Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
US immigration enforcement flights are producing hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes of climate-damaging carbon emissions as officials shuttle unprecedented numbers of people to detention centers far from home and deport them to countries across the world.
Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has spurred at least an 80% increase in such flights year over year, accelerating theclimate crisisby emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide, according to data analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian.
“We’ve seen a staggering increase of all US immigration [enforcement] flights,” including “the number of flights as well as the locations that the flights are going to,” said Savitri Arvey, director of research and analysis for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First (HRF), the US advocacy group.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) air operations pumped into the air an estimated 335,876 tonnes (370,240 US tons) of carbon emissions in 2025, up 88% from the year before. And the first four months of 2026 show the federal agency is on track to contribute even more to global heating this year from such flights, the Guardian can reveal.
Those emissions exacerbate the climate crisis, a driver of irregular migration in itself, while polluting the air in local communities used as flight hubs, such as Phoenix in Arizona, El Paso and Harlingen in Texas, and Alexandria in Louisiana.
Its tempting to say something snarky about how much more CO2 would be emitted if the illegals were granted amnesty and were able to live comfortable energy rich lives in the USA rather than being deported to whatever energy poor hellhole they came from, but the claim that immigration flights are impacting climate change is just too ridiculous.
The impact of such flights on CO2 emissions is a blip, an accounting error on last year’s expansion of China’s coal capacity. The impact of those flights would not be measurable, by any instrument which could be devised by known technology.
The Whakamaru supereruption (~350,000 years ago) was one of the largest volcanic events in New Zealand’s history and among the biggest ever recorded on Earth.
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The Whakamaru supereruption (~350,000 years ago) was one of the largest volcanic events in New Zealand’s history and among the biggest ever recorded on Earth.
It occurred in the Taupō Volcanic Zone (TVZ) in the central North Island during a colder glacial period, when the landscape featured vast beech and podocarp forests rather than today’s mountainous, scrub-covered terrain.
Details of the Eruption
Scale: It released an estimated ~2,300 km³ of volcanic material (some sources cite >1,500 km³ of magma). This is enough to bury all of New Zealand under roughly 9 meters of debris if spread evenly.
Deposits: Thick pyroclastic flow deposits (hot, dense mixtures of rock and gas) covered areas like Whakamaru and the King Country, reaching hundreds of meters thick near the source. Ash and pumice fall deposits blanketed much of the North Island (up to 4.5 m thick in places) and reached as far as the Chatham Islands (~800 km away) with at least 30 cm of material.
Impact: It dramatically reshaped the central North Island, infilling a large pre-existing lake and altering the regional landscape and ecosystems.
How It Happened
Recent studies, including one published The Conversation article (May 2026), used chemical analysis of volcanic glass shards from deposits across New Zealand and the South Pacific to correlate sites and reconstruct the event.
It began with a phreatomagmatic phase (violent magma-water interaction) as magma erupted into a large central lake.
This transitioned to drier styles as the lake was destroyed.
Critically, the eruption wasn’t from a single magma chamber. It involved a cascading chain reaction tapping at least five separate magma bodies that erupted in concert, explaining the immense volume.
This makes it the largest known eruption from the Taupō Volcanic Zone, surpassing even the more recent Ōruanui (Oruanui) supereruption ~25,700 years ago that helped form modern Lake Taupō.
Taupō Volcanic Zone (TVZ) remains highly active due to tectonic forces (Pacific Plate subducting under the Australian Plate while the region pulls apart). Supereruptions are rare, but the zone has produced four known ones in its ~2-million-year history. Understanding events like Whakamaru helps with hazard preparedness and interpreting the modern landscape.
A major new paper by Anna Miller (PhD candidate at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington) and colleagues, published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, reconstructs the eruption in detail. It uses chemical analysis of volcanic glass shards from widespread deposits (including distant sites like the Chatham Islands) to show how the event involved a cascading eruption tapping at least five separate magma bodies.
Reconstructing one of the largest explosive eruptions of the Quaternary through high-resolution tephra geochemistry: the 349 ka Whakamaru supereruption
This is the title of a new popular article by volcanologist Anna Miller (PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington) published in The Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.
