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"New Form of Imperialism": Renowned U.N. Scientist on AI Boom's Huge Water, Carbon & Land Footprint
• 5 days ago

"New Form of Imperialism": Renowned U.N. Scientist on AI Boom's Huge Water, Carbon & Land Footprint

The environmental toll of the artificial intelligence boom continues to mount as tech companies use ever more power to run their data centers and enormous amounts of water for cooling. A new investigation by U.N. scientists warns that AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people, while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined — countries with a total population of 650 million. “Most people understand AI as a digital technology, as a virtual thing, as something that is in the clouds,” says Iranian environmental scientist Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “What we tried to do in this report was to remind people that there’s some physics to all of this.”

Transcript: Trump Hits Shocking Poll Low as Aides Leak: He’s “Furious”
• 5 days ago

Transcript: Trump Hits Shocking Poll Low as Aides Leak: He’s “Furious”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 12 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.CNN reports that Donald Trump is “furious” because his bombings of Iran this week were not portrayed by the media as strong and powerful. He’s apparently “frustrated,” according to CNN sources, who are clearly leaking out of concern for his mental state. On another front entirely, Trump is smashing new records in the polling. He’s reaching new thresholds on inflation. Thanks to Trump, Democrats may now be leading Republicans by a key polling metric for the first time in many decades.We think these stories should all be connected to each other. The rage and frustration over Iran is basically rage and frustration over his political situation, because the former is causing the latter. He’s in a political bind we don’t think we’ve ever seen before.So we’re parsing through all this new data and new Trump lunacy with Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has worked on a lot of midterms and can explain how all this is playing on the ground. Christina, thanks for coming on.Christina Reynolds: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So let’s start here. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten made a point I haven’t heard before. He said Trump is the only president ever to hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. And he’s done this in many polls. Listen to Enten.Harry Enten (voiceover): Inflation net approval: minus 50 points or worse. Fifty points underwater or worse. Total polls per president. Trump in 2026—already at least eight polls in which his net approval rating on inflation or the cost of living is negative 50 points or worse. Every other president in every other year, the answer is zero.Sargent: So just to reiterate, in eight polls, Trump has hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. No other president has ever done that. Christina, I don’t think I’ve seen polling quite this bad on the economy for a president ever! As long as I’ve been following politics! Maybe something under George W. Bush? I don’t know. What do you think?Reynolds: I don’t think it was this bad. I worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in ’06, and we took back the House. Bush was certainly not a popular president at that time. But these are numbers that I would send back to the pollster and say, Can you double-check? I don’t know that I’ve seen numbers this bad.Republicans have an even bigger problem than those numbers. They have a president who absolutely wants credit for fixing everything. He believes his own spin, certainly, but also he believes he’s taken action and should get credit for that action. That happens with a lot of politicians, but this president is especially guilty of that. He is not going to fade away into the background, which Bush did largely in 2006. He is not going to let the Republicans go out and shift the conversation.Not that they would be able to shift the conversation. When inflation is growing higher than your wages, voters understand that. They know it. They live it. You can’t convince them things are better when they’re literally not. But Trump is not just going to go out and talk about things and remind voters of that—he’s going to go out and talk about his ballroom. He’s going to go out and talk about the reflecting pool, as he did in Wisconsin when he went to one of the most vulnerable Republicans. So this is a huge problem for Republicans. It’s not just the polling number, it’s what Trump’s going to do because of the polling number.Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there, which is that Donald Trump isn’t being at all accommodating of the situation that Republicans find themselves in. They’ve urged him to try to talk about the economy in a way that makes it look as if he understands what people are going through and makes it look as if he’s doing stuff. But he won’t do that, because it makes him look like a failure.Since everything has to always be about his lionization, his glorious greatness, he just says, I don’t care about inflation, or, Affordability’s a hoax. There’s no sensitivity or awareness of the situation the rest of his party is in, in any sense.Reynolds: Absolutely not. That is counter to George Bush. It’s counter to what Nancy Pelosi did when she was House Speaker and understood that some people were going to speak out against her. As long as she had the votes, she was OK. There’s some level of what gets the party, what gets the values that you support where you need to go. And Trump is about what gets Trump where he needs to go. It’s a huge problem for Republicans.You heard it in the “I don’t care about the midterms” comment. You hear it in everything that he does. If I was a Republican, I would want him to take a back seat on things outside of maybe fundraising. He’s doing the exact opposite. If you’re a Republican and you’re forced to stand up there and praise him for gold-plating the White House, that’s a pretty tough campaign ask.Sargent: That’s really interesting. By the way, Harry Enten also notes that, according to his calculations, Democrats are more trusted on inflation than Republicans for the first time since the 1970s. Enten also notes that Trump is the only president to ever hit 80 percent disapproval on gas prices. Eighty percent disapproval on gas prices! Trump is just crushing records all over the place. I swear I have not seen numbers like this, ever.Reynolds: No, me neither. It’s pretty impressive when you think about it. It also is a sign that you can’t pull the wool over voters’ eyes on things like this. Everyone goes to the gas station. Everyone has to deal with the prices going up because of gas prices. You can’t fool them. Trump talking the way he does and acknowledging that it’s OK, but it’ll get better, doesn’t help them now. He’s really leaving Republicans in a rough spot.Sargent: It’s really extraordinary. So all this is key context for what’s coming next. CNN’s Dana Bash reports that sources are saying Trump is, quote-unquote, “furious.” Why? Because after Trump struck Iran this week, the media didn’t view his action as powerful enough. Dana Bash also reports that Trump is “frustrated” that Iran didn’t seem to be taking the strike seriously. Amazing.So now Trump is saying that he won’t strike Iran again because they’re now close to a deal. He says—maybe by the time people listen to this, there will be a deal. Maybe not. I don’t think so, because he’s now talking about this weekend. But put that aside. I want to focus on the connection between Trump’s rage and his terrible polls. The reason Trump is angry isn’t just because Iran won’t do his bidding. It’s that by not doing Trump’s bidding and keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iran has him cornered. It’s driving up prices, destroying his numbers, and destroying GOP midterm hopes. The anger and the polling are connected in that sense, right, Christina?Reynolds: Absolutely they are. His frustration is coming out in what voters are understanding. It’s one of the reasons he can’t stop talking about things that are incredibly unpopular. He is just clinically unable to move on because of that rage and that frustration, because it didn’t go the way he assumed it would go. So we are stuck in a war that people didn’t ask for, that we proactively started. But we are domestically stuck with higher gas prices and everything that stems from that.That’s all because he didn’t get what he wanted, and no one is giving him credit for what he thinks he should get credit for. I am a little baffled as to what he thinks he should get credit for at this point, but no one is giving him any credit. They are giving him, rightly, the blame. He can’t handle that.Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. He’s in a rage because the media is portraying him as being fundamentally ineffective and unable to resolve the very situation that’s creating the high prices.By the way, even if he gets a deal—I don’t know, by the time people listen to this, or on the weekend, whenever—even if he gets one, those prices, especially on things like energy and gas, are going to stay up for a long time. As someone who’s worked on midterm elections, how do you anticipate the impact of this playing out on the ground in all these races over the next few months? What’s it going to look like politically?Reynolds: It’s going to look like a few things. We’re going to see more retirements. We’re seeing that at every level of the ballot, where Republicans are choosing just not to run again in this environment. We’re going to continue to see voters open for a change in surprising places, voters who understand—maybe it’s not forever, maybe we rent some seats for a little while—but they see it’s not working.Where we have candidates that are out there talking about issues that matter versus a candidate that is forced to talk about a ballroom or to praise a war that they’re not that into, you’re going to continue to see voters give a chance to those candidates.I think we’re running better candidates, and we have candidates who understand their districts and are willing to take a chance. One big difference in the shift that I’ve seen from 2002 and 2006 to 2018 and now—there’s some power in looking at Donald Trump getting elected for people who are not traditional politicians to say, Maybe I can give it a try. Maybe I can offer something different, or I can connect better with my community. That means we see some