ClimateChangeFork

 (Source: Grist, Amelia Bates)

Last week’s blog showed the continuing accelerated rise of average global temperature along with the continuing rise of global carbon emissions, in spite of the fact that the average carbon emissions of developing countries is starting to decrease. Many of us are now asking what the coming Trump administration’s response will be to this reality. Announcements of the leadership within the coming administration are almost complete, although the Senate’s advise and consent role in the process will start only after the new year. The NYT prognosis of the climate policies of the coming administration is summarized in the following article:

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s cabinet choices and key advisers run the gamut from people who acknowledge the threat of climate change to those who deny the scientific consensus that emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are dangerously heating the planet.

But virtually all support Mr. Trump’s plan to extract more oil and gas and erase environmental rules, which would exacerbate global warming. And some who once acknowledged the problem now downplay the danger.

The individual quotes of the candidates look like they have been cherry-picked to highlight confusion, but the general trend is apparent.

President-elect Trump’s current attitude on climate change is not much different from his 2016 attitude (see the March 14, 2017 blog). He withdrew from the Paris Agreement as soon as he could. The US rejoined the Agreement immediately after the Biden administration took over, four years later. In his recent election campaign, he promised again to withdraw from the Agreement as soon as possible. However, the Paris Agreement is now “history,” and reversing the US commitment to changing its energy sources away from fossil fuels will be much more complicated. The following publication describes the present role that renewable resources are playing and the rate at which their role is increasing in the US energy use:

During the first three quarters of 2024, renewables increased their output by almost 9% year-over-year, and solar is still leading the charge, reports the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Solar’s massive growth

According to the EIA’s “Electric Power Monthly” report, which includes data through September 2024, solar power generation (including both utility-scale and rooftop installations) shot up by 25.9% compared to the first nine months of 2023.

Utility-scale solar grew even faster – up 30.1% – while small-scale solar (mostly rooftop) increased by 16.2%. Combined, solar contributed more than 7% of the total electricity generated in the US so far this year.

Zooming in on September, utility-scale solar generation grew by a whopping 29% compared to September 2023, and rooftop solar climbed by 14.2%. Combined, solar generated 7.5% of the nation’s electricity that month.

Last week’s blog described the state of the transition in the 10 “best” and “worst” states in the transition in terms of progress made. It also described the gain in employment in many states as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden administration’s main energy transformation legislation. Many winners of this transformation are Republican-controlled states.

However, the mixed messages will not be confined to environmental issues and will touch many of president-elect Trump’s promises. The list of the pre-election promises was summarized in an earlier blog (November 12, 2024) titled “Resilience.”

The first issue on this list was immigration, with Trump’s promise to “seal” the southern border, and launch what he calls “the largest deportation program in American history,” invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. 

However, the US farm groups, centered in rural areas that were major contributors to Trump’s election victory, are now asking for special exemptions:

WASHINGTON, Nov 25 (Reuters) – U.S. farm industry groups want President-elect Donald Trump to spare their sector from his promise of mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain heavily dependent on immigrants in the United States illegally.

So far Trump officials have not committed to any exemptions, according to interviews with farm and worker groups and Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan.

Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture, as well as many dairy and meatpacking workers.

Immigration is also playing a role in President-elect Trump’s “relaxed” attitude to climate change and other environmental issues that have directly resulted in the global increase of environmental refugees that were discussed in previous blogs (see April 3, April 10, 2018, and January 28, 2020).

The tension in rural areas extends beyond agriculture. One good example is Virginia:

If Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly are aligned on one thing, it’s their enthusiasm for bringing more data centers to the commonwealth. Where they part ways is in how to provide enough electricity to power them. Youngkin and most Republican legislators advocate for an “all of the above” approach that includes fossil gas as well as renewables; Democrats are committed to staying the course on the transition to zero-carbon energy, with a near-term emphasis on low-cost solar.

Data centers are making the transition harder, but so is local resistance to building solar. General Assembly members mostly understand the connection, leading to a lively debate in last year’s legislative session over whether to override some local permit denials for solar projects – and if so, how to ensure the localities still have some say. Though none of the legislative proposals moved forward last year, the topic has become a central one for the recently revamped Committee on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR).

In January, the General Assembly is likely to consider legislation to override local solar permit denials in some cases, such as last year’s HB636 from Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, or another approach that would break the solar logjam. It remains to be seen, however,  whether legislators will take any action on data centers.

Another factor is Elon Musk, considered by some to be the richest man in the world, with equity estimated at $350B. He was, perhaps, the most important contributor to the Trump election victory. Yet, Tesla, one of his main sources of wealth, was also one of the main beneficiaries of President Biden’s IRA legislation; one of the industries most aided by the IRA was electric cars. The State of California has just introduced its own electric car tax credit, in case the federal government cancels them:

California will step in and provide rebates to eligible residents who buy electric vehicles if President-elect Donald J. Trump ends the $7,500 federal E.V. tax credit, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Monday.

“We will intervene if the Trump administration eliminates the federal tax credit, doubling down on our commitment to clean air and green jobs in California,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We’re not turning back on a clean transportation future — we’re going to make it more affordable for people to drive vehicles that don’t pollute.”

Mr. Newsom’s proposal comes as California officials gird for an extended battle with the incoming Trump administration over environmental policy, immigration and other issues. As he did during his first term, Mr. Trump is expected to try once again to block California’s authority to set auto emissions limits that are stricter than federal standards.

Tesla would likely be excluded from new California EV tax credits, the governor’s office said:

Nov 25 (Reuters) – Tesla’s (TSLA.O), opens new tab electric vehicles likely would not qualify for California’s new state tax credits under a proposal in the works if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the federal tax credit for EV purchases, Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said on Monday.

Tesla shares closed down 4% to $338.59 and fell another 1.2% in after hours trading.

Trump’s transition team is considering eliminating the federal tax credit of $7,500 for EV purchases, Reuters reported this month.

Will all of this keep Musk “in line”?

Another commitment that will come under serious pressure is the extension of the 2017 tax cuts, of which major parts are about to expire next year.

Republicans Ponder: What if the Trump Tax Cuts Cost Nothing?

Some in the party are considering alternative ways of assessing the federal budget as they prepare to extend temporary tax cuts passed in 2017.

What counts as a tax cut? That is the question on the minds of many Republicans on Capitol Hill these days as they consider how far — and how fast — they can cut taxes again. The wonky ways of measuring the federal budget are shaping up to be central to the debate. Forcing the issue is the end of many of the tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017. Without any action by Congress next year, taxes would go up for most Americans, as provisions like lower marginal income rates and a larger standard deduction expired. Republicans want to protect their handiwork and extend the tax cuts before they lapse.

The 2026 November elections will be the first reckoning of the coming tensions.

