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Headaches, coughs, and questions linger.
This time last year, the 151 cars of Norfolk Southern train 32N were still rolling along somewhere between Madison, Illinois, and Ohio’s eastern border. The train had suffered a brief breakdown on its northeast journey to Toledo, where a new crew came on before the double locomotives turned southeast, following the shore of Lake Erie into Cleveland, a metropolitan area of 2.18 million residents. It’d have been an irritating train to encounter at a railroad crossing: It stretched almost two miles long.
32N also weighed 18,000 tons, and in its 20 hazardous material tank cars, it carried some 700,000 pounds of vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen, which had originated in a chemical plant outside of Houston — a crucial hub in the American plastics machine, booming thanks to cheap shale gas. Some rail workers reportedly referred to the train as “32 Nasty,” due to its reputation for being difficult to handle.
On February 3, 2023, around 8:12 p.m., 32N passed a metal processing plant in Salem, Ohio, where surveillance footage showed flames and sparks coming from the wheels of one of the cars. About half an hour later, 38 of its cars derailed due to an overheated wheel bearing that engineers detected only after it was too late to stop the rupture. Eleven of the derailed cars carried hazardous materials, which immediately began leaking into the soil, nearby water, and air. The train came to rest a little less than 200 miles away from its final destination, abruptly terminating in a burst of flames in East Palestine, Ohio, population 4,700.
A year on, what we still don’t know about the Norfolk Southern derailment is almost as shocking as what we do. For all the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency, which was on site almost immediately after the accident, there are glaring pieces of information missing: the concentration of the chemicals locals were exposed to; how much of the surrounding environment is still polluted; and what health issues could still arise. Even “the plan for documenting and responding to long-term health effects experienced by residents is still being ironed out,” Bloombergreports, 364 days later.
Days after the initial derailment and the town’s first round of evacuation orders, emergency responders and Norfolk Southern made the decision to vent and then ignite the train’s remaining vinyl chloride days later, reportedly to prevent an explosion. This sent an alarming black plume into the sky over the town. Locals subsequently reported headaches, nausea, rashes, and coughs, among other ailments; some said they saw animals get sick or die. “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” one hazardous materials expert toldThe Associated Press in the aftermath.
Former President Donald Trump visited three weeks after the derailment to hand out Trump-branded water bottles and tell the residents, “You are not forgotten.” Marianne Williamson, who is mounting a longshot challenge to President Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary, recalled to Heatmap last summer that on her own visit after the disaster, “I saw the frustration, the bitterness, the despair, and in some cases, the hopelessness of people who had been not only neglected, abandoned, abused, and traumatized by Norfolk Southern, but had been re-traumatized by the neglect of their state and federal government.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited the day after Trump; Biden is expected to make his first visit to the disaster zone this month.
Despite bipartisan hand-wringing, little has been done to prevent another disaster. A rail safety bill that would enhance safety protocols for trains carrying hazardous materials sponsored by Ohio’s Senators, Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown and its Republican JD Vance, has yet to go to the floor. Experts don’t believe it will get the nine necessary Republican votes to advance, partly because Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell opposes it.
Yet Toxic-Free Future reports that some 3 million people live along vinyl chloride transportation routes between the plants in Texas and the plastic factories in New Jersey, and train derailments have been on the rise.
Politicians and pundits will mark Saturday’s derailment with their cases and appeals for this and that. But locals are uncomfortably aware that it will be years more before they know what their lingering coughs and headaches mean — for them, for their children, and everything else attempting to live in their town. Whatever eventually becomes clear may be a help to others down the line, but will likely come too late for East Palestine.
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The leaders of both countries reached deals with the U.S. in exchange for a 30-day reprieve on border taxes.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a month-long pause on across-the-board 25% tariff on Mexican goods imported into the United States that were to take effect on Tuesday.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that Sheinbaum had agreed to deploy 10,000 Mexican troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, “specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl, and illegal migrants into our Country.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick will lead talks in the coming month over what comes next.
“I look forward to participating in those negotiations, with President Sheinbaum, as we attempt to achieve a ‘deal’ between our two Countries,” Trump wrote.
In her own statement, Sheinbaum said the U.S. had committed to work on preventing the trafficking of firearms into Mexico.
There has still been no pause on planned tariffs on Canadian imports, which would likely affect the flow of oil, minerals, and lumber, as well as possibly break automobile supply chains in the United States. Canadian leaders announced several measures to counter the tariffs at both the federal and provincial level.
Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have spoken today, and are scheduled to do so again this afternoon. Canadian officials are not optimistic, however, that they’ll be able to get a similar deal, a Canadian official told The New York Times.
UPDATE 4:55 p.m. ET: Trudeau announced that he had reached a similar deal that would stave off the imposition of tariffs for a month. Following a “good call” with Trump, Trudeau said in a post on X that he would deploy personnel and resources to his country’s southern border. “Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border,” Trudeau wrote. He also said that Canada would have a “Fentanyl Czar” and would “launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering.”
PJM is projecting nearly 50% demand growth through the end of the 2030s.
The nation’s largest electricity market expects to be delivering a lot more power through the end of the next decade — even more than it expected last year.
PJM Interconnection, which covers some or all of 13 states (and Washington, D.C.) between Maryland and Illinois, released its latest long-term forecast last week, projecting that its summer peak demand would climb by almost half, from 155,000 megawatts in 2025 to around 230,000 in 2039.