interesting candidates out there who offer something different. Different is good in a change electorate.It’s going to make for some challenging elections for Republicans that they’re not expecting. What also happens in those places, when we expand the field—you have candidates that aren’t used to hard races. You have candidates who got a little lazy. They have not done their constituent services, they have not gone out and had a tough campaign schedule, versus a candidate that’s new, that’s trying again, that has the fire in their belly. I can tell you which candidate I’d rather work for every time in that scenario.Sargent: I want to pick up a little bit more on that because we have a piece up at NewRepublic.com right now about American Bridge, which is a Democratic group. They’re investing $50 million in trying to expand the House map. The Senate map as well, but let’s focus on the House for now. They’re trying to expand the House map by really going into some very difficult districts traditionally for Democrats—ones that lean Republican by four or five, six, seven, eight, that kind of thing. Some of these are in North Carolina, some of them are in central Pennsylvania, some are in Iowa.But Democrats, not just American Bridge, but as a party generally—it now looks like there’s a new level of commitment to going into harder races, to contesting tougher places and really trying to shake loose whatever can be shaken loose. That’s what happens, right, in an environment like this? If you go contest these races in hard places, things happen. Funny things happen. Surprising things happen.Reynolds: You expand the field at a time like this because we look at what’s happened since Trump got elected. Since Trump got elected, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats, Republicans have flipped none. Democrats have overperformed in the elections that have happened—a variety of special elections, state legislative elections. Democrats have overperformed in 85 percent of those seats. That number in 2006 was about two-thirds. We’re overperforming all over the place.You’re going to see it at the House level, you’re going to see it at the state legislative level, where we’re looking for where we can play. Where they have an incumbent that has gotten lazy or is standing with Trump too much against the interests of their people. They have an electorate that’s just a little tired of what’s happening or is particularly impacted by the economy, by gas prices. Ag communities are great examples of this.You’re going to see this more and more, where organizations, campaigns expand out, and we’re going to pick up some of those seats. The Republicans also have to try and expand their map. And they’re not ready for that. They don’t have the message for that, to actually reach and connect with voters.Sargent: Fascinating. To bear this all out, we have this new Emerson poll. It has Democrats leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 10 points, 50 percent to 40 percent. That’s 50–40. Now the polling averages have it a little tighter—50PlusOne, they have it at six points, the average is 49 to 43. But this 10-point poll makes me think that the average could start to widen as well. And if Democrats are up at seven, eight, nine points, you’re looking at a wave. Where do you think it is right now? Do you think it’s closer to six or do you think it’s closer to 10? And where do you expect the spread to end up this fall?Reynolds: I am usually a pragmatist, maybe a pessimist. But I think this is going to be a wave election. We spend a lot of time talking about very few candidates, and we miss some of the amazing candidates who are running in races down the ballot. We have a lot of phenomenal women running around the country who are working-class candidates who’ve been really in their communities. We have a number of people who are doing surprising things on the state level. We have some phenomenal candidates.Between the environment, between the precedent, and between what Trump’s going to be able to do and how little they are going to be able to control that, and how much they’re going to have to walk with him off that cliff—I feel good about where Democrats are.One of the reasons that generic ballot is at 10 points right now is we are reminding people—and one of the reasons, most importantly, that Democrats are winning on inflation—is we are reminding people that we understand that costs are important, that there is work that government can do, important work, to help make things a little bit easier for families. Trump is not doing that at all. That’s part of how he won: communicating with voters and telling them he understood. Now he has moved on to ballrooms, to wars they didn’t ask for, and [saying] these price increases don’t matter.Sargent: And you’re talking about House candidates when you talk about these working-class women around the country?Reynolds: House candidates, state legislative candidates, in some cases gubernatorial candidates. They don’t get as much attention as Senate candidates, but there’s some really great candidates out there doing great work. And that’s going to make a difference, too.Sargent: It’s very similar to 2018, where Trump’s first election just brought in this whole new class of public servant just out of nowhere. We’re seeing