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May 1, 2025
The Iberian Blackout
I’ve spent some time this week looking into the massive blackout that struck Spain and Portugal a few days ago, and today I share some of what I’ve learned. I start with a short primer on grid operations and follow that with some initial thoughts on the significance of the Iberian blackout. The Financial Times explains what…
April 30, 2025
Redrawing the Map: How Legal Decisions and Trade Policies Are Transforming Our Tech Ecosystem
The battle between national interests and technology’s inherently borderless nature is escalating, threatening to reshape the very technologies and services central to our daily lives. Global dynamics are redefining the tech ecosystem through regulatory shifts, trade policies, and legal rulings. As Europe cracks down on American tech companies and China races to challenge US dominance,…
April 29, 2025
Constructing Climate Catastrophism
Today kicks off a new series here at THB — Making Sense of Climate Scenarios. I have three motivations for this series: This series is an exercise in transparency, with a goal to open up discussion about what sorts of scenarios should sit at the center of climate science and policy. Sometime in the coming weeks…
April 29, 2025
Confining Government Power Over Editorial Decisions is Vital
How much authority and leeway should the government––specifically, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)––possess to decide whether news is accurate or distorted and, in turn, to punish broadcasters for the latter? If one starts from the eyes-wide-open dual premises that government officials sometimes act selfishly to serve their own interests (not necessarily those of the public)…
April 28, 2025
A World with Smart AI but Not Human-Level AI
How long, if ever, before we achieve artificial intelligence that can pretty much do everything that a human worker can do currently? My short-hand way of gauging the speculative timeline relies, at least partially, on prediction markets. And the most recent message from them suggests tempering expectations, at least a bit. For example: The current…
April 25, 2025
A NEPA Update from the White House
This past January, the White House issued Executive Order (EO) 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” which rescinded EO 11991 from May 1977. For nearly 50 years, EO 11991 served as a foundational document for national environmental law. It established the framework authorizing the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which developed regulations for federal agencies to implement…
April 23, 2025
The Digital Markets Act: A Security Risk for Encrypted Communications
A recent controversy involving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth presents a sobering, real-world example of the security risks posed by messaging platforms. Hegseth and other senior Trump administration officials discussed sensitive military plans over the unsecured Signal app—violating government security protocols. When The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to this group chat, sensitive operational…
April 23, 2025
The FCC’s Misguided Efforts to Police News Trump Disdains
Much is disturbing about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. For starters, he was deported to an El Salvador prison due to what one Republican US Senator recently called “a screw-up” by the Trump administration and what the federal government confessed in a March 31 court filing was “an administrative error.” More troubling, of course,…
April 22, 2025
America’s AI Future Needs Faster Permitting
The United States leads the world in artificial intelligence, but it’s not guaranteed to stay there. The bottleneck isn’t talent, ideas, or capital—it’s electricity. Electricity is the binding constraint for building and using hyperscale data centers, essential for training today’s advanced AI models. The Department of Energy projects that data center electricity demand will nearly…
April 21, 2025
Trump Comes for Climate Research
Last week Politico published a scoop related to climate research under the Trump Administration: The Trump administration is canceling funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the entity that produces the federal government’s signature climate change study, according to three federal officials familiar with the move. The move, which had been widely expected, is a potentially fatal…