12/28/2025 – Climate- Science.press

Why America Might Find Coal in Its Stocking This Christmas — And Be Jolly

The United States is projected to generate more power from coal in 2025 than in 2024, though the resource has endured an assault from the executive branch, green groups and Congress in recent years.

A coal-laden cart positioned beside a railway track, with piles of coal on the ground and mountains in the background.

From The Daily Caller

Audrey Streb
DCNF Energy Reporter

The United States is projected to generate more power from coal in 2025 than in 2024, though the resource has endured an assault from the executive branch, green groups and Congress in recent years.

America generated about 13 percent more energy from coal between January and October 2025 than it did during the same period in 2024, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Though the Biden administration, prominent green groups like the Sierra Club and Congressional Democrats have worked to block coal projects and smother the industry in regulations, the energy resource continues to help meet America’s power needs.

Climate activists and some high-profile Democrats argue that coal pollutes the environment and should therefore be phased out of the U.S. energy profile. However, critics of this view contend that coal remains a reliable and affordable source of electricity that is impossible to replace on the accelerated timelines often mandated by blue states, forcing a trade-off between an expedited energy transition and maintaining sufficient power supply.

“If Santa leaves you coal this year, you’re obviously on the nice list,” Amy Cooke, co-founder and president of Always on Energy Research and the director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Center told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “In a winter of surging demand and cold temperatures, it’s coal plants … that are the workhorses of the electric grid, delivering round-the-clock, reliable, and affordable power to keep your Christmas lights burning bright.”

The Trump administration’s Department of Energy (DOE) has warned that continuing to retire reliable power without replacements could trigger 100-fold more blackouts in the U.S. by 2030. Meanwhile, the agency has issued multiple emergency orders aimed at keeping coal plants online amid power shortage concerns, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Wednesday extending that authority to two coal plants in Indiana.

“Keeping these coal plants online has the potential to save lives and is just common sense,” Wright said in a statement Wednesday. “Americans deserve reliable power regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining during extreme winter conditions.”

Notably, blackouts that coincided with winter storms led to loss of life in Texas and New York in recent years. A recent North American Reliability Report (NERC) warned that “much of North America” is at risk of failing to meet demand in “extreme operating conditions,” with conditions mirroring that of 2021 before winter storm Uri devastated Texas.

NERC’s Reliability Assessments and Performance Analysis director, John Moura, said that “electricity demand continues to grow faster than the resources being added to the grid,” with the report noting that artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are increasing periods of high energy demand.

Now that data centers are increasingly driving up American electricity demand, about 60% of plans to retire oil, gas and coal plants along America’s largest power grid, PJM, have been postponed or cancelled this year, Reuters reported Tuesday.

Cooke told the DCNF that a Colorado utility’s extension of one coal plant past December helps secure more reliable power for her state, arguing that “without it, Colorado would face a darker, colder new year.”

“Coloradans are especially grateful for the early gift of sparing Comanche 2 from an arbitrary, politically driven retirement date of December 31,” Cooke said. “Extending this proven plant’s operation through 2026 isn’t nostalgia — it’s common sense at a time when reliability and affordability matter.”

Colorado is far from the only state that has aggressive mandates to support an energy transition that could result in high energy costs and a destabilized power grid, as most states with the top electricity costs are blue states with stringent profile goals, according to one recent analysis from Always on Energy Research and the Institute for Energy Research.

“Our grid should not be held hostage to one fuel for baseload power,” Energy and Environment Legal Institute Senior Fellow Steve Milloy told the DCNF, arguing that coal is a vital source of electricity for multiple reasons. “First, we have an abundance of it — hundreds of years’ worth of readily accessible reserves. Although the misguided climate and energy policies of the Obama and Biden administrations destroyed much of our coal infrastructure, much remains, and much can be rebuilt.”

Milloy also reasoned that coal is inexpensive to burn and that it powers America’s grid during periods of high demand more reliably than natural gas as “a coal plant with a pile of coal outside can more readily meet peak demand than a gas plant supplied by a pipeline with gas flowing in at 20 miles per hour.”

“There are communities all over America that thrived when coal was king, a scant 15 or so years ago,” Milloy told the DCNF. “They have suffered as a result of the Obama-Biden war on coal. These communities and their states could benefit greatly from a revived coal industry.”

Former President Joe Biden said he would shut coal “plants down all across America,” and adopted aggressive green energy policies that some top grid officials and watchdogs warned could weaken America’s power supply. In contrast, President Donald Trump has moved to bolster coal through a multi-agency agenda pushing for deregulation and projects to boost the sector.

CEO of the American Energy Institute Jason Isaac argued before Christmas in 2024 that “750 million people will wake up wishing for coal in their stockings.”

“That’s how many people around the world live without electricity, and billions more endure woefully sporadic access,” he continued, noting that affordable, reliable energy saves lives.
Isaac told the DCNF that “coal remains one of the world’s most relied upon sources of electricity, with global demand hitting record highs as countries like China and India prioritize reliable power.”

Though China and India have recently embraced more green energy technology like wind and solar, the nations have also constructed new coal plants and expanded capacity.