Around 349,000–340,000 years ago, the Whakamaru super-eruption (also called the Whakamaru group ignimbrites) was the largest volcanic event in the history of New Zealand’s Taupō Volcanic Zone (TVZ) and one of the biggest ever recorded on Earth.
Volume: Approximately 2,300 km³ of volcanic material (earlier estimates often >1,500 km³ of magma). This is VEI 8 scale — a true supereruption.
Landscape impact: It dramatically reshaped the central North Island, infilling a large ancient lake, burying vast areas under thick ignimbrite (pyroclastic flow deposits) and spreading ash/pumice as far as the Chatham Islands.
The key advance in the recent study (published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research) comes from detailed chemical analysis of volcanic glass shards in deposits across New Zealand and beyond. This allowed precise correlation of sites and reconstruction of the sequence.
Sequence of events:
Initial phreatomagmatic phase: Magma erupted into a large central lake, causing violent magma-water interactions and extremely explosive steam-driven blasts.
Transition to drier eruption: As the lake was destroyed and infilled, the style shifted to drier, highly explosive activity.
Cascading multi-magma system: Rather than tapping a single giant magma chamber, the eruption involved a chain reaction that sequentially or simultaneously drained at least five separate magma bodies at different depths and compositions. This explains the enormous total volume.
This multi-reservoir model is significant for understanding how super volcanoes can produce such massive outbursts and improves hazard assessment for future (rare) events in the still-active TVZ.
The article includes photos of distant deposits (e.g., on Chatham Island) and is written accessibly for a general audience while linking to the primary scientific paper.
It builds on decades of earlier work (e.g., Brown et al. 1998, Saunders et al. 2010, Harmon et al. 2024) but provides a more integrated picture through better tephra correlations.
Published: Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research
Authors: Anna L. Miller, Simon J. Barker, Colin J.N. Wilson
Abstract
The Rangitawa Tephra is a widespread marker ash bed over New Zealand and the southwest Pacific Ocean that has been linked with the 349 ka Whakamaru supereruption.
Here, we assess glass compositions at high resolution throughout the Rangitawa Tephra sequence to address the stratigraphy and origins of this deposit.
We correlate 25 tephra sites across subaerial and marine settings, linking them through glass compositions to the eruptive event that also produced the proximal Whakamaru-group ignimbrites.
Our analyses reveal the systematic tapping of five magma bodies throughout the eruption. The base of the tephra consists of a crystal-rich fall unit with a single compositional type, inferred to represent explosive phreatomagmatic activity concurrent with initial ignimbrite emplacement into water.
Glass compositions in basal fall deposits match those in several basal ignimbrite sections indicating that the two units were temporally linked. In the mid to upper parts of the tephra, the relative abundances of glass types appear to be controlled by the geographic distribution of magma bodies.
Marine tephra deposits, in contrast, exhibit multiple glass types but with limited stratigraphic consistency due to mixing, reflecting syn– or post-depositional reworking.
By combining near-source analyses with medial, distal, and very distal tephra analyses, we reconstruct the Whakamaru super-eruption, refining fall deposit and ignimbrite volumes to confirm a total volume exceeding ∼1500 km3 dense rock equivalent.
Our study illustrates how high-resolution geochemical stratigraphy of widespread tephra deposits can be used to reconstruct the dynamics of one of the largest caldera-forming eruptions of the Quaternary.
Hailstorms can be incredibly dangerous, posing risks to life and property. Then there’s the economic damage to cars, crops, and infrastructure caused by large balls of ice falling at high speed from the sky. And the problems could worsen as our planet heats up.
A new study published in Nature predicts that climate change could produce larger, more damaging hailstones in some regions. The editors of Nature have also published a Research Briefing in the same issue summarizing the work.
…
They found that hailstorm-induced damage worldwide is projected to increase by 36.5% to 42.1% by the late 21st century, depending on the scenario. Explaining this shift, they wrote, “Globally, increased low-level temperature and specific humidity drive a shift towards larger hailstones, with the frequency of ≥30-mm-diameter hailstones rising by 37.9–51.8%.”
At the same time, the frequency of small hailstones (less than 30 millimeters) is set to decrease by 4.2% to 12.3%.
The parts of the planet most likely to suffer the greatest damage are North America, Europe, and Asia. But it’s not all bad news, as the tropics and subtropics will see a decrease in overall hail frequency because the smaller stones will melt completely before hitting the ground.
Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is expected to modify severe convective storms and their associated hazards, including hailstorms, a primary driver of weather-related economic losses1,2,3,4. Despite some research on the response of hailstorms to ACC, most studies have focused on regional-scale changes2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, whereas global-scale assessments of hailstone size remain scarce. Here we show a 36.5–42.1% increase in global hailstorm-induced damage potential by the late twenty-first century, with the magnitude determined by the emission scenario. Our results arise from hailstone trajectory simulations conducted under historical and future scenarios, driven by EC-Earth3 ensemble outputs10 that are cross-validated through multimodel comparisons. Globally, increased low-level temperature and specific humidity drive a shift towards larger hailstones, with the frequency of ≥30-mm-diameter hailstones rising by 37.9–51.8% and <30-mm-diameter hailstones declining by 4.2–12.3%. Regionally, the mid-high latitudes predominantly exhibit increased hail damage potential owing to strong warming and weak moistening, amplifying instability sufficiently to counteract enhanced drag and melting effects. Conversely, tropical and monsoonal regions experience reduced hail damage potential owing to weak warming, strong moistening and limited hail growth depth. Our findings highlight the non-uniform impacts of ACC on global hailstorm damage, providing critical insights for future disaster prevention and mitigation strategies.
Although the full study is paywalled, it seems likely the study plays fast and loose with thermodynamics. Simplistic models which suggest warmer average surface temperatures would drive more severe weather without limit are just wrong. The total energy available to drive the climate system is set by the amount of sunlight being absorbed by the Earth – and big hailstorms require a lot of energy.
Constrained work output of the moist atmospheric heat engine in a warming climate
Global warming is expected to intensify the hydrological cycle, but it might also make the atmosphere less energetic. Laliberté et al. modeled the atmosphere as a classical heat engine in order to evaluate how much energy it contains and how much work it can do (see the Perspective by Pauluis). They then used a global climate model to project how that might change as climate warms. Although the hydrological cycle may increase in intensity, it does so at the expense of its ability to do work, such as powering large-scale atmospheric circulation or fueling more very intense storms.
Incoming and outgoing solar radiation couple with heat exchange at Earth’s surface to drive weather patterns that redistribute heat and moisture around the globe, creating an atmospheric heat engine. Here, we investigate the engine’s work output using thermodynamic diagrams computed from reanalyzed observations and from a climate model simulation with anthropogenic forcing. We show that the work output is always less than that of an equivalent Carnot cycle and that it is constrained by the power necessary to maintain the hydrological cycle. In the climate simulation, the hydrological cycle increases more rapidly than the equivalent Carnot cycle. We conclude that the intensification of the hydrological cycle in warmer climates might limit the heat engine’s ability to generate work.
Even if they got the thermodynamics right, in a world where energy policy is driven by evidence and reason, any risk of more violent weather in the future should have long since ruled out fragile weather vulnerable systems like solar.
New York State’s fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31, and thus there is a mandate that the budget for each year must be approved before April Fool’s Day. This year they blew right by that deadline. But today, 8+ weeks late, it appears that a new budget has been enacted for what they call “fiscal year” 2027, that is, April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027.
New York State’s fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31, and thus there is a mandate that the budget for each year must be approved before April Fool’s Day. This year they blew right by that deadline. But today, 8+ weeks late, it appears that a new budget has been enacted for what they call “fiscal year” 2027, that is, April 1, 2026, to March 31, 2027.
Among several contentious issues that held up enactment of this year’s budget, probably the most contentious involved the provisions relating to energy and “climate.” Our climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (CLCPA) had imposed absurd deadlines for eliminating fossil fuels from the energy system. Seven years in, Kathy Hochul, our lightweight Governor, had finally mustered just enough brain cells to recognize that disaster was approaching. But she faces big legislative majorities of her own Democratic Party committed to “climate action.” And of the members constituting those majorities, most are not moderates open to pragmatism, but rather progressive activists committed to total climate purity. How to get out of this trap?
Hochul adopted a strategy of seeking minimum possible modifications of of the CLCPA, affecting only the most immediate impending deadlines of the Act. The apparent goal is to provide a couple of years of breathing room, sufficient (they hope) to get Hochul safely re-elected later this year.
