*How is Australia trying to sell a major gas expansion? By badging it "sustainable".*

The plan is to start extracting gas from large reserves, and bet that carbon capture will be improved fast to cancel that out. If the bet succeeds, this expansion may be carbon-neutral, unless something else goes wrong.

If the bet fails, what will they do? Shut down the gas extraction? I don't think so. They will say, "Too bad, but you can't win 'em all. Enjoy your increased greenhouse emissions!"

The only sense in which this is "sustainable" is that they could hope to sustain the extraction from these new gas fields until civilization collapses from climate breakdown.

This is a plan to bet young people's lives. The owners of those companies should bet their own lives instead.

Siva Vaidhyanathan finds it easy to catch students who cheated by using neural network text generators, and uses the opportunity to teach them about the issues those raise — and the fact that you can't trust anything they say.

I am disappointed that he refers to them as "AI".

The rate of sea-level rise in New York City is augmented a little by the sinking of land under the weight of the skyscrapers.

The sinking is on the order of 1mm per year, while sea-level rise is likely to be around 1cm per year and accelerating.

Biden vs McCarthy: a weak-willed adult is negotiating with a toddler in a tantrum.

I fear that the adult will eventually give in so that the toddler ends the tantrum.

Arguing that fossil fuel companies owe a total of $200 billion per year in compensation for some of the kinds of damage their products have done.

I fear that arguing about the amount of "compensation" various companies and states ought to pay will act as a distraction from the crucial issue: how to build sustainable power facilities fast and wind up fossil fuel use soon.

The companies will resist reducing the amount of fossil fuels they sell, and they will resist paying reparations. I think the wise choice is to focus on avoiding more damage than on making them pay for it.

Meanwhile, we should certainly tax these companies (and other rich companies) a lot more. I suggest the method I described in https://stallman.org/articles/progressive-tax-on-business-gross-income.html .