Yes.

While Colorado ranks near the middle of U.S. states for carbon emissions per capita, it still produces enough CO2 per person to rival countries on the World Bank’s list of top emitters internationally.

In 2023, Colorado produced 13.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per capita. If it had been ranked by the World Bank during the same year, Colorado would have placed 14th among the more than 200 countries on the list, just behind Canada, at 14.1, and just ahead of the U.S. as a whole, at 13.7. 

Among U.S. states, Colorado ranked 26th in carbon emissions per capita. Wyoming had the highest per capita emissions in the country, at 92.9 metric tons, while Maryland had the lowest, at 7.8. 

Most of Colorado’s emissions come from energy production and consumption, primarily natural gas and oil production and electric power production and consumption. 

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The Trump administration has renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now calling it the National Laboratory of the Rockies, marking an identity shift for the Colorado institution that has been a global leader in wind, solar and other renewable energy research.

“The new name reflects the Trump administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research, which historically emphasized alternative and renewable sources of generation, and honors the natural splendor of the lab’s surroundings in Golden, Colorado,” said Jud Virden, laboratory director, in a statement.

He did not specify what this “broader vision” would mean for the lab’s programs or its staff of about 4,000.

The renaming is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to deemphasize or cut the parts of the federal government that support renewable energy, while also expanding federal support for fossil fuels.

Asked for details, the Department of Energy said in an email that the renaming  “reflects the Department’s renewed focus on ‘energy addition’ rather than the prioritization of specific energy resources.”

A lab spokesman had no additional information about whether there will be changes to programs or headcount at the lab.

Bill Ritter, a Democrat who was governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011, said it’s reasonable to assume that the name change signals that the federal government is abandoning the lab’s status as a world leader in energy research.

“It’s an iconic research facility,” he said.

Underscoring this point, he recalled a trip to Israel while he was governor.

“The head of their renewable energy laboratory said, ‘I have nothing to tell you because you come from the place that has the best renewable energy laboratory in the world,’” Ritter said.

After leaving office, he founded the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, which specializes in energy policy research and is now a consultant on energy business and policy.

Based on this experience, he thinks that anything the Trump administration does to divert from the lab’s mission is harmful to the United States’ ability to remain a major player in the energy economy of the near future.

“We’ll no longer be competitive in renewables research with China or India or other countries that are still heading toward the renewable energy transition at a very fast pace,” he said.

People with close ties to the lab were not surprised by the name change, given the administration’s broader goals.

“In the early days of DOGE, people there were whispering about a name change to avoid the ire of MAGAs,” said Matt Henry, a Montana-based social scientist who worked at the lab from February 2024 to August 2025, in a post on Bluesky. “It pissed me off—prioritizing the preservation of the institution at the expense of its [stated] mission? So disappointing.”

He was referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which sought to cut federal spending in the early months of the Trump administration. The term MAGA refers to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and movement.

Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor, said if the name change is a sign of a significant change in the lab’s work, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once.”

Mulvaney has done projects in partnership with people at the lab. An important part of the institution’s work, he said, is that its research is free and accessible to the public, helping businesses and universities that may not be able to afford the work of private research firms.

The lab’s mission has included consulting to help communities benefit from new energy technologies and ensure smooth transitions away from fossil fuels.

This work meant that the lab was out of step with an administration that has said it disagrees with the idea of a transition away from fossil fuels and has sought to impede funding and development of renewable energy.

The lab was established in 1974 as the Solar Energy Research Institute, part of a law signed by President Gerald Ford to facilitate alternatives to importing oil from the Middle East, according to a history on the lab’s website. The US was suffering through high gasoline prices amid tensions with oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia.

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” said Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary of energy, in a statement. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand.”

In 1977, the federal government selected Golden, Colorado, as the location for the lab. In 1991, the Solar Energy Research Institute became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of a change by the administration of President George H. W. Bush that also elevated the institution to become part of the country’s national lab system.

But the lab’s history has also included budget cuts and periods when its work fell out of favor with presidential administrations, including layoffs and funding cuts under President Ronald Reagan. President Donald Trump proposed substantial cuts during his first term, but Congress retained much of the funding.

The Trump administration’s budget proposal, issued in May, calls for cuts across non-defense discretionary spending, including on energy research, but the budget process is still underway.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Understand and improve on LLM-generated code

You’re about to commit a chunk of LLM-generated code into your product’s codebase. Before you do, however, pause to consider and act on these questions:

1. Does it work? A lot of generated code can ‘feel’ right but be either subtly or grossly incorrect. If you don’t already have an automated testing habit, it’s never too late. Vibes are not enough.
2. Do you understand the generated code? Could you explain it if asked? Don’t accept the code until you’ve learned from it and you know what it does. Don’t outsource your understanding.
3. What’s different between the generated code and what you might otherwise have done? Are the differences something you can learn from or something you should reject? Don’t accept code that is worse than what you would have written.
4. Can you think of at least one way to improve the generated code? Make it so.

