2026-02-16 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist in partnership with WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As more and more data centers crop up throughout Georgia and the Southeast, a recent study finds they may need less energy than the industry and utilities have been predicting. That could have substantial implications for energy bills and the planet.
Data centers—especially the biggest ones, known as hyperscalers, used for high-powered computing like generative AI—use a lot of energy. And major utilities like Georgia Power have started expanding power plants and building other infrastructure to fuel them. Late last year, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a staggering 10 gigawatt expansion for Georgia Power to meet projected demand that’s mostly from data centers, after previously greenlighting new natural gas-fired turbines for the same reason.
But the level of growth that Georgia Power and other southeastern utilities are planning for only has about a 0.2 percent chance of actually happening, according to a report for the Southern Environmental Law Center written by Greenlink Analytics, a nonprofit that promotes transitioning to clean energy, and Science for Georgia, an organization that advocates for the use of science in public policy.
“We believe that this is a very aggressive forecast coming from the utilities,” said Etan Gumerman, Greenlink’s director of analytics who did the modeling for the report.
Because the data center industry is growing and changing so fast, it’s hard to predict accurately. The report finds data center energy use across the region could grow by anything from 2.2 to 8.7 gigawatts by 2031. Still, rapid improvements to technology that could make AI much more efficient in the coming years are likely to dampen the overall increase in energy demand.
But electric utilities across the region are planning for the extreme high end of data center growth, the report finds. That creates a risk that utilities will build more infrastructure than data centers actually need. “Who’s going to pay for that?” asked Gumerman. “Not the data centers that never came.”
“The idea that we’re going to add this additional capacity with gas-fired turbines is horribly depressing.”
Regular customers, he said, will likely end up paying those costs. “And I think that’s the problem in a nutshell.”
The Greenlink report is far from the first to question the projections for how much energy data centers require and how much that generation will affect individual ratepayers. Many people, from public commenters to expert consultants to the Public Service Commission’s own staff, made similar points last year during hearings over Georgia Power’s now-approved expansion. The risk of residential and small business customers paying for infrastructure built mostly for data centers was a persistent concern.
The Georgia PSC has taken several steps to protect ordinary ratepayers from data center costs. New billing terms approved last year allow Georgia Power to collect minimum payments from large power users like data centers and commit them to 15-year contracts—measures designed to ensure those customers pay for any infrastructure built to serve them and continue to pay even if they leave the state.
As part of the agreement to approve the 10 gigawatt expansion last year, the utility agreed to backstop costs if the projected demand doesn’t materialize. The commission has also stressed it can still halt the recently approved projects. Clean energy and consumer advocates are skeptical these measures are enough.
In addition to the risk of rising costs for ratepayers, the sky-high demand projections for data centers are also stalling the transition away from fossil fuels as a source of electricity. Studies have found much of the coming data center demand could be met without building new infrastructure, through improving efficiency among utilities nationwide and through flexibility by the data centers themselves. Instead, utilities and data centers alike are falling back on natural gas.
The United States now leads the world in gas-fired capacity in development, nearly tripling the total from 2024 to 2025, according to Global Energy Monitor. Much of the capacity utilities are building is to meet increased demand from data centers, and more than a third of the whopping 252 gigawatts in development is on-site power for data centers.
That latter approach—where data centers are built with their own source of power, known as “behind-the-meter” generation—addresses the concern over rising costs, but not fossil fuel emissions. While some tech companies are pursuing nuclear energy for their data centers, currently most of the power is coming from gas.
In Georgia, for instance, Georgia Power officials have said the vast majority of the projected demand driving the company’s expansion comes from data centers. The utility has already delayed plans to close coal-fired power plants and begun adding new gas-fired turbines. The 10 gigawatt expansion approved in December will come mostly from new gas turbines, which have projected lifespans of 45 years, and natural gas-generated electricity purchased from other utilities.
