You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxes and regulations they would entail, other people said.

The LedeReport and observation on what you want to know today.

The executives responded. A fracking king named Harold Hamm (who had originally supported Ron DeSantis in the primaries) took the lead, working the phones assiduously. “Harold can just stick his finger in the ground, and oil will come up,” an admiring Trump explained at one event. But in this case he stuck his finger in his phone and what came up was money. The Post again: “Hamm is working ‘incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector,’ said a Trump campaign aide. ‘We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.’ ”

As I say, no one seems to shake their head at any of that anymore. It’s corrupt, but a kind of corruption legalized by the Supreme Court, in Citizens United and other decisions; we’re beginning to take it for granted that government power will be used on behalf of the highest bidder.

Language corruption, however, is slightly different. Trump – a master at directing attention where he needs it – also used Monday’s signing sessions to call for a “national power emergency. ” According to one advisor, this will “unlock a variety of other authorities” that will allow you to make those adjustments more easily; However, the main effect is simply to muddy the waters. Because there is no electrical emergency. The United States is generating oil and fuel at record levels. In fact, those in the oil industry have emphasized in recent weeks that they do not need to see more drilling because that would drive down prices. (Trump’s executive orders, ending the leasing of federal waters for offshore wind farms, would well restrict the amount of energy the country could potentially produce. )

This emergence of force would arise from the desire to supply more strength to the centers of knowledge, so that we can beat China in the quest for the Holy Grail of synthetic intelligence. “The emergence of the national force is due to the fact that we are in an era of AI. “We’re in a race with China, and our ability to produce American domestic strength is that we can produce the electrical power and the strength that we need to remain at the global forefront of technology,” one official said of Trump, speaking at a nonbreaking point. to present it on the periodistas. la morning of the inauguration.

But—all doubts about the utility and urgency of developing A.I. aside—if this were the new Administration’s real goal it would actually want to leave fossil fuels behind. At the end of 2024, a Silicon Valley team that included researchers from Stripe, Anthropic, Tesla, and elsewhere produced a report showing that solar microgrids are by far the fastest way to build the power that data centers need. “Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around 2 years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders,” the report states. That’s because essentially all you have to do is put up a bunch of solar panels and some batteries and run a wire to your data center—not build a huge centralized power plant and connect it to the grid. The report continues, “Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.”

The real emergency, of course, takes into account the weather. The last two years have been the most remembered. In 2023, fires in Canada filled American skies with choking smoke; In 2024, Hurricane Helen devastated the southern Appalachians; 2025 dawned with hell in Los Angeles. For years, activists have tried to convince Joe Biden to call for a climate emergency, essentially in an effort to draw attention and action to the crisis. Instead, Biden has strived to expand white power through the Inflation Reduction Act, his virtuoso cadres that have earned him and the climate crisis almost no attention.

So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s gambit will succeed in confusing voters, and it’s almost certain that it will confuse much of the media, which has a history of following whatever squirrel he lets out of the cage.

But it is unlikely to fool the Chinese, who are bringing in renewable power faster than anyone else. And it will almost certainly not confuse the planet’s glaciers and ice caps, which will continue to melt, nor its forests and grasslands, which will continue to burn, nor its seas, which will continue to rise. When we need to describe the folly of our leaders, we evoke the example of King Canute, striking the sea with his scepter to hold back the waves. Canute, however, was more cunning than our same old edition of the legend: he really sought to show his flattering courtiers that his strength had limits. The 12th-century English historian Henry of Huntingdon says that as the water passed, Cnut declared: “Let all men know how empty and insignificant is the strength of kings, for there is none worthy of the name except Him who The sky, the earth and the sea obey eternal laws. Then he hung his gold crown on a crucifix and never wore it again, “in honor of God the King Almighty. ”

Trump, of course, is delivering the opposite of that pious and humble message. He confuses attention with reality (just as Biden sometimes confused reality with attention). It’s an emergency all right. ♦

Has an old Soviet mystery been solved anyway?

Why the rules of mustard and spaghetti sauce don’t apply to ketchup.

How the Unabombers have avoided the death penalty.

The actress who magnified her fame by renouncing it.

The potluck dinner of Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein commercial.

Fiction via Jamaica Kincaid: “Girl”

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