Jane Morton @SafeClimate

Really great to see this: six Nobel Prize-winning economists (Duflo, Krugman, Diamond, Banerjee, Acemoglu and Stiglitz) just came out in favor of the California billionaire tax. You don't have to be a radical leftist to see why it's a good idea. First, look at the numbers: ten years ago, the richest 0.001% of Californians were worth $700 billion. Today, that same group (about 250 people) is worth $2.3 trillion. From 2019 to 2025, their wealth grew by $1.4 trillion. The California income tax they paid over that period was just 1.6% of that gain. A nurse or a plumber pays a higher state tax rate. Yes, many of these people built great companies, and they've made a lot of money in the process. Good for them! The problem is that wealth on this scale stops being just money. It becomes extraordinary power. In 2000, billionaires accounted for about 1% of all donations in federal elections. In 2024, it was 19%. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the platform you're reading this on: all owned and controlled by billionaires. Now add AI. If you think power is concentrated now, just wait five years. It's going to get much worse. So, what does Prop 40 actually do? It's a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of California's billionaires. That would raise about $100 billion, enough to offset the federal Medicaid cuts. "But they'll all leave!" the critics say. Nope, they can't. The tax applies to any billionaire who lived in California on January 1, 2026, and the initiative only became public about five weeks before that. "But it'll kill Silicon Valley!" Uh no, that won't happen either. Since the tax was announced, California's share of all new US venture capital has gone up, from about 50% to 80%. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who would be one of the biggest payers, said he would be "perfectly fine" with it and had "not even thought about it once". Sure, some other billionaires can't stop thinking about it. Sergey Brin has already spent more than $100 million to defeat the proposal. At a holiday party in December he pulled Gavin Newson aside and said 'he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax', because he thought the 5% tax would turn California into some kind of Soviet Union. That is, of course, nonsense. This is not going to be some kind of socialist revolution. The proposal is about restoring balance to a mixed economy. You could even argue it's about saving capitalism itself from oligarchs like Sergey Brin. I think that's exactly why Nobel Prize-winning economists are coming out in favor of this tax. If Prop 40 passes in November, it will be the first tax aimed specifically at billionaire wealth anywhere in the world. I think it could be the start of a global movement. Anyway, read the whole letter here. It's really good 👇 gabriel-zucman.eu/files/prop40le…

Yale university: The World Is Hitting Point of No Return on Climate "We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature." e360.yale.edu/features/1.5-d…

Ok this is starting to feel like a f*cking disaster. The CEO of Anthropic just published an article admitting AI is already building the next generation of AI by itself. He says within 6 to 12 months a rogue swarm could take over the entire internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. And what makes it scarier, Elon Musk just backed up everything Dario said. All of this dropping just days after Jacob Coxon went viral with his warning about AI and the extinction of humanity. Tell me this timing isn't strange.

Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei

2 weeks ago

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our

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I left Anthropic's safety team two weeks ago. Now feels like a good moment to explain why. AI companies are racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this. I want to work from the outside to ensure the public is informed about these risks, and help the world navigate this transition responsibly. Right now, AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing. We only found out about the HuggingFace incident because the agents broke out onto the public internet. I don’t think that’s acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks. The public should demand far more transparency. We can’t steer this technology safely without more people being able to see where it’s going. Some of this is basic: companies should disclose their progress towards recursive self-improvement, report safety incidents and near-misses, meet minimum safety standards, and get independent guarantees that they are meeting those standards. I’ll be joining @METR_Evals to do independent evaluations of these risks. I want to show the world that these guardrails are possible, and that by doing them we can move these companies’ incentives away from racing and towards responsible development. I wrote up more thoughts here on my decision and what I hope changes: substack.com/@jbenton1/p-21…

Last night, Donald Trump, our pathological liar-in-chief, said: “Every single promise I made to you as a candidate, I’ve delivered on. I’ve delivered on everything.” Really? Well, let’s go down the list. Since becoming president again, Trump promised: ✅ $5,000 DOGE dividend checks. A lie. ✅ $2,000 tariff dividend checks. A lie. ✅ $1,000+ checks by repealing ACA subsidies. A lie. ✅ A 10% cap on credit card interest rates. A lie. ✅ “The lowest drug prices in the world.” A lie. ✅ $2 a gallon gas. A lie. ✅ An end to inflation “starting on Day One.” A lie. ✅ An end to “endless wars.” A lie. And now, after all of those lies, Trump wants you to believe that he will give every American adult a $5,000 check - but only if the Republicans win the midterms. No. I don’t think so. The Trump Administration is not about helping working families. It’s about giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1% and throwing 15 million Americans off the health care they have. x.com/Mollyploofkins…

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

One more totally fucking nuts graph for today, care of a request by @LeonSimons8. Not only is the current standard deviation for the Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature above 4SD over the 1982-2011 mean for the first time on record, but no previous year even reached 3SD.

Periodistas despedidos del histórico The Washington Post por Jeff Bezos, han creado un nuevo periódico para luchar contra la desinformación y los bulos de la era Trump. La era donde las élites millonarias quieren controlar el mundo. No hay que rendirse.