“I think people would be a lot less hesitant and a lot less up in arms about these 10 gigawatts if it was sustainable, smart growth,” said Amy Sharma, executive director of Science for Georgia, a nonpartisan group advocating for the use of science in public policy. “The idea that we’re going to add this additional capacity with gas-fired turbines is horribly depressing and, as my high school daughter likes to remind me, so last century.”
The state legislature in Georgia is currently considering several bills to address data center concerns. One would ensure regular customers don’t pay for power generation built for data centers. Others would require more transparency from data center developers or even impose a statewide moratorium.
There are also bills to end the tax breaks that data centers currently receive in Georgia. State lawmakers already passed a bill to suspend tax exemptions for data centers in 2024, but Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed it.
2026-02-16 06:09:58
Donald Trump said Sunday that member states of his Board of Peace have pledged $5 billion toward reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
Countries will also send thousands of personnel to “maintain Security and Peace for Gazans,” the president wrote on Truth Social. The pledge will be officially announced during the board’s inaugural meeting on February 19 at the United States Institute of Peace (which the State Department announced had been renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace last December).
While it remains unclear which of the more than 20 members would make the pledge, the Associated Press reported that Indonesia said up to 8,000 troops would be ready for deployment to Gaza by June.
Trump posted his message the same day Israeli forces reportedly killed at least 12 Palestinians in airstrikes. Gaza’s civil defense agency, an emergency service and rescue force, said five people were killed and several others were injured when a strike targeted a tent sheltering displaced families.
According to the Guardian, the Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals confirmed they received the bodies of at least seven people.
An Israeli military official said that the airstrikes were conducted in response to Hamas violations of the ceasefire agreement, where several armed individuals allegedly crossed a border line that went into effect last October. The “yellow line” splits Gaza in two: one under Israeli military control and one where Palestinians face fewer mobility limitations but are still threatened by displacement and airstrikes.
Since the US-brokered ceasefire was declared, Israel has killed at least 601 Palestinians and injured 1,607, according to the latest numbers from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. As Daniel Levy, the president of the US/Middle East Project, a policy institute focusing on advancing a dignified Israeli-Palestinian peace, told my colleague Noah Lanard just days after the October ceasefire agreement, there is “no actual plan” for peace.
Although Trump’s Board of Peace was initially seen as an international organization that would end the war in Gaza, the organization’s charter does not mention Gaza, instead increasing its scope worldwide to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”
And as Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief, David Corn, wrote earlier this month, the Board of Peace has since devolved into a global slush fund where countries can upgrade a three-year term to indefinite membership by paying $1 billion.
Many of the US’ top allies in Europe have declined invitations, considering the Board of Peace a way to swerve accountability to the United Nations. Many have also condemned the organization as its charter designates Trump as the sole leader, as well as the US representative.
“Nobody should be above the law,” Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign affairs chief, told US ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz on Friday regarding Trump virtually controlling all decision-making in the international organization. “If countries are treated equally, there’s less chance for war and tyranny.”
But as Trump wrote in his Sunday social media post: “The Board of Peace will prove to be the most consequential International Body in History, and it is my honor to serve as its Chairman.”
2026-02-16 01:17:23
On Sunday morning, Border czar Tom Homan said elected officials in Minnesota “ought to be saying thank you” to the Trump administration for making the state safer.
“They were a sanctuary state,” Homan said on Fox & Friends. “Their county jails weren’t working with us across the state. So you know what? We fixed it.”
The remarks came after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and others criticized the Trump administration for its violent campaign against immigrants and the suppression of protesters in the days following Homan’s announcement that the federal government would end Operation Metro Surge.
“They left us with deep damage, generational trauma, economic ruin. They left us with many unanswered questions,” Gov. Walz said. “Where are our children? Where and what is the process of investigations into those who were responsible for the deaths of Renee and Alex?”