a new wave of it right now, and it really is heartening stuff to see.I want to flag something else from the Emerson poll. In the generic House ballot matchup, Democrats are leading the GOP among independents by 15, 45 to 30. Now, how important are independents in midterm elections? What do you make of that number? My sense is a lot of what we’re seeing now is making it possible for Democrats to have conversations with certain constituencies and types of voters that they couldn’t really reach before. They’re more attuned to listening to what Democrats have to say now.Reynolds: That’s exactly it. I think that number is huge and hugely important. More and more, people are finding themselves unaffiliated. They are deciding, Maybe I’m not connected to either party. Some of this is the divisiveness, some of this is the way we paint both sides. Count me as someone who—I don’t love where the Democratic Party brand is right now. But I’m not as worried about it because each candidate is running their own race on Democratic values, and those values are incredibly popular. That’s why we’re appealing to independents right now.Sargent: Well, it’s sure looking really good right now, Christina. Tell us, what could go wrong?Reynolds: Haha. Lots of things. We never know what’s going to happen in the world. We never know how things are going to change and what voters exactly are going to care about. Will there be massive world events? Will there be natural disasters and things like that, all of which throw a campaign off its axis a little bit? We never know that. But I feel very good about the fact that we have a class of candidates across the country and up and down the ballot who know how to talk to voters, who have an agenda that they can sell. This is not just “Trump stinks.” Those messages, those ads write themselves. He keeps giving us content. That’s out there. But we have to provide something positive for voters. And I actually think we’re doing that.I feel good about that. We keep laying the groundwork, we keep supporting those candidates. And—gosh, I’m not usually an optimistic person, Greg—but we’re doing what we need to do, and voters understand where the world is right now, and they need change.Sargent: It’s really got the same nose-to-the-grindstone feeling that 2018 had.Reynolds: It does. It very much does.Sargent: Christina Reynolds, on that note—we don’t usually end on a positive note around here, so let’s grab this opportunity while it’s there. Christina, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much. Come back, please.Reynolds: You too. Thanks so much.

I Moved to New York to Pay More in Taxes—and I’m Glad I Did
• 5 days ago

I Moved to New York to Pay More in Taxes—and I’m Glad I Did

At last week’s WelcomeFest, Matt Yglesias, the longtime blogger turned centrist Substacker, moderated a panel with two Democratic members of Congress from big blue states—Tom Suozzi, who represents part of Long Island, New York, and Adam Gray, who hails from California’s San Joaquin Valley. He ended up making a remark that immediately struck me. I’ve been thinking about it for more than a week. “The problem for Democrats is that most people see great things about California and about New York, but they don’t think of them as places where government is functioning well,” he said. “The taxes are relatively high, and it’s not obvious that people are getting anything extra for it.” He asked how Democrats could make outcomes better for people in these high-tax states.The reason this statement rang my bells is that I moved to New York almost three years ago, and taxes were a big reason why. My then partner—now husband—and I decided to move here from Arkansas. That’s right: We wanted to pay more taxes. And I’ll tell you why.It is true that New York and California have some of the highest income tax rates and estimated share of personal income residents pay in all taxes when property, sales, and local taxes are taken into account. I’m not sure what evidence Yglesias was considering when he said it wasn’t clear what people were getting from their high taxes—or what benefit he specifically thought those taxes were failing to deliver. But then, it’s not always easy to evaluate what bang we’re getting for the buck. How do we measure the effectiveness of the government? These are the questions I found myself asking.On one level, people experience their taxation in a personal way: There is an amount of money withheld from our paychecks or paid to their state finance departments (or refunded to them) every spring. That is also, usually, how they experience government services, or services largely subsidized or regulated by the government: who decides their county or city’s operations, how transparent are they, how reliable are their utilities, what is a trip to the DMV like? For the most part, they’re only paying individual taxes and living in one state at a time.Indeed, most people spend the vast majority of their lives in one state, and they’ll spend their working lives paying only one state’s income tax. People don’t make interstate moves that often: The Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies calculated in 2020 that about 13 percent of Americans move each year, and only about 14 percent of those moves are across state lines. Most people stay local. Of the