To have a better idea about the impact that the coming Trump administration will have, it’s time to address the state of the energy transition before the January 20th inauguration. This blog will be data-heavy and next week’s blog will focus on the interconnections between the various impacts. Since the inauguration is a US event, and the actions of the US have a great impact on global activities, the two blogs will emphasize global issues with a strong emphasis on the US. Figures 1 – 3 show the change in average global temperature, the 2022 global distribution of carbon emissions, and the global penetration of solar energy as an alternative energy source. Table 1 and Figure 4 show the recent state of the transition in the US. Table 1 shows the 10 states that were “best” at replacing their electric power grids with non-fossil energy sources and the 10 “worst” in that category. The Inflation Reduction Act (2022) was President Biden’s main legislative achievement in pursuing the energy transition away from fossil fuels. Figure 4 shows the which states benefited the most from the IRA’s creation of green energy jobs.

Figure 5 is a continuation of a previous blog (November 12, 2024) that describes the US governance’s resilience to changes made by new administrations. The Republican victory has been seen as a clear mandate for President-elect Trump. During his campaign, he called to stop the energy transition to non-polluting energy sources, and repeated declarations that climate change is a hoax. These claims contributed to his victory, including full control of Congress. However, even when his tenure is guaranteed for four years (pending on his ability to govern), complete control of the government is limited to two years. By the time of writing this blog (Thanksgiving day), the Republicans’ balance in the House of Representatives is 220-215 in their favor and the balance in the US Senate is 53-47 in the Republicans’ favor. However, in the 2026 congressional elections, the full House of Representatives, and one third of the Senate, will be up for election. Figure 5 shows the US map with the states in which senators will be up for reelection. As the figure shows, red states (ones that elected President-elect Trump) make up the majority. It’s the opposite situation of what we experienced in the previous election.

Figure 1 – Global average temperature, 1850-2023 (Source: Berkeley Earth)

Figure 2 – Map of global emissions (Source: Our World in Data via Wikipedia)

Figure 3 – Solar energy delivery capacity (Source: Renew Economy)

Powering of the electricity grid (2020):

Table 1 – Electricity generation by state, with total power and percentage of non-fossil fuel (Source: Big Think)

The impact of the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act):

Many Americans still have not heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act, which is expected to pour as much as $1.2 trillion into the U.S. economy over the next decade.

“We didn’t lose the election because of the I.R.A., but we also didn’t win because of it and we should have,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action, a climate nonprofit.

But rolling back such investments could be a challenge for red states — about 85 percent of the announced investments from the bill have come in Republican districts, according to E2 data from August.

“We’re at the advent of an economic revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country in generations,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2. “If it gets rolled back or reduced, it’s not liberals that’ll be hurt, but working people in rural places.”

More than half of 900 clean energy companies surveyed by E2 in October said they would lose business or revenue if the I.R.A. was repealed. Businesses in rural America would suffer the most, according to the survey.

Figure 4 – Green jobs announced after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, by state (2022) (Source: CNBC)

Initial verdict: November 2026

Figure 5 – 2026 US Senate seats up for election (Source: Wikipedia)

The state of the US in terms of the energy transition is now completely different from that which President-elect Trump encountered at the start of his previous term (January 2017). The next two blogs will examine the interconnections of the various impacts, including major campaign issues such as immigration, budget and inflation, and what happens to the international commitments to mitigating global perils that were already made by the US.

I am starting this blog on Friday, November 11th – the last scheduled day of the COP29 meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan. The world is waiting for a “final” draft of the conclusions. The central issue to be addressed is the amount of money that developed countries will pay developing countries to participate in mitigating climate change and adapting to the changes that are being inflicted. The preliminary figure is $250 billion per year. The cost to developing countries is estimated to be one trillion US$. As we will see later in this blog, the G20 (defined below) is trying to help. As usual, the blog will be posted on Tuesday; I will follow the developments and keep them as up to date as possible.

The mood is not cheerful. The general expectation (or hope) for the meeting is summarized in the following AP entry:

The overarching issue is climate finance. Without it, experts say the world can’t get a handle on fighting warming, nor can most of the nations achieve their current carbon pollution-cutting goals or the new ones they will submit next year.

“If we don’t solve the finance problem, then definitely we will not solve the climate problem,” said former Colombian deputy climate minister Pablo Vieira, who heads the support unit at NDC Partnership, which helps nations with emissions-cutting goals.

Nations can’t cut carbon pollution if they can’t afford to eliminate coal, oil and gas, Vieira and several other experts said. Poor nations are frustrated that they are being told to do more to fight climate change when they cannot afford it, he said. And the 47 poorest nations only created 4% of the heat-trapping gases in the air, according to the U.N.

About 77% of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere now comes from the G20 rich nations, many of whom are now cutting back on their pollution, something that is not happening in most poor nations or China.

A final agreement, between the developed countries and the developing countries, was announced in the early hours of Sunday (Azerbaijan time, late Saturday NYC time) (UN Climate Change Conference Baku – November 2024 | UNFCCC). The summary and the link to the full agreement are given below:

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) closed today with a new finance goal to help countries to protect their people and economies against climate disasters, and share in the vast benefits of the clean energy boom. With a central focus on climate finance, COP29 brought together nearly 200 countries in Baku, Azerbaijan, and reached a breakthrough agreement that will:

• Triple finance to developing countries, from the previous goal of USD 100 billion annually, to USD 300 billion annually by 2035.
• Secure efforts of all actors to work together to scale up finance to developing countries, from public and private sources, to the amount of USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035.

Known formally as the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), it was agreed after two weeks of intensive negotiations and several years of preparatory work, in a process that requires all nations to unanimously agree on every word of the agreement.

You can find the advance unedited versions of the decisions taken at the Baku UN Climate Change Conference here.

The reactions to this agreement by the new Trump administration, which will take over on January 20, 2025, are anybody’s guess.

The G20 mentioned above is defined in Wikipedia as:

The G20 or Group of 20 is an intergovernmental forum comprising 19 sovereign countries, the European Union (EU), and the African Union (AU).^[2][3]

The G20 scheduled its meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to take place parallel to COP29. It also tried to address the same issue of climate finance and made a recommendation to match the cost:

November 19, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – The G20 Leaders’ Summit released its final communique on Monday night (18/11). Although the declaration reaffirms the need for trillions of dollars in climate finance and  ‘hopes for a successful new climate finance goal at COP29 in Azerbaijan’ by the end of this week, it fails to specifically call for the public, grant-based finance that is an integral demand of developing countries in ongoing negotiations. While G20 governments mentioned the importance of the Paris Agreement to limit global heating, and the commitment made at COP28 to phase out fossil fuels and triple renewable energy capacity by 2030, it also failed to specifically mention the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels in their communique.

