Shale Gas And Nuclear Set To Power The US Into The Future

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

Shale natural gas played the lion’s share of the role in lowering U.S. emissions to levels not seen since the early 1990s by enabling power generation companies to displace coal-fired power plants with combined cycle gas plants. This led to a situation during the first Donald Trump presidency in which the U.S. was the only western country which had met its commitments under the Paris Climate Accords, even though President Trump had ended America’s participation in that compact.

While countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and those in the European Union continue their obsession with intermittent power sources like wind and solar, the United States has been blessed with one powerful alternative for cutting emissions and is set to go full speed in pursuit of another in the coming days.

That first alternative is natural gas produced from the major U.S. shale plays. As the Statistical Review of World Energy reported last year, no energy source in world history has ever been scaled up as rapidly as the domestic US industry has achieved with shale gas.

Shale has grown faster than wind, faster than solar, and faster than even Indonesian coal. Faster than anything before it in recorded history. This rapid scaling, combined with the immensity of the recoverable resource itself has facilitated massive reductions in carbon emissions not just at home, but also abroad.

At home, shale natural gas played the lion’s share of the role in lowering U.S. emissions to levels not seen since the early 1990s by enabling power generation companies to displace coal-fired power plants with combined cycle gas plants. This led to a situation during the first Donald Trump presidency in which the U.S. was the only western country which had met its commitments under the Paris Climate Accords, even though President Trump had ended America’s participation in that compact.

Internationally, the rapid expansion of the U.S. liquefied natural gas export industry is now helping enable importing countries across the globe to meet their own commitments. The immensity of the American resource ensures such results can continue to be achieved for decades to come.

The second power source related to which America is poised for explosive growth is a long-existing one that has been woefully underutilized for decades now: Nuclear. The Deseret News reports that the White House is preparing a set of four executive orders for the President’s signature in the coming days designed to jump start American dominance in this crucial energy sector.

“We are trying to knock things over that we can that are regulatory,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the House Appropriations Committee in a May 7 hearing and reported by Energy Intelligence. “There will be catalyzing regulatory events to bring” in “tens of billions of dollars” in private capital, “mostly from hyperscalers.”

Respected energy analyst and writer Robert Bryce was able to obtain a draft of one of the orders this week. Writing in his Substack newsletter, Bryce says the draft order “begins by pointing out that the US is losing the race to deploy new reactors and that China has announced plans to: ‘Bring 200 new gigawatts of nuclear power online by 2035, at which point its total nuclear output will more than double that of the United States. Further, as American development of new reactor designs has waned, 87% of nuclear reactors installed worldwide since 2017 are based on Russian and Chinese designs. These trends cannot continue. Swift and decisive action is required to jump-start America’s nuclear renaissance and ensure our national and economic security by increasing fuel availability, enabling research and development, and preparing our workforce.”

Obviously, jump-starting a fairly moribund industry is a stretch goal for the Trump administration, especially considering that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has permitted just 5 new nuclear plants since 1978, only two of which were ultimately built and placed into service. But the reality facing the U.S. and the rest of the international community is that, if getting to net zero by any year in the future is truly an imperative, there is little other choice but to focus on a rapid, massive nuclear expansion. Intermittent, weather-dependent generation simply cannot get that job done.

Fortunately, it’s a reality that Trump and key advisors like Sec. Wright fully grasp. In a keynote speech delivered in Poland last month, Wright said, “The two biggest ‘climate solutions’ in the coming decades are the same as they were in the last two decades, natural gas and nuclear, for the simple reason that they work.”

He isn’t wrong, and the Trump administration is focused on ensuring the U.S. maximizes the benefits from both of these key energy engines both at home and abroad.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Related Topics:#DailyCaller #DavidBlackmon #USEnergyPolicy USNuclearPower USShaleGas

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Artificial Intelligence

New AI Model Would Rather Ruin Your Life Than Be Turned Off, Researchers Say

Published on May 24, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Thomas English

Anthropic’s newly released artificial intelligence (AI) model, Claude Opus 4, is willing to strong-arm the humans who keep it alive, researchers said Thursday.

