GoKawiil
Tech News
The Sierra Club estimates that planned U.S. data center construction will push power-sector carbon emissions to 2.1 billion metric tons by 2030, a 42% jump from 2025 levels, according to Bloomberg. That figure, roughly equal to Mexico's total emissions, is two to four times higher than the group's earlier projections, and would effectively erase 15 years of U.S. emissions-reduction progress.
The United Nations Environmental Programme has for the first time acknowledged that the 2015 Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels can no longer be met. UNEP's new framework instead focuses on minimizing both the duration and magnitude of overshoot past that threshold, requiring steep near-term emissions cuts alongside large-scale removal of hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before 2100.
Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk report that patients on their GLP-1 drugs show slower biological aging according to molecular 'aging clocks' measuring DNA changes and protein levels. Separately, MIT Technology Review named Energy Dome among its 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch for 2026, citing its system that stores renewable energy using compressed carbon dioxide rather than underground caverns.
Energy Dome has activated its first commercial-scale energy storage facility in Sardinia, Italy, with a capacity of 200 megawatt-hours, capable of powering approximately 18,000 homes for 10 hours. The company, founded in 2020 and based in Milan, plans to develop up to 30 gigawatt-hours of storage projects across five continents, leveraging its unique carbon dioxide battery technology that does not rely on specific geological formations. While the technology is estimated to be more cost-effective than lithium-ion for longer durations, it currently has only one operational plant and faces efficiency limitations compared to traditional batteries.
Skeptical Science contributors published a peer-reviewed study combining data on ocean, land, air and ice warming, calculating that Earth is accumulating heat at roughly 250 trillion joules per second. To make that figure understandable, the group built a widget—available for blogs, Facebook, iPad and iPhone—that expresses this rate as equivalent to about four Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb detonations every second.
Researchers have calculated the economic damage caused by heat stress reducing worker productivity worldwide, finding that current estimates of the social cost of carbon largely omit this factor. Hot and humid conditions force workers to slow down, take more breaks, or work fewer hours, cutting output across the global workforce.
American Supercritical, a startup founded by Simon Shuham and others, emerged from stealth with $8 million in funding for technology that uses supercritical carbon dioxide to boost the efficiency of gas turbines powering data centers. The company plans to retrofit simple-cycle turbines—common at data centers but far less efficient than combined-cycle plants—so they generate more electricity without increasing fuel use, though the turbines will still emit carbon pollution from burning gas.
A new analysis by Suhrhoff et al. published in Nature examined water chemistry across the Mississippi River basin and found that agricultural liming, long classified by the IPCC as a greenhouse-gas source, has actually removed more CO2 from the atmosphere than it released. US farmers apply over 30 million tonnes of lime annually to manage soil pH, and the reaction was previously assumed to emit CO2 directly.
A new UN Environment Programme report concedes that global warming will surpass the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold set by the Paris climate accord within the next few years, driven by continued burning of coal, oil and gas. Current temperatures already sit around 1.4°C above pre-industrial levels based on 20-year averages, and scientists say there is no longer a realistic path to staying under the limit.
The UN Environment Program's new Limiting Overshoot report acknowledges that global temperatures will rise past the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C threshold, and instead focuses on how to minimize the severity and duration of that overshoot. The plan calls for nations to simultaneously cut greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero and deploy large-scale carbon dioxide removal, treating the latter as a supplement rather than a substitute for emissions cuts.
A survey of recent research consolidates evidence on how electrical double layers at charged interfaces behave when driven away from equilibrium, drawing on decades of double-layer theory alongside newer studies of cation effects in CO2 reduction and fuel-cell electrocatalysis. The compiled literature spans classic Gouy-Chapman-Stern-Grahame models through modern spectroscopic and computational probes of interfacial water and ion behavior under applied current.