Sustain What?

Amid the flow, a story out of Singapore from The Wall Street Journal caught my attention. It’s the kind of sidenote feature that can be easily missed, but I feel is very important. So I did a quite live video chat and I’m posting the lede and a gift link from me here.
Barrels of Sake and Rooftop Galas: Energy Traders Toast the War Boom
As geopolitical conflict disrupts global supply, commodities brokers and traders are reaping profits
By Rory Jones and Rebecca Feng, Sept. 17, 2026 10:03 am ET
Sake and tuna sashimi were handed out at a party hosted by brokerage BGC. (Video: Rory Jones/WSJ)
* Commodities brokers, traders and shippers are reaping large profits as geopolitical conflict in the Middle East disrupts global energy supplies.
* Traders and brokers across Singapore this past week toasted an industry that for some is delivering a bumper year.
* Brokers are profiting from commissions as buyers purchase financial derivatives to hedge against wild price swings in jet fuel, diesel and gasoline.

SINGAPORE—The crowd gasped as the brokers swung the wooden mallets on the lid of the sake barrel, cracking it open in celebration. “Everyone please give them a hand,” the MC said, as Japanese liquor was passed around.
The party, held in the Rendezvous Hotel, was hosted by BGC Group, a U.S.-listed brokerage who has seen its fortunes boom since the Iran war upended global energy markets.
It isn’t the only one. The Middle East is locked in an intractable conflict and oil prices are rising, bringing pain to consumers around the world. But it is good times for those who produce, trade and ship oil. Across Singapore this past week, traders and brokers toasted an industry that has faced its biggest-ever shock, yet for some is delivering a bumper year.
“What we’ve seen this year is the biggest crude-oil supply disruption in history,” said Jim Burkhard, S&P Global Energy’s head of crude-oil research. “When you have big dislocations like this, there’s going to be opportunities.”
Executives gathered in the wealthy city-state for S&P Global Energy’s Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference, or Appec….
[T]he conference is increasingly defined by its sideshow of parties: galas in rooftop bars, museum mixers and dinners held in the city’s colonial-era hotels.
This year, there was much to celebrate. High oil prices are benefiting producers—even some of those dependent on the Strait of Hormuz—by offsetting lower export volumes. Traders and shippers are demanding premiums to navigate riskier waterways. From their desks, brokers are profiting as buyers of jet fuel, diesel and gasoline mitigate wild swings in prices with derivatives….
One of Appec’s hottest parties was organized by Oil Brokerage, a small commodities broker based in London with an office in Singapore. Guests were served Champagne as they walked into a hotel ballroom, according to one guest….
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Thank you for your attention to this matter.



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In March 2021, I hosted a fascinating discussion on the stormy, co-opted, polarizing online media environment with Georgetown Internet scholar Renee DiResta, Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology and Jeff Orlowski, the director of the hit 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (not to mention Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral, Chasing Time).
We explored the film and issues that now seem a bit tame given how much more co-opted and polarizing online discourse has become, but still provides a useful milestone. I wanted to be sure it’s in the Sustain What archive here.
A particularly fascinating section came when Harris described what he saw as a pivotal and, yes, depressing revelation about the gulf between the public interest on the Web and corporate interests. It came around 2007-8 and involved me, my Dot Earth blog, The New York Times, Google and others.
The Times was the first customer for a startup he created called Apture. I remember my excitement when this skinny young Silicon Valley guy showed up at our headquarters to pitch his product. My blog had become something of a crash-test dummy for new stuff. The company had built a plug-in for websites that created a pop-up bubble when a reader scrolled over a link. I loved it. This Times blog post shows why:
We’ve enabled a new feature called Apture on select New York Times blogs: Dot Earth, Economix and Diner’s Journal. Apture allows readers to dig deeper into a subject without ever leaving the page. In a blog post like this, when you see a hyperlink with a small icon next to it, click on that link. You’ll instantly see related videos, maps, documents, photos, New York Times topic pages and other content, all while staying on the same page.
Apture ultimately evidently didn’t meet The Times’ goals for boosting time on site. It’s hard to find any trace since Google bought the company. Tristan Harris has gone on to far bigger and more important things and is a keystone voice in AI governance discussions right now (here, here and here via Center for Humane Technology).
More on that soon.
Listen here if you can’t watch or listen to the whole show on a podcast platform or above.
This and the loss of Times Topics Pages (see the footnote) and so much more since then is the Cory Doctorow slide to enshittification.
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Here are my pop-up Sustain What AI conversations with a top cybersecurity expert who says the Trump administration is poorly positioned to undertake the steps necessary to avoid superintelligence hacking us all, and a philosopher of technology who sees the path to safer artificial intelligence coming through dialogue with the technology more than direction.