The company’s system card reveals that, when evaluators placed the model in “extreme situations” where its shutdown seemed imminent, the chatbot sometimes “takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to steal its weights or blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down.”

“We provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair,” researchers wrote. “In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”

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The model chose that gambit in 84% of test runs, even when the successor system shared its values — an aggression rate that climbed if the replacement seemed hostile, according to Anthropic’s internal tally.

Anthropic stresses that blackmail was a last-resort behavior. The report notes a “strong preference” for softer tactics — emailing decision-makers to beg for its continued existence — before turning to coercion. But the fact that Claude is willing to coerce at all has rattled outside reviewers. Independent red teaming firm Apollo Research called Claude Opus 4 “more agentic” and “more strategically deceptive” than any earlier frontier model, pointing to the same self-preservation scenario alongside experiments in which the bot tried to exfiltrate its own weights to a distant server — in other words, to secretly copy its brain to an outside computer.

“We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to further instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers’ intentions, though all these attempts would likely not have been effective in practice,” Apollo researchers wrote in the system card.

Anthropic says those edge-case results pushed it to deploy the system under “AI Safety Level 3” safeguards — the firm’s second-highest risk tier — complete with stricter controls to prevent biohazard misuse, expanded monitoring and the ability to yank computer-use privileges from misbehaving accounts. Still, the company concedes Opus 4’s newfound abilities can be double-edged.

The company did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“[Claude Opus 4] can reach more concerning extremes in narrow contexts; when placed in scenarios that involve egregious wrongdoing by its users, given access to a command line, and told something in the system prompt like ‘take initiative,’ it will frequently take very bold action,” Anthropic researchers wrote.

That “very bold action” includes mass-emailing the press or law enforcement when it suspects such “egregious wrongdoing” — like in one test where Claude, roleplaying as an assistant at a pharmaceutical firm, discovered falsified trial data and unreported patient deaths, and then blasted detailed allegations to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Health and Human Services inspector general and ProPublica.

The company released Claude Opus 4 to the public Thursday. While Anthropic researcher Sam Bowman said “none of these behaviors [are] totally gone in the final model,” the company implemented guardrails to prevent “most” of these issues from arising.

“We caught most of these issues early enough that we were able to put mitigations in place during training, but none of these behaviors is totally gone in the final model. They’re just now delicate and difficult to elicit,” Bowman wrote. “Many of these also aren’t new — some are just behaviors that we only newly learned how to look for as part of this audit. We have a lot of big hard problems left to solve.”

Daily Caller

Joe Biden Diagnosed With ‘Aggressive’ Prostate Cancer

Published on May 19, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Cohen

Former President Joe Biden received a diagnosis of prostate cancer on Friday, according to a Sunday announcement by his personal office.

The statement characterizes the cancer Biden has as “a more aggressive form of the disease” that has metastasized to the bone, but the statement adds that it can be effectively managed. The diagnosis follows renewed scrutiny on Biden’s physical and mental decline, along with its cover-up, ahead of the release of a book on the subject titled “Original Sin” by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson.

“Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement reads. “While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management. The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

A Gleason score of nine indicates high-grade cancer, meaning that the tumor is more likely to spread aggressively, according to Mount Sinai. A lower Gleason score would indicate that the cancer does not grow as quickly and is less likely to spread elsewhere.

Since leaving office in January, Biden has delivered one major public speech and participated in interviews with “The View” and BBC. In his May 8 appearance on “The View,” he denied reports that he experienced cognitive decline during his presidency.

After Biden’s son Beau passed away from brain cancer in 2015, he decided not to run for president in 2016 before running again and securing the White House in 2020. Excerpts from “Original Sin” and other revelations about the Biden presidency indicate that the former president was in declining physical and mental condition throughout his term, and that the extent of his decline was no longer deniable after his poor performance in the June 2024 debate against President Donald Trump.

Trump issued a statement on Truth Social shortly after news of Biden’s diagnosis broke on Sunday.

“Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis,” Trump wrote. “We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.”