Andrea Shalal, reporting for Reuters:

The World Bank’s board has agreed to end a longstanding ban on funding nuclear energy projects in developing countries as part of a broader push to meet rising electricity needs, the bank’s president Ajay Banga said on Wednesday.

Banga outlined the bank’s revised energy strategy in an email to staff after what he called a constructive discussion with the board on Tuesday. He said the board was not yet in agreement on whether the bank should engage in funding the production of natural gas, and if so, under what circumstances.

The global development bank, which lends at low rates to help countries build everything from flood barriers to railroads, decided in 2013 to stop funding nuclear power projects. It announced in 2017 it would stop funding upstream oil and gas projects beginning in 2019, although it would still consider gas projects in the poorest countries.

This story is mostly about nuclear, but why would Banga even consider reversing a ban on fossil gas that was put in place by his predecessor (under whose leadership the World Bank was widely criticised for not doing enough on climate) in 2017? If this is all about helping poor countries get electricity, how did fossil gas become a better choice today?

The costs of renewables and battery storage have decreased drastically since 2017, and many developing countries struggled to pay for imported fossil fuels after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. If anything, renewables are the cheaper and more secure option today. Why would the new champion of climate action at the World Bank want to go back to fossil gas?

Here might be a clue, as reported by Max Bearak for the New York Times:

The Trump administration, while far less concerned about climate change than it is with competing against the Russian and Chinese nuclear industries, is trying to expand the fleet of American reactors and quadruple their contribution to the country’s electric grids. Cabinet officials have emphasized support for a new generation of smaller reactors that offer the promise of faster deployment but have yet to be proven.

The United States is the World Bank’s single largest shareholder and holds significant sway over its policies. In April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the bank to lift its ban, saying in a speech that doing so would “revolutionize energy supply for many emerging markets.”

I bet Trump wants the World Bank to lift its ban on fossil gas, too.

Dr Susan Cook-Patton and Kurt Fesenmyer, both researchers at the Nature Conservancy, wrote a guest post for Carbon Brief to share their latest results:

In our new study, published in Nature Communications, we unpack eight years of research into reducing these uncertainties.

We have quantified, for example, how the carbon-sucking power of trees changes when you let forests grow back naturally versus planting monoculture or mixed-species plantations.

We figured out how much carbon could be removed at different price points and mapped where trees – somewhat counterintuitively – actually act to warm, rather than cool, our climate.

But, as we shrank the uncertainty, we also shrank the estimate itself.

Our research provides the most precise estimate of global reforestation area to date – 195m hectares, or 71% less than earlier estimates.

Reforesting an area this size could capture 2GtCO2 per year.

Scientists used to think planting trees around the world could absorb 10 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year, but turns out we don’t have that much land suitable for reforestation. Climate change mitigation is a great reason to restore forests, but it shouldn’t be the reason to do so.

The whole article is worth a read.

Apple announced a slew of new features for visionOS during its WWDC 2025 keynote on Monday. High on the list of headline features is, to my surprise, better support for enterprise customers.

Compared to other computing platform owners like Microsoft, Apple historically cared less about supporting enterprise customers. In many companies, people making technology purchase decisions (i.e., IT managers) are not the people who are most directly affected by the experiences of using these products. Above almost all else, Apple cares about making “insanely great” consumer products, and prioritising what enterprise IT managers want can sometimes get in the way of providing good consumer experiences. If Apple’s consumer products are useful and popular, people will want to use them at work, and sometimes Apple will then find ways to help enterprise IT managers make it work.

For all of its products, Apple cares about delivering great consumer experiences first, before it focuses on supporting enterprise customers.

Apple Vision Pro and visionOS were announced almost exactly 2 years ago at WWDC 2023, and started shipping only 16 months ago. By all indications, its sales so far have been disappointing. For such a young product, it feels unusual, and somewhat worrying, that Apple chose to dedicate the precious number two spot on its four-point list for visionOS 26 to enterprise support at WWDC 2025.

