This is exciting news but the term power here should really be replaced with electricity which is clarified early on in the article.
Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)
Global solar PV deployment is approaching 1TW/year. All energy will be clean energy in the next 1-2 decades. Vehicles will electrify, as will heating. Roughly half of marine traffic disappears if you're not shipping fossil fuels around.
> Investors have piled into climate-friendly assets this year despite policy and regulatory rollbacks in the US and Europe, as artificial intelligence drives a boom in energy infrastructure demand. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, with Asia-Pacific companies and government-linked issuers raising $261 billion from green debt. Green investments are increasingly becoming viewed as core infrastructure and industrial plays, with clearer policy signals and an expected increase in global electricity demand lifting investor optimism. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s as stock market gauges for renewables are set for their first annual gains since 2020, outperforming the S&P 500 by a wide margin, while shares of power-grid technology companies remain in favor.
> Annual energy transition investment surpassed $2 trillion for the first time in 2024, more than double the rate in 2020, according to research by BloombergNEF examining the deployment of net zero-aligned technologies and infrastructure.
And yet, people in my home state are passionate about coal, as is the current clown-in-chief.
I do not believe that economics will win in 10-20 years if the U.S. government continues its current path, at least not to the "100% clean energy" level.
No new coal plants will be built in the US, it is only how long the existing ones will run for. The longer they run, the more expensive it costs to maintain them, continually tilting the economics against them. As more coal generators go offline, coal demand declines, and as that happens, mines will go offline as the demand drops below thresholds that will support the economics of continued operations. This is a form of "death spiral."
"This too shall pass." Existing coal will retire eventually. Let them be passionate if they wish, as comfort, but the outcome will not change. This administration has an expiration date.
> In response, the Trump administration has recently invoked legislation designed for wartime emergencies to force a number of uneconomic coal plants to remain open.
> Despite Trump’s efforts, clean energy made up 96% of the new electricity generation capacity added to the US grid in 2025. None of the new capacity came from coal power.
This is true but also distorting because it's not an Apples-to-Apples comparison. Electricity is not only much more flexible it's also much more efficient when it's an option.
The internal combustion engine is not a very efficient way to convert fuel into movement, its key benefit was that it is compact enough to put inside the vehicle itself. A steam train was more efficient, and steam boats were more efficient still, but those are both enormous so it was seen as a more reasonable option for these vehicles. So an EV transition actually doesn't mean that much more electrical generation compared to much less fossil fuel production.
All true, but also remember that in a zero-fossil world the supply chain for solar/wind also needs to be decarbonized, which involves things like making green steel, which is not such a favorable efficiency story (the way to overcome it is simply to generate massive amounts of electricity cheap enough that you can eat the inefficiency).
I expect that a zero-fossil world does a lot more steel recycling. Today steel is insanely cheap. Not so very long ago steel was this wonder metal, too expensive to mass produce, and today the pennies most people don't want as change when buying things here have steel inside because no other metal would be cheap enough given the value of the coins. They're jacketed because people expect them to look like tarnished copper (they were once bronze coins), but copper is expensive compared to steel now so it's just a jacket around a steel core.
If steel went back to say, twice the price of bronze, I think recycling makes a lot more sense and that means far less need for new steel production.
Steel is cheap for two reasons: unaccounted externalities of the use of coal in the process, and massive scale. Coal-free steel is possible, but we don’t currently do it at scale, so there is work to do.
Recycling will make sense if steel becomes much more expensive, but a future with really expensive steel is not what we should be aiming for.
The issue holding back steel recycling is contamination, most notably with copper. This forces recycled steel to be "downcycled" into lower value uses like rebar, or the recycled metal to be diluted with freshly reduced metal. A means to remove copper from molten steel is needed; there are some ideas for this being pursued.
The externalities for burning coal to make steel aren't acceptable though, we would need the mythical high performance carbon capture solutions and those aren't materialising, everybody who promised more efficient solar did what they promised, bigger wind turbines, as promised, more compact storage, as promised - but the carbon capture is MIA.