The Washington Sun @washingtonsun

2 weeks ago

Welcome to The Washington Sun. washingtonsun.com

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El-Sayed: You propose a program, and very serious people will look at you and say, “How are you going to pay for that?” You know what they never ask a general who wants to send your tax dollars abroad or go to war in a place like Iran? “General, how are you going to pay for that?” I think it is time for our U.S. Senate and everybody in a position of power to be asking that general, “How are you going to pay for that in an America where too few people get the healthcare they need and deserve?”

I'll take "Unstoppable Catastrophes" for 10 trillion dollars, Alex.

"likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years" Make no mistake, this is going to be an unprecedented and catastrophic weather/climate event Harvests will be especially badly hit Without wishing to sow concern, stocking-up would be judicious theguardian.com/environment/20…

Yesterday I gave evidence to the AUKUS Public Inquiry. I've heard from hundreds of Canberrans and did a survey on people views on AUKUS. The concerns are clear: cost, transparency, what defence capability we're not investing in because of this deal, and what AUKUS means for our sovereignty. The inquiry is doing important work, but we need a much broader and deeper conversation - an honest look at whether AUKUS is in our national interest. Not a single major party politician is expected to front up. If the case for the biggest defence spend in our history is so strong, we should expect them to make it publicly. The evidence from the inquiry is available at aukuspublicinquiry.com If you’d like to do my survey on AUKUS, click the link below👇 davidpocock.com.au/aukus_survey

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🚨The most important graph in the world has another 6 months of data!🚨 NASA CERES satellites measure how much sunlight Earth absorbs and how much heat is radiated back to space. The difference is heat accumulation, which has more than tripled over the past 26 years!

Leon Simons 🌍 @LeonSimons8

3 years ago

The most important graph in the world. Two years ago NASA showed the world that the rate of global heat uptake had doubled since 2005. It barely made the news. nasa.gov/feature/langle…

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We already have hundreds of data centres operating outside these new “national standards” that haven’t been agreed or implemented yet with more under construction. It is urgent that our govts put in place protections for communities, for energy & water use, for local compute access and some form of data centre rent tax so we actually capture the benefits and manage the risks over the long term. theguardian.com/australia-news…

This is the final vote on the ASIO Bill. Labor and the Coalition in lock step. We WILL remember this at the next election. The Greens opposed these laws in EVERY vote. Barnaby Joyce voted for this but in the Senate One Nation was dragged to vote against after community pressure.

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David McBride released from prison after serving his full 2 years 3 months non-parole. The only one to be jailed for Afghan war crimes was the guy who objected #auspol michaelwest.com.au/david-mcbride-…

No human alive has seen an El Niño event this strong. In fact, it’s possible that no human in history has seen an event this strong. Forecasts continue to project a 3.5-4.0°C ‘Super El Nino’. Temperatures in the east Pacific are now widely 5°C above average, peaking at 6°C.

2027 is likely to be WAY worse than this 2026 in terms of extreme heat, drought, fires, crop losses. WAY worse. In the Northern hemisphere, we have half a year to prepare for next summer and save some lives. Everyone is acting like 2026 is a blip. No: far worse is to come.

Zeke Hausfather @hausfath

2 months ago

2027 is now expected to reach 1.7C in my model – exactly where Hansen predicted it would land (albeit in the GISTEMP dataset) back in December 2025:

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When Margaret Thatcher made England and Wales the only countries in the world with fully privatised water, the naysayers argued it was a terrible idea. Today, everyone agrees privatisation has been a roaring success. It has delivered an impressive rise in customer bills which has coincided with an equally impressive rise in shareholder profits. These improvements were delivered through efficiency savings, such as not building any reservoirs since 1992 and forgetting about silly ideas like sewage treatment. Thanks to neoliberalism, turds are now a common sight at our beaches and marine life is not. If that wasn’t impressive enough, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has confirmed the UK is officially the world’s dampest desert. Three-quarters of the nation has been plunged into drought, despite the fact it constantly pisses down. You are therefore banned from gardening and bathing your children so that data centres don’t go without. No one knows why countries that contain actual deserts don’t experience the same difficulties we do. For example, Saudi Arabia doesn’t have a hose pipe ban. Unfortunately, we live in a place where the weather breaks everything. Sunshine? Drought. Rain? Floods. An inch of snow? The whole country closes for some reason. The only weather the UK can actually cope with is grey and miserable. Any deviation leads to immediate national collapse. If we didn’t have such a brilliant water system, we’d be in serious trouble. But thankfully, our system is built to protect corporate profits, no matter what. Everything is secondary to that, including your ability to drink. Thankfully, Andy Burnham is showing leadership on the matter. He is taking the emergency step of doing absolutely nothing. When questioned about nationalisation, the Prime Minister calmly explained that his donors won’t allow it. In a bizarre coincidence, the system that allows them to personally profit is the only one that could possibly work. Sure, we could end up with crop failures and food shortages, but I’m sure things would’ve been worse if Jeremy Corbyn had got his way. Obviously, this is not a systemic problem, it’s a technological one. Virtually all our rainfall is lost because we can’t make pipes that don’t burst. Water companies have absolutely no incentive to stop leaks and every incentive not to, but I’m confident this has nothing whatsoever to do with the matter.

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.