France, Germany, and the UK have submitted a letter to members of the UN Security Council announcing they aretriggering the "snapback" mechanism to reimpose UN sanctions on Iran, Axios and others are reporting Thursday.
These are past sanctions which had been suspended under the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, which the US unilaterally pulled out of in April 2018 under the first Trump administration.
Axios writes that "In the letter, the three European powers emphasized that during the next 30 days - before the sanctions take effect - they are open to negotiations with Iran on a nuclear agreement that could halt the process."
Tuesday saw tense discussions between Iran and the E3 nations - France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. They warned at the meeting the E3 is preparing trigger the mechanism for reimposing international sanctions on Iran if it fails to either reach a new nuclear agreement by the end of August or agrees to extend UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which covers the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Axios' Barak Ravid had earlier acknowledged that "It will take a diplomatic miracle to prevent this from happening."
The Europeans are also pressing Iran to rejoin nuclear talks with Washington; however, the Iranians have made clear that the US can no longer be trusted - as it bombed the Islamic Republic in June at the very moment the sides were engaged in talks.
The Associated Press has explained how 'snapback' works in the following:
Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action reached between world powers and Iran in 2015, Iran agreed to limit uranium enrichment to levels necessary for civilian nuclear power in exchange for lifted economic sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency was tasked with monitoring Iran’s nuclear program.
The snapback mechanism’s purpose is to swiftly reimpose all pre-deal sanctions without being vetoed by U.N. Security Council members, including permanent members Russia and China.
The process began Thursday, when the E3 formally notified the U.N. secretary-general and Security Council president about Iran’s “significant nonperformance of commitments.”
Iran's alleged uranium stockpiles are believed to be significantly beyond the limits set by the original deal, in both purity and quantity.
"In May, the IAEA said Iran had amassed 408.6 kilograms (900.8 pounds) of uranium enriched up to 60% purity. If it is enriched to 90%, it would be enough to make nine nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick, though a weapon would require other expertise, such as a detonation device," the AP noted.
The joint Israel and US surprise assault of the 12-day June war might have actually done much to hasten Iran's nuclear development and Tehran leaders now believe - not without good reason - that past and future negotiations with Washington are based on deception by the US side.
American Bitcoin, a bitcoin mining firm backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, is preparing to go public on the Nasdaq in early September through a unique all-stock merger, Reutersreportedon August 28.
The company will merge with Gryphon Digital Mining, according to Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8 — the Miami-based firm that holds an 80% stake in American Bitcoin. The resulting entity will retain the name “American Bitcoin” and trade under the ticker ABTC.
Instead of going the conventional IPO route, the team opted for a merger structure that unlocks faster access to capital.
Anchor investors include the Gemini crypto exchange’s co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.
Launched in March 2025, the firm has ambitious goals. It aims to be “the world’s largest, most efficient pure-play bitcoin miner,” according to a mission statement. It plans to both mine and buy bitcoin depending on market conditions. “We ebb and flow between which one is the best return at different times,” Genoot explained.
The move comes amid renewed pro-crypto momentum in Washington under President Trump’s second term.
Reuters also noted that American Bitcoin is actively exploring acquisitions in Asia, particularly Hong Kong and Japan, to broaden its international reach.
On Aug. 27, Benchmark, the investment banking firm reaffirmed its "buy" rating on the Bitcoin mining operation Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) and increased its price target to $36 from $33.
A Republican senator closely allied with US PresidentDonald Trumpsuggested imposing additional tariffs on Norway in retaliation for a decision by the country’s sovereign wealth fund to divest its holdings of heavy-equipment makerCaterpillar Inc.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, in a social media post Thursday also floated halting US visas for leaders of the sovereign wealth fund and other “organizations that attempt to punish American companies for geopolitical differences.”
Almost weekly in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, a sensational assault committed by an illegal migrant—often enjoying some sort of state support or with prior arrests for the same crime—surfaces.
Until recently, European politicians and the media sought to either ignore such news or accuse those who clamored for tighter borders, more police protection, and stiffer penalties of being “racists” or “xenophobes.”
