This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a press conference to announce the signing of executive orders intended to shape American energy policy in favor of one particular source: coal, the most carbon-intense fossil fuel. "I call it beautiful, clean coal," President Trump said while flanked by a crowd of miners at the White House. "I tell my people never use the word coal unless you put'beautiful, clean' before it." Trump has talked about saving coal, and coal jobs, for as long as he's been in politics.

There are reasonable arguments to suggest that AI tools may eventually help reduce emissions, as the IEA report underscores. But what we know for sure is that they're driving up energy demand and emissions today--especially in the regional pockets where data centers are clustering. So far, these facilities, which generally run around the clock, are substantially powered through natural-gas turbines, which produce significant levels of planet-warming emissions. Electricity demands are rising so fast that developers are proposing to build new gas plants and convert retired coal plants to supply the buzzy industry. The other thing we know is that there are better, cleaner ways of powering these facilities already, including geothermal plants, nuclear reactors, hydroelectric power, and wind or solar projects coupled with significant amounts of battery storage. The trade-off is that these facilities may cost more to build or operate, or take longer to get up and running.

A handful of wealthy, politically connected Silicon Valley investors are reportedly eyeing Greenland's icy shores as the site for a techno-utopian "freedom city." That's according to a report from Reuters, which details a proposed effort to establish a new, libertarian-minded municipality characterized by minimal corporate regulation and a focus on accelerating emerging technologies like AI and mini nuclear reactors. Supporters of increased economic development in Greenland argue its frigid climate could naturally cool massive, energy intensive AI data centers. Large deposits of critical and rare earth minerals buried beneath the island's ice sheets could also potentially be used to manufacture consumer electronics. The so-called "start-up city"--which bears similarities to another ongoing venture in California's Solano County--reportedly already has the backing of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, President Donald Trump's pick for Denmark ambassador.

Lockin has stuffed pleny of clever ideas into this smart lock, but it feels like it's a few firmware updates away from something I'd trust to guard any of my entry doors. Lockin claims a history dating back to 2014--as well as the involvement of Hartmut Esslinger, best known as a key Apple Computer designer in the 1980s--but it wasn't until CES 2025 that the company really touched down with a major presence in the smart lock space. Though Esslinger has a reputation for minimalism, the new Lockin Veno 7 Pro really does come loaded with everything. It's a hub-free Wi-Fi lock with ANSI grade 2 and IP65 certifications that allows for access via a numeric touchpad, fingerprint reader, or palm vein scan--in addition to support for its mobile app and a physical key. A very wide-angle camera mounted on the front of the device also lets the unit work as a video doorbell, complete with a ring button that illuminates when someone comes near.

A pair of studies analyzing the effects of AI on our planet have been released and the news is fairly grim. Greenpeace studied the emissions generated from the production of the semiconductors used in AI chips and found that there was a fourfold increase in 2024. This analysis was completed using publicly available data. Many of the big chipmakers like NVIDIA rely on companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and SK Hynix Inc. for the components of GPUs and memory units. Most of this manufacturing happens in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, where power grids are primarily reliant on fossil fuels.

Black Mirror is more than science fiction – its stories about modernity have become akin to science folklore, shaping our collective view of technology and the future. Each new innovation gets an allegory: smartphones as tools for a new age caste system, robot dogs as overzealous human hunters, drones as a murderous swarm, artificial intelligence as new age necromancy, virtual reality and brain chips as seizure-inducing nightmares, to name a few. It is a must-watch, but must we take it so seriously? Black Mirror fails to consistently explore the duality of technology and our reactions to it. It is a critical deficit.

The global rush to AI technology will require almost as much energy by the end of this decade as Japan uses today, but only about half of the demand is likely to be met from renewable sources. Processing data, mainly for AI, will consume more electricity in the US alone by 2030 than manufacturing steel, cement, chemicals and all other energy-intensive goods combined, according to a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). AI will be the main driver of that increase, with demand from dedicated AI datacentres alone forecast to more than quadruple. One datacentre today consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, but some of those currently under construction will require 20 times more. But fears that the rapid adoption of AI will destroy hopes of tackling the climate crisis have been "overstated", according to the report, which was published on Thursday.

Power grid operation is becoming increasingly complex due to the rising integration of renewable energy sources and the need for more adaptive control strategies. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to power network control (PNC), offering the potential to enhance decision-making in dynamic and uncertain environments. The Learning To Run a Power Network (L2RPN) competitions have played a key role in accelerating research by providing standardized benchmarks and problem formulations, leading to rapid advancements in RL-based methods. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured overview of RL applications for power grid topology optimization, categorizing existing techniques, highlighting key design choices, and identifying gaps in current research. Additionally, we present a comparative numerical study evaluating the impact of commonly applied RL-based methods, offering insights into their practical effectiveness. By consolidating existing research and outlining open challenges, this survey aims to provide a foundation for future advancements in RL-driven power grid optimization.

We propose an innovative design for an all-optical Echo State Network (ESN), an advanced type of reservoir computer known for its universal computational capabilities. Our design enables fully optical implementation of arbitrary ESNs, featuring complete flexibility in optical matrix multiplication and nonlinear activation. Leveraging the nonlinear characteristics of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), the architecture efficiently realizes measurement-free operations crucial for reservoir computing. The approach significantly reduces computational overhead and energy consumption compared to traditional software-based methods. Comprehensive simulations validate the system's memory capacity, nonlinear processing strength, and polynomial algebra capabilities, showcasing performance comparable to software ESNs across key benchmark tasks. Our design establishes a feasible, scalable, and universally applicable framework for optical reservoir computing, suitable for diverse machine learning applications.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a press conference to announce the signing of executive orders intended to shape American energy policy in favor of one particular source: coal, the most carbon-intense fossil fuel. "I call it beautiful, clean coal," President Trump said while flanked by a crowd of miners at the White House. "I tell my people never use the word coal, unless you put'beautiful, clean' before it." Trump has talked about saving coal, and coal jobs, for as long as he's been in politics. This time, he's got a convenient vehicle for his policies: the growth of AI and data centers, which could potentially supercharge American energy demand over the coming years.