated Press. www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

A MF MONSTER Thoughts on MAGA Minaj from a Barb in recovery

I wrote about MAGA Minaj from the perspective of a Barb (a condition for which there is lamentably no known cure) johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/a-mf-monster

Six-byline alert: 🚨

“.. laws of armed conflict forbid combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called ‘perfidy.’”

@nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/u...

In celebration of Mamdani's first day in office, the map from our 2016 NYC atlas celebrating Queens as the most linguistically diverse place on earth. (800 languages spoken in NYC, according to NY's Endangered Language Institute, which collaborated with us on this map.

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Australians: we don't like guns. This is excellent.