In software development, one of the (non-swear) words we use to describe things we don’t understand or feel empowered to improve is legacy. We should be careful both to avoid ‘optimising’ and accelerating the creation of legacy code and to mistake such pessimisation as productivity — especially if we’re doing so at the expense of joy, time and skill.

In using Gen AI, many developers have unintentionally taken a back seat with both their knowledge and their destiny. By skimming past the friction necessary for learning, the pursuit of convenience ends up deskilling them rather than enhancing their skills. Many have confused meaningful productivity with the movement of a single metric or a subjective feeling.

It is easy — and common — to conflate progress through Jira tickets with actual progress in software development, or lines of code with needed functionality, or fixing defects with adding value to a product. Busyness is not the same as business. Getting better at getting through issues is not a benefit if you are creating disproportionately more issues over time, playing Whac-A-Mole with failure demand.

Use AI as augmentation. Treat AI as a power tool, not a replacement for craftsmanship.

— Russ Miles

AI coding assistants offer many opportunities for improvement of both our codebases and our knowledge. But just because the offer exists doesn’t mean it will be taken up. Without conscious effort and engagement not only is this opportunity lost, but the outcome could be worse in the long run. Being the human in the loop needs to be understood as an active not a passive role.

Don’t just turn the handle; listen to the music. Understand it. Feel it. Join in. It’s yours.

A person infectious with measles traveled through Denver International Airport earlier this month, a reminder to holiday travelers to be aware of the risk of infection as they journey to and fro.

The traveler, who lives out of state, landed at DIA at 7:24 p.m. on Dec. 12 at gate B45. The traveler departed from gate B84 at 9:41 p.m. the same night, state and local health officials say.

Authorities did not identify where those flights originated or where they were headed and said passengers who shared a flight with the infected person will be notified directly. But other travelers or workers who were at the airport from when the traveler arrived until about midnight that night should monitor themselves for symptoms of measles and call ahead before seeking medical attention if they believe they have been infected.

People exposed could come down with symptoms up until Jan. 2. However, authorities said the infected traveler was fully vaccinated against measles and had mild symptoms, meaning the risk of the traveler spreading the disease to others is lower.

Colorado has seen 36 cases of measles so far this year, the second most in a year since cases started being tracked in 1993, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has said. But other states have been hit far harder.

There are currently two large outbreaks in the United States, one in South Carolina and another along the Utah-Arizona border. Both outbreaks have seen well over 100 cases reported.

Following the widespread introduction of vaccines, measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000. But the country will likely lose that status early next year. Facing even higher infection numbers, Canada lost its elimination status last month.

CBS cannot contain the online spread of a "60 Minutes" segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing.

The episode, "Inside CECOT," featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. "Welcome to hell," one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games."

Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment "did not advance the ball" and merely echoed others' reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was "ready," insisting that holding stories "for whatever reason" happens "every day in every newsroom."

But Weiss apparently did not realize that the "Inside CECOT" would still stream in Canada, giving the public a chance to view the segment as reporters had intended.

Critics accusing CBS of censoring the story quickly shared the segment online Monday after discovering that it was available on the Global TV app. Using a VPN to connect to the app with a Canadian IP address was all it took to override Weiss' block in the US, as 404 Media reported the segment was uploaded to "to a variety of file sharing sites and services, including iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent," including on the recently revived file-sharing service LimeWire. It's currently also available to stream on the Internet Archive, where one reviewer largely summed up the public's response so far, writing, "cannot believe this was pulled, not a dang thing wrong with this segment except it shows truth."

CBS did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment. The network faces criticism from both outside and within its studios, as reporters and CBS viewers question the integrity of Weiss' decision now that the segment has aired. Recently appointed CBS editor-in-chief, Weiss' prior experience as a contrarian opinion writer helming her own right-leaning platform, The Free Press, prompted early concerns that she might water down CBS's critical coverage of the Trump administration. And the seeming censorship of the "60 Minutes" episode was perceived by some as a canary in a coal mine, confirming critics' fears.

CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who anchored the segment, noted that the Trump administration had repeatedly declined to comment as the story came together. By delaying the segment solely because of Trump officials' silence, Weiss appeared to be giving the Trump administration a "kill switch" to block any story they don't want aired, Alfonsi suggested.

"Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices," Alfonsi wrote in a note to CBS colleagues that was widely shared online. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America, told NBC News that Weiss risked damaging CBS's credibility by making a seemingly hasty decision to postpone a report that may have upset the Trump administration.

"CBS journalists, among the best in this country, appropriately made an outreach effort to get the government to weigh in on a deeply reported story out of El Salvador," Richardson said. "Pulling it back at the last minute because the government chose not to respond is an insult not only to the integrity of the journalists but to core principles of independent news gathering."

Early 2000s tool LimeWire used to pirate episode

As Americans scrambled to share the "Inside CECOT" story, assuming that CBS would be working in the background to pull down uploads, a once-blacklisted tool from the early 2000s became a reliable way to keep the broadcast online.

On Reddit, users shared links to a LimeWire torrent, prompting chuckles from people surprised to see the peer-to-peer service best known for infecting parents' computers with viruses in the 2000s suddenly revived in 2025 to skirt feared US government censorship.

"Yo what," one user joked, highlighting only the word "LimeWire." Another user, ironically using the LimeWire logo as a profile picture, responded, "man, who knew my nostalgia prof pic would become relevant again, WTF."

LimeWire was created in 2000 and quickly became one of the Internet's favorite services for pirating music until record labels won a 2010 injunction that blocked all file-sharing functionality. As the Reddit thread noted, some LimeWire users were personally targeted in lawsuits.

For a while after the injunction, a fraction of users kept the service alive by running older versions of the software that weren't immediately disabled. New owners took over LimeWire in 2022, officially relaunching the service. The service's about page currently notes that "millions of individuals and businesses" use the global file-sharing service today, but for some early Internet users, the name remains a blast from the past.

"Bringing back LimeWire to illegally rip copies of reporting suppressed by the government is definitely some cyberpunk shit," a Bluesky user wrote.

"We need a champion against the darkness," a Reddit commenter echoed. "I side with LimeWire."

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So: I've had surgery on one eye, and have new glasses to tide me over while the cataract in my other eye worsens enough to require surgery (I'm on the low priority waiting list in the meantime). And I'm about to head off for a fortnight of vacation time, mostly in Germany (which has the best Christmas markets) before coming home in mid-December and getting down to work on the final draft of Starter Pack.

Starter Pack is a book I wrote on spec--without a contracted publisher--this summer when Ghost Engine just got a bit too much. It's a spin-off of Ghost Engine, which started out as a joke mashup of two genres: "what if ... The Stainless Steel Rat got Isekai'd?" Nobody's writing the Rat these days, which I feel is a Mistake, so I decided to remedy it. This is my own take on the ideas, not a copy of Harry Harrison's late 1950s original, so it's a bit different, but it's mostly there now and it works as its own thing. Meanwhile, my agent read it and made some really good suggestions for how to make it more commercial, and "more commercial" is what pays the bills so I'm all on board with that. Especially as it's not sold yet.

Ghost Engine is still in progress: I hit a wall and needed to rethink the ending, again. But at least I am writing: having working binocular vision is a sadly underrated luxury--at least, it's underrated until you have to do without it for a few months. Along the way, Ghost Engine required me to come up with a new story setting in which there is no general AI, no superintelligent AI, no mind uploading to non-biological substrates, and above all no singularity--but our descendants have gone interstellar in a big way thanks to that One Neat Magictech Trick I trialed in my novella Palimpsest back in 2009. (Yes, Ghost Engine and Starter Pack are both set very loosely in the same continuum as Palimpsest. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that Palimpsest is to these new novels what A Colder War was to the Laundry Files.) So I finally got back to writing far future wide screen space opera, even if you aren't going to be able to read any of it for at least a year.

Why do this, though?

Bluntly: I needed to change course. After the US election outcome of November 2024 it was pretty clear that we were in for a very bumpy ride over the next few years. The lunatics have taken over the asylum and the economy is teetering on the edge of a very steep precipice. It's not just the over-hyped AI bubble that's propping up the US tech sector and global stock markets--that would be bad enough, but macro policy is being set by feces-hurling baboons and it really looks as if Trump is willing to invade Central America as a distraction gambit. All the world's a Reality TV show right now, and Reality TV is all about indulging our worst collective instincts.

It's too depressing to contemplate writing more Laundry Files stories; I get email from people who read the New Management as a happy, escapist fantasy these days because we've got a bunch of competent people battling to hold the centre together, under the aegis of a horrific ancient evil who is nevertheless a competent ancient evil. Unfortunately the ancient evil wins, and that's just not something I want to explore further right now.

I'm a popular entertainer and it seems to me that in bad times people want entertainments that take them out of their current quagmire and offers them escape, or at least gratuitous adventures with a side-order of humour. I'm not much of an optimist about our short-term future (I don't expect to survive long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel) so I can't really write solarpunk or hopepunk utopias, but I can write space operas in which absolutely horrible people are viciously mocked and my new protagonists can at least hope for a happy ending.

Upcoming Events

In the new year, I've got three SF conventions planned already: Iridescence (Eastercon 2026), Birmingham UK, 3-6 April: Satellite 9, Glasgow, 22-24 May: and Metropol con Berlin (Eurocon 2026), Berlin, 2-5 July. I'm also going to try and set up a reading/signing/book launch for The Regicide Report in Edinburgh; more here if I manage it.

As during previous Republican presidencies in the USA it does not feel safe to visit that country, so I won't be attending the 2026 worldcon. However the 2027 world science fiction convention will almost certainly take place in Montreal, which is in North America but not part of Trumpistan, so (health and budget permitting) I'll try to make it there.

(Assuming we've still got a habitable planet and a working economy, which kind of presupposes the POTUS isn't biting the heads off live chickens or rogering a plush sofa in the Oval Office, of course, neither of which can be taken for granted this century.)