James' World 2

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CLIMATEWIRE | Clean energy has gotten steadily cheaper for years thanks to a global network of research facilities and factories.

That’s over now.

President Donald Trump’s decision on Saturday to slap steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China signals the birth of a new global trade regime: one focused on nationalist protections, with potentially expensive repercussions for Americans. And although clean energy is a bit player in the president’s trade war, the tariffs could hit the solar, battery, wind, and electric vehicle industries particularly hard.

“It probably slows down the energy transition because it drives up cost, especially the tariffs on China, and creates chaos” in supply chains, said David Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego. It “probably also introduces a large amount of uncertainty about the credibility of international rules on trade investment, insofar as those seem to matter at all anymore.”

Trump’s order — which is scheduled to go into effect Tuesday — places a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports. It imposes a lower levy of 10 percent on Canadian oil imports.

A White House fact sheet posted Saturday night called tariffs “a powerful, proven source of leverage” for stemming the flow of immigration and drugs like fentanyl. The order could significantly increase prices for goods, with organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute raising concerns over the impact on the U.S. economy.

“Energy markets are highly integrated, and free and fair trade across our borders is critical for delivering affordable, reliable energy to U.S. consumers,” API President and CEO Mike Sommers said in a statement.

The tariffs come as clean energy industries race to curb costs in a bid to displace fossil fuels, the main drivers of climate change.

Trade has been a key reason behind the global decline in clean energy costs in recent decades. The average lifetime cost of utility-scale storage fell 83 percent between 2009 and 2024, even after accounting for a post-Covid bump in solar costs, according to Lazard, an investment bank. Onshore wind costs were down 65 percent over that time.

Tariffs threaten those gains. The American Clean Power Association, a trade group, said it was “concerned that increasing the costs of energy production inputs will put upward pressure on consumer energy costs and diminish our capacity to unleash energy abundance.”

“While the fuel relied upon by wind and solar energy — complemented by battery storage — is free, some parts for these machines that harness these renewable resources are manufactured in Canada and Mexico,” the group added.

Roughly three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries are made in China, according to the International Energy Agency.

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I was born with nystagmus, a neurological condition that affects my vision, and until I was in my 30s, I’d only met one person that shared it. At a holiday party with my parents when I was probably 8 or 9, my mom pointed out a boy across the room. “He has nystagmus like you,” she said. “But not exactly. Your eyes bop all over your head and his just move back and forth. He also has albinism, which is why his eyes do that. We don’t know what causes yours.” I regarded the ice blond teen across the room. I don’t think we spoke. What would I have said to him? My vision was a point of shame and something I tried to hide. If kids pointed it out, I usually ended up in tears.

My son inherited my nystagmus. It’s given me the unusual opportunity to watch how people react to his vision as a window into how the world reacts to me. Being able to watch my child closely — the flickering of his eyes as he nursed, the tilt of his head as he searched for me among the waiting moms (yes, they were always all moms) at school pickup, as he struggled to read the routes on the approaching buses just like I did — these were moments of familiarity but also of novelty, as I observed how the world observed him. The social stigma of appearing disabled trained out of me many of the behaviors that mark him as “different,” movement patterns that I have no personal recollection of, but can pick up from the family photos in which I always was tilting my head, my eyes struggling like his do to make contact with the aperture of the lens.

In some ways, it has given me the opportunity to revisit my own childhood experience of disability. And one of my main regrets, if I have any, is that I never learned braille. According to the National Federation of the Blind, only about 10% of blind and low-vision children in the U.S. are learning braille. Much of this is due to our bias toward learning through sight, and so children who have any vision are pushed toward text magnification as a replacement. But like me, every person I’ve asked who is blind or low-vision wishes they’d been taught braille as a child or, if they’d been introduced to it, wish they’d been pushed to gain true fluency. Access to language is power. That’s why I’m determined to make sure my kid learns it.

In middle school, I learned to hate public speaking. I was in every sense an “overachiever,” so I remember preparing fastidiously for my first presentation in English class, where we had to present instructions about how to perform a skill or task for our classmates. I had rainbow pastel index cards where I’d written my presentation talking points.

Then I got my grade. It wasn’t perfect. I’d been marked down because I held the note cards in front of my face and I’d failed to make eye contact with my classmates. It wasn’t so much the grade that bothered me, but the awareness that when I spoke publicly, my disability was super visible. In my attempt to assimilate and be “normal,” I feared that visibility more than anything else. From that point on, any kind of speaking in front of other people made me extremely nervous. I dreaded when other people had to watch me talk and avoided it as much as I could.

There are moments where my throat catches as I watch my kid encountering situations l can remember from my own childhood.

It wasn’t until my mid-30s when I started to work with other disabled people and from their comfort with themselves and speaking publicly, I pushed myself to get through my shame. But even with this new confidence, public speaking is still a struggle for me. The more stressed I get, the more my eyes move and so I stumble over words and easily lose my place.

To compensate, I stopped using written notes for my presentations. Instead of reading from my book at author’s events, I used slides with images to prompt me through the outline of my presentation.

Then I watched as a blind advocate read a proclamation at a public hearing using braille. Her presentation was flawless — the kind of flawlessness I’d been dreaming of since my stumbles in middle school. I wanted that skill. But braille, like any language, is difficult to learn in adulthood. If I worked really hard at it, maybe someday I’d be able to read it fluently enough to crib notes for a talk, but I’d never have the speed of someone who learned it as a child.

In the 1820s, braille was created by and embraced by students at the National Institute for the Blind in Paris. But soon their sighted educators tried to stop its adoption, at one point burning all the braille books. These educators preferred a language that they too had access to, like raised letter shapes embossed on the page. Braille was harder for sighted educators to read and it threatened their control and their careers.

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A few captive bonobos recently faced a seemingly simple task: locate a tasty snack hidden under one of three cups. Because bonobos are brainiacs, pinpointing the cup with the treat should have been no sweat.

But there was a wrinkle: the apes were relying on a human, not another member of their own species, to flip over the correct cup. What’s worse, this person sometimes did not see where the food was placed. So the bonobos took it upon themselves to point out the correct cup to their human partner.

“The bonobos knew when their partner was ignorant, and they communicated proactively to make sure that their ignorant partner still made the correct choice,” says Christopher Krupenye, an evolutionary cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University, who helped run the experiment.

Krupenye and his graduate student Luke Townrow described the bonobos’ behavior in a paper published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Their findings provide compelling evidence that the apes can infer someone’s ignorance and also act to help clear up the confusion.

The ability to infer the mental states of others is often referred to as theory of mind. Humans utilize theory of mind to successfully communicate and coordinate with one another. For example, intuiting when someone lacks certain information helps us determine when and how to share knowledge.

Researchers have proposed that humans’ closest evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos, may also possess theory of mind. But few have examined this idea in controlled experimental environments, according to the authors.

Krupenye and Townrow worked with three male bonobos living at Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative, a research center in Des Moines, Iowa. During the experiment, one of the male bonobos would sit across from Townrow as a treat, like a grape or a peanut, was placed under one of three cups on the table between them. If Townrow flipped over the correct cup, the bonobo would receive the reward.

In some trials, Townrow could see the treat being placed under the cup. In others, his view was blocked by cardboard. Once the treat was stashed, he would wait 10 seconds before flipping over a cup.

The bonobos appeared to know when Townrow had his eye on the treat. In the trials where he had observed the placement of the treat, the apes patiently waited for him to flip over the correct cup. In the trials where Townrow’s view was blocked, however, the bonobos pointed toward the correct cup in an effort to fill him in on what he had missed. “They got the task immediately and knew where to point,” Townrow says.

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Between ever-evolving technology, social media influence, and a society that thrives on competition and instant gratification, parents these days are stressed. That’s where slow parenting comes in. Slow parenting emphasizes the importance of stepping back from the fast-paced world of modern parenting and instead focusing on spending meaningful time with your kids. There’s no need to pack their days with activities, sports, and social events to help them thrive—sometimes, all you need are the little moments when you can relax, connect, and appreciate each other’s company.