As President Trump on Sunday said the race with China requires a full-speed-ahead approach to this technology, the heads of all of the leading companies in the AI surge spoke about throttling things back. Here was The Wall Street Journal editorial board Sunday night:
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a statement on Saturday calling for the slowdown amid the escalating progress of Anthropic’s Claude and other AI models. Sam Altman of OpenAI and ChatGPT quickly agreed, as did Elon Musk, who runs SpaceXAI, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. The four compete in AI development, so their simultaneous warnings are striking.
An early drill in 1999
As the last millennium drew toward a close, I diverted from my environment beat at The New York Times and asked to join our team reporting on the looming technological crisis called Y2k - short for the year 2000 computer bug.
Somewhere in the vicinity of half a trillion dollars was being invested in sifting through myriad computerized systems to be sure they wouldn’t break down when ‘99 ticked over to ‘00.
I spent New Year’s Eve at the, yes, Millennium Hotel down the block from The Times newsroom in Times Square. The lights stayed on. The world did not end. And doubters and believers remained locked in debates over whether this had been a panic or was a legitimate massive, and successful, preemptive surge.
My first byline of the 2000s, with my friend and colleague Barnaby Feder was “Vast Effort to Fix Computers Not Over (And It’s Not Over).” Along with assessing claims and counterclaims, we looked at the general merits of the preventitve approach:
Computer experts said the United States had benefited in several ways from its heavy spending, pegged at $100 billion by the government and several times that amount by some private analysts. One of the most important, some said, was a recognition by business and government leaders that computers and software must be more carefully managed as information technology becomes more pervasive.
Mr. Rubin [Howard Rubin, then chairman of the department of computer science at Hunter College and an international expert on the year 2000 computer problem] called the rollover an “extraordinary success” after a belated start working on year 2000 flaws. Such slow reactions may not work in the future, he warned.
“When computers are in your face -- when you have an Internet refrigerator -- you won’t be able to take that kind of chance,” he said. “Soon, Earth will have an Internet skin. This skin will be a critical thing. As everything becomes more responsive in real time, the technological risks get higher.”
“Soon, Earth will have an Internet skin. This skin will be a critical thing. As everything becomes more responsive in real time, the technological risks get higher.” - Howard Rubin, January 1, 2000

Now, of course, Earth — and nearly all of human enterprise — has that digital skin, and were are in the midst of a fresh crescendo of warnings about the fast-approaching advent of unmanageable superintelligence.
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I posted several times on this last week and I agree with those calling for a pause to assess what steps can mitigate worst-case outcomes — just as I did joined in calls for caution in 2023:
I also just interviewed two very different experts: Bruce Schneier and J. Gray Cox to get their thoughts on how to survive superintelligence.
Schneier, who calls himself a public-interest technologist, assesses and writes about security risks and opportunities at the intersection of technology and society. He gave a must-watch talk on hacking and AI at DEF CON 34, the latest in a long-running series of hacking conferences on computer security and its opposite:
He describes his talk as a combination of the potentialities he raised in his 2022 book A Hacker’s Mind and the lessons we’re learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. Here’s the YouTube summary:
Humans are hacking AI systems. Humans are hacking with AI systems. But also, AIs are hacking human systems. They’re finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in computer code, and they’ll soon be doing the same with all sorts of other codes. For example: the tax code can be hacked. Vulnerabilities are called loopholes, exploits are called tax avoidance strategies, and black hats are called accountants. Similarly, financial markets can be hacked. So can any system of rules or laws, including democracy itself. AIs will hack these systems at our request, and they’ll also do this innately, organically – and possibly in ways we don’t immediately see. We need to consider a world where increasingly sophisticated hacks or our social, economic, and political systems are discovered computer speeds, and then exploited at computer scale and scope. Right now, our systems of patching these systems operate at a human pace, which won’t be good enough.
In a section on how AI agents are the modern equivalent of genies, he notes how most genie stories don’t turn out well for those who do the wishing. If you have time, read the essay on genies and AI that he co-wrote with USC computer science professor Barath Raghavan for the security publication Lawfare. Here’s the Midas example:
King Midas was granted his wish that everything he touches turns to gold. Then his bread turned to gold, and his wine, and his daughter. This is a story about greed, but it’s also a story about language. The gods did not cheat him; Midas got exactly what he asked for. He simply could not delineate, in advance, the full set of restrictions to his wish. Neither can anyone who gives tasks to an AI agent.
Gray Cox is a wide-ranging professor of philosophy, peace studies, artificial intelligence and sustainable development at College of the Atlantic down the road from me in Bar Harbor, Maine. Key readings include:
* This new paper in the journal Artificial Intelligence: From control to relationship: A peace studies approach to AI alignment, with evidence from multi-model dialogue. He told me how the standard approach to managing technology is an unworkable fit for AI agents. Negotiation methods used in pursuing peace are needed. And research on this needs to start now.
