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17 Mar 2026

17 Mar 2026 12:01pm GMT

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Bills Would Ban Liability Lawsuits For Climate Change

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Republican lawmakers in multiple states and Congress are advancing proposals to shield polluters from climate accountability and prevent any type of liability for climate change harms -- even as these harms and their associated costs continue to mount. It's the latest in a counter-offensive that has unfolded on multiple fronts, from the halls of Congress and the White House to courts and state attorneys general offices across the country. Dozens of local communities, states and individuals are suing major oil and gas companies and their trade associations over rising climate costs and for allegedly lying to consumers about climate change risks and solutions. At the same time, some states are enacting or considering laws modeled after the federal Superfund program that would impose retroactive liability on large fossil fuel producers and levy a one-time charge on them to help fund climate adaptation and resiliency measures. But many of these cases and climate superfund laws could be stopped in their tracks, either by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court or by the Republican-controlled Congress. Last month the court decided to take up a petition lodged by oil companies Suncor and ExxonMobil in a climate-damages case brought against the companies by Boulder, Colorado. The petition argues that Boulder's claims are barred by federal law, and if the justices agree, it could knock out not only Boulder's lawsuit but also many others like it. The court is expected to hear the case during its upcoming term that starts in October. There is also a possibility that Republicans in Congress will take action before then to gift the fossil fuel industry legal immunity, similar to that granted to gun manufacturers with the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Sixteen Republican attorneys general wrote (PDF) to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in June suggesting that the Department of Justice could recommend legislation creating precisely this type of liability shield. And last month, one Republican congresswoman announced that such legislation is indeed in the works. "The ultimate democratic institution in America is the jury," said former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. Enacting policies that prevent or block climate-related lawsuits against polluters, he said, would effectively shutter "the doors of the courthouse to Americans that have been injured by oil and gas company pollution and by their lies and deceit about that pollution." "I really think it's an un-American effort to deny Americans the traditional right of access to a jury," Inslee said. Oil and gas executives are "terrified" by the prospect of having to stand before a jury and face evidence of their climate-change lies and deception, he added. "You'll see the steam coming out of the jury's ears when they hear about how they've been lied to for decades. [Oil companies] understand why juries will be outraged by it, and they are shaking in their boots. The day of reckoning is coming, and that's why they're afraid."

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Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta's $2B Lobbying for Age Verification Tech

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17 Mar 2026 10:39am GMT

Kagi Small Web

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17 Mar 2026 9:53am GMT

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Hydropower Line From Quebec Could Power a Million NYC Homes

The Champlain Hudson Power Express, a $6 billion, 339-mile buried transmission line, will soon deliver Canadian hydropower from Hydro-Quebec to New York City. The project could supply up to 20% of the city's electricity and power roughly one million homes throughout the year. "This is far and away the largest project I have ever worked on," said Bob Harrison, who has worked in infrastructure for 40 years and is the head of engineering for the Champlain Hudson Power Express. "We like to say it's the largest project you'll never see." The New York Times reports: The massive power project, expected to provide energy to a million New York City customers a year, travels underground and underwater, from the northern plains at the Canadian border to the filled-in marshlands of coastal Queens, much of it loosely following the Hudson River. Its construction included the underwater installation of more than two million feet of cable imported from Sweden. It also required special boats, loaded with equipment that could shoot water jets deep into the sediment, to create trenches for the cable. Then, when it came to placing cable beneath the landscape, more than 700 land-use easements were needed, plus an additional 1.55 million feet of cable. The Champlain Hudson Power Express has found a way to plug into the city, but it wasn't easy. The work included 10 new manholes and more than three miles of new underground circuitry, according to Con Edison, the city's primary electricity provider. "It was literally a hand weave under the streets of Queens," said Jennifer Laird-White, the head of external affairs for Transmission Developers. The hydropower travels from Canada via two buried cables that are as round as cantaloupes. Those lines snake for hundreds of miles under a lake, several rivers (including the Hudson for about 90 miles) and through buried trenches alongside train tracks and roads. The cables resurface in Astoria, Queens, where a converter station shapes, filters and refines the raw power into a product that New Yorkers can consume. In two cavernous rooms that could be mistaken for "Star Wars" sets, the electricity flows through 30 hanging structures encased in what look like metallic, dinosaurlike exoskeletons. Each one weighs about as much as a small humpback whale and contains microprocessors, thousands of valves and fiber wires. "I am still wowed when I walk into that facility," said Mr. Harrison, the engineer. "I mean, it is just mind-boggling."

New 'Vibe Coded' AI Translation Tool Splits the Video Game Preservation Community

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" just over a year ago, we've seen a rapid increase in both the capabilities and popularity of using AI models to throw together quick programming projects with less human time and effort than ever before. One such vibe-coded project, Gaming Alexandria Researcher, launched over the weekend as what coder Dustin Hubbard called an effort to help organize the hundreds of scanned Japanese gaming magazines he's helped maintain at clearinghouse Gaming Alexandria over the years, alongside machine translations of their OCR text. A day after that project went public, though, Hubbard was issuing an apology to many members of the Gaming Alexandria community who loudly objected to the use of Patreon funds for an error-prone AI-powered translation effort. The hubbub highlights just how controversial AI tools remain for many online communities, even as many see them as ways to maximize limited funds and man-hours. "I sincerely apologize," Hubbard wrote in his apology post. "My entire preservation philosophy has been to get people access to things we've never had access to before. I felt this project was a good step towards that, but I should have taken more into consideration the issues with AI." "I'm very, very disappointed to see [Gaming Alexandria], one of the foremost organizations for preserving game history, promoting the use of AI translation and using Patreon funds to pay for AI licenses," game designer and Legend of Zelda historian Max Nichols wrote in a post on Bluesky over the weekend. "I have cancelled my Patreon membership and will no longer promote the organization." Nichols later deleted his original message (archived here), saying he was "uncomfortable with the scale of reposts and anger" it had generated in the community. However, he maintained his core criticism: that Gemini-generated translations inevitably introduce inaccuracies that make them unreliable for scholarly use. In a follow-up, he also objected to Patreon funds being used to pay for AI tools that produce what he called "untrustworthy" translations, arguing they distort history and are not valid sources for research. "... It's worthless and destructive: these translations are like looking at history through a clownhouse mirror," he added.