“In the United States, elitist politicians and utility executives dismantled our beautiful, clean coal fleet to satisfy Paris style virtue signaling, replacing it with taxpayer subsidized, China dependent, weather driven generation that sent electricity prices soaring,” Isaac told the DCNF. “The Green New Scam is the real Grinch, stealing billions from American families. This Christmas and for years to come, policies championed by President Donald Trump offer the best gift under the tree: affordable and reliable energy.”

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When the energy transition runs out of raw materials

We all know the story: wind and sun are available in unlimited quantities, clean and sustainable. The technology is there; you just have to expand it. If it weren’t for a small detail that is often overlooked in the colorful brochures of the energy transition: the raw materials. Because while sun and wind are indeed abundant, the same is not true for the metals and rare earths needed to harvest this energy.

A diverse collection of critical minerals and metals displayed in piles, showcasing their various shapes and colors, with the text 'Critical Mineral's' prominently featured above.

From The Klima Nachrichten

New studies show that demand for critical metals is growing six times faster than supply – silver will be half short by 2030

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has presented the figures in its current “Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025”. And they have it all – even if they are presented in the usual optimistic tone.

The number of horrors: factor 6.4

A recent study has calculated what the goal of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030 means: The annual demand for 21 critical minerals will increase from 4.7 million tons (2022) to 30 million tons (2030). That is an increase by a factor of 6.4 – in just eight years.

The IEA itself forecasts for its net-zero scenario (NZE) by 2040: lithium demand increases by a factor of 9, graphite quadruples, cobalt and rare earths double, copper increases by 50 percent. Clean energy technologies alone would devour almost 40 million tons of these minerals by 2040.

The Silver Dilemma: When the Sun Gets Expensive

The situation is particularly dramatic for silver. A European study from the end of 2025 calculates that global demand will rise to 48,000 to 52,000 tonnes per year by 2030. The supply? If you follow historical trends, it reaches just 34,000 tons. This means that only 62 to 70 percent of demand can be met.

The solar industry is the biggest driver. In 2023, it already consumed 19 percent of global silver production – in 2014 it was still 5 percent. By 2030, the share could rise to 40 percent. The newer solar cell technologies (TOPCon, heterojunction) require 1.5 to 2 times more silver per gigawatt than the older PERC cells.

The consequence? A study from 2023 shows that if the 63 terawatts of photovoltaics required for complete electrification were to be installed by 2050, 89 to 93 percent of the silver reserves known today would be consumed. With dominant TOPCon technology, the solar industry’s annual silver demand could exceed 10,000 tons as early as 2027 – that would be 43 percent of global supply. And that’s just for solar.

Copper: “The line is breaking”

Copper is the backbone of any electrified infrastructure. An electric car requires twice as much copper as a combustion engine, an offshore wind turbine over 20 tons per megawatt. The IEA and S&P Global predict supply shortages from the mid-2020s – that is, now.

If you look at the recent sharp rise in the price of copper, the market seems to confirm this assessment: Currently, the price is around $5.40 per pound – 34 percent higher than a year ago. In the last month alone, the price rose by over 9 percent. These are no longer normal fluctuations, this is scarcity that is reflected in prices.

The problem: The ore quality has been declining for years. In Chile, the largest copper producer, the average copper content in the ore has decreased by 30 percent in the last 15 years. New copper mines take about 20 years from discovery to production. However, there are only five years left until 2030, when the energy transition is to show significant progress. A mine planned today will not deliver until 2045 – much too late.

Lithium: The bottleneck of e-mobility

Lithium – the “white gold” of the energy transition. The IEA expects supply bottlenecks from 2027-2028 if production capacities are not drastically expanded. Currently, the market is in a paradoxical situation: prices have collapsed by over 80 percent in 2024 due to short-term overcapacity. But these prices make new investments unattractive – exactly the investments that would be needed for the predicted increase in demand.

The China question: 86 percent concentration

This is where the geopolitical component comes into play. The IEA notes: The market concentration for critical minerals has not decreased, but increased. For copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare earths, the average market share of the three largest refining nations was 86 percent in 2024 – in 2020 it was still 82 percent.

The reason: Almost all of the growth came from a single source – Indonesia for nickel, China for everything else. China currently refines almost half of the world’s copper and dominates lithium, graphite, cobalt and rare earths with similar proportions. At the end of 2024, China imposed export restrictions on gallium, germanium and antimony – followed by tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, molybdenum and seven heavy rare earths at the beginning of 2025.

More than half of all energy-related minerals are now subject to export controls. The IEA predicts that this concentration will hardly change in the next ten years – even with today’s political requirements, the share of top 3 suppliers would only fall marginally and effectively return to 2020 levels.

The investment brake: 5 percent instead of 14 percent

And this is where it gets really problematic: Investments in critical minerals increased by only 5 percent in 2024 – after 14 percent in 2023. Adjusted for inflation, growth was only 2 percent in real terms. Exploration activity stagnated completely in 2024, after years of growth.

The reason is the low prices. Lithium prices fell by 80 percent, graphite, cobalt and nickel by 10 to 20 percent. Good for consumers, bad for the future. Because without investments today, there will be no mines tomorrow. And without new mines, there would be no minerals for the energy transition the day after tomorrow.

At what point does it become a lid?