Until recently, that is.
Mass protests are now common in Britain against the Labour Party’s open borders policies and generous welfare entitlements for immigrants who arrive illegally and without authentic “political refugee” status.
Greek officials, also swamped by illegal immigration, now cite President Trump’s secure border policies as new models for their own.
The majority of European immigrants now come from majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet many arrivals seem angrier at their newfound liberal hosts than at the dictatorships they fled back home.
Europe’s immigration policies will not work in a multiethnic democracy.
Too many immigrants are arriving too quickly, without sufficient diversity, language fluency, skills, or familiarity with the customs and culture of their host nations. They often enter with separatist religious and cultural values antithetical to the very place they seek refuge.
Yet, there is no European plan of civic education to assimilate immigrants and teach them the rules, laws, and culture of their hosts.
It is then no surprise that what follows is ghettoization, resentment, and loud attacks on the very nation in which they seek sanctuary, denouncing it as decadent and godless.
In the past, Europe’s anemic military budgets, reliance on borrowed money, socialism, and a once-strong economy papered over these existential challenges of illegal immigration.
Or, as left-wing former chancellor Angela Merkel once inanely said of massive illegal influxes into Germany and Europe, “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”).
But, of course, Merkel could not.
She offered zero plans on how to integrate, assimilate, and acculturate millions of Europe’s illegal aliens. Now, some 15 percent of Germany’s population are foreign nationals.
Unfortunately, the statist economies of high-cost Europe are stagnating.
Massive welfare outlays, coupled with a shrinking and aging native population—with a birth rate sinking below 1.4—are finally slowing economic growth.
Current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put the dilemma bluntly: “The welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed with what we can economically afford.”
Yet the more socialism ossifies, the more popular culture still demands free benefits that a shrinking number of taxpayers can no longer provide.
The United States is finally taking the opposite approach of cracking down on illegal immigration, deregulating the economy, and unleashing high technology to fast-track new frontiers of artificial intelligence, robotics, cryptocurrency, and genetic engineering.
Often, Europe’s best and brightest—and frustrated—are migrating to greater opportunities and freedom in the U.S., further hampering European research and development.
Europe foolishly adopted a self-defeating energy policy to achieve net-zero emissions by subsidizing inefficient wind and solar power while ignoring or shutting down far cheaper natural gas, nuclear, and coal-powered electrical generation.
Meanwhile, China, grinning like a Cheshire cat and caring little about its carbon footprint, is eagerly exporting wind and solar systems to the suicidal West.
Yet China itself is busy building about two massive coal-fired plants a month, and the largest and most environmentally disruptive hydroelectric projects in the world.
No wonder average European electricity costs are even steeper than those in failing California. European consumers often cannot afford to turn their heaters and air conditioners on, while businesses cannot compete with industries abroad that enjoy far cheaper power.
Donald Trump has declared that the 80-year postwar order is calcified and that the US will no longer run huge trading deficits with European Union nations. Instead, it will demand symmetrical tariffs, further challenging past European mercantile profitability.
The days of Europe disarming and relying on the United States for defense are also over, given that Vladimir Putin, for the third time in 15 years, invaded a neighboring country.
Yet Ukraine is not Chechnya or Georgia, but instead on the doorstep of Europe.
So in panic, a perennially delinquent NATO is not only promising to spend the required 2 percent of GDP on defense but also increasing arms budgets to 5 percent of GDP, a higher rate even than that of the US.
No one knows how Europeans will afford such massive rearmament.
To do so would require opening up their economies, adopting far more flexible and traditional energy policies, securing their borders, ending illegal immigration, pruning the welfare state, increasing their fertility rates, and dropping the DEI salad bowl while re-embracing the melting pot of integration and acculturation.
We will soon see whether Europeans can adopt such needed reforms, or find the necessary medicine worse than their current crippling continental disease.
The adage “knowledge is power” could be recast: knowledgeconsumes power. Throughout history, the advance of knowledge has led to the invention of new products and services. These innovations inevitably increase energy consumption. With the invention of useful artificial intelligence (AI), we have another example of that truth.