Gov. Walz also stressed the economic toll on the people and businesses of Minnesota and said on Thursday that lawmakers would work to reestablish the fund the state used for Covid recovery, starting with $10 million in forgivable loans for small businesses.
Walz stated that the Trump administration has to “pay for what they broke here” and that he has been in contact with federal leadership.
Mayor Frey also highlighted the economic damage of Operation Metro Surge on Friday. Minneapolis city officials released a 38-page report that estimated the immediate impact since the start of the wave of federal agents arriving in the city in December 2025—including $47 million in lost wages for people who were afraid to leave home, which has led to an additional $15.7 million needed in rent assistance and 76,200 people experiencing food insecurity.
The assessment, which totaled immediate costs at at least $203.1 million, concludes that “significant external funding is required” for the city to recover.
“Was the chaos worth it? Was the fear worth it?” Frey asked in his press conference on Friday.
For Homan, it was. “President Trump gets another win,” he said on Sunday. “Every day he’s winning, and I’m just proud to be a small part of this administration.”
2026-02-15 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Australia is famously a place with some of the world’s most dangerous and frightening animals. Venomous spiders. Deadly snakes. Jellyfish with fatal stings.
But it is also home to one of the world’s cutest: the flying fox, also known as the giant fruit bat. I mean, look at this animal.
This is a baby bat taking a bubble bath. If it doesn’t melt your heart, nothing will.
In northeastern Australia, not far from the coastal city of Cairns, is a place called Tolga Bat Hospital. It is, as its name suggests, a hospital for bats—one of the only such facilities on the planet. And it’s also one of the few places you can see a baby bat getting a bubble bath.
The hospital, which has just one full-time paid employee but a cadre of volunteers, has been treating bats for more than 30 years. It comprises a few small buildings with treatment rooms, cold storage for fruit, and a nursery for orphan bats, as well as several outdoor wire enclosures. The largest cage is akin to a long-term care facility; it’s for bats that can no longer fly and will live out their lives at the hospital.
Tolga Bat Hospital cares for as many as 1,000 bats a year, the bulk of which are spectacled flying foxes, an endangered species and one of four distinct kinds of flying foxes in mainland Australia. They come in with disease, heat stress, or injuries from barbed wire. The hospital also cares for hundreds of baby spectacleds—named for the lighter fur around their eyes that makes it look like they’re wearing glasses—that have lost their mothers and can’t survive on their own.
On a warm afternoon in December, I visited the hospital with Australian photographer Harriet Spark. We met a lot of cute bats—and they were hard not to love. Flying foxes are furry with expressive eyes, large ears, and a dog-like snout. But it was the hospital founder and director, Jenny Mclean, whom I found even more endearing.
“You meet a bat, and they’re worth caring about,” Mclean, 71, told me that afternoon, as she fed a sick adult bat fruit juice from a syringe. “They have serious threats that they’re facing, all of them human-induced.”
Mclean, who works around the clock at the hospital and doesn’t pay herself, said she feels a responsibility to help these creatures—not only because they’re suffering at our expense but because they help keep our planet healthy. Flying foxes are exceptionally good at pollinating plants and dispersing their seeds, Mclean said.
Giving back to these animals in some way, she said, is the least we can do.
The nursery is a small, two-story building with a verandah that looks out onto the lush grounds of the hospital. Most of the babies were outside when we visited, hanging with their feet on several mesh metal shelves. Spectacled flying foxes are enormous: These animals were about 2 months old and already football-sized. By the time they grow up, their wingspan could reach more than three feet.
The bats, still too young to fly, hung upside down, wrapped in their own wings, alongside stuffed animals. The stuffies, which Mclean buys from a local secondhand store, are meant to mimic mother bats, and the babies will often cling to them for comfort, Mclean told me. Some of the bats were drinking from bottles of flying fox formula attached to the shelves.