The crucial question is: At what share of renewable energies in the global electricity mix will the availability of raw materials become a hard cap? The answer is complex, but the data gives clues:

It will be critical for silver if solar continues to grow exponentially. With current trends, the solar industry could account for half of global primary production by 2030 alone. This leaves dramatically less for all other applications (electronics, medical technology, 5G). If solar does indeed account for over 30 percent of global electricity generation by 2030, as predicted by the IEA, silver will reach its physical limits.

For copper, the bottleneck is earlier. Columbia University estimates that copper will become scarce as early as 2026 if the expansion of electromobility and power grids proceeds as planned. With a complete electrification of transport and massive grid expansion, copper could become the limiting factor before renewables even reach 50 percent of the electricity mix.

The studies show that without massive improvements in material efficiency, recycling and substitution, there is a risk of supply gaps for six key minerals: lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt, neodymium and copper. And that already in this decade.

Is the IEA concealing the problem?

Interestingly, no. The IEA reports in detail on all these problems. The “Global Critical Minerals Outlook” is now an annual report with hundreds of pages of detailed analyses. What is striking, however, is that the tone is optimistic. There is talk of “challenges”, of “risks” that are “manageable” if action is taken in time.

But will action be taken in time? The investment figures say no. The concentration trends say no. The physical realities say no.

Recycling: The lifeline?

The IEA sees recycling as an important lever. By 2050, recycling could reduce the need for new mine production by 25 to 40 percent – for copper and cobalt by 40 percent, for lithium and nickel by 25 percent. Sounds good.

The problem: Recycling only works if there is enough material in the cycle. Solar panels have a lifespan of 25+ years. The first massive waves of installations were 2010-2015, which means that relevant recycling quantities from solar will not be available until 2035 at the earliest. Too late for the 2030 targets.

The situation is similar with lithium batteries. E-car batteries last 10-15 years. The big wave of e-cars began in 2020. In the mid-2030s at the earliest.

The inconvenient truth: Green mining does not exist

More than 50 percent of today’s lithium and copper production takes place in regions with extreme water stress. The IEA dryly notes that climate change, droughts and floods are endangering the supply – in the mining areas of the minerals that are supposed to combat climate change. The green energy transition leaves behind tailings heaps in Chile, deforested rainforests in Indonesia and contaminated rivers in the Congo. But people don’t like to talk about that.

Conclusion: Physics doesn’t care about goals

The energy transition has a fundamental problem that is reluctant to be talked about: it replaces a combustion-based economy with a material-based one. Oil and gas are burned – after that they are gone, but new ones can be extracted. Metals and rare earths, on the other hand, are stuck in durable products.

The IEA figures clearly show that the demand for critical minerals will increase six times faster than the supply. Silver will be missing a third in 2030. Copper shortages are imminent immediately. For lithium from 2027. And 86 percent of the supply is in the hands of three nations – dominated by China.

You can want to expand renewable energies. You can set climate targets. You can dream of 100 percent green electricity. But if the materials are not there, the wind turbines remain in storage and the solar panels unbuilt. It is the invisible limit of the energy transition – and it is closer than many want to admit.

The energy transition will not fail due to a lack of political will. It will be

the availability of a few dozen elements from the periodic table. No subsidies and no resolutions will help against this. Only physics can help against this. And it is uncompromising.

Sources: IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025, The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, Study “Critical mineral bottlenecks constrain sub-technology choices“, Study “Forecasting silver demand and supply by 2030“, Columbia University “Critical Mineral Supply Constraints“

How the Frankfurt School Captured the Culture – and How to Fight Back

The Frankfurt School wasn’t a physical building, but a group of German philosophers and social thinker based at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, starting in the 1920s. Key figures included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin.

A graphic illustration of Karl Marx with an industrial background and a red backdrop, symbolizing his association with Marxism and industrialization.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Kevin Donnelly

A man in a suit with a serious expression sitting on a talk show set, with a colorful background featuring text.

Conservatives have too often failed to realise that “politics is downstream from culture”. So argued Douglas Murray in a recent obituary of the late Peter Whittle, founder of the New Culture Forum (NCF), following the adage popularised by the late American journalist Andrew Breitbart, himself the founder of Breitbart News. “Too many conservatives for far too long felt the crucial battles were about economics”, Murray writes. “The NCF founder helped to correct that error.”

Equally vital, given culture is upstream of politics, is what the philosopher Roger Scruton describes as “cultural conservatism”.

While some dismiss the culture war as a side show, Scruton argues that for conservatives, these battles are “central to their sense of what they are fighting for and why”. In particular, Scruton argues Western societies must regain confidence “not in our political institutions only, but in the spiritual inheritance on which they ultimately rest”.

Certainly, the enemies of conservatism have long understood the centrality of culture to modern political struggles. Classical Marxism once expected the economic contradictions of capitalism to be the vehicle for revolutionary change, inexorably bringing about a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. There was only one problem with this theory: the mass industrial working classes of Europe simply didn’t play ball, with many millions of them willingly going to fight for their capitalist homelands in the First World War rather than rebelling against their supposed oppression.