I was impressed with the experiences that Vision Pro made possible. (If you haven’t tried it yet, book a one-to-one in-person demo at an Apple Store. You won’t be disappointed.) And I believe with a lower price, Vision Pro (or its rumoured lower-end successor) can be a compelling consumer product. I want Vision Pro to succeed as a consumer product because I want one someday, but Apple’s decision to highlight enterprise features so prominently, so early in its product lifecycle, suggests a lack of confidence in Vision Pro’s future as a consumer product. It would be a shame for it to go the way of Google Glass.

Another, perhaps less jarring sign of Apple’s lack of confidence in Vision Pro came a few minutes later in the visionOS accessories segment of the keynote, when Mike Rockwell introduced a pen that works with Vision Pro for drawing in a 3D space. It’s easy to see a parallel to Apple Pencil, which delivers one of the most unique and quintessential iPad experiences that no other compatible stylus can match. But unlike Apple Pencils, this brand-new, state-of-the-art input device for Vision Pro is made by Logitech. I’m certain Apple knows how to make a great “Spatial Pencil”, and I bet they even have a few prototypes in their labs. But Apple chose not to make one that delivers the best spatial drawing experience for Vision Pro, perhaps because it’s not convinced of Vision Pro’s chances.

Besides these worrying signs for VisionOS and Vision Pro, I’m mostly excited by the new Liquid Glass design, enhanced Spotlight capabilities in macOS, and the new multitasking and windowing system in iPadOS. I have been using the latest developer beta on my aging A12 iPad Air, and have mixed feelings about the new design and multitasking features. There are plenty of quick takes, hate, and ridicule for the redesign out there, but I think we all need to live with it for a while and give Apple time to refine it before drawing a conclusion.

It’s going to be a fun summer, that’s for sure.

Jeva Lange, reporting for Heatmap:

The average energy infrastructure project costs 40% more than expected for construction and takes nearly two years longer to complete than initially planned, according to a new study of 662 such projects in 83 countries by the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability, published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science. Nuclear power plants were the worst offenders, with construction costing 102.5% more on average, or $1.56 billion more than expected. Hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and thermal power plants that rely on natural gas were also among higher-risk infrastructure projects, the study found.

[…]

Solar energy and transmission projects, on the other hand, had the lowest investment risks for construction and time costs, and are often completed ahead of schedule and for less than expected, the research found. Wind, similarly, “performed favorably in the financial risk assessment.”

Last month, E3G, Beyond Fossil Fuels, We Mean Business Coalition and Savanta released a report after surveying 1,477 senior business executives across 15 countries. As you’d expect, the results show an overwhelming support for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels to renewables in the power system. There are a few key findings worth highlighting from the press release:

No room for new gas: Two-thirds (67%) of executives want coal phased out and replaced with renewables, grids and storage—without locking in new gas infrastructure. Even in gas-reliant countries like Mexico, Italy, and Japan, businesses favour a direct transition to renewables. In the United States which has the fourth largest proven gas deposits in the world, almost two-thirds (65%) of those polled would rather see a direct transition to renewables in a post-coal era.

Despite relentless lobbying by oil and gas interests and wrong-headed advocacy by some governments, business leaders are not fooled by the false narrative of “gas is a transition fuel”.

Energy security is paramount: Three-quarters (75%) of executives associate renewables with stronger energy security. 78% of German business leaders believe an accelerated renewable transition will reduce Germany’s exposure to volatile energy imports.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine rattled the international fossil fuel markets, “energy security” has become the new excuse that lobbyists and policymakers use to accelerate climate disruptions. Again, business leaders understand that more fossil fuel dependence won’t prevent energy crises caused by fossil fuel dependence.

People used to think that being able to import LNG from global markets provides some insurance when piped gas stops flowing. But they quickly find out that when gas stops flowing in some big pipes, everyone rushes to buy the insurance at the same time, and they can’t afford the insurance anymore. Investing in more LNG infrastructure and supply doesn’t solve the problem because these new capacity will be quickly consumed by new demands. Oil and gas businesses, like any other businesses, optimise for asset efficiency. Only idling capacity can absorb shocks, but idling capacity doesn’t make money. When the next shock inevitably comes, fossil fuel-dependent countries will babble about the same energy security challenges all over again.

