On 15 June 1991, the volcano Mount Pinatubo on the island of Luzon in the Philippines erupted violently, releasing an ash cloud on a scale so vast that seeing a photograph of it boggles the human mind. The eruption spewed out something north of 17 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide. For context, that's roughly equivalent to 1,700 Eiffel Towers' worth of material ejected out of the ground and into the sky.

The effects were global, albeit quite temporary. As a result of the explosion, NASA estimates that temperatures worldwide fell by about half a degree Celsius on average over the following fifteen months.

I lead with this because it reveals climate change as something that can be physically reduced. How does that work? Well, in this case the aerosol particles released by the volcano reflected sunlight back into space, reducing the amount that reaches the planet.

The Earth is warmed by sunlight. It cools by radiating heat back out into space. This is a delicate balance. Greenhouse gases absorb some of that outgoing heat. Raise their atmospheric concentration and the planet retains more energy, thus leading to warming.

The greenhouse effect, of course, is partially responsible for making this planet habitable in the first place. Atmospheric water vapour, carbon dioxide and other such gases keep the surface far warmer than it would otherwise be. That's essential for life as we know it.

But industrial civilisation is changing the balance of the equation. Before industrialisation, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level stood at around 280 parts per million. The global monthly mean exceeded 428 parts per million in April 2026. This, obviously, is a rapid increase in a relatively short time span.

Effectively, current estimates are that human activity has raised global surface temperature by roughly 1.4°C on average compared with the second half of the nineteenth century. And so the public—especially in the West—has been relentlessly told by climate activists, science communicators, governments and so forth: take one fewer flight. Turn down the heating. Plant a tree. Check your “carbon footprint”. Get ready for “net zero”. But these efforts take place inside a global energy system moving decisively in the opposite direction.

In China and India, by great contrast to the West, energy demand has been rising rapidly for decades, and shows no sign of this pattern abating. China already consumes more electricity than any other country by a wide margin. The International Energy Agency expects it to add roughly another 2,600 terawatt-hours of annual demand by 2030. That's about as much electricity as the entire European Union uses.

This is a staggering figure, and it really puts our efforts in the West into perspective. What difference does Europeans sacrificing their economic growth for the sake of climate change make when China is adding so much capacity? China has 1,195 active coal-fired power stations.

Economic development requires energy usage. The West has spent recent decades trying to encourage restraint while Asia has continued to modernise and develop.

And so a Briton or a German can fly less, or even not at all. They can heat the house less. They can scold their less fastidious neighbours to no end about how much plastic they are recycling, or how driving a car or using air conditioning contributes to climate change. They can vote for far-left ecologically minded political candidates in the Greta Thunberg mould who would go much further even than the current and previous governments.

But the effect on global carbon emissions will be negligible so long as the rest of the world just wants to build vast numbers of coal-fired power stations and run them. The brutal truth is that what is effectively a planetary problem won't get solved through marginal acts of European, American, or Australian abstinence.

Not to mention that Western countries need economic growth, too. Every society does. A society that shies away from energy usage, I would suggest, is heading towards stagnation and decline. Britain has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 53 percent since 1990. Yet over the same period, it has fallen into a long and discontented economic slump.

To be clear, I am not necessarily blaming climate policy entirely for that. Economic growth is a multifactorial equation. Planning restrictions, high taxes, Brexit-related trade frictions, an ageing population, and poor infrastructure have probably all played a role in the malaise.

But, yes. Energy is also a factor. A very powerful one. Britain has some of the highest energy prices in the world. And energy is needed for everything we do. For transport. For refrigeration. For lighting and heating. No wonder it's hard to do business here when the basic costs of keeping the lights on are so high.

Eventually, people in countries like Britain are going to get sick of expensive energy and years of low economic growth.

We can all see the megacities that have been built in China in the last few years. They are broadcast to us through TikTok livestreams. New metro systems, hundreds of apartment towers, high-speed rail, vast factories, and neon-lit skylines—and all of it rests on the expansion of the energy supply. Energy gives you the capacity to do things. That's good.

And this raises an awkward question. Why is rapid material development fine when it happens in Shenzhen or Chongqing, but somehow vulgar or environmentally irresponsible when people in Britain ask for cheaper electricity?