Rather than admitting their theory had been wrong, the Marxists decided the industrial proletariat must have been suffering from “false consciousness”. From the early 1930s, Marxist academics associated with the Frankfurt School began to reorient Marxism as a cultural struggle, seeking to subvert the norms and ideologies of conventional bourgeois society by which they believed the masses had been brainwashed. Leading adherents included Theodor Adorno, whose dubious study The Authoritarian Personality painted all Western publics as inherently fascistic, Herbert Marcuse, with his ideas of “repressive tolerance”, and Jürgen Habermas, who is still wittering on about critical theory (and the EU) to this day.

Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony and Rudi Dutschke’s idea of a “long march through the institutions”, cultural Marxism sought to take control of Western societies not through violent revolution, but by infiltrating and dominating schools, universities, the media, political parties, intermediary organisations and the family to change the way people think.

The spread of anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-family ideologies throughout our culture today is testament to their success. Whether it’s gender ideology, where children are told gender and sexuality are fluid and limitless; climate alarmism, where activists wail that the world is about to go up in flames because of the industrial revolution; or the ever-present accusation that Western societies are sexist, transphobic, misogynistic, racist, classist and guilty of white supremacism, it certainly seems the Left’s long march has claimed tremendous ground.

To fight back, we need to understand what makes conservatism so uniquely beneficial.

Where Leftists scoff at ‘outdated’ traditions, conservatism entails a proper understanding of one’s history and cultural inheritance. As Edmund Burke, the founding father of English conservatism, wrote: “People will not look forward to prosperity who never look back to their ancestors.” Yet while critics may say this makes it stuffy, they forget it involves change as well as continuity. As Burke also wrote: “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.”

Rather than an inflexible and unyielding ideology, like communism, fascism and cultural Marxism, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott describes conservatism as a particular disposition.

The conservative prefers “the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant… present laughter to utopian bliss”, he writes. Like Burke, Oakeshott simultaneously accepts the need for change, arguing it is wrong to idolise “what is past and gone”.

The Italian philosopher and cultural critic Augusto Del Noce, while not widely known in the Anglosphere, usefully defines conservatism as having the limited goal of the “conservation of freedom”.

He argues that the inherent danger with revolutionary and utopian ideologies, by contrast, is that they promise to bring about the kingdom of God here on Earth, in pursuit of which almost anything can be justified. Religion, and with it concepts like good and evil, right and wrong and God-given rights to liberty and freedom are all thrown aside, replaced instead by totalising political ideologies “as the source of man’s liberation”.

Beginning with the French Revolution, and followed by Communist Russia and China, the likes of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, as well as Nazi Germany, the barbarism, carnage and inhumanity inflicted on millions in the name of modern ideologies shows the horrors we are prone to once religion is lost. As Del Noce concludes, “every cruelty and every violation of the moral order” becomes possible.

Dreadful as they are, why have Left-wing ideologies been able to gain so much ground in our societies? President Abraham Lincoln once observed that “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next”. One of the reasons why the cultural Left has been so effective is because education was, and still is, their prime target.

As a result, generations of students have been fed a steady diet of Leftist ideology, whether on race, gender, economics or history. Much of this is based on the unflushable woke dogma that knowledge is a social construct enforcing the power of the elites and that a commitment to truth is simply a ‘binary’, oppressive, ‘white supremacist’ concept.

Conservatives, on the other hand, refuse to believe that truth is simply determined by power. From Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, our philosophical patrimony of reason, rationality and common sense is what has allowed Western societies to flourish: our planes to stay in the air and our bridges not to collapse. Today, it is this cultural inheritance we must fight to conserve.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Melbourne-based cultural critic and author. Email him at kevind@netspace.net.au

How a PNAS Study Confuses Institutional Authority with Truth

Every so often an academic paper appears that claims to analyze a problem while quietly defining the outcome in advance. The recent PNAS paper by Mosleh et al., “Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms,” is a textbook example.

A silhouetted figure stands by a tranquil body of water, gazing at a glowing ring in the sky, reflecting the orange hues in the calm surface below.

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

Research article titled 'Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms' by Mohsen Mosleh, Jennifer Allen, and David G. Rand, published on October 30, 2025.

Every so often an academic paper appears that claims to analyze a problem while quietly defining the outcome in advance. The recent PNAS paper by Mosleh et al., “Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms,” is a textbook example.

Abstract

In recent years, social media has become increasingly fragmented, as platforms evolve and new alternatives emerge. Yet most research studies a single platform—typically X/Twitter, or occasionally Facebook—leaving little known about the broader social media landscape. Here, we shed light on patterns of cross-platform variation in the high-stakes context of news sharing. We examine the relationship between user engagement and news domains’ political orientation and quality across seven platforms: X/Twitter, BlueSky, TruthSocial, Gab, GETTR, Mastodon, and LinkedIn. Using an exhaustive sample, we analyze all (over 10 million) posts containing links to news domains shared on these platforms during January 2024. We find that news shared on platforms with more conservative user bases is significantly lower quality on average. Turning to engagement, we find—contrary to hypotheses of a consistent “right-wing advantage” on social media—that the relationship between political lean and engagement is strongly heterogeneous across platforms. Conservative news posts receive more engagement on platforms where most content is conservative, and vice versa for liberal news posts, consistent with an “echo platform” perspective. In contrast, the relationship between news quality and engagement is strikingly consistent: Across all platforms examined, a given user’s lower-quality news posts received higher average engagement, even though higher-quality news is substantially more prevalent and garners far more total engagement across posts. This pattern holds when accounting for poster-level variation and is observed even in the absence of ranking algorithms, suggesting that user preferences—not algorithmic bias—may underlie the underperformance of higher-quality news.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2425739122

The authors announce, right up front, that they are studying “news quality,” political lean, and engagement across seven platforms. What they never seriously do is justify what “quality” means. Instead, they import it wholesale from an ideological ecosystem that has already decided which voices are acceptable.

