relianceschool

The American prairie was so vast, so alien, it shattered comprehension.

Newcomers to the seemingly endless grasslands that once spanned approximately a quarter of North America often hit a psychic wall, descending into fits of mania. Prairie madness, as the phenomenon came to be known, was recorded by the journalist E.V. Smalley in 1893 after a decade of observing life on the frontier: “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new Prairie States among farmers and their wives.”

America’s treeless, isolated expanse put early European settlers to the test. Drought, loneliness, and debt drove many to failure, forcing the homesteaders to retreat East.

But those who stayed unwittingly launched one of history’s largest terraforming projects, rewiring the land, the climate, and the future of the continent.

In Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, longtime Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty trace this staggering transformation.“ The Europeans who colonized North America in the 19th century transformed the continent’s hydrology as thoroughly as the glaciers,” they write. “But, remarkably, they did it in less than 100 years instead of tens of thousands.”

In putting hundreds of millions of acres of prairie to the plow, settlers not only forcibly displaced Indigenous nations, but completely altered the region’s ancient carbon and nitrogen cycles. They also turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse. The deep black soil once prevalent in the Midwest — the result of thousands of years of animal and plant decomposition depositing untold carbon stores into the ground — became the foundation of the modern food system. But the undoing of the American prairie also dismantled one of the Earth’s most effective climate defenses.

Lorries thunder over the A14 bridge north of Cambridge, above steep roadside embankments covered in plastic shrouds containing the desiccated remains of trees.

The new 21-mile road between Cambridge and Huntingdon cost £1.5bn and was opened in 2020 to fulfil a familiar political desire: growth. National Highways, the government-owned company that builds and maintains England’s A roads, promised that the biodiversity net gain from the construction project would be 11.5%; in other words, they pledged the natural environment would be left in a considerably better state after the road was built than before.

But five years on from the opening of the A14, the evidence is otherwise, and National Highways has admitted biodiversity and the environment have been left in a worse state as a result of the road project.

Empty plastic tree guards stretch for mile after mile along the new road, testament to the mass die-off of most of the 860,000 trees planted in mitigation for the impact of the road. Culverts dug as a safe route for animals such as newts and water voles are dried up and litter-strewn, while ponds designed to collect rainwater and provide a wildlife habitat are choked with mud and silt.

Edna Murphy and her colleague Ros Hathorn believe the failure of the environmental improvements created in mitigation for the A14 are a shocking example of how powerful developers make environmental pledges in order to gain planning permission, which are then not upheld. A slide presentation in 2022 to Murphy and Hathorn indicated 70% of the 860,000 trees originally planted had died.

From 2026, biodiversity net gain will be mandatory for big infrastructure such as the A14 road. But Becky Pullinger, head of land management for the Wildlife Trusts, said developers had to be held to account once the mandate came in, so that recreated habitats had a fighting chance of survival. A recent report showed that only a third of ecological enhancements promised by housebuilders were fulfilled.

Pullinger said the example of the A14 showed how important it was that harm to wildlife was avoided in the first place, reducing the need for compensation planting.

https://archive.ph/JgfLK

The melting of glaciers and ice caps by the climate crisis could unleash a barrage of explosive volcanic eruptions, a study suggests.

The loss of ice releases the pressure on underground magma chambers and makes eruptions more likely. This process has been seen in Iceland, an unusual island that sits on a mid-ocean tectonic plate boundary. But the research in Chile is one of the first studies to show a surge in volcanism on a continent in the past, after the last ice age ended.

Global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels is now melting ice caps and glaciers across the world. The biggest risk of a resurgence of volcanic eruptions is in west Antarctica, the researchers said, where at least 100 volcanoes lie under the thick ice. This ice is very likely to be lost in the coming decades and centuries as the world warms.

Volcanic eruptions can cool the planet temporarily by shooting sunlight-reflecting particles into the atmosphere. However, sustained eruptions would pump significant greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. This would further heat the planet and potentially create a vicious circle, in which rising temperatures melt ice that leads to further eruptions and more global heating.

https://archive.ph/I4CHs

The Trump administration’s proposed budget seeks to shut down the laboratory atop a peak in Hawaii where scientists have gathered the most conclusive evidence of human-caused climate change since the 1950s.

The president’s budget proposal would also defund many other climate labs, including instrument sites comprising the US government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network, which stretches from northern Alaska to the South Pole.

But it’s the Mauna Loa laboratory that is the most prominent target of the President Donald Trump’s climate ire, as measurements that began there in 1958 have steadily shown CO2’s upward march as human activities have emitted more and more of the planet-warming gas each year.