Even younger bats were in a room inside the building. Infants under one week are kept in an incubator because they have trouble regulating their body temperature. Slightly older babies are kept in plastic boxes with heating pads and socks that they can cling to. For feeding, “box babies” are swaddled in cloth around a small rectangular pillow so their wings are contained—forming baby bat burritos. A few had silicon pacifiers in their mouths.
Nearly all of these orphans lost their moms to Australian paralysis ticks: parasites that carry a potent neurotoxin in their saliva. When paralysis ticks bite bats and other animals without natural immunity, such as pet cats and dogs, the insects can, as their name suggests, cause paralysis and, eventually, heart failure.
During tick season, which typically runs from October to December, hospital workers search the ground below colonies, or “camps,” for infected bats, which often fall out of trees. If the infection is mild, workers treat the animal with an anti-toxin at the hospital. The babies, meanwhile, are often spared from paralysis. Mothers likely pick up ticks while they’re foraging without their young, Mclean said, and the parasites latch on before they have a chance to crawl onto the babies. That leads to an abundance of orphans in need of care.
Paralysis ticks live all across eastern Australia, but they only seem to affect spectacled flying foxes in the Atherton Tablelands, where the hospital is located, Mclean told me. The reason is still a mystery. One explanation, Mclean said, is that spectacleds in this region feed on the berries of an invasive shrub called wild tobacco, where they encounter the ticks. While the plant grows in other parts of Australia where both ticks and flying foxes are found, Mclean said, the moist climate of the Tablelands may make ticks more likely to venture out of the grass and into the branches of the invasive shrub. That’s where the flying foxes feed.
That afternoon, I followed Mclean into the main hospital building, where she treats adult bats with paralysis. Rows of small metal cages and cloth boxes sat on shelves along the wall. In some of the enclosures, large flying foxes hung calmly from the top, whereas in others, the animals—still facing the effects of paralysis—were lying down.
Using a towel, Mclean gently grabbed one of the bats from its cage to see if it would eat. The animal was having trouble swallowing, Mclean told me, as she placed a syringe with apple and mango juice in its mouth. The bat took a few sips and then pulled its head away. Mclean moved it into a small plastic bin for plan B: seeing if the animal would eat a small piece of pear instead. The bat began to chew, but then spat it out. “You have not got a good swallow, my girl,” Mclean said.
Tick paralysis is just one of the threats to Australia’s flying foxes, many of which are getting worse. Little reds, another species, get tangled in barbed wire, causing tears in their wings. Spectacleds in the Tablelands, meanwhile, are increasingly born with cleft palate syndrome (for reasons that are not yet clear), which makes it hard for them to feed. And more recently, severe heat waves tied to climate change have decimated flying fox populations. In 2018, unrelenting heat killed about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes in Far North Queensland, nearly a third of the entire population. Mclean says she received about 500 orphans that year from the heat wave alone.
Nonetheless, these animals lack support—they’re “maligned,” Mclean said—especially compared to koalas and other furry animals in Australia. “There are not that many people who will champion them,” she told me.
Bats have a bad rap, in part, because they can carry diseases. Flying foxes are no exception—in rare cases, they can carry Australian bat lyssavirus, a relative of rabies. What gets less attention is the fact that humans almost never contract a disease from flying foxes. “We get about a thousand sick and injured bats a year, and we get a lyssavirus bat once every three years,” Mclean said. (Workers at Tolga Bat Hospital get vaccinated before handling bats as a safety precaution.)
Ultimately, flying foxes are not a real threat to humans, she said. Disproportionately, humans harm them. “It’s this whole thing of, are we willing to share the planet or not?” she said. “If you’re not willing to share the planet, you are going to destroy the planet.”
If flying foxes continue to disappear, so will essential services like pollination and seed dispersal that keep forests alive, Mclean told me. “You can’t have a healthy person unless you’ve got healthy wildlife and a healthy environment.”
