Power Plays: Part II
highjacking the narrative, intentional ignorance, grooming LLMs, politicizing AI
Power Plays Part I: energy efficiency, growing an economy, climate change, buying time & solar gains
Power Plays Part III: solar wins the AI race, footing the fossil bill, hat tricks and Sun Day
INTENTIONAL IGNORANCE
The Trump administration’s attack on efficiency may be stalling out, but it is only one part of a much larger strategy to lock in fossil fuel use for decades to come—a move that will guarantee a hotter, harder, hungrier, disease-burdened, impoverished future.
The push is on to drill more oil, frack more gas, lay more pipelines and mine more coal. In a fair market fight, fossil fuels lose to renewables and storage. But this isn’t a fair fight, so solar and wind have been knee-capped with tariffs and regulations, and tax incentives scrapped. Team Fossil, meanwhile, has been granted subsidies and given loads of legal cover.
Laws protecting air and water have been gutted. The director of the EPA has declared the problem isn’t greenhouse gases, but their regulation. Eighteen years after the US Supreme Court ruled CO2 and methane could be classified as air pollutants and regulated under the Clean Air Act—and the EPA passed an “endangerment finding” to do just that—it’s a great big “nevermind”
Fifteen seasons of “The Apprentice” taught the President how to control the narrative, the power of stagecraft and the importance of brand. A lifetime of lawsuits, including two Congressional impeachments and 34 felony convictions, made him an expert in the art of the technicality. It is the appearance of truth, not truth, that matters. It is the letter of the law, not its spirit, that counts.
In the effort to build a case for fossil fuels, no action has been too audacious and no detail too small. It isn’t enough to deny the reality of climate change. All scientific research to the contrary must be buried or altered. Researchers must sidelined. Critics attacked. The media brought to heel.
Since January, the administration has:
decommissioned satellites for NASA’s Orbiting Earth Observatory
announced plans to close the NOAA lab at Mauna Loa that’s tracked atmospheric carbon levels since 1958; also, three other sites monitoring carbon
removed the words “climate change” from government websites
shut down dozens of NSF-funded projects studying various aspects of climate change
cutting funding to produce a Congressionally-mandated report on climate change
hired fringe scientists to write a government report casting doubt on the seriousness of climate change
announced plans to edit and rewrite archived, peer-reviewed climate reports
issued an executive order that would put political appointees in charge of awarding all federal grants
The list goes on. And on.
This zealous attention to informational detail isn’t limited to climate change. There have been bans on books and on words. Copy on historic plaques has been rewritten. Exhibits at Smithsonian museums are under review to weed out “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology.” The White House has embraced PragerU’s scrubbed, revisionist version of American history. The chief economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics was sacked over a jobs report at odds with the President’s narrative. The President now literally runs the show at the Kennedy Center. It is all of a piece. All on brand.
Now, add AI.
TO PRE-WRITE THE FUTURE, EDIT THE PAST AND CENSOR THE PRESENT
Three years after ChatGPT was unleashed upon an unprepared world, AI has become a critical information gatekeeper used by hundreds of millions of people as a search engine and an oracle. Legions of chatbots, proliferating Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style across the internet, stand ready to spout answers—accurate, flawed, hallucinated—with unflappable confidence, 24/7.
Yet an AI knows only what the Large Language Model (LLM)—the foundation upon which the algorithm is built—has been trained on. An AI can never be truly neutral. It picks up biases and distortions, some benign and some decidedly less so, in the “corpus” of information it assimilates.
As Wired recently reported, the President’s social media platform, Truth Social, has a new chatbot that was raised on a heavy diet of far right news.
Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group launched the chatbot, called “Truth Search AI,” on Wednesday. The bot is powered by Perplexity AI…
…While Perplexity’s AI draws from sources on the left and center, the Truth Search AI version never cited a center- or left-leaning source in dozens of tests conducted by WIRED. In fact, the chatbot highlighted only seven sources in total in response to my queries—Fox News, Fox Business, The Washington Times, The Epoch Times, Breitbart, Newsmax, and JustTheNews.com. This was true even for innocuous, nonpolitical questions. When I ask the bot “What is 30 times 30?” It sourced its answer from a Fox Business article called “Inflation Reduction Act Estimated to Induce Mortality 30 Times More than COVID.” Similar tests by Axios and the Verge also show this extreme bias towards conservative media…
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In the short history of AI, US government data have generally been considered a high quality, reliable resource for training LLMs. Now, with information deleted, filtered and altered to fit a political agenda, that is no longer the case. Government data are being groomed for LLMs. And as LLMs repeatedly crawl the web to update their training, the biases, inaccuracies and omissions will be reinforced.
Very quickly, it will become harder and harder to know different: to know what we used to know.
TRUTH WILL OUT
Yet for all the considerable effort to bury every scrap of data on climate change and banish the very words, it is impossible to ignore the day-to-day reality of heat domes, record floods, megafires and entire regions declared uninsurable. Beyond the borders of the US, climate change is still very much part of the vocabulary and still a headline story.
Yes, it would be better if CO2 levels continued to be tracked at the NOAA observatory at Mauna Loa, as has been done for nearly 70 years. It would be better to have the data from the satellites that make up NASA’s Orbiting Earth Observatory, instead of destroying the satellites in a cosmic example of killing the messenger. And it would be better to have the research from the dozens of climate-related projects that have been defunded.
But the patterns are clear and the signs are dire. To quote Bob Dylan, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
You also don’t need a weatherman to know there is more than a concern for national security behind the declaration of an “Energy Emergency” set forth in a presidential executive order last January 20. According to Section 8, paragraph a:
The term “energy” or “energy resources” means crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals, as defined by 30 U.S.C. 1606 (a)(3).
Despite the stated concern about an “…active threat to the American people from high energy prices…,” solar, by far the cheapest way to generate electricity, isn’t on the menu. Neither is wind or battery storage.
an example of science that will no longer be possible when satellites are intentionally destroyed and research projects are shut down:
Continue to Power Plays Part III: solar wins the AI race, footing the fossil bill, hat tricks and Sun Day