Britain has already started to shift in the direction of questioning the status quo. The current Labour government is backing a substantial expansion of nuclear power, and the new prime minister has faced pressure to approve new North Sea gas production.

There is something deeply regressive about asking people to reduce their activities in the name of saving the climate. Cheap energy gives ordinary people warm homes, private and comfortable transport, refrigeration, air conditioning and access to goods that earlier generations would have considered extraordinary luxuries. Developing countries now want the same transformation that developed countries already enjoyed. And frankly, I can't blame them. Who are we in the West to tell countries like China, India, the Middle East, and Africa not to develop? That's the height of arrogance.

And it wouldn't even work, because the governments of these countries have no interest in slowing down their development. But I don't think this needs to be a problem. The good news is that humans have been through some strikingly similar transitions before.

And the doomers have got it incredibly wrong before.

In 1798, the prototypical doomer and clergyman Thomas Malthus argued that population growth would eventually outrun the food supply. Human numbers, he thought, could grow exponentially. Meanwhile agricultural output would rise much more slowly. This, he suggested, would then result in hunger, falling living standards, and eventually mass starvation.

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Malthusian Theory Has Always Been False

Rethinking Limits: What Superabundance Gets Right About Human Progress.

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This was, it turns out, a terrible prediction. Malthus, of course, disregarded the capacity of human beings to change the terms of the problem. He looked at the agricultural productivity of his own age and simply projected it forward. In reality, over the following two centuries, farmers learned to produce vastly more food from the same amount of land. The development of industrial fertilisers jacked up yields. Machinery multiplied the amount each worker could produce.

The result was that the world population grew from around one billion people at the start of the nineteenth century to more than eight billion today, while the average person also became far better fed. Life expectancy rose dramatically, while things like infant mortality greatly declined.

The key Malthusian mistake was mistaking a limit that could be broken by improving technology for an unbreakable natural one. Western climate politics seems to have spent the last thirty years repeating this kind of error. But we can produce vastly more energy. We can produce it without even increasing carbon emissions—via wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and so forth. Take solar energy, for example. In just one hour, the sun delivers to our planet roughly as much energy as all of humanity consumes in an entire year. Most of it goes unused. But it can be captured, used, and even stored.

What's more, we can remove carbon already released from the atmosphere. And, if necessary, we can intervene further in the physical processes that determine atmospheric temperature.

The current rising panic over data centres repeats the old Malthusian error in miniature. Criticism of data centres tends to focus on their appetite for electricity, their carbon emissions and, in some cases, their water usage. These are real constraints. But they are constraints that can be overcome via technology.

Carbon emissions depend on how the electricity is generated. Water use depends on the cooling system, and how efficient it is. Grid congestion depends on the electrical grid, and how much generation and transmission capacity has been built. If you build enough capacity, these things aren't problems.

If demand for AI is consuming vastly more power, the answer cannot be to get by with an electricity system designed for the era before AI and modern data centres. The answer is to build an electricity system capable of supplying the needs of the modern world.

And data centres will only be the first instalment. More than half a million industrial robots entered service worldwide in 2024. That's more than twice the number installed a decade earlier. China alone installed 295,000; Britain installed a relatively meagre 2,500. Both of those numbers can be expected to increase rapidly as humanoid projects like Tesla's Optimus shift into production.

Such developments could produce an extraordinary increase in industrial capacity. Machines can run for longer than a human worker, and will tend to become more capable as software improves.

It seems like we are getting closer to the era of AI folding your laundry, cleaning your house, and doing your drudgery. Seen from that perspective, anxiety over the electricity consumed by AI looks peculiarly short-sighted. Demand for electricity will rise. The challenge is to satisfy that demand while controlling the climatic consequences of producing the energy.

So what would it mean to treat climate change as an engineering challenge, rather than as a political problem?

In hot cities that still lack air conditioning, it means installing sufficient quantities of air conditioning. This also requires building enough generating capacity to run it during the hottest hours of the year. While tropical climates have for the most part invested in air conditioning already, many European cities like London and Paris learned this year the discomfort of struggling through heatwaves without it.

The next step is to work on becoming able to manipulate the composition of the atmosphere itself. If excess carbon dioxide is what keeps pushing temperatures upward, then why not deliberately draw the concentration back down closer to the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million?