AI-focused data centers, more than any other single factor, are driving growth in regional and national electricity demands at a rate not seen in a half-century. The boom has caused the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to more than triple its formerly tepid forecast for growth in U.S. power demand by 2030. The lower end of its growth estimate would be equivalent to adding about five times New York City’s peak power usage.
The scale of digital power is truly daunting. Consider the energy demands of other big facilities: the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, requires about 40 megawatts (MW), an electric steel mill about 100 MW, a giant TSMC semiconductor fabrication plant about 200 MW, and a giant oil refinery or LNG export terminal about 500 MW. In the U.S., we’re building only a few such facilities at any given time. Meantime, over the next few years alone—and in just the U.S.—constructionis underway on dozens, and soon likely hundreds, of AI-centric data centers, each requiring 200 MW to 1,000 MW.
Companies ranging from Anthropic—the four-year-old AI startup valued at nearly $200 billion—to OpenAI (valued at some $300 billion), Google ($2.5 trillion), and numerous other tech giants (collectively, more than $20 trillion) have all weighed in with national energy plans to ensure power for “a generational opportunity to build a new era of American innovation and growth,” as Google put it. Anthropic’s July 2025 roadmap, like many others, notes that AI “will require a broader-based effort to unlock energy and data center buildouts around the country,” including the need to accelerate “geothermal, natural gas, and nuclear permitting.” [emphasis added] It is a sign of the times that Big Tech is calling for more conventional power plants.
The top question for pro-growthers: What can be done to ensure that America can power the AI and data-center revolution? The same concern has attended the emergence of all radically new technologies over history.
For example, economist William Stanley Jevons’s iconic 1865 paper, “The Coal Question,” was animated by worries that the “exhaustion of coal” would end the prosperity wave driven by the invention of steam engines for factories and ships. More recently, the 1973 Arab oil embargo engendered a half-century of handwringing about “peak oil,” worries that would stall booming automobile and aviation sectors. And in 1978, Congress passed the Fuel Use Act, banning the consumption of natural gas for electric power plants because of fears of imminent exhaustion of that fuel, which the (politically important) residential sector craved after a 250 percent rise in gas demand over the prior few decades.
But today, there is finally widespread recognition of the “bottomless well” (to borrow the title of a book I coauthored with Peter Huber) of underlying energy resources. That’s why the no-growth greens have switched from preaching “peak oil” to a “keep it in the ground” campaign. Thus, when it comes to building the energy systems needed to fuel growth, the issue is no longer about the exhaustibility of resources but about the need to weigh choices and tradeoffs, while minimizing government friction.
Much of that friction comes from a cohort of influential analysts fearful of any growth in fuel use, anywhere. For these thinkers, the key question can be summarized as: Should private markets be allowed to do what’s needed to power the AI and data-center revolution?
Stories and articles about AI’s “excessive” energy use are proliferating in the technical literature and popular media. The headline of a recent article by the editors of Scientific American cuts to the chase: “Artificial Intelligence uses too much energy.” The article asserts that AI’s “skyrocketing” energy use is “exorbitant” and antithetical to the need to “keep the energy footprint of the U.S. reined in.” Or consider a French-government-commissioned analysis that—echoing many others, such as one from the International Energy Agency—proposes schemes to encourage or enforce “digital sobriety” to curb the market’s appetite for digital services, and thus energy.
It should be obvious that energy-constrained “digital sobriety” would merely choke expansion. Statist inclinations to constrain freedom-of-choice are not new to the energy debates. But this is different. It’s not about regulating, say, the annual number of vacations by aircraft, or your thermostat setting, but about throttling a nascent revolutionary technology.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has called the global race to “dominate” AI our modern “Sputnik moment.” Space travel, at least to near-Earth orbit, has yielded manifold benefits—GPS and superior weather forecasts, to note just two. And rocket ships are epic energy hogs. But the 1957 Sputnik moment is really the wrong analogy.
In infrastructure terms, facilitating the AI boom is more like the 1956 Highway Act or, in technology terms, the invention of the plane that kicked off the boom in modern aviation—the Boeing 707.
The 1958 introduction of the 707, the first practical commercial jet aircraft, made possible high-altitude (more comfortable and above-the-weather) long-distance flights, propelling the transatlantic travel boom. While passenger aviation was by then a nearly a four-decade old industry, the reliable jet engine was the pivotal invention enabling global air traffic to soar—as did aviation fuel use, up some 500 percent since 1958 (during which aviation fuel efficiency tripled).
Similarly, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the 1956 Highway Act, the automobile age was four decades old and the nation was already festooned with thousands of miles of local roadways. That Act’s goal to build 40,000 miles of interstate superhighways was unambiguously both economic and strategic—the legislation’s full title is The National Interstate and Defense Highway Act. Few doubt that it unleashed freedom and economic mobility and facilitated growth. Those benefits entailed a 300 percent rise in overall highway fuel use since 1956, despite a doubling in the energy efficiency of car engines over that period.
Consider some parallels.
A single AI server rack, a refrigerator-sized assembly of silicon chips and the attendant supporting hardware, can weigh as much as a car, though each rack uses as much energy annually as 100 cars. A single data center hosts hundreds or thousands of such racks.
Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Image
The hundreds of mega-scale data centers under construction in the U.S. are joining thousands of existing smaller data centers, all woven together by a telecommunication network—made up of hundreds of thousands of miles of physical cables and wireless “roads”—that is itself power hungry. You might guess where this logic is going: $30 billion is about what it costs to build 1,000 miles of car-carrying superhighway (including the cost of the cars it can carry). It also costs about $30 billion to build a single 1 GW data center (including the cost of the AI chips). That single data center will consume twentyfold more energy a year than the annual auto traffic on that span of highway.
Thus, the $64,000 question for the twenty-first century: Are we at the equivalent of the 1958 starting point in building out a new information highway infrastructure, or are we approaching the equivalent of 1992, when the last section of the original interstate network was completed? That question should answer itself.
The challenge now lies in guessing how much more power the nation will require. The FERC forecast draws on a range of independent estimates suggesting the need for between 50 GW and 130 GW in extra generating capacity. We already know that demand will be higher than the lower range of that estimate, since a detailed national survey from a team at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business found a total of some 55 GW of new data-center projects already committed or under construction.
Pro-growthers worry that the nation won’t be able to build energy infrastructure fast enough. The “digital sobriety” crowd worry that the nation will be able to build it.
The latter group fret especially about how conventional power plants will be used to meet most digital demands—and for good reason. Consider that last year, 30 GW of solar accounted for nearly two-thirds of the power capacity added to the nation’s utility grids. Sounds like a lot, but because of the inherent intermittency of solar, the energy-producing capability of that 30 GW is equal to less than 8 GW of conventional generation capacity. Building 30 GW of data centers creates a need for 30 GW of round-the-clock energy production, not 8 GW.
So far, we’re meeting the digital power challenge with the proverbial “all of the above.” A handful of projects (in the sunny Southwest) will use utility-scale solar, with huge battery arrays. At the other end of energy’s political spectrum, numerous planned retirements of coal plants have been reversed. There have also been highly publicized plans to restart a few retired nuclear plants, as well as a rush to invest in yet-to-be-proven small modular reactors, most of which can provide only about 0.1 GW.
But more than 50 GW of new data-center demand will be online long before the realization of any such plans. With the need to light up hundreds of megawatts of silicon in the year or two it takes to a build a mega-scale data center, we’re seeing the market overweight the pursuit of natural gas.
The three major vendors for utility-scale gas-fired turbines are sold out through 2030. Expanding their capacity to manufacture takes time, given the complexities of building massive combustion turbines. Thus, many data-center builders have turned to using huge numbers of the smaller, easier-to-build turbines, including ordering massive diesel engines (the kinds that power ships and mines around the world) capable of burning natural gas. Caterpillar, for example, announced on August 7 a partnership with a Utah developer to supply some 4 GW of diesel engine generation.