2026-02-15 04:26:15
The United States military killed three more people on Friday in their 39th boat attack in six months, according to a tracker maintained by the New York Times. All told, the strikes by US forces have killed at least 133 people in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained, often without evidence, that they are targeting the boats as an anti-drug smuggling measure. Though, even if people on these boats were confirmed to be transporting drugs, a broad array of legal specialists have held that the “strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings” because the military “cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts,” the Times reported on Saturday.
An 11-second video of the Friday strike, posted by US Southern Command, shows what appears to be a missile hitting a boat in open waters, with a caption claiming without further evidence that the three people killed were “narco-terrorists.”
The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy organization, wrote on Friday that those killed by the US military at sea “are denied any due process whatsoever,” and that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “are asserting and exercising an apparently unlimited license to kill people that the president deems to be terrorists.”
The boat attacks have been accompanied by social media posts that include videos of the strikes, including by Hegseth and Southern Command. Multiple of the previous deaths came from a secondary attack on people who were alive after initial strikes, as confirmed by the White House.
“I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water,” Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, told the Associated Press in December. “That is clearly unlawful.”
Friday’s strike follows increased US military operations in the region, including the administration’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in early January. According to Venezuela’s Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López, US forces killed 83 people during the Maduro operation, including multiple civilians. Trump subsequently claimed that his administration will run the country and control their oil.
“Just as the U.S. killings of those aboard targeted vessels are entirely premeditated and intentional,” the Washington Office on Latin America wrote on Friday, “the ongoing attacks at sea appear designed to normalize killings at President Trump’s discretion, both within the U.S. military chain of command and in the eyes of the American people.”
2026-02-15 02:28:46
Hundreds of judges across the nation have ruled over 4,400 times that President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement arm is detaining people unlawfully, according to a new Reuters review of court documents. And that’s just since October.
The Trump administration’s immense increase in detainments rests, in part, on their decision to detain people while their immigration cases are moving through the system—a departure from previous administrations’ interpretation of immigration law. This has led to a steep increase in immigrants petitioning the courts to be released, as Reuters reports, and the thousands of rulings finding that these prolonged detainments were unlawful.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, told Reuters that the increase in lawsuits came as “no surprise” because “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.” But not all of the judges challenging the Trump administration’s mass deportation mechanism were appointed by Democrats.
Just last week, a judge appointed by George W. Bush ordered the release of a Venezuelan detainee. “It is appalling that the Government insists that this Court should redefine or completely disregard the current law as it is clearly written,” wrote US District Judge Thomas Johnston of West Virginia.
Before Trump 2.0, if immigration enforcement agents detained someone without documentation who had no criminal record, they would typically be released on bond while their case went through the system. Trump officials are now often keeping those individuals locked up indefinitely.
Earlier this month, the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Trump administration a win. In a 2-1 ruling, that court held that the administration could hold people whose cases are actively going through the system. It’s a key win, as the circuit oversees Texas and Louisiana, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has some of its most populated detention centers.
The number of people kept in detainment who have no criminal record—the population petitioning the courts to be released—has increased exponentially under Trump’s second administration. According to a recent report from the American Immigration Council, the Trump administration’s arrest practices have led to a 2,450 percent increase in people with no criminal record being held in ICE detention on any given day.
This mass detention, per the new Reuters review, has spurred detainees to file “more than 20,200 federal lawsuits demanding their release since Trump took office”—an overflow that has created a “legal logjam” and has resulted in people remaining locked up even after judges have ordered their release.
The environment of fear for scores of these detained immigrants doesn’t end after a judge orders their release. That’s true for Joseph Thomas, an 18-year-old who was detained with his father in Wisconsin in December and whose case was highlighted in the Reuters investigation. The pair are both asylum seekers and were driving on the father’s Walmart delivery route. Within a month, another Bush-appointee, Chief US District Judge Patrick Schiltz, ordered that they both be released.
Even though Thomas is out of detention and can return to school, things aren’t back to normal. He’s afraid to go in person to class and is instead learning online.