But then what? It looks like they have traded a very brief reprieve for what will very likely be an even worse subsequent disaster.
First, let’s review the problematical CLCPA provisions. The CLCPA had three near-term deadlines that had become obviously impossible. Those were: (1) a 2024 deadline for promulgating regulations, particularly for what they called a “cap and invest” program, to implement the Act; (2) a 2030 deadline to reduce statewide “greenhouse gas” emissions by 40% from 1990 levels; and (3) a 2030 deadline to get 70% of electricity from “renewables.”
So where was the State with respect to these CLCPA statutory mandates?
The State had completely blown off the 2024 deadline for the “cap and invest” regs. As a result, environmental groups had sued, and a state court had ordered that the State issue the regulations as required, as painful as that may be. However, the judge had stayed his injunction in order to give the legislature time to act.
As to the mandate of 40% reduction of GHG emissions from 1990 levels by 2030, the State “Climate Act Dashboard” admits that the reduction so far has been only 14% (data only through 2023, but not much has changed since). Most of that has been a consequence of switching power plants from burning coal to natural gas. There are no more coal power plants to switch. The prospect of major further reductions in GHG emissions between now and 2030 is nil.
As to renewable electricity generation, the Climate Act Dashboard states that 32% of the goal of 70% or electricity from renewables has been achieved, and another 30% of the goal is supposedly “in the pipeline.” Most of the 32% already achieved consists of Niagara Falls, which existed way before the CLCPA came along in 2019. They don’t give details of what the “in the pipeline” projects are, or of whether they are anything more than pipe dreams. They clearly will get nowhere close to the supposedly mandatory “70% of electricity from renewables” goal by 2030.
The 2024 deadline for promulgating “cap and trade” regulations gets moved from 2024 to 2028.
The mandate for 40% reduction in GHG emissions in 2030 is eliminated. In its stead, we get non-binding target of a 60% reduction in GHG emissions by 2040.
From what I can tell, the “70% of electricity from renewables” mandate remains in place.
Comments:
(1) The “cap and trade” regulations will be no more feasible in 2028 than they are today. The only difference will be that Hochul will not be up for re-election that year. They will have two options, which will be to blow off the deadline as they did the last time, or extend it again.
(2) The idea that GHG emissions will be reduced 60% by 2040 is even more absurd than the prior idea that emissions would be reduced 40% by 2030. Given that it is no longer a mandate, and has been moved from four years out to fourteen, nobody will even bother to pay attention to this one for at least a decade.
(3) The “70% of electricity from renewables by 2030” mandate will be missed by a mile. But there is no one to hold accountable. Utilities? They are not in the business of generating the power any more. The people who do generate the power are independent operators who run one or a few power plants or wind farms or whatever, but have no responsibility for the overall generation mix. The people who are supposedly responsible for the generation mix are an alphabet soup of brainless state agencies (NYSERDA, NYISO, CAC, etc.) with no skin in the game. The whole idea of holding such bureaucracies accountable is antithetical to their very nature.
But meanwhile, as time will continue its march, New York’s energy situation will continue to worsen:
The provisions of the CLCPA and New York’s environmental laws that currently make it impossible to build new natural gas power plants, or repower old ones to new technology, will remain in place. The natural gas fleet will continue to age, and some plants will retire.
The termination of federal subsidies plus restrictions on offshore wind mean that little wind or solar generation will be built either.
New York City’s Local Law 97, mandating conversion to electric heat for most large buildings, remains in place. Where is the electricity going to come from? Nobody knows.
And then there is RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. New York is a member, along with all the other states along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Virginia (except Pennsylvania). There are limited allowances for GHG emissions from power plants, and the amount of those allowances is scheduled to decrease by approximately 10% per year every year through 2033. The very idea is to force many of the natural gas power plants to close, and to force the price of electricity from the remaining ones to skyrocket. As of now this remains in place. If you think this scheme is so ridiculous that no state could possibly be part of it, remember that Virginia just re-joined a couple of months ago.
Here is some related advice from the State of New York: if you should ever find yourself in a car hurtling toward a brick wall at 100 mph, your best strategy is to close your eyes and pretend it is not happening.