The curve produced by the Mauna Loa measurements is one of the most iconic charts in modern science, known as the Keeling Curve, after Charles David Keeling, who was the researcher who painstakingly collected the data. His son, Ralph Keeling, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, now oversees collecting and updating that data.

The proposal to shut down Mauna Loa had been made public previously but was spelled out in more detail on Monday when NOAA submitted a budget document to Congress. It made more clear that the Trump administration envisions eliminating all climate-related research work at NOAA, as had been proposed in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for overhauling the government.

It would do this in large part by cutting NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research entirely, including some labs that are also involved in improving weather forecasting.

https://archive.ph/caA1y

This analysis came out earlier this month, and it's the mother of all wake-up calls. Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" would appropriate $200 billion to ICE, which the Cato Institute has called an "unimaginable sum." Some relevant quotes:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill will direct an astounding $168 billion of the budget to immigration and border law enforcement, and there is even more for agencies that indirectly support immigration law enforcement.

The $168 billion is, by itself, an unimaginable sum. Without H.R. 1, Congress had already appropriated twice as much money to America’s border police as all other federal law enforcement combined. In FY 2025, immigration and border enforcement accounted for at least two-thirds of all federal law enforcement.

In FY 2025—again, before H.R. 1—Congress allocated nearly $34 billion to immigration and border enforcement agencies. That’s 36 times more than what is provided for tax and financial crimes enforcement (IRS-Treasury), 21 times more than funding for firearms enforcement (ATF), 13 times more than drug enforcement (DEA), and 8 times more than the FBI budget to enforce effectively everything else. The level of border police spending is already so extreme that it has swamped nearly all other criminal law enforcement priorities for the federal government.

The House plans to distort this wildly out-of-whack law enforcement system beyond recognition. H.R. 1 appropriates $168 billion to agencies whose primary purpose is immigration enforcement. It adds $1.2 billion to all other law enforcement for the Secret Service. This sum comes on top of the $33 billion, meaning that if this bill passes, about $200 billion will be made available for immigration enforcement starting in FY 2025.

$200 billion dollars is equivalent to 1/5th of our entire military budget ($960 billion). It's more than Russia's entire military spending in 2024 ($149 billion). To say that Trump would be creating a 7th branch of the military operating on US soil would be neither an overstatement nor a conspiracy theory.

For context, this article was published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank originally founded by Charles Koch (among others). The fact that these guys are ringing the alarm bell should be a warning unto itself. You can read the full text of the bill (H.R. 1) here.

https://archive.ph/pfuB6

Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden agreed late in 2024 that artificial intelligence (AI) should never be empowered to decide to launch a nuclear war. The groundwork for this excellent policy decision was laid over five years of discussions at the Track II U.S.-China Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence and National Security convened by the Brookings Institution and Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy.

By examining several cases from the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, one can see what might have happened if AI had existed back in that period and been trusted with the job of deciding to launch nuclear weapons or to preempt an anticipated nuclear attack—and had been wrong in its decisionmaking. Given the prevailing ideas, doctrines, and procedures of the day, an AI system “trained” on that information (perhaps through the use of many imaginary scenarios that reflected the current conventional wisdom) might have decided to launch nuclear weapons, with catastrophic results.

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

https://archive.ph/Fapar

When it rains in Newton, Massachusetts, water rushes off roads, down asphalt gullies, and into Cheesecake Brook – a small stream that was converted many years ago into a narrow channel lined with masonry walls.

During downpours, more water is shunted to the brook than it can hold. Max Rome is with the nonprofit Charles River Watershed Association: “Basically, what we’ve designed is a system that is almost perfectly set up to create flooding.” As climate change causes heavier downpours, the brook is more likely to flood nearby roads and yards. So Rome’s group is working with the city of Newton to restore a section of the brook and reduce those risks.

Instead of sending stormwater to the brook, they’re diverting it into underground tanks. The stormwater will then be able to slowly trickle out of the gravel-lined tanks and into the ground. They’re also planting native vegetation along its banks that will help slow and filter runoff.

Rome: “There’s going to be a lot of really beautiful plants, a lot of flowering, interesting species that are going to be attracting pollinators, attracting birds.”

On a walk near his house, with views of the ocean, Mark Ellis speaks with urgency about how the utility business—the industry that long employed him—is harming the public with unsustainable rate increases.

He keeps coming back to the same point: The complexity of utility regulation is obscuring a transfer of wealth from the general public to shareholders on a vast scale.