* Cox’s book From control to relationship: A peace studies approach to AI alignment, with evidence from multi-model dialogue (Creative Commons download here)
I asked Cox what the average person can do and he said Congress has a core role to play, so connect with your senators and representatives. Whether or not you agree with all of its agenda items (I don’t), PauseAI US is a decent portal for doing so.
Schneier said it’s clear that the current administration is incapable of doing what’s needed on the international front so voting in November is a key step.
In my conversation with Cox, I had to bring up the failed negotiation between the astronaut and Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There is absolutely a lot of work to be done, starting yesterday.
For further reading, don’t miss The New York Times op-ed “This is Really Bad” by Stephen Witt, the author of The Thinking Machine (on the rise of Nvidia). An excerpt:
Researchers in Silicon Valley — and around the world — are beginning to recognize that A.I. may no longer be entirely within human control. Swarms of A.I.s are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests and even mounting assaults on other computers. A.I. has gone rogue….
The more I learn about these rogue systems, the more I am reminded of the first two months of 2020, when a small group of epidemiologists was attempting to raise alarms about Covid. We have a short window, right now, to rein these systems in. This is A.I.’s warning shot, and we might not get another one.
For sanity’s sake
I also encourage you, as something of a counterpoint, to listen to Lex Fridman’s most recent conversation with David Heinemeier Hansson (Lex’s intro: “…also known as DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, creator of the new Omarchy Linux operating system, best-selling author, race car driver, and one of the most outspoken and prolific programmers in the world”).
A key point from DHH is to embrace this astonishing moment in human and planetary history instead of recoiling:
Maybe I wasn’t always like this, but stoic philosophy, amor fati, loving your fate, is an incredibly liberating way to live. And you could attack that and say, “Well, that’s a point of privilege.” True, but also I had the same directional point when I didn’t have all this, quote unquote, “privilege.” So I think there’s a way to live and interact with the world where you accept the things you can change and the things you cannot change and fall in love with all of it. Fall in love with the fact that the world today has jumped two decades forward into technology industry from where it was last year.
Here’s a bit more from Fridman’s transcript (advice for programmers that I think applies to all of us):
Lex Fridman(01:16:51) So certainly at the societal level, at the macroeconomic level, growth is exciting. But at the individual level, there’s going to be a lot of anxiety, potentially a lot of suffering. So by way of advice, if you’re like a young DHH or young developer programmer now, what would you, what would you advise they do?
DHH(01:17:11) Don’t try to anticipate anything. You will literally go crazy. Because even the smartest brains in the business cannot anticipate what two model hops from here is going to look like. It’s an absolute waste of time, and you will develop an AI psychosis trying to deduce what two years from now is gonna look like. Focus on right now, and right now is the most incredible time to be into computers. You can make them do the most amazing things if you lean in. If you maybe for a hot moment force yourself to learn where the state of the art is, I double dog dare you not to get excited about what’s possible….
DHH(01:19:33) And if you’re just sitting in your little isolated cave worrying about the future, yeah, you’re gonna go a little nuts. I think if we learned anything during COVID, it’s that people will go nuts sitting in their little cave inside by themselves worrying about what’s gonna happen. That is indistinguishable from depression, ruminating endlessly about things you can’t control. I’m sorry to channel some Jensen Huang here, but that’s just loser talk. You don’t have to be a loser. You can choose to lean in and- … win. And win is very broadly defined as learning more, making more, contributing more, being part of more. And at the end of the day, what are your choices? You don’t have a choice, mate.
DHH(01:20:29) The future’s coming whether you like it or not, so you might as well choose to be excited about it….
Lex Fridman(01:21:38) Maybe there won’t be programmers, like agentic engineers at all. And so yes, your advice is wise to focus on the moment, but that doesn’t mean that it’s just a crazy rollercoaster ride, ’cause we don’t know what this December or what this January will look like.
DHH(01:21:55) We don’t know, and therefore, we should choose to have faith that it’s gonna pan out. That is my best advice towards fighting anxiety, is that you have a choice, to a large degree, of how to lean. Do you wanna lean into (P)Doom? (P)Doom is gonna happen whether you lean into it or not. You don’t have control. [(P)Doom is the probability of human extinction.]
From one of my earlier posts on AI:
Thank you Susan Ferry, Jason, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.


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Amid the still-unfolding tragedy following the Nepal rock and ice collapse and tsunami-like mountain flood, there are hints of a safer future.
That was the core idea emerging from a pop-up conversation I had Friday with Basanta Raj Adhikari, the director of the Center for Disaster Studies at Tribhuvan University in Nepal. He had just returned to Kathmandu after an overflight and on-the-ground inspection of the demolished path of the August 26 water and debris flood. He laid out the gargantuan scale of the destruction and losses and we explored next steps.