Renewables have their own security challenges. (China’s dominance in renewables is not a challenge because renewables don’t require constant replenishment.) But compared to fossil fuels, renewables have the unique advantage that what makes them secure (predictable sunlight, rainfall and wind patterns) are completely aligned with our goal of a stable climate.

Our choices are:

• Doubling down on fossil fuels that will wreck the climate system without providing real security, ever. Or,
• Switching to renewables that slow down climate change, and becomes more secure as climate change slows down.

Which of these feels like a better bet for energy security?

Have you ever looked at the name of someone you haven’t met, and wonder whether you should refer to them as “she”, “he”, or “they”? Now Standard Chartered (where I used to work) has an AI for that:

In 2023, Standard Chartered deepened its commitment to social sustainability and appointed Natalie Marko Nietsch as its inaugural Global Head of Social Sustainability. In partnership with her team, the Sustainability Data team has piloted an innovative and multifaceted approach to enable the bank to disaggregate its SME portfolio by sex on a current and continuing basis, with over 90% accuracy, without the collection of private personal data. The team developed the Standard Chartered SocialAl model, a hybrid approach to identify whether enterprise owners are male or female using the first name, country-adapted, and public and internal datasets.

This is … kind of ridiculous?

First, it’s not the cutting-edge AI that can code up an app from a back-of-the-napkin sketch. This is more like your parents’ good ol’ classifier. Remember Jian Yang’s “Hot Dog or Not” app in Silicon Valley? Yep, something like that.

Second, if Standard Chartered wants to know the gender of their clients, one solution might be—gee, I don’t know—just ask them? But apparently, that’s too much red tape and legal risks for a big global bank. And where do they find the employee time! So their clever solution is: let’s ask AI to make it up.

Sure, the model is 90% accurate, presumably when they tested it against the small portion of their clients for whom they do know the gender. But how accurate is the model for the rest? 🤷 What do they tell regulators when asked about how they got the data? I guess they can point to their “innovative and multifaceted” blackbox and say “Haaave you met …”

Lastly, how will knowing the gender of their clients really help Standard Chartered develop better products for women entrepreneurs? We all know there is a gender bias in access to financing, and Standard Chartered have already committed to provide more financing to women entrepreneurs. To understand the problem and figure out how to solve it, it’s probably more effective to just talk to the relationship managers who work with clients every day (and presumably know whether their clients are male or female). I bet engineers at Apple didn’t need to know the gender of their customers in order to develop the ovulation detection feature for Apple Watch.

Most barriers women entrepreneurs face in accessing finance are social and systemic: unconscious biases, rights to own assets, inequitable caretaking burden, exclusion from networks. Guessing the gender of the bank’s clients doesn’t help frontline employees address any of these challenges. It only gives senior executives a false sense of awareness and control.

David Fogarty, reporting for the Straits Times:

SINGAPORE – Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi Corporation on May 7 joined Singapore’s Keppel and investment platform GenZero in a climate initiative that aims to retire a Philippine coal plant early using funds from a new type of carbon credit backed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). 

[…]

The aim is to retire a 246 megawatt (MW) coal plant in Batangas province, South Luzon, by 2030 – ahead of its scheduled closure in 2040 – and replace it with renewable energy and battery storage.

Shutting it down a decade early could save 19 million tonnes of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions – and cut local air pollution.

The catch is that closing the plant early is costly. Replacing it with green power generation and new power lines, as well as compensation for the lost 10 years of electricity income, would cost over US$1 billion (S$1.29 billion), said Mr Eric Francia, president and chief executive of the plant’s owner Acen, which is the listed energy platform of Ayala Group.

“We’re still finalising the numbers, we’re talking about US$1.5 billion-plus overall cost,” he told The Straits Times at the GenZero Climate Summit 2025, being held from May 5 to 8 at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre.

Fully replacing the coal plant with the same level of on-demand power would require 1,000MW of solar, 250MW of wind, and 1,000MW of battery energy storage, according to The Rockefeller Foundation, which is also involved in the project.