people who move, most move for personal reasons having to do with jobs and family—or the chance to buy a new home instead of renting. Which is to say: Most people can’t make a real assessment on what they’re getting for their taxes on an individual level because they lack the information needed to make informed comparisons.My husband and I lived in my home state of Arkansas together for a little more than five years; like most people, we decided to move for a number of reasons. One was that we could no longer stand the South’s blazing hot summers and were worried about climate change, so we looked for more climate-resilient places to live, which mostly led us up north. We wanted to live somewhere near an Amtrak station with frequent service, near mountains, and we really wanted to buy an older home that we could comfortably afford. We also wanted to leave the South for political and cultural reasons. We landed in central New York.All that being said, if I had to name the catalyst for the move, it was when I had to write a check for my 2022 Arkansas state income taxes. I was self-employed for most of my time in Arkansas, which meant I frequently owed some amount of taxes at the end of the tax year, and in the spring of 2023 that amount was a little more than $7,000. That was, coincidentally, the amount that the state would soon be giving to individuals who wanted to use tax money to send their children to private school under the newly passed LEARNS Act.The LEARNS Act gave almost anyone, regardless of income, taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. I realized the same amount of money I was sending to the state could be used by someone with more money than I had to send their children to a school that promoted teachings I disagreed with, while also robbing the public school system of funds. I simply decided that I didn’t want to live in a state that used its tax dollars—my tax dollars—that way. I wanted to move to a place where my taxes were spent more in line with my values. Even if it meant paying more.It was a clarifying moment. We had lived for years in a very rural part of the state that looked different even from where we live now, near New York’s dairy country. We often had to take our own trash to the dump, our roads fell into disrepair after the slightest winter storm, and the county often relied on private help to fix them. There were knock-down, drag-out fights over even small amounts of tax increases that funded things like my local library. There was no county-funded animal shelter, and animal control was spotty at best, which meant stray and abandoned animals were everywhere, and my husband and I, dog and cat lovers, spent thousands of our own money to rescue animals, spay and neuter pets for people who couldn’t afford it, and send homeless pets to friends around the country.Getting even basic information about services, and service interruptions, from the county government or local utilities was difficult. I once FOIA-ed information about county water shutoffs from my local water utility and got a large folder with handwritten records. When the pipes burst at my house—for complicated reasons I won’t go into—I called to ask if the water company could shut my water off so that I could have it fixed, and the person I spoke to told me—and I am deadly serious—to find my water meter and “just stick a screwdriver down there.”I have spent many years complaining about rural Arkansas only because I loved living there and think my neighbors deserve better. But when we finally left the second time, I realized how stressful the daily indignities of life there had been. We live in a place now where things just work. The roads are plowed in winter, they’re repaired in the spring, the local utilities text and email us when there are service interruptions and they repair them quickly, we have a well-funded library system.Across the board, the services and benefits I get for my tax money outstrip what I got from my former state. I regularly receive booklets in my mailbox with reports from the county government and the county schools. We live near a city, Utica, with a beautiful train station with services that can get us to most places in the country, and the DMV is in that train station and is one of the quickest, politest places I have ever been. Utica, which has a third of the population of Arkansas’s state capital, Little Rock, is served by a public transit system that provides nearly three times the annual rides that Little Rock’s does. Hourly wages are higher here, and the safety net provides to those in need better.Moving to New York was the good kind of culture shock. My husband and I are constantly asking each other, “Is it just me, or are the vibes here just … better?” The answer is yes. Together, we have lived in four cities across three states; separately, you can add four more cities and three more states to that list. They vary in their level of taxation and politics, and we have developed a personal metric for assessing the quality of a place, which we call the Potts-Suarez Theory of County Dumps. How easy is it, and how much does it cost, to get rid of your household trash?In Arkansas, we resorted to piling our own trash into our 2003 Subaru Forester and taking it to the dump on Saturdays, usually spending about $20 a week to