Their own description is telling:

“We measure the quality of the news source linked to in each post using a ‘wisdom of experts’ approach in which ratings from a variety of fact-checkers, journalists, and academics are aggregated…”

This sentence does nearly all the work in the paper. It sounds neutral, technocratic, and authoritative. It is none of those things.

There is no definition of ideological diversity among these “experts,” no attempt to measure disagreement, and no adversarial testing. The paper simply assumes that journalists, professional fact-checkers, and academics constitute a politically neutral reference class. Anyone familiar with the modern media-academic complex knows that assumption is indefensible.

Worse, the authors openly admit that they are not measuring accuracy at all. Instead, they rely on reputation as a stand-in:

“We followed a standard practice in the literature and used the reliability of the publisher as a proxy for accuracy of content.”

A proxy is not a measurement. And this proxy commits a fundamental category error: individual claims are judged not by whether they are true, but by whether the institution publishing them has been blessed by the correct set of gatekeepers. A factual article from a disfavored outlet is permanently “low quality.” A false article from a prestige outlet remains “high quality” by definition.

Accuracy never enters the model.

One of the primary sources feeding these domain ratings is NewsGuard, an organization that has moved well beyond fact-checking into open policy advocacy, government partnerships, and content policing. Treating NewsGuard scores as an epistemic baseline is not neutral. It is ideological outsourcing.

Yet the paper anticipates this criticism and waves it away:

“The strong correlation between political leaning and source quality we observe… is unlikely to be the result of ideological bias among fact-checkers…”

This is not an empirical conclusion. It is a declaration of trust.

The authors argue that “politically balanced crowds” produce similar ratings, implying this somehow proves neutrality. But political balance does not equal epistemic independence. A Democrat and a Republican who both consume the same legacy media, trust the same institutions, and defer to the same authorities do not magically cancel out shared priors.

Once “quality” has been defined this way, the paper’s headline results become tautological. The authors report:

“Lower-quality news domains are shared more on right-leaning platforms…”

Translated into plain English, this means: platforms populated by people skeptical of mainstream institutions tend to link to outlets disliked by mainstream institutions. That is not a discovery. It is a restatement of the setup.

Political lean itself is classified using GPT-4:

“To measure political lean, we used GPT-4o and asked it to rate domains…”

A large language model trained primarily on mainstream journalism and academic literature is being used to label ideological bias. The authors then “validate” these labels against other commonly used measures—measures built from the same institutional inputs. This is not validation; it is ideological echo.

The paper’s central behavioral claim is that users engage more with “low-quality” content than “high-quality” content, even when controlling for the user:

“Across all platforms examined, a given user’s lower-quality news posts received higher average engagement…”

This is framed as evidence that misinformation is inherently more engaging. But the authors quietly concede a far less flattering explanation for the institutions they favor:

“An important contributor appears to be comparatively low engagement rates of posts linking to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Reuters…”

In other words, elite legacy outlets perform poorly. Users are not stampeding toward fringe conspiracy sites; they are disengaging from institutions that have become repetitive, moralizing, and predictably wrong on too many major issues to count.

Rather than take this as evidence of institutional fatigue or earned distrust, the authors reach for familiar psychological clichés:

“This pattern suggests an underlying reason simply might be user preference—e.g., for novel, negative, or moralizing content…”

Notice what is never considered: that some content labeled “low quality” might be accurate, insightful, or correct earlier than elite consensus allowed. That possibility would require interrogating the rating system itself, which the paper treats as sacrosanct.

The study’s confidence in its framework is further undercut by its funding disclosure:

“We acknowledge funding support from the Open Society Foundation.”

This is not a moral indictment. It is contextual information. The Open Society Foundation has invested heavily in misinformation research, platform governance, and content moderation. A paper that defines quality via activist-aligned institutions, finds dissent engaging, and frames that engagement as a problem fits neatly within that agenda.

What the paper actually demonstrates—despite its intentions—is that institutional authority no longer guarantees attention. Users are selective. They are skeptical. They are increasingly uninterested in being told what is true by organizations that spent years insisting certainty where uncertainty reigned, and silence where debate was warranted.

A genuinely skeptical study would have examined claim-level accuracy. It would have tracked which “low-quality” claims later proved correct. It would have tested ideological variance among raters rather than asserting neutrality by credential. It might even have entertained the heretical notion that elite consensus is sometimes wrong.

This paper does none of that. Instead, it constructs a closed epistemic loop, defines disagreement as low quality, and then expresses concern that disagreement is popular.

The real finding is not about misinformation. It is about the collapse of deference—and the quiet panic of institutions that mistook authority for truth.

Tropical timings – the orbit of Uranus

The idea here is to demonstrate that the Uranus orbit period on the solar simulator is in tropical years, using the same process as in our Neptune orbit post (here).