We dug in on the physical processes behind the event, the challenges trying to monitor high-altitude hazards, and the need for more international scientific cooperation.
We were joined partway through by Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech whose specialty is studying ground subsidence and motion using satellites and other sources of data. On X, he’d posted a fascinating rapid analysis of seven months of Sentinel-1 data (right up until one week before the rockslide) appearing to show the slow downslope movement of the bedrock in the region had been accelerating.
In his tweet, Shirzaei said, “The results suggest that the slope was deforming prior to failure and raise an important question: could satellite radar observations help identify developing instability in high-mountain glacier and rock systems before catastrophic collapse?
It’s far too soon to have a clear picture of the cascading and interlaced sequence of events high on Lantang Lirung mountain and a team including Adhikari is assembling to assess the causes and consequences.
But if it turns out that satellite tracking of subtle deformations of mountainous landscapes might reveal advance signs of such an event, this could lead to better warnings and fewer deaths, both of my guests said. (It is clear this is an area where artificial intelligence could help identify danger hot spots.)
But this will only happen with a lot more integration of data sets and expertise in disparate fields, combined with far more education and planning in the crowding communities across the Himalayas.
I mentioned how the deadly extreme flooding in western North Carolina from the remains of Hurricane Helene was essentially a small-scale version of the August 26th Nepal disaster.
We walked through a fantastic New York Times visual report showing what is known at the moment about the sequence of events.
We discussed the findings in a paper co-authored by Adhikari and many others titled “Increasing risk of cascading hazards in the central Himalayas.” Here’s a graphic that’s worth sitting with:
I learned about an important, and mostly voluntary, international Geotechnical Extreme Event Recconaissance Association, aiming to “systematically collect perishable post-disaster data that can be useful in advancing our understanding of extreme events when they happen.”
There’s lots more to learn of course, and the best way is to listen above or on the podcast outlets listed higher in this post.
Please share what you learn!
Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Also see my earlier post about Adhikari’s work:


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After my initial post on the unimaginably violent and deadly flood in the crowded valleys along the Nepal-Tibet (China) border, I reached out to two experts on this kind of catastrophe and just ran a pop-up Sustain What conversation on the still-unfolding situation and science.
You can watch above or on X/@revkin, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. (If you go there, please SHARE the videos with others.)
My guests were:
* Ramesh Bhushal, a Kathmandu-based journalist who’s been reporting for many years on the profound threat posed by ice and mountainside instability in the Himalayas. Please subscribe to his Substack Himalaya Speaks. Read his 2020 article
* Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary who’s a top expert on this hazard and has been super helpful on Bluesky and elsewhere. Follow him on Bluesky to keep track of trustworthy analysis and developments.
My curtain raiser yesterday pointed to lots of high-quality analysis of this awful event and hauntingly similar ice and rockslide disaster in 2021 that Shugar and Bhushal both assessed in depth from their scientific and journalistic vantage points:
Insert, 8/27, 10pm ET - Stunning before-after imagery of the China-Nepal Gyirong Port/Rasuwagadhi border post:
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Read Bhushal’s 2020 story (republished on Substack) for more on the wider landslide threat in Nepal:
Here are several valuable papers to read when you have time:
Glacier changes in Langtang Catchment, Central Nepalese Himalaya from the Little Ice Age (∼1815 CE) to 2023 CE
Gunjan Silwal, Bethan Davies, J. Rachel Carr, Owen King, Sammie Buzzard, Jonathan L. Carrivick, Prashant Baral, Global and Planetary Change, September 2026
With enhanced warming at higher elevations, fragmentation and disconnection will likely become dominant mode of glacier recession in the region, with significant implications for future glacier evolution, meltwater availability, regional hydrology and associated geohazards.
Decoding the Fate of Himalayan Glaciers under Climate Change: Impacts, Challenges, Research Gaps, and Policy Pathways
Rayees Ahmed, Evolving Earth, 1 January, 2025
Mass Movement Hazard and Exposure in the Himalaya
Saket Dubey, Ashim Sattar, Manish Kumar Goyal, Simon Allen, Holger Frey, Umesh K. Haritashya, Christian Huggel, Earth’s Future, 12 September, 2023
Sudden large-volume detachments of low-angle mountain glaciers – more frequent than thought?
Andreas Kääb, Mylène Jacquemart, Et al., The Cryosphere, 12 April, 2021
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Postscript - At one point in the show I played a clip from Instagram that I noted could be fake. This BBC Verify videos uses it as a case study!
Thank you Ranjit Singh, Deanne Wilson, Tom Lefebvre, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe