James' World 2

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America’s war on Iran began with what was meant to be an intimidating performance of overwhelming air power. Quickly, it became another kind of conflict, with low-cost missiles and drones effectively neutralizing a superpower by punishing its allies and paralyzing energy flows. By the time President Trump tried to threaten Iran into reopening the Strait of Hormuz with a 48-hour ultimatum, it was clear not just that the strait had become America’s singular strategic fixation but that the whole campaign was now a war about energy, in which oil prices and gas plants had become the central theater of conflict.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the supply-chain disruptions of Covid, the war in Iran marks the third major energy shock in just a handful of years, years in which fossil loyalists argued that the green transition risked intolerable turmoil and political leaders cooled off on climate urgency in the name of “energy security.”

The world is still feeling the sting of the last shock, and the new one promises a brutal long tail, as well; the head of the International Energy Agency has called the war in Iran “the greatest global energy security threat in history.” One-fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz, along with perhaps one-fifth of its oil — and though the direct costs of the blockade have generated the most attention, the downstream price spikes are just as concerning. Across much of Asia and parts of Africa, fuel shortages and blackouts are likely. The world could be pulled into recession by the force of energy inflation, even if outright conflict subsides soon, and the higher costs of everything, including the inputs for semiconductors, the Financial Times has warned, might pop the A.I. bubble that is keeping the American economy afloat. A food crisis to dwarf the one that followed the invasion of Ukraine could follow, as the war disrupts not just the price of food but also the global flow of fertilizer — another product of fossil fuels — on the brink of planting season.

That so much could be pulled down the drain by a somewhat goal-less war of choice is partly a result of inept or indifferent planning. But this war is also a new kind of conflict, given shape by fossil-fuel turmoil and the uncertainty brought about by the energy transition of the last decade.

By many metrics and from many vantages, green energy has been a dizzying, ecstatic success. Renewables have grown faster than any new source of energy in history, surpassing nearly all expectations. But we are still in the middle of that transition, with the end of the old paradigm, built on oil and gas and coal, still decades away.

Climate advocates and energy analysts like to say that in the postcarbon future, the geopolitics of energy will be defanged. In the meantime, the energy transition has tightened fossil-fuel markets and concentrated fossil-fuel supply, drawing investment away from aging infrastructure. This has made energy supply somewhat more vulnerable to shock and energy infrastructure more attractive to military targeting. Even wars of choice unfold in a global context, and Iran is no different: a new age of resource conflict arising just as the old energy order was being upended, but before the new one has really taken hold.

Call it a midtransition war.

This Is the Midtransition

You can date the very beginning of the long green transition to the energy crises of the 1970s: Jimmy Carter slapping solar panels on the White House roof, France going all in on nuclear power, those first earnest lectures about “energy efficiency.” The price of solar panels fell 99 percent in the 50 years that followed, but global uptake was painfully incremental. It was only in the decade after the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015 that the world really started to believe that renewables might soon dominate the energy future. Money followed, with worldwide investment in fossil fuels dropping by more than a third between 2015 and 2020 and clean-energy investment growing nearly twice as high since.

But global transformations take time, and for all the rapid green progress, we are still drawing a majority of our energy from legacy systems burning through fossil fuels.

The term “midtransition” comes from Emily Grubert, an environmental sociologist who uses it to describe just how messy decarbonization might be, even if it all goes inspiringly well. Take, just for instance, gas stations: How many of them should there be, once electric vehicles take over the roads while charging exclusively in garages and driveways, and what should we do about all the others made redundant? Or think about the electricity grid, which nearly everyone, considering the energy future now agrees must be rapidly expanded: Elsewhere in the world, users have flocked to rooftop solar to secure their own energy needs, shrinking their carbon footprints but also destabilizing the grid by depriving it of customers and revenue. What happens to the global shipping industry as the world moves away from fossil fuels, given that they account for some 40 percent of all shipping by volume? Literally: What are we supposed to do with all those tankers? This is the midtransition in energy.

There is also a midtransition in geopolitics, already underway. Look, for example, at the Arab gulf countries, petrostates that have spent the last decade channeling oil profits into Big Tech venture capital, bringing them further into alignment with the United States and Israel. Or at China, which now spends hundreds of billions on clean-energy investments abroad while maintaining a fossil-fuel partnership with Russia — and Iran.

And then there’s the midtransition in war. Though Vladimir Putin offered a mesmerizing array of justifications when he invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe’s energy transition offered its own logic — or rather, its own timeline. The continent’s ambitious net-zero commitments meant that Europe was planning to move away from imports of gas, inevitably cutting Russia’s energy leverage over NATO. When the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up that September, it seemed so hard to understand that many assumed Russia was to blame. But even American intelligence now believes it was the Ukrainians, effectively applying the same midtransition principle in reverse: Blowing up the pipeline ensured that Ukraine’s NATO allies couldn’t make up with Russia easily and pushed Europe faster along its path of decarbonization. This used to be called ecoterrorism; now it was the strategic work of hardheaded nation states.

In Foreign Affairs last fall, Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan declared “the return of the energy weapon.” For most of the modern era, they wrote, energy was a familiar tool of great power coercion. But over the last half-century, since the 1973 oil crisis, global powers had managed to mostly avoid the old conflicts and smooth out once-familiar disruptions. Citizens across the rich world were lulled into the expectation that the energy system would always work reliably for them. “Today, that complacency has been upended,” they wrote, with the global order and the energy system fragmenting at the same time. And that was before Trump ordered the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, partly to secure a new source of oil, and before the United States stumbled into a global energy crisis by trying to bomb a petrostate into regime change. No one has ever started a war over solar panels, as any climate activist will tell you. And the economic blast radius of the Iran conflict is large enough that it’s hard to miss the argument it makes for rapid decarbonization. Why continue to rely so heavily on imports from erratic authoritarians overseas when you can instead harvest the bountiful sun, wind, hydropower, and geothermal found nearly everywhere on earth?

In a time of resource wars, you get to reap additional rewards, too. The most outspoken Western critic of the war in Iran has been Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain, a country that has doubled its renewable capacity in the last five years and cut the influence of fossil fuels on its electricity price by 75 percent. The Spanish energy transition is far from complete, but the country has already bought back the right to speak its conscience.

The Wars of the Future

Not that a renewable future will be a peace-loving utopia. There are already heated trade wars over the minerals necessary for the batteries that power electric vehicles. The United States’ recent escalation with China reached its boiling point over rare-earth metals, and Trump grew thirsty for Greenland seemingly on the same basis. (As it turns out, Greenland doesn’t actually have particularly great rare-earth deposits, which aren’t all that rare anyway.) Lithium and cobalt mining are a source of intense conflict in countries from Bolivia to Congo. It’s not hard to imagine those fights spiraling out of control, with consequences all down the global supply chain.

Beyond the famous petrostates, plenty of governments across the developing world depend on tax revenue from energy companies or direct funding from state-owned fossil-fuel enterprises. That funding will dry up more quickly the faster the transition goes, leaving those states precarious and vulnerable. Anytime the world map of literal power changes, the political hierarchy shifts, too.

Then there’s the issue of water. In Iran, a six-year drought has pushed the country to the brink of what is called “water bankruptcy,” with regular supply curtailments and street protests demanding “water, electricity, life.” In December, taps in Tehran’s south began to run dry. Then came larger protests, brutal crackdown, and now war.

Already, desalination has become a miraculous lifeline in an increasingly inhospitable and unforgiving land, with parts of the Gulf drawing 90 percent of their drinking water from desalination plants. Over the last few years, the global green-energy boom has fed a dream that such free and abundant power will allow desalination to transform water-starved regions into oases. But what looks in the distance like techno-utopianism appears, in the meantime, more like a terrifying military vulnerability: Two desalination plants have already reportedly been struck — one in Iran, with the Iranians blaming the United States, and one in supposed retaliation by an Iranian drone in Bahrain.

This is all happening on a planet in the middle of its own transition, one that may well last thousands or even millions of years and to which few nations have even begun to properly adapt. In the meantime, vulnerabilities proliferate like heat.

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• A Toothless Iran?: A recent wave of strikes across the Middle East shows that Tehran has not lost the capacity to retaliate.

• Global Reliance on Natural Gas: From Western Europe to East Asia, countries are scouring the globe for natural gas after the war cut off the Persian Gulf fuel that they relied on to cook dinner, heat homes, and generate electricity. The United States, as the world’s biggest gas exporter, will almost certainly benefit from this upheaval, at least in the short term.

• Journalists Killed in Lebanon: An Israeli strike killed two prominent Lebanese television journalists and a cameraman, according to their news organizations and Lebanese officials. Israel accused one of the reporters of being a Hezbollah operative. Lebanon’s president said they were journalists and condemned the killings. The funerals drew hundreds of mourners.

• Houthis Attack Israel: The Iran-allied rebel group in Yemen joined the widening war with an unsuccessful missile attack on Israel.

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Photo illustration by Chantal Jachan

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Science has always relied on a curious human’s mind forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, analyzing the results, and presenting the case to that person’s peers. Over centuries, we’ve built better tools such as electron microscopes, particle accelerators, and supercomputers, but the core loop of scientific discovery has remained stubbornly human. Now, for the first time, that loop has started with a new kind of mind.

So far, scientists have often had artificial intelligence help them with solving a predefined, narrow task, such as folding proteins, says Jeff Clune, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. “We’re saying the AI gets to be the scientist,” he says.

In a recent Nature study, Clune and his colleagues unveiled the AI Scientist, an AI system that wrote a paper without human involvement that passed peer review for a workshop at the 2025 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a top-tier venue in the field of machine learning. The paper was mediocre, according to Clune and other experts. But its existence marks a turning point that the scientific community is only beginning to grapple with: AI has quickly moved from assisting scientists to attempting to be one.

The AI Scientist comprises multiple modules. After it is given a general topic prompt by researchers, it surveys available literature and generates hypotheses. “We’re just giving it a general direction like ‘Come up with something interesting to study on how the AI learns,’” Clune explains. The system then evaluates and refines those ideas, filtering out any that are not novel. From there, further modules plan and execute experiments, analyze and plot the data, and, finally, write the paper. It even does its own internal peer review process to find flaws in its papers, Clune says. (The system relies on existing foundation models such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o; the team’s contribution is the pipeline orchestrating these models).

To see if The AI Scientist’s output could meet human standards, the team submitted three papers generated by it to the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better (ICBINB) workshop at the 2025 ICLR. One was accepted. (The conference organizers gave their permission for the AI-generated papers to be submitted, and all of the AI Scientist’s papers were withdrawn from the conference after the review process.)

The team behind the AI Scientist admits the bar for this workshop was lower than that of a main conference publication. “Would a mediocre graduate student get one paper in three accepted at a place that accepts 70 percent of papers? Sure!” says Jodi Schneider, an associate professor of information sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not involved in Clune’s study.

The AI’s papers “are okay but not great,” Clune says. To him, some of the AI’s ideas seemed truly creative, yet the system struggled with execution. “The logic and the writing and the thinking throughout the whole paper didn’t all fit together beautifully,” he notes. Further issues included hallucinated references, duplicated figures, and a lack of methodological rigor.

Overall, Clune and his colleagues’ new study has received a lukewarm reception. “The approach is agentic and without any real novelty,” says Maria Liakata, a professor of natural language processing at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the work.

There was one metric, though, where the AI Scientist did outperform human researchers by a huge margin: it produced a formally passable paper on machine learning within 15 hours at a cost Clune estimated to be around $140. Compare that with the capability of a graduate student, who might take a full semester to write their first accepted workshop paper, according to Schneider.

As costs drop and output speeds increase, AI-authored papers present the scientific community with an immediate challenge. “The AI-written papers are probably going to make things much worse,” warns Yanan Sui, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China and the senior workshop chair for ICLR 2026.

To safeguard against this flood, top-tier venues have begun setting limits. “There are strict rules for the main conference that do not allow submission of purely AI-written papers,” Sui says. The compromise, for now, is forced transparency—the authors using AI must clearly state how it was used. Sui admits, though, that journals and conferences usually lack the tools to reliably detect AI-generated contributions.

The tools to autonomously write these contributions, meanwhile, have already started to proliferate. Intology claimed its AI Zochi passed peer review for the main proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (though human researchers were involved in areas such as verifying results before submission and communicating with peer reviewers). Another group, called the Autoscience Institute, stated that its AI system created papers that were accepted at ICLR workshops before the AI Scientist.

“We’re not going to be able to remove the power to generate AI scientific papers,” says Aaron Schein, a data scientist at the University of Chicago and one of the ICBINB workshop organizers. “This technology is only going to get better. I don’t think there’s anything to do about that.”

But what if one day the AI-generated papers stop being mediocre?

Clune sees the transition unfolding in two phases. “In the very short term, you’re going to get a lot of slop and garbage, and the peer review systems are going to have to deal with that,” he says. But eventually, he argues, AI systems will be far better at science than human researchers. “I predict the AI Scientist actually marks the dawn of a new era of rapid scientific advances,” Clune claims, imagining humans reduced to curators witnessing AI achieve scientific wonders.

Liakata, though, thinks there’s still something for us humans to do. “I believe the future is not fully autonomous scientific discovery but advanced human-agent interaction where the human can scrutinize and contribute to the process,” she says.

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‘No Kings’ rallies draw crowds across US against Trump Adminstration

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Tens of thousands of people have joined “No Kings” protests across the U.S. against the war in Iran and President Donald Trump’s actions. (AP video by Mike Pesoli, Mark Vancleave, and Emily Wang)

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In big cities and small towns across the world, protesters gathered for thousands of rallies against President Trump and his policies and actions, with the self-stated goal of fighting dictatorship.

Demonstrators, including elected officials and community leaders, chanted defiant messages and carried homemade signs that condemned the war in Iran, threats against voting rights, and the White House’s mass deportation push, among other topics. Organized by a coalition of activist groups under the banner “No Kings,” it was the third such countrywide protest in the past 10 months.

No Kings organizers said eight million people took part, one of the largest protests in recent history. Their estimates in some cities were higher than those of local public safety officials. The New York Times is doing its own reporting on some of the turnout, but has not independently confirmed the numbers from the thousands of protest sites.

One of the largest rallies took place outside the Minnesota Capitol, where the singer Bruce Springsteen performed “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote to protest the immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal agents in January.

“They picked the wrong city,” Mr. Springsteen told the large crowd, adding that “these invasions of American cities will not stand.”

In Washington, D.C., some protesters marched to the military base where Stephen Miller, the White House official overseeing the mass deportation push, has been residing. Some chanted, “Stephen Miller’s got to go,” and “We’ve got the people outside your door.”

Protesters marched down small-town main streets and thoroughfares, many bundled up to withstand chilly temperatures. Attendees at small gatherings, including one in Richmond, Ky., waved American flags as drivers signaled support by honking. In Atlanta, protesters chanted for an end to immigration raids.

Demonstrators seized upon topics where they said there was overreach by the Trump administration, including health care and the environment.

A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, called the protests “Trump derangement therapy sessions” in a statement on Thursday.

The protests, organizers have said, intentionally lack a single, specific demand but rather seek to harness energy on a wide variety of grievances regarding Mr. Trump and his policies.

Like many silver-haired protesters gathered at Auditorium Shores, a riverside park in Austin, Texas, Gilbert Martinez, a 93-year-old Korean War veteran, sees Mr. Trump as reckless and rebellious. And that’s not aligned with the values Mr. Martinez has spent his life preaching.

He called the attack on Iran a “diversion.”

“That idiot is going to cause a lot of good military people to lose their lives,” he said.

A longtime local business leader, Mr. Martinez is from the Texas Panhandle and says he can trace his family lineage to El Paso. He started Austin’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 1973, he said, because in those days, downtown was a “backwater” devoid of Hispanic-owned businesses.

“I’m an American,” Mr. Martinez said. “We didn’t just get here.”

Chicagoans gathered at Grant Park, where Saira Bensett, 60, a retired zoological worker, described the turnout as cathartic.

“When I watch the news, it’s often too much — the emotions I feel make me feel like I’m alone,” she said. “So I wanted to be here to feel like I’m not by myself.”

Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton of Illinois, who is also the Democratic nominee for a Senate seat, told a crowd, “We all know the power of turning our anger into action.”

Many who gathered outside the Minnesota State Capitol said they had been driven to protest by the tumultuous monthslong presence of federal immigration officers in the Twin Cities region.

“We don’t want to walk out our door in fear,” said Chas Jensen, 68, who has lived in St. Paul his entire life and marched with his wife, Kitty Warner. “I’ve seen a lot over the years, but nothing like this.”

“It’s been hell, the last few months,” added Sadikshya Aryal, who came from South Minneapolis with her husband and two friends. Ms. Aryal, 32, still carries her passport whenever she leaves her house, she said.

Attendees said they felt the area had not returned to normal since the immigration operation but were comforted by how many people showed up Saturday.

“As much as it can feel helpless, this shows it’s not,” said Ms. Warner, 80.

The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, gave a fiery address from behind a row of bulletproof glass panels, which underscored fears of political violence. Referring to the president’s oft-stated disdain for Somali immigrants, Mr. Walz said that their grandchildren would remain in the United States long after “the orange clown is in the dustbin of history.”

In New York City, Valerie Tirado said she decided to attend an anti-Trump demonstration for the first time because her son, a Marine, was set to be deployed to the Middle East.

“Trump is using these military men as pawns, just to flex,” said Ms. Tirado, 60, a registered Democrat.

Spouses Michael Bianco and Susan Draper said they had demonstrated in the streets for causes they support since 1968. What struck them most about Saturday’s was how many people their age were on the streets.

“I want to express my disdain,” said Ms. Draper, 77, a retired N.Y.U. urban anthropology professor.