A visually stunning image of Uranus showcasing its vibrant blue color and faint ring system against a black background.

From Tallbloke’s Talkshop

By oldbrew

A colorful depiction of the planet Neptune, showcasing its blue hue and faint rings against a black background.

The idea here is to demonstrate that the Uranus orbit period on the solar simulator is in tropical years, using the same process as in our Neptune orbit post (here).

The alternative would be a sidereal year period based on the so-called ‘fixed stars’ as a reference frame. As Wikipedia points out, ‘The term fixed stars is a misnomer because those celestial objects are not actually fixed with respect to one another or to Earth’, but their movement from an Earth perspective is extremely slow due to their vast distances away from us.

From the NASA planetary factsheet for Uranus we find:
Sidereal orbit period (days) — 30,685.40 (U) — 365.256 (E) — 84.011
Tropical orbit period (days) — 30,588.74 (U) — 365.242 (E) — 83.749

The last figure in each row is the time of one Uranus orbit in Earth years. The data can be used on Arnholm’s solar simulator to test planetary motions.

To improve the accuracy we use the tropical year of Earth as published – 365.24219 days, so the NASA orbit period is:
30588.74 / 365.24219 = 83.7492 tropical years (TY)
The period of a Uranus-Earth conjunction using this result is:
83.7492 TY * 1 / (83.7492 – 1) = 83.7492/82.7492 = 1.0120847 TY.

Since 83.7492 * 4 = 99.999% of 335 years, a simple formula to test on the solar simulator is:
4 Uranus orbits = 331 Uranus-Earth conjunctions = 335 TY.

On the solar simulator, the note at the top says: ‘Looking down on Sun’s north pole’. This defines its frame of reference. For a first check we compare two Uranus-Earth conjunctions 335 tropical years apart.

A comparison of Uranus and Neptune's positions relative to Jupiter on two different dates: September 21, 1675, and September 21, 2010, displaying an orange sun at the center surrounded by labeled planets.

That shows 4 Uranus and 335 Earth orbits (= tropical years) is a period when their conjunctions occur in the same orientation to the Sun.

For longer checks, the 3000-year window of the simulator allows time for 8 sets (of 4 each) test Uranus orbits = 32*83.75 = 2680 TY. The screenshots will show two comparisons of the orientation of Uranus and Earth, one from an initial conjunction in year zero, and another from initial year 310. The comparison years are 2680 TY (335*8) ahead, i.e. year 2680 itself and year 2990. (The first comparison ends exactly 8 Uranus orbits after the 2010 graphic shown above.)

Dual simulation images showing the positions of planets relative to the Sun on September 21 and September 22 in the years 0 and 2680, respectively. Labels indicate Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Diagram comparing planetary positions on June 9, 310 and June 7, 2990, showing orbits of Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus around the Sun.

These results confirm that the simulator represents the planetary movement of Uranus using the tropical orbit data, completing 32 orbits within a day or two of 83.75 TY * 32. The test orbit period of 83.75 TY = 30589.033 days, only 0.293 days more than the NASA published tropical orbit period (30588.74 days).

Note that using the NASA sidereal orbit number the whole test period would be over 8 years greater, at about 2688.35 years, and would not return to the same orientation, due to the 0.35 years ‘overlap’.
– – –
Image: Uranus [credit: NASA]
– – –
For other ‘tropical timings’ posts see here:
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/?s=tropical+timings

More about reference frames: https://boffinsportal.com/non-inertial-frame-of-reference-examples/

President Trump Invests in a Nuclear Fusion Startup

TAE Technologies wants to start building a commercial hydrogen boron fusion reactor in 2026.

A futuristic nuclear fusion reactor with illuminated components, showcasing advanced technology and intricate design.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

TAE Technologies wants to start building a commercial hydrogen boron fusion reactor in 2026.

Trump Media announces merger with fusion firm TAE Technologies

Friday, 19 December 2025

Trump Media & Technology Group – the social media firm majority-owned by US President Donald Trump – and US private fusion energy company TAE Technologies have announced an agreement to merge in a transaction valued at more than USD6 billion.

Under the terms of the merger agreement, TAE and Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) shareholders will each own about 50% of the combined company – which will be one of the world’s first publicly traded fusion companies – at closing. As part of the transaction, TMTG has agreed to provide up to USD200 million of cash to TAE at signing and an additional USD100 million is available upon initial filing of the Form S-4 registration statement. The transaction, which was approved by the boards of directors of both companies, is expected to close in mid-2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including shareholder and regulatory approvals.

In 2026, the combined company plans to site and begin construction of the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant (50 MWe), subject to required approvals. Additional fusion power plants are planned and expected to be 350–500 MWe.

…

TAE’s approach to fusion combines advanced accelerator and plasma physics, and uses abundant, non-radioactive hydrogen-boron (p-B11) as a fuel source. The proprietary magnetic beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC) technology injects high-energy hydrogen atoms into the plasma to make the system more stable and better confined. This solution is compact and energy efficient, California-based TAE says.

…Read more: https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/trump-media-announces-merger-with-fusion-firm-tae-technologies

My problem with TAE’s approach is they are focusing on Hydrogen Boron fusion, which requires ignition temperatures at least 500x hotter than the Deuterium Tritium reaction which mainstream fusion research projects like ITER intend to use in their proof of concept.