People around the world are demanding that governments commit to at least $1 trillion a year for quality climate finance at COP29 – with activists taking to the streets in over 26 countries over the weekend. In coordinated marches, thousands of people expressed their demand for climate justice, creative, collective and guerilla actions in cities like Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Munich put Billionaires in the spotlight, demanding that governments Tax Their Billions to unlock huge sums to tackle the climate crisis.

As Figure 1 shows, the recent, post-pandemic, carbon dioxide emissions in the developed world (Europe and US) are decreasing, but global emissions are continuing to increase. Emissions do not know boundaries, so to fight climate change, the world needs for developed countries with valuable resources to grow their economies by shifting to sustainable energy sources. To do this without hurting their populations, they need help.

Figure 1 – Global carbon emissions (Source: @Nature on X)

As was mentioned earlier (December 12, 19, 2023 blogs), the previous COP (COP28), which was held also in a petrostate, finally recommended that the world replace fossil fuels with non-polluting sustainable sources. However, the past year didn’t show any adherence to this trend. Countries promised to ditch fossil fuels. Instead they’re booming:     

When nations at last year’s global climate conference historically agreed to transition away from coal, oil and gas, Australia’s climate minister predicted that the “age of fossil fuels will end.” Norway’s foreign minister lauded countries for at last tackling the climate crisis “head-on.” President Joe Biden said the deal put the world “one significant step closer” to its climate goals.

But one year later, these same wealthy countries are undercutting it, by scaling up exports and launching new fossil fuel projects that could last for decades. At the same time, major oil companies have weakened their climate pledges.

As world leaders gather Monday in Azerbaijan to open COP29, the moves are fueling a sense among scientists and policy professionals that the world has squandered a crucial year and raising questions about how effectively the annual U.N. climate conference can address this core part of planetary warming.

The NYT offers an explanation: Why Oil Companies Are Walking Back From Green Energy:

BAKU, Azerbaijan — When oil and gas companies made ambitious commitments four years ago to curb emissions and transition to renewable energy, their businesses were in free fall.

Demand for the fuels was drying up as the pandemic took hold. Prices plunged. And large Western oil companies were hemorrhaging money, with losses topping $100 billion, according to the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

Renewable energy, it seemed to many companies and investors at the time, was not just cleaner — it was a better business than oil and gas.

“Investors were focused on what I would say was the prevailing narrative around it’s all moving to wind and solar,” Darren Woods, Exxon Mobil’s chief executive, said in an interview with The New York Times last week at a United Nations climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. “I had a lot of pressure to get into the wind and solar business,” he added.

Mr. Woods resisted, reasoning that Exxon did not have expertise in those areas. Instead, the company invested in areas like hydrogen and lithium extraction that are more akin to its traditional business.

Wall Street has rewarded the company for those bets. The company’s stock price has climbed more than 70 percent since the end of 2019, lifting its market valuation to a record of nearly $560 billion in October, though it has since fallen to about $524 billion.

Many in the general public feel like the COP meetings—and their requirement of unanimous decisions—might reach the stage of obsolescence. In the mean time, however, attendance is booming:

Over 50,000 people are gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the United Nations climate conference known as COP29. This is the second largest of the annual gatherings in their history, according to official estimates and recently published data.

As climate change has captured global attention, the U.N. conference has evolved from a relatively small gathering of diplomats into a major world summit, with growing delegations from developing countries that produce fossil fuels and are particularly vulnerable to their pollution.

The next blog will try to explore how the next four years of Trump’s presidency in the US will impact the energy transition.

Figure 1 – Map of Azerbaijan (Source: CDC)

If I were president-elect, with the same results and history as President-elect Trump, I would have taken a short working vacation to Baku, Azerbaijan, where COP29 has just opened. As the map above shows, it sits between Russia and Iran. Regardless of the COP29 focus on climate change, which would likely not play a role in his attraction to the event, if he were to take advantage of the location, it could potentially set him up as a world savior. Right now, the heads of state of the most carbon-emitting countries, are skipping the conference:

BAKU, Azerbaijan — World leaders are converging Tuesday at the United Nations annual climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan although the big names and powerful countries are noticeably absent, unlike past climate talks which had the star power of a soccer World Cup.

But 2024’s COP29 climate talks are more like the International Chess Federation world championship, lacking the recognizable names but big on nerd power and strategy. The top leaders of the 13 largest carbon dioxide-polluting countries will not appear. Their nations are responsible for more than 70% of 2023’s heat-trapping gases.

I am certain that Trump’s presence would have changed that. President Biden is not participating, probably for the reason that after the November 5^th election, his participation likely wouldn’t have made a major impact. President Putin is skipping too, although Russia is attending with a large delegation and was instrumental in choosing this location for COP29. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian will take part in the conference although the trip recently invoked bitter memories:

On 19 May, a helicopter carrying Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, crashed in the north-western province of East Azerbaijan. Raisi, 63, was killed, along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and six others including the East Azerbaijan governor and Tabriz’s Friday prayer leader. They were returning from a trip to the Iran-Azerbaijan border, where they had inaugurated a dam alongside the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev.

As I am writing this blog (Thursday, November 14^th), it is likely that President Zelensky of Ukraine will participate. Prime Minister Netanyahu from Israel will not attend, although the President of Israel will. The attendance of President-elect Trump would have probably changed much of that participation. It would have also given a big headache to Azerbaijan in terms of securing the place. The part that would have most likely interested Trump would be Azerbaijan’s history—specifically, the country’s government after it declared independence from the Soviet Union (1991) (more about this later).

One can find reminders about the COP system by putting it into the search box of this blog or just glancing at the last paragraph of last week’s blog. In the context of President-elect Trump, everybody is going back to the start of his first term, in which, shortly after his inauguration, he took the US out of the Paris Agreement (See “The Paris Commitments and What to Expect,”  March 14, 2017). Our country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement was reinstated immediately after President Biden won the presidency in 2020. Many expect a repeat of the scenario with different participants. A trip by President Trump to Azerbaijan would have given him ownership of the process and maybe helped him keep Elon Musk in his orbit. We will probably start to see a separation between the two once Trump’s policies begin to to hit Tesla or Musk’s other business interests.

The last two COP meetings (28 and 29) took place in what many call petrostates. The paragraph below from the UNFCCC page describes the selection process:

Regional group members hold consultations to determine which country from their region will make an offer to host a conference. The host country of the COP normally rotates among the five United Nations regional groups (The African Group, the Asia-Pacific Group, the Eastern Europe Group, the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) and the Western European and Others Group (WEOG)). Once agreed, the country selected by the regional group to host the conference sends, through its regional group, its offer formally to the UNFCCC secretariat. The COP considers the offers and adopts a decision, usually titled “Dates and Venues of Future Sessions”, accepting the offer. The secretariat then undertakes a fact-finding mission to the prospective host country to determine that all “logistical, technical and financial elements for hosting the sessions are available” and reports back to the Bureau, early at the start of the year.