Eileen McHugh, 59, traveled an hour from her Republican-leaning town in Westchester County to protest at Columbus Circle.

“The whole Republican Party has blood on their hands,” Ms. McHugh said. “Bombing boats in Venezuela and schools in Iran is murder.”

While immigration policy was the focus of past No Kings protests in Atlanta, demonstrators on Saturday drew attention to the war in Iran, the toll the partial government shutdown is taking on air travel, and a bill Republicans are championing to tighten voting rules.

“They just keep pushing the limits every day to see how far they can take their regime,” said Alan Reed, 72, who attended the protest using a walker and had a rainbow flag draped over his back. “To see how much authority they can grab, until they can cancel our elections.”

Nicholas Phillips, 34, of Long Beach, Calif., cooled himself outside Los Angeles City Hall with a rainbow fan, joined by friends.

Mr. Phillips, who is gay, said he came to protest the Trump administration’s anti-transgender policies and the potential for the Supreme Court to reverse the country’s marriage equality laws.

“It’s important to show up,” he said.

Later in the day, tensions escalated toward a separate group of protesters who had gathered outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center. Tear gas was deployed, and rubber bullets were shot into the crowd. The police declared an unlawful assembly, formed a line, and made several arrests.

In statements on social media, the Los Angeles Police Department said that federal authorities had used nonlethal measures to move the crowd back after protesters were warned not to throw items or try to tear down the gate.

A city councilor, Sameer Kanal, described “a sea of Portlanders” in a park near downtown. Many were wearing the inflatable animal costumes that have made the city’s anti-immigration rallies a viral sensation.

Deana Fredericks, 65, was among a group of women wearing outfits inspired by “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a show drawn from the Margaret Atwood novel that depicts a totalitarian society in which women are treated as property. “We’re concerned about women’s rights, but it’s also gone beyond that,” she said, citing the Iran war and voting rights.

Later, outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, hundreds of protesters gathered, with some breaking open a gate at the entrance of the building. The authorities pushed them back. State and city police officers arrived to further break up the crowd.

No Kings protesters gathered at the park at Pier A in Hoboken on the banks of the Hudson River on a chilly morning. A local folk singer, Ed Fogarty, played the classic Bob Dylan protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Noah Schwartz, 54, one of the organizers of a march from Jersey City to Hoboken, used a bullhorn to lead the crowd in a chant.

“We will not stop our fun, our joy, our democracy,” he said. “Say it once, say it twice! We will not put up with ICE!”

Protesters with signs slung over their shoulders streamed into Anchorage’s Town Square Park, as temperatures hovered around 20.

Lynette Moreno-Hinz, a 67-year-old cabdriver from Anchorage, played a skin drum for the crowd. Ms. Moreno-Hinz, who is Tlingit, said she was protesting because Alaska Natives are concerned about federal support for myriad tribal programs. “He’s taking away the money for our Native people,” she said, referring to Mr. Trump.

The No Kings movement debuted in February 2025 on Presidents’ Day. The decentralized coalition had a stronger showing last June, on the day Mr. Trump marked his birthday by ordering the military to stage a large parade in Washington, D.C. The groups reported an even larger turnout in October.

In London, demonstrators carried scowling bobbleheads of Mr. Trump; the first lady, Melania Trump; and Vice President JD Vance. Caricatures of Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem also hovered over the crowd.

Carmen Kingston, a New Yorker who has lived in Britain for a decade, carried a poster with the words “Minab Massacre,” referring to the strike on an elementary school in Iran that killed at least 175 people, most of them children.

The war, she said, is “part of a domestics political climate that includes the erosion of democratic institutions, democratic guardrails, and unaccountable violence.”

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• Houthis Attack Israel: The attack by the Iranian-backed militia in Yemen marked an escalation in the conflict, bringing in a new actor who threatened to expand the war’s reach across the region.

• Strike on U.S. Base: A combined missile and drone attack by Iran injured 12 American troops, two of them seriously, at Prince ​Sultan Air Base in Saudi ​Arabia, two U.S. officials said.

• Iran’s Information War: With help from Russia, China, and A.I. tools, Iran is spreading content designed to exploit opposition to the U.S.-Israeli campaign and to deflect from its own considerable losses on the battlefield. Both U.S. and Iranian officials alike have used memes to taunt each other.

• Attacks on Iranian Infrastructure: Strikes on Iran’s industrial infrastructure widened, with attacks on two major steel production complexes that are vital to the country’s economy, along with other industrial sites. Iran attributed the strikes to Israel.

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https://www.nytimes.com

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