Some Like It Hothouse

PRESENTED BY EISVOGEL

Thanks to the rapid insertion of nearly two trillion tons of industrial greenhouse pollution into the atmosphere, the planet is heating faster than at any time in at least three million years. The risks of self-reinforcing feedbacks pushing “the climate system past a point of no return, committing the planet to substantially higher long-term temperatures, even if emissions are later reduced” are rising daily. In “the risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory,” Oregon State climate scientists William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, and Jillian W. Gregg, with European climate scientists Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Nico Wunderling, Thomas Westerhold, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber caution that “we may be approaching a perilous threshold, with rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.”

On Thursday, Our Dark Lord Donald Trump took decisive and blatantly illegal action to send humanity into the hothouse, reversing the U.S. government’s recognition that industrial greenhouse gases are pollutants. That endangerment finding was only made in 2009, after decades of delay at the behest of corporate polluters. A faint silver lining of this miasmic cloud is that the regime was forced to drop Fracking Secretary Chris Wright’s hackjob climate denier report down to an appendix to its ruling, which now hinges on the the Trumpist shift in the Supreme Court since its 2007 decision that compelled the endangerment finding.

“Praise be!” worshipped the anonymous Jeff Bezos puppets on the Washington Post editorial page.

Thursday’s climate demolition was a regime-wide affair. The National Science Foundation is rapidly stripping the National Center for Atmospheric Research for parts, announcing on Thursday that it is taking away NCAR’s supercomputer. And the Department of Energy announced its new AI-driven research Genesis mandate, including “Unleashing Subsurface Strategic Energy Assets,” a wild euphemism for fossil-fuel drilling (more on the fracking-AI acceleration below the eisvogel).

Also on Thursday, a mini-Trump judge quashed Carrboro, N.C.’s climate-harms suit against Duke Energy, claiming “many significant issues regarding climate change are not only the subject of complex scientific debate but also implicate political, economic, and moral choices made by governments and members of the public literally across the globe.”

Sure, the planet may get too hot and unstable for people, plants, and animals. But will it be too hot for data centers? That’s the question that would keep the billionaire Universal Paperclip cultists awake at night, if they weren’t too busy feeding ever more of human society into their fields of gas-powered silicon wood chippers and spewing garbage into our political system to ensure voters choose between AI-and-crypto-beholden Democrats or AI-and-crypto-beholden Republicans.

The Palantir-OpenAI-Marc Andreessen super PAC Leading the Future “announced recently that it and associated organizations had raised over $125 million in commitments and had over $70 million cash on hand at the start of this year.” It’s already dumped $500K on Laurie Buckhout in N.C.’s 1st and promised $5 million for the extremist Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) in his campaign to be Florida governor. On the Democratic side, it’s planning to back Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (Ill. 2nd) and former Rep. Melissa Bean (Ill. 8th) in their competitive primaries.

While the dark-money group Public First (and its GOP front group Defending Our Values) backed by the Anthropic effective-altruist cultists has better branding, claiming it’s backing “AI safety,” it’s looking to spend at least $75 million to prop up candidates including Trumpist Republicans like Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts.

In a recent interview, Anthropic CEO Dario “Wario” Amodei pledged to destroy civilization through annual 3x growth:

When’s that tripling gonna stop, Wario? Half of the world’s data centers are in the United States. If that ratio remains constant, then Wario is saying by 2029 Team Fracking Paperclip will be be using one-quarter of the country’s current electricity generation capacity. And in three or four more years his industry—which employs fewer people than a large retail chain—will be using more electricity than total current global generation.

In the long run? IN THE LONG RUN?¹

Wario’s Schismatrix-Accelerando vision isn’t just a threat to American democracy or human civilization; it is a threat to all life on earth. If we’re lucky, he and his fellow AGI worshippers will merely be leading the global economy into a Great Depression-scale crash.

These people make Bond villains look like sober bureaucrats.

Something I do love are the good folks who are fighting back, unafraid to fight for this planet and its people and against the brutal boxes of Big Oil and Bigger Silicon. Just this week, CA-32 candidate Chris Ahuja signed the Green New Deal pledge, and CO-AG candidate Jena Griswold signed the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge.

It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day.

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

1  And yes, if you’re wondering, Wario has read John Maynard Keynes.