The nature of the main exports of the two countries that were selected to host COP29 and COP28 in their largest cities, Baku (Azerbaijan) and Dubai (UAE) are shown in Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2 – Azerbaijan products export (Source: Wikipedia)

Figure 3 – UAE (United Arab Emirates) products export (Source: Wikimedia)

At the beginning of COP29, we can best summarize the transition between the two conferences by looking at the final decision (which must be accepted unanimously) of COP28 and the opening speech of COP29 by the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliev.

The final agreement of COP28 was referenced and partially quoted in an earlier blog titled “COP28 Conclusions” (December 19, 2023):

The focus of most of the media was on the last two paragraphs, which emphasize the inclusion of language that many interpret as the “start of the end” of reliance on fossil fuels. This is especially notable because it was expressed at a global conference in a petrostate, presided over by the head of its national oil company.

The reference to the full concluding document (labeled as “Draft”) was posted in

(Outcome of the first global stocktake. Draft decision -/CMA.5. Proposal by the President).

An important part of President Aliev’s welcome to the COP29 meeting is cited below:

Now, a couple of words I’d like to say about another segment of energy security, which is oil and gas. I understand that this topic is not very popular at a climate change conference, but without that, my comments would not be complete. Just to begin with information, the world’s first industrial oil well was drilled in Azerbaijan, in Baku, in 1846. It is situated not far from this place. Maybe it may take a 10-15 minute drive. The first offshore oil well was also drilled by Azerbaijani oilmen in the Caspian Sea in the middle of 20th century. In the 19th century, Azerbaijan produced more than half of the world’s oil.

If, then, some Western politicians and media called us a petrostate, that would probably have been acceptable. But when they call us a petrostate now, today, this is not fair, and it only demonstrates a lack of political culture and knowledge. Today, Azerbaijan’s share of global oil production is 0.7%, and its share of global gas production is 0.9%. But the fake news media of the country, which is the number one oil and gas producer in the world and produces 30 times more oil than Azerbaijan, calls us a petrostate.

They had better look at themselves, or at least at their neighbor, which produces 10 times more oil than Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s share in global gas emissions is only 0.1%. I have to bring these figures to the attention of our audience because right after Azerbaijan was elected as the host country of COP29, we became the target of a coordinated, well-orchestrated campaign of slander and blackmail.

Western fake news media, so-called independent NGOs, and some politicians seemed to be competing in spreading disinformation and false information about our country. To accuse us of having oil is the same as accusing us of having more than 250 sunny days a year in Baku.

Countries should be judged by other criteria. For instance, the level of unemployment in Azerbaijan, it is 5.4%, the level of poverty, it is 5.2%, our green agenda—I have already described our plans – how countries manage their foreign debt – in Azerbaijan, it’s only 7.5% of GDP.

These, along with many other important criteria, should serve as the basis for evaluating the country’s performance, rather than its natural resources, which are a gift from God. I said this several months ago, and now those who want to attack me, particularly the international media, simply quote me saying that this is a gift from God.

And I want to repeat it here today: it is a gift from God. Every natural resource, whether it’s oil, gas, wind, sun, gold, silver, copper, they are all natural resources. Countries should not be blamed for having them, and should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market because the market needs them. The people need them. So, this is my message. As the President of COP29, of course, we will be strong advocates for the green transition, and we’re doing it, but at the same time, we must be realistic.

The combination of Ilham Aliev and Donald Trump is not reassuring. In the next blog (or more) I will try to describe the present state of the world in terms of the energy transition so we can prepare to quantify the activities of the new leadership in this area. Frustration among environmentalists is now spreading fast when it comes to the recent changes in global leadership and the resulting shifts in global efforts to mitigate climate change. Future blogs will try to follow the details.

Figure 1 – 2024 Senate election results as of November 12th, 4:32 pm, ET

Last week’s blog promised to discuss geographic trends in America’s election in terms of a strive to increase the entropy of the system (see last week’s blog). Like many of you, last Tuesday night, I was glued to the TV screen, following the evolving map of the election results. Almost from the beginning, the trend became transparent. The focus was on the swing states but the data from states that had finished counting was quickly compared to the 2020 elections. The shift from blue to red based on these comparisons was almost always unidirectional – from blue to red. Almost every group with a previous concentration of up to 70% Democratic votes lost votes to Trump.  These shifts move slowly from a very high concentration toward average, and the balance determines the final result. The NYT did a quantitative analysis of these trends by character and state, including cities and suburbs, the rural-urban divide, race and ethnicity, educational attainment, economic types, and age and across the country.

Figure 2 – Shifts in vote margins as of Friday

Perhaps the most striking examples are the choices of voters with Muslim and/or Palestinian backgrounds and Jewish voters. Many in both groups moved toward Trump at least partially because of Biden’s current American policy in the war in the Middle East. There is very little chance that both groups will be satisfied with Trump in power. As the NYT explains, right-leaning Jews look back at his support for Israel during his first term and hope for a continuation while many Muslims hope that his policy will be different (and better) than Biden’s.

Ex-President Trump had a decisive win on all levels. As of yesterday, the House count had yet to finish but it already had a strong Republican-leaning trend. Winning the House vote would give Republicans control of the Legislative and Executive branches of government, meaning that Trump and the Republican party would reach the desired Trifecta. President-elect Trump also decisively won the popular vote (75.5M to 71.9M as of this posting). Combining that with the present Conservative control of the Supreme Court that was achieved during Trump’s first term, he would have the rarely-achieved control of all three branches of the US government, and the ability to do what he wishes.

Yet in this blog, I will try to make the point that the American Constitution constructed the American government in one of the most resilient ways that can be imagined and that President Trump will have only two years to prove that he deserves the country’s confidence. If he fails, he will be paralyzed from further changes, and unable to prolong his rule because of the two-term limit in the presidency. It will also mean the likely removal of the Republican party from the Legislative branches of government (removal from the control of the Supreme Court will be more difficult). Anyone opposed to Trump’s policies has to learn to be patient and carefully plan how to open the door for a transition. President-elect Trump figured out that the best way to counter all the criminal and civil charges that have piled on him after 2020 was to win back the presidency in 2024. The first step in the strategy to achieve this objective was to stretch the judicial procedures beyond November 2024, which he did successfully. Now it is his opposition’s turn to strategize to stop the parts of his policies that they don’t like. In 2026, the election should focus on the continuation of Trump’s policies without Trump. This should be a winnable terrain for Trump’s opposition.

The first issue to address is what president-elect Trump promised to accomplish if elected:

Immigration – “seal” the southern border, and launch what he calls “the largest deportation program in American history,” invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

Abortion – veto a federal abortion ban but allow each individual state to restrict the procedure as it wishes.

Economy – “end inflation” and plans to pass what he calls “historic” tax cuts for workers and small businesses. He said this will include no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security benefits and a tax credit for family caregivers who take care of a parent or loved one Trump said he will work with tech mogul Elon Musk to eliminate “every single” federal regulation that he says raises prices and kills American jobs. And on the topic of regulations, Trump has promised to end 10 federal regulations for every new one created. Trump has also promised that under his administration, there will be no tax on the first $10,000 of costs associated with education for parents of children who are homeschooled. Trump has promised American companies will get “the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the lowest regulatory burdens, and free access to the single best and biggest market on the planet.”

In September, Trump called for reinstating the state and local tax deduction, commonly known as SALT. In 2017, Trump signed the legislation that capped the previously unlimited federal deduction at $10,000 per filer. The policy hit people in blue states the hardest. Even though Trump signed that measure, he has pledged to undo it.).

Environment – For cars made in the United States, Trump said he will make interest on car loans fully tax-deductible. He said he will terminate an electric vehicle rule published by President Joe Biden’s administration in March that makes EVs more available and affordable over the next several years and makes it more difficult for gas-powered cars to keep up with an increasingly stringent Environmental Protection Agency’s standard. Trump also wants to, once again, withdraw from the Paris Agreement, a major international climate treaty.

Foreign policy – He will end Russia’s war in Ukraine within a day. stop “the chaos” in the Middle East and prevent “World War III.”.

Cultural Wars –“On Day 1, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children,” Trump has said. “And I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” Trump said he wants to “get rid” of the Education Department as it currently exists and allow each state to individually “handle education,” as he put it.

Retaliation- Prosecute and jail anybody who went after him during the four years that he was out of power

All of that (even some of that) will take time. Let us figure out how much time the president-elect has. The details are derived from the governance outlined in the US Constitution.

The principle is simple:  presidents are elected for four years, with a maximum of two terms. Senators are elected for six-year terms and congressmen for two-year terms. There are no federal term limits for senators and congressmen. In 1992, California passed a term limit that never materialized because it was not approved by the Supreme Court. The counts as I write this (Friday, November 8^th at 3pm) are: House – 201 Democrats and 212 Republicans. 218 are needed for a majority. Senate – 52 Republicans and 44 Democrats. 50 are needed for the majority. Between 33 and 34 senators are elected every 2 years. So, although every senator has a tenure of 6 years, the rotation means that a majority of the Senate is running for election every 2 years. This is especially important because majorities are almost always much smaller than the number of senators elected every 2 years. As the map at the top shows, most of the senators that need to be elected or reelected are from red states. The reverse was the case in the 2024 election.

So, if President Trump and the Republican Congress do not perform as promised, the American people can reject congressional majorities in 2 years and leave the president to govern through executive orders that can be nullified in 4 years by a new president.

One of the major issues in this election was the presumed danger that the other guy’s election might destroy our democratic system. One can find a short history of democracy on Wikipedia. It shows that the American Constitution established one of the earliest modern democracies. However, democracies, in one form or another, became the leading mode of government only after the dismantling of the imperial systems following WWII. The universal participation of adult citizens in selecting the American government only reached its full scope after the ratification of the 19^th Amendment, which secured women’s vote. Another key event in the process was the ratification of the 14^th Amendment after the Civil War. The sequence of these ratifications is summarized below:

The American Constitution – ratified in 1788

The 14^th Amendment – ratified in 1868

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 19th Amendment – ratified in 1920

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.^[1]

My favorite take on the main value of the democratic system is Karl Popper’s book, The Open Society and its Enemies. As Wikipedia summarizes it:

 Popper advocates for direct liberal democracy as the only form of government that allows institutional improvements without violence and bloodshed.

To my knowledge, the only exception to this rule within the confines of American presidential elections was the Trump-inspired attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, when Trump lost his 2^nd term election bid to Joe Biden.

What to do?

What president-elect Trump promised to accomplish, based on which he got the decisive public support to lead the US over the next four years, was summarized earlier. The objective should be to give him a chance to govern productively and follow closely the impacts of his actions on all of us. Two years from now, our collective job is to vote for a Congress that will either continue to support him or try to freeze him. The next presidential election is four years away. The additional advantage that the Constitution left us with is the federal nature of the US. The roles of the individual states and the federal government are clearly stated. The advantages and disadvantages of the separation of power are already visible in the present attempt to adjust to Supreme Court’s decision to end Roe vs. Wade and remove abortion decisions from mandated constitutional protection. Many blue states are now busy in discussions over Trump-proofing as much as possible before his inauguration.

The first test exploring and navigating Trump’s governance started yesterday. Monday marked the start of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. The COP (Conference of the Parties) annual series  of international meetings (this will be the 29^th meeting) are organized through UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This blog has covered these conferences since I started it. For COP28, go to the December 12, 2023 blog. For reference, one of the first environmental actions that President Trump took after his inauguration in his first term was to take the US out of the Paris Agreement that was created during COP21. One of the first things that President Biden did after his inauguration was to rejoin the agreement. It is logical that President Trump will be consulted on any agreement that will be negotiated in Baku.  President-elect Trump devoted many of his objections to the energy transition that is now taking place to mitigate climate change. He especially objected to the shift to electric cars that is now taking place. However, Tesla, the largest manufacture of electric cars, is led by Elon Musk, who became one of the most vocal supporters and probably the largest funds provider to the president-elect. We’ll see if that changes his outlook. Meanwhile, COP29 should be the first stage to examine how or if Trump’s dynamics on environmental issues have changed.

In the next few blogs, I will try to focus on COP29 and its implications.

This blog will be posted on Election Day, which marks the end of the election period. It is estimated that more than half of voters had already cast their vote before today. This evening, I and many million others will be glued—probably not to our televisions but to our mobile phones, checking the trending results. Today’s blog, and probably next week’s, will try to understand two key elements of the process that we are all going through. The first issue is the role of gender and college education in the process and the second issue is the dynamics of the spatial distribution of the electorate.

A recent article in the New York Times (NYT) piqued my interest in the role of gender and college education. The article was based on a Pew Research survey of US adults conducted from September 30 to October 6, 2024 which polled different voting groups and came out with the following result (in percentage differences):

Non-college-educated men – Trump +16

Non-college-educated women – Trump + 4

College-educated men – Harris +7

College-educated women – Harris + 27

Below is a key paragraph from the NYT about these numbers:

We are truly looking at two different Americas when we dig into the views of men without college degrees and women with college degrees. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum politically and experience essentially separate economies, and therefore give priority to distinct sets of character traits and issues.