The big outstanding problem with nuclear fusion is keeping the plasma hot, without expending more energy than the plasma produces through nuclear fusion. An eighty million degree Deuterium Tritium plasma really wants to shed its heat, so preventing the heat from escaping long enough so the plasma produces substantially more energy than it took to warm the plasma up is the biggest unsolved problem. For a practical fusion generator, you would need to either retain enough heat in the plasma to keep the plasma burning, or extract enough energy to power the next cycle if your reactor operates as a series of small explosions.

If keeping an eighty million degree Deuterium Tritium plasma hot enough to fuse is an unsolved problem, how do you describe the problem of keeping a Boron Hydrogen plasma at a temperature in excess of 5 BILLION degrees, for long enough to produce useful fusion energy?

I accept that commercialisation of Deuterium Tritium fusion would be difficult. Tritium is rare, rare enough that there is probably only 50kg of Tritium in the entire world. Producing that Tritium in sufficient quantities for a significant fusion economy is an unsolved problem. Deuterium Tritium also produces a blizzard of fast neutrons, which causes everything in the vicinity of the plasma to become radioactive, as well as physically damaging the reactor containment vessel. But demonstrating a viable self-sustaining fusion reaction using Deuterium Tritium, regardless of the obstacles to commercial viability, would provide valuable insights, and would also prove you were on the right track. It would make pursuit of more technically challenging fusion reactions like boron hydrogen more credible.

I’m not a fusion physicist, nor am I a billionaire, so maybe President Trump has seen something I haven’t. I would love to be wrong about this. But I simply don’t believe in startups which claim they are ready to jump straight to commercialisation of insanely difficult exotic fusion technologies like Proton (Hydrogen) Boron fusion, when nobody has yet cracked the technically much simpler problem of creating an energy producing Deuterium Tritium fusion reactor.

Show me a self sustaining 80 million degree plasma Deuterium Tritium proof of concept reactor, and I’ll take your 5 BILLION degree commercial Boron Hydrogen plasma ambitions seriously.

Note I use Proton and Hydrogen interchangeably in this article. A proton is an electrically charged hydrogen atom.

Eco Loons Object to AI Centres in Scotland

Data centres planned for Scotland would require a “mindblowing” amount of energy that would be sufficient to power several trips in the famous time-travelling DeLorean from the Back To The Future films, campaigners have calculated.

An artistic representation of the letters 'AI' surrounded by glowing blue graphics, symbolizing artificial intelligence.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie

Scottish greens getting apoplexy!

From The Herald:

In the hit movies, Doc Brown’s fictional time-travelling car required 1.21 gigawatts (GW) of energy to take Marty McFly, played by actor Michael J Fox, back to 1985 – with this more than the 1.19GW of power produced by the Torness nuclear power station in East Lothian.

Kat Jones, director of the countryside charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS), criticised the “ridiculous” amount energy needed by the “hyperscale” data centres.

APRS has calculated that data centres in the planning system and going though pre-application processes could require between 4.7 and 5.5 GW of power.

Full story here.

Below is the APRS Press Release:

Today APRS and ERCS wrote to the Planning Minister Ivan McKee to express concern about the energy demands of data centres coming through Scotland’s planning system. They called for a pause on all planning applications until a more strategic approach can be made and strict environmental standards are defined for data centres. The full press release is below.

For release 12:01am Thursday 18th December 2025

An environmental charity has revealed that the energy demand from data centres currently in the Scottish planning system is between 4450 MW and 4950 MW, which is larger than the winter peak electricity demand for the whole of Scotland [1]. Information collected by Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) from the planning portals of Scotland’s local authorities found 17 hyperscale data centers at various stages of the planning process [2] and many others at earlier stages. None have yet received a decision on whether or not they have planning permission.

This rush of applications is related to the exponential growth of AI and the processing power that it demands. UK Government and Scottish Government estimates give a figure of 10-30 MW for 2024 data centre capacity in Scotland. [5] Three quarters of the data centre electricity demand comes from planning applications from just one company.

Today, in a letter to the Scottish Government environmental charities Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) and the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland (ERCS) call for an urgent response to the threat these data centres pose to Scotland’s energy security, energy prices and climate targets.

APRS and ERCS are calling on the Scottish Government to pause all applications to give time to examine the implications for Scotland’s energy grid, energy prices and net zero targets, as well as other impacts on the environment and on local communities.

Data Centres in the Scottish Planning system would double Scotland’s energy demands

APRS Director, Kat Jones, told the Herald:

“It’s hard to imagine another area of life where boasting about how much energy something uses would be a selling point.

“You don’t see washing machines, houses and TVs sold on the basis of how much energy they use – rather the reverse. Society has been trying to be as efficient on energy as possible to deal with the existential threat of climate breakdown, after all.”

I do find it extraordinary that an organisation set up to protect the Scottish countryside should prioritise Net Zero over the industrialisation of the Highlands by wind farms and pylons!

Kat Jones, of course, is welcome to give up computers and all the other trappings of modern life. But I suspect that she won’t.

And if these data centres are not built in Scotland, they will simply be built somewhere else.