A direct-air-capture plant can do this with currently available technology. Large fans push air through filters or chemical solutions that bind CO₂. The plant then compresses the captured gas and injects it into rock formations deep underground. Done on a sufficiently large scale, this would gradually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. At present, such technologies are prohibitively expensive—costing hundreds of dollars per tonne of CO₂. That wouldn't be economically feasible. But through research, experimentation, and scaling up mass production we can drive costs down just as has been done across so many other industries.

Another plausible technique (unpopular with certain well-known American conspiracy theorists) is to use aircraft to release small quantities of sulphur compounds into the stratosphere, where they would act as reflective aerosols similar to those produced by a volcanic eruption like Pinatubo. Such techniques carry risks, such as termination shock, and certainly should be carefully tested before any widespread rollout. They also do nothing about ocean acidification. But here, too, technology offers some plausible solutions. Removing CO₂ directly from the atmosphere would itself reduce the amount entering the oceans. And techniques such as ocean alkalinity enhancement can directly counteract acidification.

Any attempt to control global temperature would also raise the political question of who gets to control the thermostat. The UN? The United States? China? What happens if two countries disagree? Could countries try to cancel out each other's mitigation efforts? Could these technologies be adapted and used as weapons of war? These are challenges that will each have to be navigated.

But once we admit that we need to engineer technological solutions, and that we can't simply get out of this with vague promises to reduce emissions or achieve “net zero”, this serves as a huge step in the right direction.

The central mistake of climate politics, in my eyes, has been to conceive of human influence on nature mainly as something to minimise. As if we are somehow unnatural creatures who should be embarrassed by our existence, and our impact on the universe.

I propose a different ambition: let's build without feeling guilty for it, and without feeling like our existence is somehow a burden on the planet. No. We are part of the planet. As a species, we came this far by taking control of our environment. Not by being apologetic, or capitulating to doomers, or to the various high priests of self-flagellation. We should produce vastly more energy. We should develop infrastructure to remove greenhouse gases at industrial scale, and develop the capacity to influence temperature directly.

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The U.S. national debt just crossed the $40 trillion threshold, doubling in less than a decade. Washington politicians have responded with their favorite fiscal game: blaming the other party. Democrats say Republican tax cuts are the culprit. Republicans say Democratic spending is the root cause. But both parties are responsible, with both hiding behind a lie of omission. And if we let them, they'll keep driving us into the same wall together.

Sen. Patty Murray (D–Wash.) recently called Republican tax cuts "the single biggest driver" of the debt across the last 25 years. The number uses an unrealistic 2001 baseline that projected endless surpluses, as if the late-1990s revenue windfall would last forever. The Brookings Institution's Jessica Riedl makes a more honest comparison by lining up the actual budget in 2000 against 2026. Tax cuts have reduced revenue by roughly 2 percent of gross domestic product. Spending rose by 5.7 percent, nearly three times as much.

Its a common and effective talking point, but not true. Below is a comparison of the 2000 vs. 2026 federal budget. Tax cuts have totalled 2% of GDP (unrelated economic factors also reduced revenues). But spending has jumped 5.7% of GDP since 2000. Lots of blame to go around. https://t.co/JZUBKyYDS7 pic.twitter.com/8AkqGMps9B

— Jessica Riedl (@JessicaBRiedl) August 22, 2026

Tax cuts can be great, especially when structured to move us toward a better overall tax code. But they are not free and often do not pay for themselves, largely because they come with lots of nonproductive handouts to special interests.

Yet the fact of the matter is that despite every tax cut since 2001, revenue today sits near its long-run average as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP). With spending climbing nearly six points, we know exactly where the problem lies.

The Congressional Budget Office projects federal spending to rise further, from 23.3 percent of GDP this year to 24.4 percent in 2036. For those paying attention, the drivers won't come as a surprise: entitlement programs and interest payments. Discretionary spending, defense included, is poised to shrink relative to GDP. Revenue holds near its average.

But while Republicans blame Democrats for expanding spending, they have joyfully participated. As David Stockman documented in his 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics, the Reagan Revolution failed to truly reform welfare and entitlement spending because Republicans were active in their expansion in the decades before.