The NYT article says these results describe the behavior of two different countries: non-college-graduate men and women college graduates. The numbers indicate relative polling numbers but not the impacts these groups will have on final results. The impact on the final results can be estimated from the weight of these two groups in the general voting population. We can get an approximation of the total numbers from the labor force estimates from the same Pew source shown in Figure 1. The total number of eligible voters in the US 2024 election is 186 million. The voting percentage in the last presidential election (2022) was 66%, which amounts to 124 million voters. The number of the labor force described in Figure 1 is 144 million. If the trends described above are representative, putting these numbers in, we get the following split:

Non-college-educated men – Trump – 7.5M

Non-college-educated women – Trump – 1.5M

College-educated men – Harris – 2.1M

College-educated women – Harris – 8.5M

The net difference is 1.6 million in Harris’ advantage. This kind of estimate is no better than the rest of the polling that was addressed in last week’s blog. However, if schools want to have an impact on the political environment, it might well be more effective for their survival and that of the country to enhance recruiting efforts in populations where they currently have minimal impact.

Figure 1 (Source: Pew Research Center)

The second issue that I will address in this blog is the dynamics of the spatial distribution of the electorate. I have tried to address this issue in previous blogs that, like this one, were posted in close proximity to previous presidential elections. I posted two good examples back to back following Ex-president Trump’s first election win in 2016.. The first one is titled “Election and Urbanization” (December 6, 2016), and the second one is titled “The Urban/Rural Voting Split: a Global Perspective (December 13, 2016).

Figure 2, taken from the December 6^th blog (the original reference is posted there), shows how voting depended on population density in the 2012 presidential election. Figure 3 shows the actual distribution in the state of Pennsylvania (the largest swing state in the present election) in the most recent 2020 election.

Figure 2 (From the December 6, 2016 blog)

Figure 3 – The Pennsylvania 2020 voting distribution (Source: Reddit)

We clearly see the Democratic blue distribution on the Eastern part of the state dominated by Philadelphia and the dominant red in the rest of the state, with blue islands in cities such as Pittsburgh, Allentown, Reading, Erie, and Scranton.

Until recently, The global and US trends showed most of the population movement flowed from countrysides to urban areas. Figure 4 shows the recent trend in the US. Based on these trends, one might think that the Democrats would be certain to win all the coming elections.

Figure 4 – Evolution of US urban/rural populations (Source: UN)

However, recent trends in the US show a reverse in movement. Figure 5 shows recent movements from big cities such as NYC, LA , San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Miami to less populated areas. The next blog will try to explore this development and connect it to the concept of entropy (just put the word in the search box to reintroduce yourself to our previous uses of the concept).

Figure 5 – American interstate movements (Source: NYT)

(Source: The Naked Scientists)

I started last week’s blog with the following two sentences:

The last few blogs have alternated between descriptions of AI—with its environmental impacts—and the upcoming elections. On a more abstract level, both issues represent key features of our reality: the elections are part of the short term and AI is longer term.

My emphasis was on the role of AI in the recent Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. Since election day (November 5^th) is getting closer and outcome predictions have become indistinguishable from guesses, the link between long term and short term can appear to be cyclical.

This blog focuses again on the link between the energy cost of AI that was raised by Sonya Landau’s question (see the September 10^th blog) and the coming elections. The October 8^th blog mentions the recent developments needed to satisfy the huge amounts of energy needed for AI. Microsoft is now resurrecting the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to help satisfy the power need and it’s not alone. Google is following the same track:

Google is the latest big player in artificial intelligence that will turn to nuclear power as a means of meeting the heavy energy needs of data centers.

The company has reached an agreement with Kairos Power that will provide “a path to deploy a U.S. fleet of advanced nuclear-power projects” amounting to 500 megawatts by 2035.

Kairos Power plans to develop, construct and run multiple nuclear-reactor plants through purchase-power agreements. The company, which is headquartered in Alameda, Calif., expects its initial deployment in 2030 as it works to power Google data centers.

The trend has now become visible in the stock market return as well:

Nvidia shares gained 145 percent this year through September, compared with 208 percent for Vistra. Another utility, Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear power operator in the United States, follows close behind, with a return of 122 percent.

When I wrote about the Microsoft deal on Three Mile Island, I also wrote about my personal reluctance to rely on nuclear power to satisfy an increased need for electric power. My reasoning had to do with the potential for a major increase in global nuclear power to also increase the spread of nuclear technology for military use. I wrote in that blog that the additional threat of a major increase in long-lasting nuclear waste is one that can be controlled. Apparently, I was wrong.

In the past, I had direct involvement in the treatment of nuclear waste. I described this involvement in a previous blog titled “Playing for a Better Future” (January 17, 2017):

A few days ago I revisited the nuclear waste issue when I watched a PBS program. Most of the material was familiar however I almost fainted when I heard about an aspect about which I was totally ignorant – WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant). There is a site in Carlsbad, New Mexico that already has a license to store radioactive waste provided that one “minor” condition is fulfilled: Markers should be placed there that will be functional 10,000 years from now to warn whatever civilization may come next not to trespass on the site due to the risk of exposure to the deadly radiation. A large, multidisciplinary group was assembled there to try to figure out what kind of civilization will be around then so as to tailor make said warnings. We are already spending big money on a distant future 10,000 years from now to warn our descendants or extraterrestrials of damage that we are inflicting now. It’s not out of line to broaden the scope for damage that most of us consider existential within the lifespan of our grandchildren.

To put it into perspective, January 17, 2017 was three days before the inauguration of President Trump. That blog summarized my understanding at that time that the issue was “solved.” As I said, I was wrong.

A recent revisit of the issue led me to an article in a Texas local paper with the following highlight:

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up a yearslong dispute over a plan to ship highly radioactive nuclear waste to rural West Texas, a case that could have sweeping implications for how the nation deals with a growing stockpile of waste generated by nuclear power plants.

A company called Interim Storage Partners has long pursued the plan to move “high-level” nuclear waste from power plants across the nation to an existing nuclear waste storage facility in Andrews County, on the Texas-New Mexico border.

Last year, in a Texas-led lawsuit, a federal court blocked the plan and threw out Interim Storage Partners’s federal license to handle the waste. A federal appeals court upheld the decision earlier this year, but the company and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission urged the Supreme Court to reconsider the ruling.

The high court agreed to take up the case on Friday, Oct. 4., allotting one hour for oral arguments at a later date. The court also consolidated a related challenge from the waste company into the Texas case.

The composition of the Supreme Court now is the product of Trump’s 1^st presidency (he nominated three of the judges). A valid question is how Trump’s win in November would impact the Supreme Court ruling and what the federal government’s position on the issue would be.

The topic at hand here is not only nuclear waste, but it also extends to all regulatory climate policies. California started an effort to create “Trump proof” regulations, based on what was learned from Trump’s 1^st presidency. I have no idea if these contingency plans already include long-term storage for nuclear waste; there is very little time until January 20^th so if not, they should start on it now.