do so. Many people in my home county simply burned their own trash in their yards, violating an ordinance to do so because it’s easier and cheaper. In New York State, our trash and recycling services cost half that amount and are reliable, and when we have to make a trip to the county eco-station to dump hazardous waste—we are DIY-ing much of our old house, including removing lead paint—it is open more hours, well organized, clean, and well staffed.Obviously, this is a very silly and subjective measure. But there are some data points hinting that it’s not just us. The states that rank higher in health outcomes tend to be more progressive states with a higher tax base, while those at the bottom are across the low-tax, low-wage South. Maps look similar for educational attainment, food security, and median income. A recent study ranking states on overall measures of well-being found New York and California in the middle, while the states at the top were a mix of high- and low-tax states, number one being Minnesota, and states at the bottom included much of the mid-South, like Arkansas. Surveys that try to assess happiness find similar results. New York and California are also some of the least affordable states to live in in the U.S., but the supply-side housing folks ought to know that some of that is because the supply is outpaced by demand: People want to live in these states.Some of my problems are particular to the South, which, as my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. wrote last month, has long been antidemocratic and especially focused on disenfranchising Black citizens. “Whether the United States overall is a liberal democracy or can become one again, the states in the South are at best electoral democracies and are veering toward electoral autocracies,” he wrote, and he details the ways those states restrict freedoms of their residents and liberal voters’ abilities to shape their own cities and communities.There is, at base, a set of questions each state, or city, or country, has to organize itself around. How can we form a community? How do we create a good life for the people who live here? Most people don’t truly have any way to assess how their own communities are answering that question compared to others. There are very few objective measures on which we can rank states on how nice it is to live there—and they would be imperfect at best because different people value different things. Taxes are one objective measure, but taxes have long been framed as a burden weighing on people, not as an investment we’re all making so that the place we’ve chosen to live is as good as it can be.Viewed as an investment, the basic level of taxation can fund the services that free up time and energy for its residents to work, care for their families, enjoy their leisure, make art, and build cool things together because they’re less worried about basic things like how hard it is to dispose of the household trash. States that don’t invest in their public infrastructure and well-being are shifting the burdens to individuals.The great things about California and New York are inextricable from these states’ tax systems. But the vast majority of political writers who question taxes in places like Washington, D.C., New York, or California—or who hold up places like Texas as an example of housing abundance, have never seen what that looks like for the people who live in those places on a daily basis. The lack of taxes, the lack of investment, can take the form of all manner of imposition, from a county dump that is too expensive for people to use to inadequate reproductive health care, to never knowing if your vote will be counted. From 30,000 feet in the air, these can look like separate issues. At ground level, they’re all born from the neglect that comes in the lack of real investment. I know exactly what I’m getting from my taxes in New York. And I suspect other low-tax boosters know what they’re getting too, which is why they haven’t moved en masse to places like Arkansas.

Trump Hits Record-Breaking Low in Polls as Aides Leak: He’s “Furious”
• 5 days ago

Trump Hits Record-Breaking Low in Polls as Aides Leak: He’s “Furious”

Donald Trump’s polling just crashed to new lows. He’s hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points in numerous surveys, something no other president has done—ever. Trump also is at 80 percent disapproval on gas prices. And this is the first time Democrats have led Republicans on inflation since the 1970s. It’s no accident that this comes as sources around Trump tell CNN that he’s “furious” because the media didn’t make his latest Iran bombing look strong and powerful. These stories are linked: His failure to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is causing the very cost spikes that are tanking his approval and his party’s chances in the midterms. We talked to Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has extensive experience in midterms. She explains how Trump’s travails are translating into new pickup opportunities in surprising places, parses a new poll showing Democrats up 10 in the generic House matchup, and explains why 2026 reminds her of Democratic routs in 2006 and 2018. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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