There is a simple solution to all this. Build two or three clean burning, environmentally friendly CCGT plants.

As with Ireland, this is all a reminder that wind and solar power cannot run a modern economy.

How the Grinch Stole Greenie Christmas

Every Greenie down in Green-ville liked green funding a lot,
But the Grinch, up in D.C., most certainly did not.

A cartoon depiction of a character resembling the Grinch, dressed in a red Santa suit with a white trim, carrying a large bag filled with money and green energy items such as solar panels and wind turbine blades. In front of him, a box labeled with terms like 'Clean Energy,' 'Green Energy Funding,' 'Climate Grants,' and 'EPA' is overflowing with cash.

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

Every Greenie down in Green-ville liked green funding a lot,
But the Grinch, up in D.C., most certainly did not.

The Grinch hated permits! He hated subsidies!
Now please don’t ask why—some say regulatory allergies.
It could be his tie was tied just a bit too tight,
Or his patience for slogans had run out one night.

But whatever the reason, his logic or gut,
He stood there on Christmas Eve, funding list in his clutch,
Staring down at Green-ville with a cold, steady stare,
At the grants and the credits still floating through air.

“For years now,” he muttered, “they’ve feasted on checks,
On loans and exemptions and modeling specs.
They promise the future! They promise the fix!
All funded by taxpayers—quite a neat little trick.”

“For every green ribbon, a billion is spent,
Yet emissions stay stubborn, reliability bent.
They call this ‘transition,’ they call it ‘the way,’
But none of it works if the funding goes away.”

Then he had an idea. An awful idea.
The Grinch had a wonderful, awful idea.

“I’ll pull all their funding! I’ll halt all their plans!
I’ll tighten the permits! I’ll cancel the grants!
No fast-track approvals! No blank-check delight!
Let’s see how they do with the market in sight.”

So he crept down to Green-ville with policy in hand,
With memos and orders and budgets unplanned.
He yanked loan guarantees! He froze every spigot!
He questioned the models! (Oh, Greenies did not dig it.)

He canceled the projects that lived on applause,
That fed on good headlines and regulatory laws.
He tugged at the strings of the climate parade,
And watched as the floats slowly started to fade.

He took their green ornaments—credits and caps!
He took their big conferences, jet-setting maps!
He took every program that couldn’t survive
Without subsidies keeping its promises alive.

Then he paused. And he listened.
On Christmas Day morn.

He expected the wailing! The screaming! The scorn!
The headlines! The protests! The moral outrage!
The chants about science! The rage on the stage!

But what he heard wasn’t collapse or despair.
The grid stayed online. Heat flowed through the air.
Lights flickered on homes. The world did not freeze.
Reality carried on—quite rudely—with ease.

Down in Green-ville, the Greenies still gathered that day,
But something was missing—they couldn’t quite say.
No fresh pile of funding, no targets brand new,
No glossy report saying “We’re saving you.”

They sang their old songs about justice and fate,
About deadlines and tipping points scheduled too late.
But the chorus felt thinner. The rhythm felt wrong.
The checks weren’t arriving to carry the song.

Some projects sat idle. Some vanished outright.
No private investor came rushing in sight.
No crowd funded turbines that failed on calm nights.
No bank backed a grid that dimmed without lights.

The Greenies grew restless. They frowned and they stewed.
“This isn’t how it’s meant to be done!” they booed.
“The Grinch doesn’t care! He denies what is true!
He’s stolen our future! He hasn’t a clue!”

But the Grinch, up in D.C., just watched with a grin,
Not swelling with warmth, not letting them win.
He didn’t convert. He didn’t repent.
His heart did not grow three sizes—percent.

Instead, it stayed steady. Analytical. Cold.
He looked at the numbers. The stories they told.
He noted what vanished when funding was gone,
And what quietly worked—and kept carrying on.

“If Christmas depended on money alone,”
He muttered, “It wouldn’t have lasted this long.
If energy systems collapse without aid,
They weren’t systems at all—just theater staged.”

“So let them be angry. Let editorials cry.
Let conferences schedule the end of July.
What matters is this, though it pains them to hear:
Reality doesn’t bend for career.”

And so Christmas passed without climate salvation,
No miracle born from bureaucratic elation.
The Greenies stayed hopeful. The Grinch stayed the same.
And markets kept asking the simplest question of fame:

And so Christmas passed without grand revelation,
No miracle born of bureaucratic elation.
No carbon was saved by sacrifice or decree,
No planet was fixed by a press conference spree.
The Greenies kept planning their next big appeal,

The Grinch kept insisting on proof that was real.
And markets, unmoved by belief or by spin,
Kept asking the question that cuts to the skin:

Not who funds the dream,
Or how it’s sold out—
But simply and plainly:
Does it work…When the money runs out?

And that little question,
Unloved but precise,
Outlived every slogan,
Every target,
Every price

Day: December 28, 2025

Why America Might Find Coal in Its Stocking This Christmas — And Be Jolly

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When the energy transition runs out of raw materials

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How the Frankfurt School Captured the Culture – and How to Fight Back

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Tropical timings – the orbit of Uranus

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President Trump Invests in a Nuclear Fusion Startup

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Eco Loons Object to AI Centres in Scotland

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How the Grinch Stole Greenie Christmas

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