He’s far from the first person to say this. But he’s getting attention to a degree others haven’t, thanks to the clarity of his message and his status as a former utility insider. He’s in the early stages of becoming an activist.

Ellis’ adversaries should know what they’re up against. He is a financial analyst, with degrees from Harvard and MIT, and he is a wrestler, with experience on the mat as recently as two years ago, when he was competing in his age division in national tournaments.

“I don’t like bullies,” he said. “I feel like there’s a lot of bullying going on with utilities. People need to stand up to the bully.”

U.S. households have seen their electricity prices increase by an average of 25 percent from 2020 to 2024, which exceeds the rate of inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration.

When electricity is unaffordable, the transition away from fossil fuels becomes expensive to the point that it stretches feasibility; ideas such as electrifying home heating and using electricity to power vehicles make less sense in purely financial terms.

Despite universal opposition by the dozens of residents present at the meeting, commissioners voted to recommend changes to the city’s zoning laws to allow data centers in areas zoned for light industrial use and to rezone a 700-acre property from agricultural to light industrial to accommodate the construction of a hyperscale data center.

Now, one of the largest proposed data centers in the country is one step closer to construction. “This was only a damn formality,” resident Ron Morgan yelled out after the measures passed. “Y’all have already made up your minds.”

At full buildout, the proposed data center would lead to clear-cutting of more than 100 acres of forested land and have 18 server-farm buildings that would each be larger than the average Walmart Supercenter. Projections suggest the site would consume 10 times the energy used by all residences in nearby Birmingham and more than five times the entire state’s residential consumption of water.

Scientists have also said that the project’s construction and operation could put a newly discovered fish species—the Birmingham darter—at risk of extinction because of its potential impact on waterways. “This would nuke this creek,” Thomas Near, a Yale University biologist, has said of the project.

Resident after resident, each limited to three minutes, made their way to the podium in the packed chamber inside Bessemer City Hall on Tuesday evening to oppose both the zoning law change and the development plan itself. Only a representative of the developer, Logistic Land Investments LLC, and its law firm, Evans & Evans, spoke in favor of the plan, arguing that there would be virtually no impacts on residents or the environment.

After the meeting, the development representative, Brad Kaaber, initially refused to spell his name for a reporter. “I’d really rather you not use my name at all,” Kaaber said, though he soon relented.

The planning and zoning commission’s recommended approval will now be sent to Bessemer City Council, which will ultimately decide the fate of the $14.5 billion project.

Every few years, a Silicon Valley gig-economy company announces a “disruptive” innovation that looks a whole lot like a bus. Uber rolled out Smart Routes a decade ago, followed a short time later by the Lyft Shuttle of its biggest competitor. Even Elon Musk gave it a try in 2018 with the “urban loop system” that never quite materialized beyond the Vegas Strip. And does anyone remember Chariot?

Now it’s Uber’s turn again. The ride-hailing company recently announced Route Share, in which shuttles will travel dozens of fixed routes, with fixed stops, picking up passengers and dropping them off at fixed times. Amid the inevitable jokes about Silicon Valley once again discovering buses are serious questions about what this will mean for struggling transit systems, air quality, and congestion.

Five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report that found ride-share services emit 69 percent mo

re planet-warming carbon dioxide and other pollutants than the trips they displace — largely because as many as 40 percent of the miles traveled by Uber and Lyft drivers are driven without a passenger, something called “deadheading.” That climate disadvantage decreases with pooled services like UberX Share — but it’s still not much greener than owning and driving a vehicle, the report noted, unless the car is electric.

Khosrowshahi insists Uber is “in competition with personal car ownership,” not public transportation. “Public transport is a teammate,” he told The Verge. But a study released last year by the University of California, Davis found that in three California cities, **over half of all ride-hailing trips didn’t replace personal cars, they replaced more sustainable modes of getting around, like walking, public transportation, and bicycling. **

https://archive.ph/xcnRy

At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, Americans see a host of economic issues – from inflation to the affordability of health care and the federal budget deficit – as top problems facing the country.

Over the past decade, a number of issues have been marked by deep partisan divides, with some of the issues that rank among the top concerns for one party ranking among the lowest for the other.

There is a 54-point gap in the share of Democrats (67%) and Republicans (13%) who rate climate change as a very big problem facing the nation, also similar to previous years. Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to see “the impact of natural disasters” as a very big problem, though the partisan gap on these views is more modest (54% of Democrats vs. 33% of Republicans).