More recently, Republicans who spent years complaining about Obamacare have failed to abolish it, let alone reform its finances. Today, you don't hear a peep out of Republicans about reforming Social Security and Medicare, though they have made some cosmetic adjustments to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as they were cutting taxes.

This is not new. About 26 years ago, Social Security's trustees were already projecting the trust funds to run dry in 2037, after which payroll taxes would cover only 72 percent of benefits. Today, the trustees expect the old-age fund to be depleted by around 2032, covering about 77 percent of benefits thereafter. And we have always known why: longer lives, lower birth rates, fewer workers per retiree. Maintaining these benefits without crushing taxes was always going to mean a lot of debt.

Medicare's Hospital Insurance fund is estimated to run dry around the same time. But as the Hoover Institution's Tom Church notes, Medicare's real fiscal problem is that we now rely on general revenue to cover more than half of its outlays. This amounts to roughly $10 trillion over 2026-2035, mostly from Part B (a medical insurance program for outpatient and doctors' visits). That's huge, but it's not news, either.

All of this has frustrated me for years. Those of us warning about debt have been dismissed as primitives. When interest rates were low, debt was cheap. We were assured that if growth beat the borrowing rate, we could roll it over almost for free. The reality is that even low rates on explosive debt aren't cheap, and there was little chance that rates would stay low forever.

Here's what the low-rate crowd never understood, and what this decade's inflation should have taught everyone: Government debt is a promise to run future surpluses. The market expects no less, and thus, the debt's real value depends on whether investors believe that promise.

When Washington dropped roughly $5 trillion in pandemic dollars into the economy with no plan to pay for any of it, investors reappraised this promise and the price level adjusted. The inflation of 2021 and 2022 was not an unlucky storm. It was the market's response to a government taking on debt it didn't have fiscal backing for. Higher interest rates followed, and we are still living with them.

That's the risk Washington is not pricing into its complacency. The danger of an unreformed entitlement state is about more than interest payments crowding out the rest of the budget. It's that bondholders will stop believing future surpluses will materialize, and the adjustment comes through the price level again. Unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises are, in effect, a standing commitment to more debt and future inflation.

So, the question is whether the politicians who claim to be alarmed by the crossing of this threshold will stand up and turn the tide of red ink heading our way.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

The post The National Debt Has Crossed $40 Trillion. Both Parties Are Responsible. appeared first on Reason.com.

CBS knew what it was doing by replacing “The Late Show” with “Comics Unleashed.”

“The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert was reportedly losing CBS $40 million a year, while Byron Allen’s stand-up showcase offered a more positive revenue stream.

The math wasn’t mathing, and the Tiffany Network had had enough. What would you do in that situation?

And, for a while, the ratings drop proved painful. “Comics Unleashed” drew far fewer viewers than Colbert’s “Late Show” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” – not to mention “The Tonight Show.”

That’s the price CBS was willing to pay to stop hemorrhaging cash.

A funny thing happened earlier this week. Monday’s “Comics Unleashed” episode topped “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in the 18-49 demographic, according to LateNighter.com.

a rerun of Comics Unleashed averaged 161,000 viewers in the coveted 18-49 demo. In comparison, an original episode of Kimmel, guest-hosted by Jelly Roll, drew 158,000 demo viewers in its first half hour, while a Tonight Show rerun drew 154,000.

A rerun, mind you, against fresh material.

For context, advertisers generally crave that demographic for establishing brand loyalty and access to disposable income.

“Comics Unleashed” lost the overall ratings battle to both Kimmel and “The Tonight Show” on NBC, but the 18-49 demographic told other stories, too. The show increased by nearly 85 percent in that demo over the prior week.

Allen’s show, coupled with “Funny You Should Ask,” appears to be growing in the ratings battles overall. That may change after Labor Day when Kimmel returns to his far-Left perch, but for now the Allen one-two punch may be more formidable than many originally thought.

Or, audiences are exhausted by the monologues brimming with stale, predictable anti-Trump barbs. It’s hard to blame them.

Roll’s monologues this week relentlessly targeted President Donald Trump while ignoring Democrats, per the Kimmel playbook. The blowback for the country crooner was so strong he responded on-air, suggesting Trump fans who didn’t like his barbs should stop listening to his music.

Good thing for him? A smaller than expected crowd heard his plea in real time.

The post Colbert’s Replacement Beats Jelly Roll-led ‘Kimmel’ in Key Demo appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago:

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are expected to receive massive rebates from the Trump Administration for tariffs paid last year — to provide refunds to customers.

“I urge you to pass along any refund you may receive to the consumers who paid higher prices for your products while the tariffs were in place,” wrote Senator Warren.

On Twitter/X, she posted:

NEW: Apple reportedly got $2.2 BILLION back in tariff refunds. Amazon got $600 MILLION.

What’s their plan to give YOU your money back?

Warren published the letters she sent to the CEOs, including Tim Cook:

Reports indicate that Apple has applied for a refund of the roughly $3.3 billion in tariffs you paid in 2025, and as of July 30th, that you have received nearly $2.2 billion in refunds. This amounts to a multi-billion dollar windfall, which could still grow if more of your refund petitions are granted. You have claimed that you “plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing,” but this vague statement offers no clarity as to where this money will go: indeed, it implies that you will not be returning it to the millions of consumers who purchased Apple products last year and paid higher prices. [...]

You have received an astronomical cash infusion in the form of a tariff refund, and Apple customers who paid increased prices for your products, ostensibly due to tariffs, deserve to know how that money will be spent. Your vague statements about “reinvesting” the refund leave hardworking Americans who paid hundreds of dollars more to buy Apple products in the dark about why they paid those increased prices and where their money will go. To better understand the disposition of any tariff refund you might receive, I request that you respond to the following questions by August 21, 2026.

Amongst the 11 questions she asks, the only one that seems pertinent is #5:

(5) How much did Apple increase prices on products in 2025?
(a) For what products did Apple increase prices, and how many of these products were directly impacted by tariffs?

Unless I’m missing something, the answers are “$0” and “none”. Apple increased none of its prices on any of its products in response to tariffs in 2025. The iPhone 17 lineup, in fact, surprised many observers and made news by holding prices steady.

In May 2025, Warren co-signed a letter to the FTC encouraging them to discourage large profitable companies from raising prices due to tariffs. Apple — a large profitable company — didn’t raise prices at all, which seemingly was what Warren thought they should do. But now she’s expressing outrage that Apple got a refund for the tariffs whose costs the company covered, and her followers are left to believe that Apple did raise prices and is keeping the money.

... Etiquette, Vaccination, and More

Twice yesterday, I encountered two of my favorite commentators urging a more self-interested discussion of two things America would do much better with more of: etiquette and vaccination.

Both were a breath of fresh air, but I'll start with the one that mildly surprised me, although it really shouldn't have.

Miss Manners takes a question from someone who by chance observed an acquaintance being extremely rude in a store.

The questioner looked away, but may not have escaped detection, and so wondered if a greeting was in order.

Unlike so many who would have probably said something about sparing the acquaintance embarrassment, Miss Manners advises sparing oneself:

As you were not the one who misbehaved, there is no etiquette rule preventing you from greeting your friend with a cheerful smile. But Miss Manners does feel that your solution is both more tactful and less exhausting, as you were then spared the explanation that would no doubt have followed about why she thought her rude behavior was justified by the part you did not see.

Yes!

That would be tiresome, on top of being awkward and unpleasant. While it does comport with my typical inclinations, it's nice to have that underscored with an explicit connection to the real value of etiquette: That it helps us lead our own lives more smoothly.

Less surprising, but wonderful to see coming from a highly visible and respected national figure is a recent comment by epidemiologist Amesh Adalja about how people discuss the subject of vaccination.

Around the 16:30 mark of his podcast,in Adalja starts by criticizing a pro-vaccination op-ed that relied on the idea that we are all our brothers' keepers, backing himself with research concerning what motivates people to get vaccinated. Older adults found arguments based on preserving their own independence more persuasive, for example. Adalja's own framing is in part:

"Vaccines are a technology that lets an individual live in a world full of infectious disease threats. They free you from worry... [T]hey make that risk much more manageable. ... They're increasing your freedom of action...

I completely agree with him that the brother's keeper argument is missing a highly persuasive reason to get jabbed.

Sane people -- who are the only ones worth reaching out to, anyway -- want to improve their own lives. That sounds like a much brighter and less frustrating starting point for any discussion than anything else to me.

-- CAV