If it is any consolation, the Greenberg Traurig summary of the CLCPA amendments reports that another change in the statute is that the percent of “benefits” of the Act directed to “disadvantaged communities” is to go from 40% to 45%. So at least there’s that.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus article “Something ‘unprecedented’ is now happening to Earth’s rotation, scientists say” claims that climate change is causing an “unprecedented” slowing of Earth’s rotation by 1.33 milliseconds per century, something not seen in 3.6 million years. This is false. The data show that millisecond-scale variations in Earth’s length of day are routine, naturally occurring, and both technologically and biologically insignificant.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus article “Something ‘unprecedented’ is now happening to Earth’s rotation, scientists say” claims that climate change is causing an “unprecedented” slowing of Earth’s rotation by 1.33 milliseconds per century, something not seen in 3.6 million years. This is false. The data show that millisecond-scale variations in Earth’s length of day are routine, naturally occurring, and both technologically and biologically insignificant.
The BBC sensationalizes the issue as something extraordinary, stating that today’s rate of change is “unequivocally” unlike anything in millions of years. But Earth’s rotation has never been constant. As explained in the Climate Realismrebuttal to Euronews on the same topic, seasonal atmospheric mass redistribution alone produces annual variations of 0.5 to 1 millisecond. Interannual ENSO shifts add another ±0.3 to 0.5 milliseconds. Decadal core-mantle coupling produces swings of 3 to 4 milliseconds. These are measured, observed phenomena, not model projections.
In that context, 1.33 milliseconds per century is not planetary destabilization. It is background noise, certainly nothing that would be noticed by even the most sensitive ecosystem or living being.
The BBC emphasizes that melting ice shifts mass toward the equator, comparing it to a spinning skater extending their arms. That physics analogy is correct in principle. What is incorrect is the implication that this is some new geophysical regime. Earth’s length of day has fluctuated throughout recorded history due to tidal friction from the Moon, atmospheric angular momentum exchange, ocean circulation, and core dynamics. The long-term tidal braking trend alone is about +1.7 to +1.8 milliseconds per century based on 2,500 years of eclipse records, a rate comparable to or larger than the BBC’s headline number.
Even more inconvenient for the narrative is the recent acceleration of Earth’s rotation. As noted in the Climate Realism piece, June 29, 2022 was the shortest day ever recorded in the atomic timekeeping era, about 1.59 milliseconds shorter than 86,400 seconds. If climate change were producing a simple, monotonic slowdown, we would not be seeing record-setting shorter days in the same decade.
The BBC also attempts to inflate the significance of the change by invoking dramatic metaphors. One researcher is quoted comparing the energy involved to a catastrophic earthquake, saying: “The change in the Earth’s rotational energy is equivalent to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.” This is nothing but irresponsible doom mongering. The comparison is not about destructive force, as the article admits, but about abstract energy equivalence. It is an analogy designed to impress, not to inform. No cities are shaking. No ecosystems are collapsing. No lifeform on Earth can feel a thousandth of a second difference.
Let’s put the number in perspective. One millisecond is 0.001 seconds. A 1.33 millisecond change represents approximately 0.000015 percent of a 24-hour day. Human circadian rhythms are tuned to roughly 24 hours, not to thousandths of a second. There is no plausible biological mechanism by which such a tiny change could affect human health, animal behavior, or plant life. It is physiologically undetectable. Even if the rate of change were accurate, consistent, and sustained, it would take approximately 75,188 years for the day to lengthen by exactly one full second.
Technologically, the “crisis” BBC claims is even more absurd. Modern systems already handle irregular rotation through leap seconds. Since 1972, 27 leap seconds have been added to Coordinated Universal Time to synchronize atomic clocks with Earth’s spin. Discussions are underway about possibly implementing a negative leap second because of recent acceleration. GPS, spacecraft navigation, financial trading platforms, and astronomical observatories continuously ingest Earth orientation parameters from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and adjust automatically. They already deal with corrections far larger than 1 millisecond.
Society adjusts clocks by one hour every year for daylight saving time in many regions. That is 3.6 million times larger than the 1.33 millisecond change being described. Leap years add a full day. Compared to those routine adjustments, this isn’t even a rounding error.
