Technology

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

The strikes on Iran show why quitting oil is more important than ever (Hussein Dia, March 1, 2026, The Conversation)

In 2015, India blocked Nepal’s oil imports, triggering chaos. In response, authorities encouraged the very rapid growth of electric vehicles. Oil imports have begun to fall.

More recently, the Russia–Ukraine war and US strikes on Venezuela and Iran have brought new focus on reducing oil imports and bolstering domestic energy security.

In oil-dependent Cuba, US pressure has slashed the supply of oil. Blackouts are common and cars stay put. In response, authorities and businesses are importing 34 times as many Chinese solar panels as they did a year ago.

It’s not ideology driving this shift – it’s necessity. Electric vehicle imports, too, are soaring. “Cuba may experience the fastest energy transition in the world,” a Cuban economist told The Economist.

Renewables are the only reliable energy source.

THAT WAS EASY:

The Race to Build the World’s First Commercial Fusion Plant Is Heating Up (Gayoung Lee, March 2, 2026, Gizmodo)

Germany is not the first to pursue commercial fusion plants. In the United States, several private companies have expressed interest in realizing commercial fusion plants. For example, Helion intends to complete a fusion plant to power Microsoft buildings as early as 2028, whereas Type One Energy has partnered with the Tennessee Valley Authority and Oak Ridge National Laboratory for its project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has also explicitly stated it aims to bring fusion power to commercial grids by the mid-2030s.

In that sense, Proxima’s new contract—involving government interests, the country’s most prestigious research institute, and sizable private firms—reflects Germany’s keen interest in getting ahead of the competition. Or at least, to keep up.

IKE’S ONE UNFORGIVABLE SIN:

Finding and Losing Train Culture (Bruce Frohnen, February 27th, 2026, Imaginative Conservative()

And train culture itself helped integrate communities into the larger, state, and national society in a way that left local autonomy intact. The nice thing about trains is that they bring people and things to your community and take them from your community to the wider world without erasing your actual community. Trains come in at one or two points, and leave by those same points, on a more or less regular, but distinctly limited schedule. Even the train suburbs of our cities, when they existed, had an actual character of their own that is not duplicated by suburbs on the beltway (just compare Philadelphia—a tough town with vibrant suburbs, to Los Angeles, an extremely pleasant collection of communities in the early twentieth century that has been transformed into a literal concrete jungle).

Transportation by train is a distinct event, or series of events, rather than the constant flow that automobile traffic tends to be. Of course, change was a constant on and near the frontier as people passed through on their way West. But the train had a more direct, concentrated, and so geographically limited impact than our current web of “free”ways. This is not to say that roads do not both integrate and exclude communities. When Eisenhower insisted on that massive public works and nationalization program that became our freeway system, his engineers made a number of towns into large cities by putting them on the main freeway route—and destroyed many more by bypassing them.