California officials have been working for months on a plan to “Trump proof” the state’s leading edge environmental and climate policies, in the event that former President Donald J. Trump returns to White House and follows through on his promise to gut them.

Whether California succeeds could affect more than a dozen other states that follow its emissions rules, and could have global impact because the state’s market muscle compels auto makers and other companies to conform to California standards.

The strategy now being crafted in Sacramento includes lawsuits designed to reach wide-ranging settlements with industries that generate greenhouse gases, and new rules and laws that rely on state authority and would be beyond the reach of the administration.

State-of-the-art nuclear waste management toward the end of the 20^th century was discussed in the symposium below (You can read the full proceedings here):

Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management XVI

Symposium held November 30-December 4, 1992,

Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

EDITORS:

C.G. Interrante

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Washington, DC, U.S.A.

R,T. Pabalan

CNWRA, Southwest Research Institute

San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A.

IMTRISI

MATERIALS RESEARCH SOCIETY

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 

My group’s contribution, in collaboration with a local DOE scientist (Albert Kruger), was part of this symposium:

In-Situ Electrochemical Characterization of Grouted Radioactive Waste 291. Albert A. Kruger, Jingyan Gu, and Micha Tomkiewicz.

Recently, a new concept has started to emerge: micro and nano nuclear reactors that could be spread everywhere. While there is a lot of excitement over this technology, most articles don’t mention the nuclear waste these reactors put out. There are, however, some studies that look into it:

Stanford-led research finds small modular reactors will exacerbate challenges of highly radioactive nuclear waste|StanfordReport

Argonne releases small modular reactor waste analysis report | Argonne National Laboratory

Micro Nuclear Reactors Can Help Solve the Climate Crisis – Bradley Newsad |Lewis & Clark Law School

Mini nuclear power stations may produce more waste than large ones |NewScientist

In Charts: Will small modular reactors drive nuclear growth in 2024? | SustainableViews

The French government has apparently invested heavily in the technology, so stay tuned to see what happens.

(Source: Unifying Quantum and Relativistic Theories)

The last few blogs have alternated between descriptions of AI—with its environmental impacts—and the upcoming elections. On a more abstract level, both issues represent key features of our reality: the elections are part of the short term and AI is longer term. My intention in this blog was to focus on the elections, with an emphasis on the frequent polling that all of us are bombarded with. But, as often happens, reality has its own priorities. This week was the announcement of the Nobel Prizes. The second and third Prizes, announced in the beginning of the week (October 8^th and 9^th) were for Physics and Chemistry. Below are the two citations:

Physics:

They used physics to find patterns in information

This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created a structure that can store and reconstruct information. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can independently discover properties in data and which has become important for the large artificial neural networks now in use.

Chemistry:

They cracked the code for proteins’ amazing structures

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

AI is mentioned in both Prizes. The surprise, to me and others, was that AI is not currently directly associated with Physics and certainly not with Chemistry, but the awards were given to scientists with backgrounds in the disciplines that allowed them to make key contributions to machine learning (Physics) and the use of AI in protein chemistry. The technique itself is associated with Computer Science. However, there is no Nobel in Computer Science (according to Wikipedia, “The top computer science award is the ACM Turing Award, generally regarded as the Nobel Prize equivalent for Computer Science.”)

The criteria to receive the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are given below:

Who can receive the Prize?

According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to the person who made the most important discovery or invention in the field of physics and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the person who made the most important chemical discovery or improvement.

AI (through Google) tried to clarify the meaning of “most important discovery in the field” in the following way:

According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the key criteria for awarding a Nobel Prize is to recognize the person who has made “the most important discovery” within their field, which must have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind,” meaning the discovery should be of significant impact and have a positive influence on society at large.

“Conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” might refer to having contributed to changing reality for the betterment of humankind. In an earlier blog titled “The Physics of Reality” (February 2, 2021), I used the Encyclopedia Britannica to define reality in the following way:

Physics, science that deals with the structure of matter and the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe. In the broadest sense, physics (from the Greek physikos) is concerned with all aspects of nature on both the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels. Its scope of study encompasses not only the behaviour of objects under the action of given forces but also the nature and origin of gravitational, electromagnetic, and nuclear force fields. Its ultimate objective is the formulation of a few comprehensive principles that bring together and explain all such disparate phenomena.

I was not the only skeptic asking whether, in its present form, AI qualifies ():

You might think that the Nobel Prize for Physics would go to a physicist. Not this, year though. As usual, the Prize was shared earlier this week, but both of the winners were computer scientists. It’s as if the Olympic gold for the 100-metre dash had gone to a cyclist.

It should be said that the two laureates, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, are highly distinguished in their field. However, that field is artificial intelligence (AI), which is not usually regarded as a branch of physics.

So quite a slap in the face for the physicists. But, then, the very next day, came a second slap —  this time for the chemists. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry was another shock win for computer science. One of the three winners, David Baker, has a background in biochemistry, but the other two — John Michael Jumper and Demis Hassabis — are leading AI experts.

The skepticism focused on the present concentration of the technology in the for-profit industry. Below are a few highlights from the NYT on the topic:

Google, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars it makes every year from its online search business, has long pursued giant research projects that could one day change the world.

On Wednesday, the Nobel Prize committee conferred considerable prestige to Google’s pursuit of big ideas. Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google’s primary artificial intelligence lab, and John Jumper, one of the lab’s scientists, were among a trio of researchers who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their efforts to better understand the human body and fight disease through A.I.

The two Google scientists won their Nobels a day after Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google vice president and researcher, was one of two winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence.

The Nobel wins were a demonstration of the growing role artificial intelligence is playing in areas far beyond the traditional world of the high-tech industry, and were a reminder of Silicon Valley’s influence in nearly every corner of science and the economy.

But the triumphant moment for Google was tempered by concerns that the commercial success that has allowed the company to pursue these long-term projects is under threat by antitrust regulators. The Nobel awards were also a reminder of worries that the tech industry isn’t paying enough attention to the implications of its open-throttled pursuit of building more powerful A.I. systems.

Dr. Hinton left Google, using his retirement as an opportunity to speak freely about his worry that the race toward A.I. could one day be catastrophic. He said on Tuesday that he hoped “having the Nobel Prize could mean that people will take me more seriously.”

Leading researchers such as Dr. Hassabis often describe artificial intelligence as a way to cure disease, battle climate change and solve other scientific mysteries that have long bedeviled the world’s researchers. The work that won a Nobel was a significant step in that direction.

Out-of-discipline Nobel Prizes are somewhat rare but they do happen. The recent one that comes to mind is the 2002 Prize in Economics, which went to Daniel Kahneman for his contributions to Behavioral Economics. I wrote three earlier blogs on the topics (November 21 – December 5, 2017) with “irrationality” as the common word in the three titles. We will continue to follow AI progress to see if it fits.