US$1.5 billion seems high.

For comparison, in a 2023 report, MAS and McKinsey modelled what it would take to shorten the lifespan of a hypothetical 1 GW coal plant in Indonesia by 5 years. At a 50% capacity factor and 8-9% discount rate, retiring the 1 GW plant early will only cost USD 70 million. This number does not include investments in and revenues from renewables that would replace the retired coal capacity. The early retirement would cut 23 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions. If these avoided emissions were to be sold as carbon credits to close the 70 million dollar cost gap, each tonne of CO₂ would cost US$11-12.

Now, ACEN is asking for US$1.5 billion to retire a coal plant that’s one quarter the size (246 MW vs 1 GW). Sure, the Batangas plant will shorten its lifespan by 10 years instead of 5. Sure, it may be operating at a higher capacity factor, generating more future revenues and carrying a higher NPV. This price tag includes investments in renewables and storage to replace the retired coal plant, but shouldn’t you also account for future revenues generated by the renewables?

Speaking of renewables, I don’t believe you need 1 GW of solar, 250 MW of wind and 1 GW of storage to replace a 246 MW coal plant. The cost of adding intermittent renewables and the need for storage both depend on how much intermittent renewables is already on the grid. As of May 2024, the Luzon grid had a total installed capacity of 20 GW, with only less than 8% intermittent sources (1.2 GW solar and 337 MW wind) and 363 MW storage. Would you believe them when they say they need to almost double their solar and wind capacity, and quadruple storage, just to retire 1.6% of the fossil fuel?

[Francia] said he hopes the Singapore Government might be among buyers of the credits and linked the future price of the credits to the Republic’s estimated carbon tax price of $50 to $80 per tonne of emissions in the coming years.

“We’re anchoring this to the Singapore carbon tax. Hopefully, we would be closer to the lower end of the $50 to $80 range,” he said.

Compared to the US$11-12 per tonne estimated for the hypothetical Indonesian plant, what ACEN is asking for feels more like a shakedown.

Mia Pei’s recent story for the Business Times is such a train wreck of bad journalism and misinformation:

Temasek sees plant seeds as a game changer to fixing the broken global food system

[SINGAPORE] Pulses, or edible plant seeds such as chickpeas and lentils, could be the transformative answer to a global food system that is under severe strain.

Firstly, the title. Most of the major food crops (wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, etc.) are “plant seeds”. For a story that is just about pulses, this title doesn’t make any sense.

Secondly, sure, pulses are “edible plant seeds”, but so are those other major crops. The journalist is doing a terrible job explaining (if you can call it that) what “pulses” are. If they bothered to take a quick look at Wikipedia, they would know that pulses are simply legumes that are not soybeans or peanuts.

“Pulses produce 90 per cent fewer emissions per gram of protein than beef. They use half the water of soy and corn to produce the same amount of calories. They require 20 times less land than animal proteins,” said Maheshwari, adding that these plants also fix atmospheric nitrogen that is responsible for as much as 6 per cent of the global greenhouse gas emissions.

At the farming stage, pulses have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots, allowing them to convert atmospheric nitrogen gas into a usable form for plants. This process of nitrogen fixation not only enriches the soil, making it less reliant on synthetic fertilisers, but also reduces nitrogen compounds in the air that contribute to the greenhouse effect.

Lastly, and most infuriatingly, the journalist is confusing nitrogen gas (N₂), which happens to be 78% of our atmosphere and not a GHG, with nitrous oxide (N₂O), the third most important anthropogenic GHG. If they didn’t learn this in secondary school, a quick Google search should make it clear that legumes (including pulses) and their symbiotic Rhizobia bacteria convert N₂ from the atmosphere into ammonia in the soil. Legumes and Rhizobia do not “fix” or draw down N₂O, so they don’t reduce atmospheric GHG directly. If anything, the nitrogen that legumes and Rhizobia fixed into the soil will be converted by other microbes into atmospheric N₂O over time, so they can actually release GHG in some cases.

Business Times, you need to do better.