From a purely technical viewpoint, we know the engineering capabilities exist to supply the levels of power needed—and in the timeframes needed. For perspective, some 150 GW of power capacity is manufactured every year by the industry that supplies diesel truck engines. Each such engine is about 0.5 MW and similar to those used to generate electricity. The constraints to deployment are mainly regulatory and political.
When it comes to the policy implications for delivering the power needed, the “digital sobriety” crowd is eager to frame the challenge as partisan. A recent article in The Atlanticasserted that the administration “solicited input from AI firms, civil-society groups, and everyday citizens,” indicating that the “White House is clearly deferring to the private sector, which has close ties to the Trump administration.”
It is no surprise that the private sector is seeking to influence and inform the government, given the hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital involved, and the unavoidable role that policies play (often an impeding one) at these scales. But the nation will be better served if the capital does not come from the public purse.
The good news: Big Tech seems to be tilting hard toward market-based solutions for deploying its ample capital. Thus, it’s also no surprise that the debate around Big Tech and Big Energy is becoming embroiled in naked politicking. As a recent Wall Street Journalheadline put it: “Democrats Try to Halt Silicon Valley’s Swing to the Right.”
Remember the backdrop. New vectors for massive energy demands have always followed the invention of transformational technologies—steamship, lightbulb, automobile, airplane, air conditioner, fertilizer, and pharmaceuticals. Such innovations are what drove the great expansion of well-being in earlier times. The innovation-energy linkage is seen as a Faustian Bargain by the “digital sobriety” cohort, exposing its implicit (sometimes explicit) antipathy to growth and abundance.
Energy’s bottomless well has fueled and can continue to fuel prosperity—provided, to quote the late, great political analyst Charles Krauthammer, “we get the politics right.”
Mark P. Mills is a City Journal contributing editor, the executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, and author of The Cloud Revolution.
Some would call Norwegian tennis star Casper Ruud—currently competing at the US Open— rude with an e for bringing up something many of us have been thinking for years.
I don’t know about “worst,” but it’s certainly up there. Every time I go to New York I feel as if I’m getting a contact high just walking around midtown Manhattan, a contact high, to be clear, I don’t want.
(This goes for many other cities, notably Seattle, Denver, Portland and everywhere in CA. In the case of Seattle, you trip over smokers getting off the ferry. It’s like an opium den in 19th Century China.)
I have no right to be a prude about marijuana. I smoked it regularly in my thirties. As I detailed in “Turning Right at Hollywood & Vine,” I did a fair number of other drugs popular at the time as well (psychedelics, etc.). Most of them I only tried once (okay, twice) because I am fortunate not to have an addictive personality—except for the ribeye steaks my doctor tells me are lethal for my kidneys and I am currently trying to shake.
As is well known, marijuana has changed over the years, becoming many times more potent. Curious about that, roughly ten years ago when I was still living in Los Angeles, I picked up the new vintage (there were as many choices as at a luxury wine shop) at a couple of the upscale marijuana emporiums then blossoming along Ventura Blvd. One of them had valet parking yet.
I told the seemingly knowledgeable sales folk I was not interested so much in getting high as in getting a good night’s sleep. They both claimed to have just the thing for me.
Sorry, no. In both cases what I paid (or overpaid) for kept me up past three a.m. in an anguished paranoid mood I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
Was this due to my aging body? Maybe partly. I don’t know. But so much for reefer. I haven’t touched the stuff since.
Nevertheless, as we also all know, smoking it has been become ubiquitous. We don’t need Casper Ruud to tell us that. It’s everywhere.
Technically speaking, you’re not allowed to smoke anything at the Open, but the fans don’t seem to care. As another tennis player, Maria Sakkari put it about the alternative, “There’s a park behind, people can do whatever they want.”
Only they don’t. They prefer to smoke inside Arthur Ashe Stadium where ticket prices reach quadruple digits for the final rounds. I guess if you pay that much to watch tennis you should be able to do whatever you please while there. The athletes who have trained so hard to entertain you be damned.
Or maybe not.