A slow parenting approach is not about doing less or being hands-off—it’s about being more present and mindful while remembering that childhood is not a competition or a race, but it is fleeting. Those moments you share with your kids should be treated as precious. Here, we look at what slow parenting entails, the pros and cons, and how to be a slow parent in an increasingly fast-paced society.

What is Slow Parenting?

Slow parenting is a parenting style that encourages parents to take a break from the constant need to plan outings and extracurricular activities. The idea is that without a packed schedule, kids have more time to play, explore, and develop at their own pace. And for parents, its an opportunity to take a break from the high-speed, competitive world of modern parenting, which demands more and more of parents’ time and energy. 

At its core, the slow parenting style emphasizes quality over quantity—how your time is spent is more important than the number of activities you participate in.

“You can just take a step back, follow [your child’s] lead, and [let them] show you what they’re really interested in and what they’re curious about,” says Liz Conradt, Ph.D., a clinical and developmental psychologist and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Duke University. 

Slow Parenting Characteristics

These are some of the most common traits of slow parents: 

• They are patient regarding their children’s interests, avoiding the urge to rush them into activities or sports. “A lot of times kids will say, ‘I want to do this,’ or ‘I don’t want to do that,’ [so] then you let them develop their own passions and interests,” says Dr. Conradt.

• They appreciate quality time with their kids—even if that means spending more time at home. 

• They are flexible and open to changing plans or adjusting schedules based on their children’s needs, rather than sticking to a rigid routine—perhaps even sharing some characteristics with Type B parents.

• They believe childhood is not a competition, focusing instead on their children’s well-being and personal growth rather than comparing them to their peers.

• They prioritize strengthening the parent-child bond over constantly trying to schedule activities to keep them busy.

• They don’t feel the need to keep their kids busy all the time—relaxation and downtime are a priority.

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Long in decline, the U.S. nuclear industry is hoping for resurrection at two sites of its greatest failures: Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the Hanford Site in Washington state. Nuclear power, the industry claims, will help satisfy the surging power demands from data centers and the growing AI economy. But such a wrong turn ignores the long-unresolved problems of radioactive nuclear wastes that AI cannot wish away.

In September Constellation Energy announced plans to restart a shuttered reactor at Three Mile Island, prodded by Microsoft, which will need many gigawatts of power to perform extensive AI calculations in its expanding fleet of data centers. Amazon followed suit and announced in November that it will invest $334 million to develop small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) at Hanford, site of the world’s first plutonium-production facility.

Google and Meta are also hoping to bring nuclear power back. In October 2024 Google announced it eventually plans to purchase 500 megawatts of electricity from Kairos Power, which is developing a novel SMR in Oak Ridge,

Tenn., on the site of the national lab that long refined uranium for the nuclear industry. And Facebook parent Meta is seeking bids for nuclear power plants for its data centers.

These tech giants recognize that the next generation of microprocessors to be used for AI calculations at data centers will require oodles of electricity to power and cool them. A single Nvidia Blackwell chip, for example, can draw up to two kilowatts, more than what is needed for a typical house. Cram thousands of them in servers inside a data center, and they will need as much power as a small city.

So-called hyperscale data centers require over 100 megawatts (100 MW)—a sizeable fraction of the output of a major power plant. And that power should be cheap, steady, and reliable.

An authoritative December 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy, written by energy experts at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is especially illuminating. The growth in U.S. data-center energy usage over the next five years, they state, would correspond “to a total power demand for data centers between 74 and 132 [gigawatts].” That would represent some 7 to 12 percent of the U.S. electricity consumption forecast for 2028.

Where on Earth is all this power going to come from? Given the challenges electric utilities face in supplying electricity to meet other growing needs, including electric vehicles, it’s small wonder that big tech has turned back to the atomic nucleus. But the power demands outlined in the DOE report would require building or resurrecting the equivalent of at least 40 Three Mile Island reactors over the next five years. That’s impossible.

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