The BBC article goes further, suggesting that by 2100 climate change could outpace even the Moon’s gravitational influence on day length. That projection is model-dependent and scenario-driven. It assumes the now discredited and removed RCP8.5 high-emissions pathways and continued ice loss at rates embedded in climate models. It is not an observed reality. It is a modeled extrapolation.
And even if that projection were accurate, we are still talking about millisecond-scale shifts. The practical consequences remain limited to timekeeping adjustments that modern civilization already manages with ease. There is no crisis as the infinitesimal change in the Earth’s rotation has and can have no plausible impact on ecosystems or living beings.
Can you spot the millisecond shift in Earth’s rotation seen below?
Figure: DSCOVR EPIC – Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera 20 images taken by the NASA probe showing the Earth spin at 23.4 degrees of tilt.
The most telling line in the BBC piece is the assertion that “human influence on the Earth system has become so profound that we are now changing the very way our Earth spins.” That statement is designed to provoke awe and alarm. It is also technically trivial. Humans also change Earth’s mass distribution through groundwater extraction, reservoir construction, mining, and urbanization. These processes are measurable, they are not existential.
In the end, the BBC’s hyped 1.33 millisecond per century change to the Earth’s length of rotation, even if true, represents trivial geophysical adjustment. One that is not biologically meaningful, technologically disruptive, and not outside the envelope of natural variability observed over decades and centuries.
Framing a millisecond-scale variation as “unprecedented” planetary destabilization represents a a textbook example of taking a measurable but trivial geophysical adjustment and inflating it into a symbolic crisis. It is a giant nothingburger. An attempt to scare people with a story that is not scary in the least.
Australia is supposed to be going hell for leather to install renewables in order to pretend it has a chance of making Labor’s 82% reduction in emissions target by 2030. Instead investors are running away:
National flag of Australia from thick colored smoke on a black isolated background
Australia is supposed to be going hell for leather to install renewables in order to pretend it has a chance of making Labor’s 82% reduction in emissions target by 2030. Instead investors are running away:
Mike Foley and Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald
Investment in renewable projects collapsed by 50 per cent over the past year, wiping out $4 billion in spending on the rollout, compromising the Albanese government’s clean energy targets and spurring industry warnings that the delays could raise electricity bills.
It’s always a critical juncture for renewables isn’t it? It’s like that for things that serve no useful purpose and levitate on subsidies. Investors must bet on which way the political wind will blow, and last year, after the Trump win, renewable energy took a hit.
Financial commitments for new renewable generation projects fell to a 10-year low in 2025 of $4.4 billion, half the value of projects that reached financial close in 2024, according to the Clean Energy Council’s annual report, published on Tuesday.
Investors are fleeing because of all the usual reasons not to invest — there’s a glut of solar power at noon that curtails every kind of generator and makes prices so low they go negative. Manufacturing and transportation costs are lifting off. Added to that, all the new areas for wind and solar plants have no transmission lines built to them yet, and the farmers hate the proposed high voltage lines. Community resistance is organized and growing. Around the world skeptical governments are winning elections and the golden subsidy deals might vanish any day now.
Cue the next crazy plan where our Energy Minister thinks data centers will rescue his ludicrous target:
By Perry Williams and Elizabeth Pike, The Australian
Energy Minister Chris Bowen has bet that Australia’s booming data-centre industry can reverse the slower-than-expected rollout of wind farms amid fears a slump in financing projects will result in Labor failing to hit its 2030 renewables target.
Data centres could help wind farm projects get off the ground as part of a proposed edict for operators to underwrite new renewable power supply and pay their full share of new grid connectivity, so costs are not passed on to consumers or businesses.
As if AI data centres would want to jump through all those Australian hoops and regressive taxes to make it happen here, when they can set up in the US where electricity is half the price?
The kind of dumb datacenters that serve up Netflix need to be near their customers because the lag times matter, but AI datacenters don’t because no one cares if their answer comes 500 milliseconds later. Australia could have been a master hub of AI development for the world if we wanted to burn our coal, gas, or uranium, instead, we pray to the Eco-Lords to attract datacentres for gaming or watching reruns of the Hunger Games so they might install a few more industrial wind parks, kill off some excess koalas, and cool us by zero degrees by 2100.
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