We need steel for a million and one things that make modernity possible, but in the context of renewable energy, we particularly need it to build the towers that the largest and most efficient wind turbines sit on.
Important to consider that your stat is likely comparing primary energy, not secondary energy. E.g. an electric car or a heat pump use less primary energy than the fossil equivalent.
no. if you work in the industry you'll know power/electricity are used interchangeably, and energy is treated as the superset. in the physics sense, you're right.
If you don't look at electricity generation, yes. If you look at grid generators, that fraction can get as low as 1/3. (But then, it can get higher than 3/4 on transportation.)
So it really depends on who is counting and how. I do think transportation and heating use more energy than the grid, but I was never able to get a definitive number. (My best guess is it's close to 2 times larger.)
Also, electricity to transportation conversion is usually only around 80% efficient. Making electricity portable has a cost.
I generally think this is a poor take although it mostly hinges in my opinion on whether the answer you're giving them is correct or not.
There's plenty of people who probably remember the "Let me Google That For You". This is a combination of people being rude about giving others answers mixed with some people not spending enough time figuring out the answer themselves (sometimes with just a simple google search).
I've seen plenty of people ask questions that LLMs when given the right context and prompting are able to answer. Providing them the correct answer in any way (via search, via an LLM, or via your own human expertise) is valid. Its certainly annoying if a person is giving you poor answers because the answers come from an AI. And I'd definitely take that to heart and likely ask them fewer questions in the future. But similarly if someone kept coming to me with questions that can be easily answered by AI I'd tell them to spend some more time investigating on their own.
When you are investor and broadly choose to buy US companies (which is what most people do), you get Tesla in the list (e.g. QQQ) as part of the package, and this pushes price higher, no matter if you believe in Tesla specifically or not.
In addition, existing investors are very very deep into Tesla now, and don't want to lose.
The sandcastle is quite fragile so one of the best strategy for everyone (funds and Musk) is to keep buying more, no matter if the news are bad or not. It works, until other people disagree with you, but so far, nobody is interested into losing that game.
> When you are investor and broadly choose to buy US companies (which is what most people do), you get Tesla in the list (e.g. QQQ) as part of the package, and this pushes price higher, no matter if you believe in Tesla specifically or not.
I actually short Tesla just enough to offset my long positions that come as part of my regular ETFs.
> Can you share more specifics on how you go about doing that?
I buy multi-year put options, there's some fuzziness around the appropriate strike price and number of options for a given long position, but effectively I'm paying the option premium to limit my downside risk.
> Do you do that for your long non-ETF positions too?
At the risk of exposing my obvious naivety, my guess is that TSLA is a proxy purchase for many people for SpaceX. I won't be surprised if SpaceX becoming public causes TSLA to tank.
Or maybe it's all because of index funds. What bothers me most about that is that if TSLA tanks, so does a big chunk of the S&P 500 and therefore my 401(k). Hrmph.
I suspect you may be right. My guess is that Telsa will be bought out by SpaceX so they can cover up loses from various parts of the company, namely X and xAI.
Like security backed bonds but on a company scale.
With SpaceX having loads of government contracts, they become more immune to failure via odds of a bailout.
People expected something like that to happen, so only the few most naive people waited for the news to sell. As a result, people that would sell because of that sold already.
On the other hand, after those few people sell, the stock won't fall anymore, so the people that were waiting for it to stop falling before they buy make their move.
That's very common, but not reliable for you to make a profit on it. And anyway, those short-term changes are mostly meaningless.
I think there's a difference between a single individual causing another harm and a product which also provides massive benefits causing harm.
It seems similar to Waymo which has a fairly consistent track record of improved safety over human drivers. If it ever causes a fatality in the future I'm not sure it would be a fair comparison to say we should ban it even though I'd want to be fairly harsh for a single individual causing a fatality.