The electricity market attributed the increased demand to “the proliferation of data centers, electrification of buildings and vehicles, and manufacturing,” and noted (not for the first time) that the demand surge comes at the same time many fossil fuel power plants are scheduled to close, especially coal plants. Already, some natural gas and even some coal plants in PJM andelsewhere that were scheduled to close have seen their retirement dates pushed out in order to handle forecast electricity demand.
This is just the latest eye-popping projection of forthcoming electricity demand from PJM and others — last year, PJM forecast summer peak demand of about 180,000 megawatts in 2035, a figure that jumped to around 220,000 megawatts in this year’s forecast.
While summer is typically when grids are most taxed due to heavy demand from air conditioning, as more of daily life gets electrified — especially home heating — winter demand is forecast to rise, too. PJM forecast that its winter peak demand would go from 139,000 megawatts in 2025, or 88% of the summer peak, to 210,000 megawatts in 2039, or 95% of its summer peak demand forecast for that year.
Systems are designed to accommodate their peak, but winter poses special challenges for grids. Namely, the electric grid can freeze, with natural gas plants and pipelines posing a special risk in cold weather — not to mention that it’s typically not a great time for solar production, either.
Aftab Khan, PJM’s executive vice president for operations, planning, and security, said in a statement Thursday that much of the recent demand increase was due to data centers growing “exponentially” in PJM’s territory.
The disparity between future demand and foreseeable available supply in the short term has already led to a colossal increase in “capacity” payments within PJM, where generators are paid to guarantee they’ll be able to deliver power in a crunch. These payments tend to favor coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants, which can produce power (hopefully) in all weather conditions whenever it’s needed, in a way that variable energy generation such as wind and solar — even when backed up by batteries — cannot as yet.
Prices at the latest capacity auction were high enough to induce Calpine, the independent power company that operates dozens of natural gas power plants and recently announced a merger with Constellation, the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, to say it would look at building new power plants in the territory.
The expected relentless increase in power demand, power capacity, and presumably, profits for power companies, was thrown into doubt, however, when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released a large language model that appears to require far less power than state of the art models developed by American companies such as OpenAI. While the biggest stock market victim has been the chip designer Nvidia, which has shed hundreds of billions of dollars of market capitalization this week, a number of power companies including Constellation and Vistra are down around 10%, after being some of the best stock market performers in 2024.
It’s not just AI companies taking a beating today.
It’s not just tech stocks that are reeling after the release of Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, which performs similarly to state-of-the-art models from American companies while using less expensive hardware far more efficiently. Energy and infrastructure companies — whose share prices had soared in the past year on the promise of powering a massive artificial intelligence buildout — have also seen their stock prices fall early Monday.
Shares in GE Vernova, which manufactures turbines for gas-fired power plants, were down 19% in early trading Monday. Since the company’s spinoff from GE last April, the share price had risen almost 200% through last Friday, largely based on optimism about its ability to supply higher electricity demand. Oklo, the advanced nuclear company backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, is down 25%, after rising almost 300% in the past year. Constellation Energy, the independent power producer that’s re-powering Three Mile Island in partnership with Microsoft, saw its shares fall almost 20% in early trading. It had risen almost 190% in the year prior to Monday.
“DeepSeek’s power implications for AI training punctures some of the capex euphoria which followed major commitments from Stargate and Meta last week,” Jefferies infrastructure analyst Graham Hunt and his colleagues wrote in a note to clients Monday. “With DeepSeek delivering performance comparable to GPT-4 for a fraction of the computing power, there are potential negative implications for the builders, as pressure on AI players to justify ever increasing capex plans could ultimately lead to a lower trajectory for data center revenue and profit growth.”
Investors fear that the proliferation of cheaper, more efficient models may hurt the prospects of technology companies — and their suppliers — that are spending tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence investments.
Just last week, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, announced huge new investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Altman’s OpenAI is part of Stargate, the joint venture with Microsoft and SoftBank that got a splashy White House-based announcement and promises to invest $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure. There was already some skepticism of these numbers, with Altman-nemesis Elon Musk charging that certain members would be unable to fulfill their ends of the deal, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told CNBC from Davos, “I’m good for my $80 billion.”
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, said late last week that his company was building a data center “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” which would require 2 gigawatts of electricity to power. (For scale, reactors 3 and 4 of the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia are a little over 1 gigawatt each.) He also said that Meta had planned up to $65 billion of capital expenditure this year.
These escalating announcements have been manna to investors in any company that provides the building blocks for large artificial intelligence systems — namely chips and energy, with companies like Nvidia, the chip designer, and power companies and energy infrastructure companies posting some of the best stock market performances last year.
But exactly how cheaper artificial intelligence plays out in terms of real investment remains to be seen. Late Sunday night Redmond, Washington-time, Nadella posted a link on X to the Wikipedia page for Jevons Paradox. The idea dates from 19th century Britain, and posits that increased efficiency in using a resource (in Jevons’ case, coal) could actually accelerate its depletion, as the resource becomes cheaper for the same economic output, encouraging more use of it (in Jevons’ case, iron).
“Jevons paradox strikes again!,” Nadella wrote. “As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.”
Investors in chips and energy companies are hoping that’s the case; at least so far, the market doesn’t appear to agree.