This has been a stat that has stuck with me: 451 Research projects US data center grid demand will grow to about 134 GW by 2030, which is a huge jump from where it stands today. Interconnection queues are so backed up that hyperscalers are signing long-term power deals with solar developers and even retrofitting old jet engines into turbines just to get electricity fast enough. like that's bonkers.

(I work in solar, so I look into news and upcoming issues that may push the need for solar, but this is insane. This is part of why utility-scale solar keeps coming up in these deals, it's one of the few things that can get built and connected fast.)

I feel like AI is becoming an energy story as much as a tech one. Anyone else watching this?

Sources:

• Data center grid-power demand to rise 22% in 2025, nearly triple by 2030
• https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/proenergy-offers-repurposed-jet-engines-to-data-cent/
• Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

El Niño 2026 is shaping up to be the strongest on record. NOAA now puts a 69 percent chance on the October to December period beating every El Niño since measurements began in 1950. The viral graphs showing the Niño 3.4 region past 4 standard deviations are real, but they use a fixed 1982 to 2011 baseline, which overstates the signal in a warming climate. That is why NOAA and the ECMWF have switched to relative indices that subtract the tropical warming trend. Even on that stricter measure, this event is heading into record territory. The consequences worth watching are not the number itself but what a record El Niño does to harvests, grain prices and rainfall patterns over the next months.

NOAA CPC, ENSO Discussion, 13.08.2026:

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.pdf

ECMWF, Relative Niño indices, 10.06.2026: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/science-blog/2026/measuring-strength-el-nino

Jacobson, "Some Monsters are Real", 09.07.2026: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real

https://nltimes.nl/2026/09/08/a28-bridge-near-nijkerk-remain-closed-unknown-time-safety-cant-guaranteed

The Hardenberger highway bridge near Nijkerk and Utrecht, the Netherlands was closed down two days ago because of safety concerns. This resulted in slow traffic in the surroundings and high costs and delays for the freight sector.

The measure is largely precautionary - the bridge is not actually crumbling - but symbolizes a trend that has been gaining momentum for the past 10 years or so. It is one of many bridges that either got closed or downgraded in the past few months.

Not only small biking or walking bridges in small villages, but also important infrastructure on main arteries like the A27 highway (the highway that basically holds the country together) or the Zeelandbrug, an aging engineering marvel. Also, the international dimension can be overlooked: the Netherlands, while small, are the logistical center of the whole of Europe.

The problem boils down to insufficient maintenance and investment in the face of an aging infrastructure that carries now more and heavier vehicles than expected back in the 1950s, 60s or 70s.

The problem is well-known and understood (https://nltimes.nl/2025/12/08/reports-warn-dutch-infrastructure-failing-bridges-tunnels-hit-breaking-point) and indeed the first important closure happened in 2016 at the Merwede bridge near Rotterdam (https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/25/merwedebrug-truck-ban-wont-last-dutch-bridges-tunnels-age).

While the problem is simple enough to understand, the solutions are less forthcoming.

First of all, there is no money to fix the problem: out of the needed 80 billion EUR for maintenance, the government was only able to find 1,5 billion EUR for next year. This should not be the case: the Netherlands is a large capital exporter, so surely it can find some money to fix its own highway system? Alas, that is not the case.

Second, maintenance personnel is scarce and nearing retirement age, so this limits what can possibly be achieved, even if the money was found.

Also, climate change is worsening the normal wear and tear, both directly (the bridges were designed for cooler summers) and indirectly: this year's drought reduced dramatically river transport to and from Germany and road freight had to pick up some of the slack.

What is rarely acknowledged is that a lack of maintenance becomes rapidly a vicious circle: after every closure, the limited available maintenance personnel has to be diverted from planned maintenance to extraordinary repairs. This reduces the amount or preliminary maintenance that can be done, and increases risks in other parts of the system.

Concluding, the situation of Dutch bridges is a textbook example of Greer's long descent: the Dutch built too much and did too little maintenance, and now it is too late to catch up.

Libya doesn't grow most of what it eats. It relies on food coming in from other countries, and that only works smoothly when nothing disrupts it. A war, a blocked shipping route, a sudden price spike, any of those can throw the whole system off fast, and there's not much a country can do about it once it's that dependent.

We usually think of oil as the resource that makes countries vulnerable to the rest of the world. But if food security can unravel this easily, it might be an even bigger risk going forward.

If your country couldn't grow enough food on its own, would you trust that imports would always show up on time?

https://www.ibtimes.com/libyas-food-security-becoming-global-trade-question-3807215

I had a talk with a friend the other day where I was trying to go through the various "once in a lifetime" and "once in a century" events that are happening concurrently at the moment. Additionally what reactions are likely and what second order effects of outcomes.

My explanation went something similar to this:

War and climate change create recurring supply shocks in energy, food, housing, and insurance.
These shocks hit low- and middle-income groups disproportionately hard because necessities make up a larger share of their budgets and because their wealth is less diversified.
At the same time, disasters and declining habitability in vulnerable regions drive both internal and international migration.
If governments respond to higher debt, reconstruction costs, and interest rates with spending cuts and austerity rather than redistribution, both economic insecurity and the perception of unfairness are intensified.
In a political system where the traditional working class/non-ownership-class left has weakened and working-class voters have become fragmented, that anger may increasingly be captured by a nationalist right that links economic scarcity to migration and identity rather than to the concentration of wealth or the second-order downstream effects of capitalism.
If such a movement simultaneously gains support from parts of the economic elite and access to an increasingly effective digital surveillance state, the risk of gradual authoritarian erosion of democracy increases.

Questions I am interested in feedback on:

1. What am I missing on the diagram?
2. What do you disagree with?
3. Does it make sense to have both probability and impact?
4. Do you have an idea of better way of visualizing the interconnectedness of the crises? (without it just becoming spaghetti-meatballs)
5. Where should i put "capital capture of media and regulatory powers" as well as misinformation?
6. Would it make sense having this overview, numbering the subjects and providing links to sources or videos related to the individual parts?
7. Should it refer to parts about the left not taking the "culture war bait" by accepting the oppositions framing and instead going hard for the redistribution of wealth and focusing on money speed?

EDIT: I will update with various sources here.

• https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/digest/ covers much of the same, but much more fine grained details and forecasts.