We should work to improve these products to minimize harm along with investigating to understand how widespread the harm is, but immediately jumping to banning might also be causing more harm than good.
The earth isn't a person. I think it seems valid to consider the harm and or benefits being caused on a per person basis. Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
I don't find this too surprising. The study itself was primarily just testing a students ability to identify syntax and remember what various functions do. I wouldn't expect math proficiency to help much in this area vs I would very much expect language to.
It'd be interesting to see correlations (language brain vs math brain) for how easy or hard it is for people to solve new problems with language after they already know the basics.
Congress and the Supreme Court already decided they wanted the law enforced. It's up to the executive branch to enforce it and if they decide not to there isn't much the others can do.
There are certainly things that can be done, but the executive can of course escalate their disobedience. If this ends up in court (though I'm not sure who has standing to sue), the courts could order the executive branch to enforce the law. If they don't comply, the courts can find specific people responsible for enforcing the law in contempt of court, and jail them. Of course, they need some appropriate law enforcement agency to arrest them, and there may not be one with jurisdiction that is willing to go against Trump.
Ultimately Congress can impeach and convict Trump and Vance if their shenanigans go too far for even their tastes, but I doubt that will ever happen. (And even then, we'll get Mike Johnson as president, which is not really an improvement.)
Other advanced tactics involve giving a broad clue that matches 3-4 of your own and just one other (either your opponents or a civilian). Your team can pick up all the matches across several turns and the one off doesn't hurt as much as the plus four helps
The S-tier tactic: When that high-number clue is cut short by a turn-ending mistake, the guessers tell their clue giver to inflate the number given during the totally unrelated next clue by however many remained from the truncated turn for which they don't need additional information to locate (and therefore it would be wasteful for a future clue to re-group those) so the stated number of that next clue must allow for its own cards plus the prior cards.
Example: The clue is "places 4" and the guessers choose 1 correctly and then 1 wrong answer, but they had achieved consensus about 2 others (and are confused about only the remaining 1). So the turns ends but they inform the clue giver to inflate by 2 next turn. That clue giver (after the other team goes) will then say the clue is "people 5" and the guessers will know that they shall select 2 places and 3 people.
I don't think this sort of communication from guessers to clue giver is in the spirit of the game (at least in my play group). However, inflating later clues is a reasonable approach! It's just that I don't think you're allowed to communicate the amount of inflation. Guessers must determine whether people 5 has slack to allow additional guesses on previous clues.
You're free to add additional prohibitions on communication as a house rule I guess, but the only prohibition in the rule book I've seen is that the clue giver's speech must consist exclusively of clues (and private consultation with the other clue giver). The clue giver is free to adjust their clue in reaction to anything they hear, and guessers can speak freely.
Important: the clue giver cannot acknowledge the instruction during gameplay. That would certainly extend beyond giving a clue! The guessers must know that their clue giver can play this way prior to the game commencing.
Edit: I just consulted the rules and this is the most relevant section:
> If you are a field operative, you should focus on the table when you are making your guesses. Do not make eye contact with the spymaster while you are guessing. This will help you avoid nonverbal cues.
> When your information is strictly limited to what can be conveyed with one word and one number, you are playing in the spirit of the game.
The author's use of the pronoun "you/your" switches from field ops in that first paragraph to spymasters in that second paragraph, confusingly. With that in mind, it boils down to this: field ops cannot seek non-clue information from spymasters, and spymasters cannot convey non-clue information. The strategy I'm suggesting involves neither!
If you take this idea of communication restrictions to the limit, you could imagine the guessers identifying N sets of cards by a single word each as they discuss their guess. The clue giver listens, then uses the clue that identifies the correct set of N cards.
You really just need an algorithm to generate unique sets of 8 or 9 from the whole board, and identifies those sets by a word.
Yeah it's interesting to take these ideas to the extreme... even at the lower end I don't like it, I think zero communication outside of clues is the best way to follow the spirit of the game. But a little bit of banter and "kibitzing" is what makes it fun too.
