Futurology

The countries committed to permanently ending fossil fuel use now far outnumber those against. Their problem? Their chief organising conference, the 30-year-old COP conferences, comes with vetoes from the petro-states. This year, 1,600 fossil industry lobbyists attended, and they managed to get any mention of fossil fuels scrubbed from the final agreement.

This ridiculous state of affairs can't continue, and this is a classic move to break the deadlock. Sideline COP & the petrostates, by creating an alternative, they don't have power in.

The first ever International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, scheduled for April 2026.

A headline from earlier this week was 'Google DeepMind Hires Former CTO of Boston Dynamics as the Company Pushes Deeper Into Robotics'. Google once owned Boston Dynamics and sold it as they didn't think it had anything to sell. I bet they regret that now. Even its AI training data would have made it worth retaining. The things you don't see when you take the short-term view.

I wonder if that's the same with this warning from China's National Development and Reform Commission. Yes, humanoid robotics are at their gold rush stage, but that's because people know the future probably means billions of these robots, and trillions of profit building them. At the turn of the 20th century, the nascent automobile and aerospace industries had hundreds of small firms all over the world operating out of workshops. Robotics looks like it's at the same stage.

A humanoid robot-shaped bubble is forming, China warns

A large chunk of international trade is in dollars. Even though the US as a country is only 13.4% of global trade, over 40% of all global trade is invoiced in dollars. International banking (countries' foreign reserves, loans, & debt payments, etc) is even more dominated by the US dollar.

This fact has become weaponized in US foreign policy, with country after country having banking deposits frozen, or even being excluded from international banking altogether (via its SWIFT network backbone). Around the world, this is focusing other countries' minds on de-dollarizing global trade.

This foreign policy weaponization has now spread to tech platforms, too. This has led to a push for technology sovereignty, where countries like Canada & Europe are rapidly seeking alternatives to previously trusted US tech.

As sci-writer Cory Doctorow explains, this disentangling will be far from easy. China is already building much of an alternative international technology & financial infrastructure, but can it be trusted any more than the US? Probably not. The only alternatives may be decentralized, and building those may be a messy process.

This year’s U.N. climate summit, COP30, has just ended in Brazil. There were 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance, a bigger delegation than any other country, other than host Brazil. They managed to strip talk of a permanent transition from fossil fuels from the final agreement.

But they are only delaying the inevitable. Most countries want a permanent end to fossil fuels, and the action to make it happen is happening outside of structures that the fossil fuel industry can't subvert.

Uruguay is another sign that is happening. They used to say near-100% renewable power grids were impossible, but they were wrong. Some will say it still can't happen in big countries with heavy industry, but they'll be proved wrong, too.

Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, A Big Lesson For The World

"Closed models dominate, with on average 80% of monthly LLM tokens using closed models despite much higher prices - on average 6x the price of open models - and only modest performance advantages. Frontier open models typically reach performance parity with frontier closed models within months, suggesting relatively fast convergence. Nevertheless, users continue to select closed models even when open alternatives are cheaper and offer superior performance. This systematic underutilization is economically significant: reallocating demand from observably dominated closed models to superior open models would reduce average prices by over 70% and, when extrapolated to the total market, generate an estimated $24.8 billion in additional consumer savings across 2025."

This is another sign that the AI bubble almost certainly has to pop. But there's an interesting implication here. Will open-source AI inherit the future?

Linux, Android, MySQL, Git, WordPress - are just a few of the open-source software solutions that dominate modern software & the internet. Will the bedrock of 2030s AI be open-source?

The Latent Role of Open Models in the AI Economy

I'm actually speechless, because why?

When people imagine the possible collapse of highly centralized systems, like food production & distribution in developed nations, they often assume the result can only mean disaster.

But renewables point to a different outcome - decentralized self-sufficiency.

With your own solar setup, you can power all your energy needs, including transport with EVs. Not only that, you can power all your basic metabolic needs. Living off nothing but Solein doesn't sound like much fun, but it's a complete protein, so at least it would be a healthy diet.

Decentralized renewable energy is spreading throughout the developed world; will decentralized renewable-powered food production follow?

Source 1 - Reinventing the Subsistence Economy How Energy and Food Decoupling Rewrite the Map of Post-Growth Futures

Source 2 - This Protein Powder Is Made Out of Air and Uses 600 Times Less Water Than Beef

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