Of course, this extends well beyond tennis and into the larger question of the legality of Mary Jane that evidently President Trump is considering making national (for the most part it’s almost already there anyway).
I don’t want to see anybody arrested for what I used to do regularly. I’m not that much of an old fogey hypocrite. Part of a free society is giving people their choice of self-destruction.
No, I don’t want to get into an argument about what’s worse, bourbon or pot? But, just as I don’t like to see alcoholics puking in the street, I’m not happy with people polluting our public spaces with pot smoke. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
One suggestion is simply to have smoking areas, designated areas in the park, as Maria Sakkari suggested. Music venues could be another designated area.
Unfortunately, I doubt many people will adhere to this. Those of us who are tired of having pot smoke blown in our faces either may have to suck it up for the rest of our lives or go somewhere far away where it is forbidden like Antarctica…. Oh, wait.
With Minnesota Democrats in control of the political branches of state government, they lost no time advancing the agenda of their base. In the first months of the 2023-2024 “let’s go crazy” legislative session, they made the national news with a bizarre “trans refuge” bill. The bill was preceded by Governor Tim Walz’s executive order making Minnesota a “sanctuary” where minors could suffer permanent genital mutilation in a manner that would be illegal where they live.
In the same “let’s go crazy” legislative session Democrats also banned therapy “that seeks to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions…” If you don’t doubt the wisdom of the law, you’re out of your mind.
The “let’s go crazy” session helped bring Tim Walz to the attention of national Democrats. President Obama thought that Walz had a good thing going. Following his selection as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Obama was ecstatic. “He knows who he is and what’s important,” Obama said. “You can tell those flannel shirts he wears don’t come from some political consultant, they come from his closet…” And he wasn’t talking about Walz’s effeminate theatrics on the campaign trail. They were yet to come.
If Minnesota is a state trans refuge, Minneapolis must be the capital. In the wake of the mass shooting yesterday at Annunciation Church by trans madperson Robin Westman, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey instructed us: “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity.” He means to shut down those of us who have do not concur in the wisdom of the party’s program.
Frey also disparaged “thoughts and prayers” for the two children and others injured in Westman’s murder spree. He apparently wants to tout gun control. “Gun violence” is the question and “gun control” is the answer. Amen.
Westman’s reported video/manifestos include anti-Semitic and anti-Christian phrases and symbols as well as calls to kill President Donald Trump and destroy the state of Israel. He wrote of murdering “filthy Zionist Jews,” that “six million wasn’t enough,” and “free Palestine,” the New York Post reported yesterday. “If I will carry out a racially motivated attack, it would be most likely against filthy Zionist jews,” Westman reportedly wrote in a journal that the paper said was “full of antisemitic slurs.”
The lineup of public officials at the press briefing after the shooting yesterday is a joke: Walz, Frey, O’Hara, Minneapolis public safety commissioner Toddrick Barnette, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. They make for an unintentionally satirical portrait of political clowns. It is the visual counterpart to Devine’s column.
We have followed the exodus of sworn officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, the demoralization of the department under Chief Brian O’Hara, the lawlessly lax law enforcement of Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, the promotion of Minneapolis and Minnesota as “sanctuary” jurisdictions for illegal immigration, and so on. Minneapolis is down some 350 officers of the more than 900 that populated the ranks at the time of the death of Saint George Floyd. Five years later, Minneapolis’s police department more than 150 officers short of the legal minimum.
It should be noted that Walz has manifested his hostility to religious schools such as the Annunciation Catholic School affiliate of the church. The two students killed and others injured in the shooting attended the school. The National Catholic Register reports “Minnesota Catholic School Shooting Came After Bishops’ Pleas for Security Funds Went Unanswered.” Subhead: “Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and the state Legislature both declined to act on repeated appeals from Catholic leaders seeking the same level of protection public schools receive.” It is a timely, detailed, and devastating story by senior editor Jonathan Liedl.
The bishops speak for everyone I know involved with our local religious schools. That’s an angle that the Star Tribune has not yet covered in connection with the Annunciation shooting. That much I can tell you.