I played in a Codenames tournament at CGE's stand at GenCon, and they forbid guessers from communicating at all. Officially, its supposed to be just the clue and number and nothing else.
The communication is only necessary/important if people haven't set this as a convention in the first place. I'll say that prior to ever looking at my clues: "I will give you higher numbers than what I said if you miss by more than 1. THe number I pick will always be high enough as to allow you to, with the +1 guess you get for free, make guesses on all the words I was hinting at.
There's also all kinds of not necessarily intended communicaton from the guessers in the fact that you can listen to which words they were considering and didn't pick. Nothing in the game attempt to say that you should not consider, say, whether they were going in the right or wrong direction in their guessing, but it sure can make a difference in how to approach later clues. If they were being very wrong, there might be a need to double up on words that you intended, and that your guessers missed.
In the same fashion, nothing in the game saying that I cannot listen to those guesses as a member of the other team, whether guesser or spymaster, and then change behaviors to make sure we don't hit words they considered as candidate words without very good reasons. Let them double dip on mistakes, or not make their difficult decisions easier. It's not as if the game demands that everyone that isn't currenly guessing should wear headphones to be sure they disregard what the other team says or does.
You can of course play however you want (and I certainly think this is clever), but imo this is likely against the spirit, and perhaps letter, of the rules.
The rule on giving clues is:
"If you are the spymaster, you are trying to think of a one-word clue that relates to some of the words
your team is trying to guess. When you think you have a good clue, you say it. You also say one
number, which tells your teammates how many codenames are related to your clue." (emphasis mine).
The rule states that the number should be the number of words related to the clue. There is later provisions allowing you to use zero and infinity, but outside of these carve-outs (and imo the "allowed" language is telling here, since it implies any other number not equal to the number of words is not allowed) I don't think this is legal.
We always allow any number when we play, because part of the thinking is we cannot be sure what the spy master has in mind. Of course, the number is related to the clue but possibly also to the game history up to that point. The teammates and opponents might interpret it wrong, and that’s OK. Infinity is typically used when there is enough info in principle to finish the game and a high risk if you dont; zero is super rare. We do tend to have very aggressive bids with tenuous connections, and 4 or 5 for a clue word are used in most games. Often, they don’t all work out in a single round, but on some lucky boards or in spousal teams, they occasionally work well.
You have a valid point, to which I'll concede. The rule book gives an example (spanning pages 4-5) where a guesser uses prior clues to select a card while the count is still within the number stated by the spymaster, but I suppose an allowance for guessers to deviate in this way does not also imply that spymasters may deviate in this way. Mea culpa!
Taking this a step further, given that it's well-known that a clue is deemed invalid when it pertains to cards in certain non-definitional ways (sounds-like, number of letters, etc.), it seems extremely reasonable to call a clue followed by N invalid if it doesn't pertain to N cards in a definitional way.
Yeah, in fact we tend to play without a limit on the number of guesses, just to avoid this sort of loophole. In variants like Codenames Duet I think there's also no limit on the number of guesses.
Another thing the guessers can do if unsure about one of the tiles from the last round, is to tell the clue giver which tile they think it was. The clue giver then tries to give a clue that either tenuously links to it or clearly excludes it. That can give the clue more scope for linking to several other words. It risks giving information to the other team though so is more of an final turn play.
Glad to hear you were able to find a mechanism that clicked and stuck with it after that! The concept of learning styles for individuals though is a common myth
There isn't any evidence that individuals learn best to a single style and generally approaching learning from multiple facets is the best way for everyone to learn!
Thankyou, I'll be interested to understand more about what the latest thinking around this is.
I've always assumed some people are better suited to learning one way, while other another way. I've never been good at absorbing information or understanding (which I'd differentiate from knowing, rightly or wrongly) through reading, while I know many others who can easily do this.
Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)
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