Michelle Ma, reporting for Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp. is partnering with Sublime Systems to reduce its indirect greenhouse gas emissions through a first-of-a-kind deal to buy low-carbon cement products from the startup.

Under the contract, Microsoft can purchase up to 622,500 metric tons of Sublime’s cement over a period of six to nine years. Microsoft can claim the carbon reductions associated with that cement in its own emissions accounting, even if it doesn’t use the material itself. If Microsoft passes on buying the product, the Somerville, Massachusetts-based Sublime can sell it to local buyers but the software giant still gets to claim the carbon savings.

[…]

Sublime will start delivering on its deal with Microsoft when its first 30,000-ton commercial plant is operational. It’s slated to be completed in 2027.

All tech giants in the AI race should be buying green cement and green steel, right now. Unlike expanding or restarting nuclear power plants, they don’t have to buy green cement and steel for their data centres, but they should.

For the current state of green cement, this is a huge deal. Microsoft’s commitment is equivalent to more than 20 years’ worth of output from Sublime’s first commercial plant. But in the context of conventional cement, this is less than the annual output of just one typical plant. There is still plenty of room for scale.

Alissa Rubin, in a conversation with Sabrina Tavernise for the New York Times, on how climate change-induced water stress is changing lives in the Fertile Crescent, where settled farming first emerged:

Alissa Rubin

Well, as the wars wound down, there was something still deeply unsettling. And it wasn’t just the aftermath of war. There were cities where people weren’t leaving their homes during the day. Villages that were half empty or even villages where I saw people leaving, animals abandoned by their owners and just left to die, and really overcrowded hospital emergency rooms in some places.

These are things I expect to see during a war. But this was about something else. It was actually about hotter temperatures and, ultimately, an increasing lack of water. It was making it impossible to have a kind of civilized, normal life. And yet, it seemed almost no one was talking about it.

It is a little ironic, and incredibly sad to see Iraq, whose modern fortunes have been inextricably linked to fossil fuels, suffering from some of the worst impacts of climate change. It has both started and suffered devastating wars because of oil. Amongst violence, sanctions, and political turmoils, Iraq does not have the stable institutions to amass huge sums of oil cash to adapt to climate impacts, or rebrand itself as a shiny clean tech leader like some other Gulf states.

Now climate impacts are fuelling the cycle of violence and despair:

Alissa Rubin

Upstream villages in places that are water-stressed will build a little dam or put in a gate that stops the water from flowing downstream. And then they take the water until they’ve taken as much as they need. And then there’s not so much to go to the next downstream village, and even less for the village after that. And after this happens several times over, people get angry. And they’re willing to attack people in the neighboring village who are doing that.

Another piece that feeds into conflict is that because people are poor and it’s hard to find jobs, and especially young people — they’re at the beginning of their lives, but they don’t have much to hope for — it’s very fertile ground for recruitment by different kinds of armed groups and extremists. These are groups that will pay to have you work as a soldier, essentially. And that’s at least something people can bring home. And if you don’t have other options, you’re willing to consider that.

What’s happening in Iraq should be alarming, concerning and motivating for all of us:

Alissa Rubin

This is more than the canary in the coal mine. It’s just a little ahead of where a whole raft of places in the world are going to be.

[…]

Countries that are poor, countries that have weak government or very nearly failed states, or if you look at the Middle East, countries that keep having conflict, Syria, Lebanon, they can’t do long-term planning. It’s just not part of what’s possible when you have conflict. So they are going to become harder and harder and more and more awful to live in.

And people will get poorer. The places become more unstable. And that spills over into neighboring countries, into various kinds of climate migration. It leads to a, rather, not just a poorer future, but one with an awful lot of suffering. Living in heat with too little water is a recipe for instability, but also disease and a complete lack of hope for large areas.

Sabrina Tavernise

Fundamentally, the common thread is a less stable world.

Alissa Rubin

A less stable world and a more selfish world, Sabrina. That’s the way I would think of it.

What we are fighting against, perhaps more than emissions or even fossil fuel interests, is “a more selfish world”, as Rubin puts it.