 In this blog, I will return to the issue of the environmental cost of AI (September 3^rd and 10^th blogs) that I wrote about in response to Sonya Landau’s question. The technology is changing fast and is being compared to some of the foundational documents of the United States. Below is an attempt to compare it to the Federalist Papers:

In the late 1780s, shortly after the Industrial Revolution had begun, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote a series of 85 spirited essays, collectively known as the Federalist Papers. They argued for ratification of the Constitution and an American system of checks and balances to keep power-hungry “factions” in check.

A new project, orchestrated by Stanford University and published on Tuesday, is inspired by the Federalist Papers and contends that today is a broadly similar historical moment of economic and political upheaval that calls for a rethinking of society’s institutional arrangements.

In an introduction to its collection of 12 essays, called the Digitalist Papers, the editors overseeing the project, including Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, and Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration and director of the Hoover Institution, identify their overarching concern.

“A powerful new technology, artificial intelligence,” they write, “explodes onto the scene and threatens to transform, for better or worse, all legacy social institutions.”

Of course, anything this big and important needs guidelines. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), the US federal agency responsible for establishing standards, produced some:

Under the October 30, 2023, Presidential Executive Order, NIST developed a plan for global engagement on promoting and developing AI standards. The goal is to drive the development and implementation of AI-related consensus standards, cooperation and coordination, and information sharing.  Reflecting public and private sector input, on April 29, 2024, NIST released a draft plan. On July 26, 2024, after considering public comments on the draft, NIST released A Plan for Global Engagement on AI Standards (NIST AI 100-5). More information is available here.

The World Economic Forum has the most complete description that I could find of the excessive energy needs of AI technology in its present state. It also shows proposals for how to address these needs in the near, intermediate, and long-term future:

AI and energy demand

Remarkably, the computational power required for sustaining AI’s rise is doubling roughly every 100 days. To achieve a tenfold improvement in AI model efficiency, the computational power demand could surge by up to 10,000 times. The energy required to run AI tasks is already accelerating with an annual growth rate between 26% and 36%. This means by 2028, AI could be using more power than the entire country of Iceland used in 2021.

The AI lifecycle impacts the environment in two key stages: the training phase and the inference phase. In the training phase, models learn and develop by digesting vast amounts of data. Once trained, they step into the inference phase, where they’re applied to solve real-world problems. At present, the environmental footprint is split, with training responsible for about 20% and inference taking up the lion’s share at 80%. As AI models gain traction across diverse sectors, the need for inference and its environmental footprint will escalate.

To align the rapid progress of AI with the imperative of environmental sustainability, a meticulously planned strategy is essential. This encompasses immediate and near-term actions while also laying the groundwork for long-term sustainability.

The long-term: AI and quantum computing

In the long term, fostering synergy between AI and burgeoning quantum technologies is a vital strategy for steering AI towards sustainable development. In contrast to traditional computing, where energy consumption escalates with increased computational demand, quantum computing exhibits a linear relationship between computational power and energy usage. Further, quantum technology holds the potential of transforming AI by making models more compact, enhancing their learning efficiency and improving their overall functionality — all without the substantial energy footprint that has become a concerning norm in the industry.

Realizing this potential necessitates a collective endeavor involving government support, industry investment, academic research and public engagement. By amalgamating these elements, it is possible to envisage and establish a future where advancement in AI proceeds in harmony with the preservation of the planet’s health.

As we stand at the intersection of technological innovation and environmental responsibility, the path forward is clear. It calls for a collective endeavor to embrace and drive the integration of sustainability into the heart of AI development. The future of our planet hinges on this pivotal alignment. We must act decisively and collaboratively.

Presently, the enormous power needs of AI, combined with the simultaneous need for an energy transition away from fossil fuels, is forcing companies to look to nuclear power. The most eye-catching move has been Microsoft’s plan to resurrect the Three Mile Island plant:

In a striking sign of renewed interest in nuclear power, Constellation Energy said on Friday that it plans to reopen the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, the site of the worst reactor accident in United States history.

Three Mile Island became shorthand for the risks posed by nuclear energy after one of the plant’s two reactors partly melted down in 1979. The other reactor kept operating safely for decades until finally closing, for economic reasons, five years ago.

Now a revival is at hand. Microsoft, which needs tremendous amounts of electricity for its growing fleet of data centers, has agreed to buy as much power as it can from the plant for 20 years. Constellation plans to spend $1.6 billion to refurbish the reactor that recently closed and restart it by 2028, pending regulatory approval.

To those of you too young to know what this turn signifies, the Wikipedia entry for Three Mile Island might help. I was never an enthusiast for making nuclear energy a strong component of the energy transition (see the November 11^th and 18^th posts from 2014 and the strong responses that these blogs provoked). My main reason was that global reliance on nuclear power would open the door to a much wider spread of nuclear power for military use. While they’re still unresolved, other objections—such as what to do with the radioactive waste produced—could be remediated with further research; the proximity to military applications could not. By all accounts, the primary objective of the energy transition is to convert electricity production to sustainable sources. So, even without resorting to nuclear energy, the amplified need for electricity to run AI is not an insurmountable problem.

However, the last paragraph of the World Economic Forum piece that discussed the long-term prospects of AI is the real key to the environmental impact. The technology for this scenario is quantum computing, which would generate the needed power to train and run the AI.

I have hardly talked about this technology before (one exception is the February 6, 2018 blog) but I will expand on it in future blogs. Those who want to know more right now can look at Amazon’s explanation. One short paragraph exposes us to the key concept of the qubits shown in Figure 1. The article defines them in the following way:

Quantum bits, or qubits, are represented by quantum particles. The manipulation of qubits by control devices is at the core of a quantum computer’s processing power. Qubits in quantum computers are analogous to bits in classical computers. At its core, a classical machine’s processor does all its work by manipulating bits. Similarly, the quantum processor does all its work by processing qubits.

Figure 1 – Progress of quantum computing over the last 20 years (Source: Aviva)

The graph in Figure 1 shows the universal preoccupation and the progress that has been made in this technology over the last 20 years. Estimates are that quantum computing will enter commercial applications toward the end of the decade but estimates can be wrong!

Based on today’s understanding of the technology, quantum computing will revolutionize the energy efficiency of computing:

Today, quantum computers’ electricity usage is orders of magnitude much less than any supercomputer, and this is counting all the different quantum architectures available. Let’s take for example superconducting qubits, the most expensive architecture, and these computers only consume about 25 kW. That amounts to 600 kWh daily, a thousand times less than the Frontier supercomputer. Much less is the consumption of neutral atoms quantum devices, such as PASQAL’s, which amount up to 7 kW.

Understanding this technology requires serious prerequisites. In future blogs, I will try to fill these knowledge voids.