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China’s Green Energy Surge Has Caused CO2 Emissions to Fall for the First Time

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China just surpassed a new green energy milestone, crushing the west in the process.

As countries like the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom appear to be backpedaling on climate pledges, China is showing some massive results on its quest to reverse carbon emissions.

The latest analysis of China's annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions found that they slid by 1.6 percent nationwide compared to the same quarter last year. Year-to-date emissions were down one percent compared to the same date in 2024.

Analysis by Carbon Brief, a UK-based climate publication, attributed the decline in CO2 output to green energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear infrastructure, cutting the need for coal-powered energy. It notes that the drop in CO2 output came despite a nationwide surge in energy demand.

While previous drops in China's noxious exhaust coincided with lower energy use overall, this is the first time the country could directly credit its green energy strategy for a fall in CO2 output — a huge win.

The report further found that China's clean power generation has grown faster than the current and long-term growth in electricity demand, as power-sector emissions — separate from the rest of the nation — fell two percent from March 2024 to 2025. While that's a positive sign in the short term, it could be the start of the massive structural change in China's emission trends that Carbon Brief predicted back in 2023.

That said, the publication noted the current CO2 emissions were only one percent lower than China's latest peak, which may imply that a short-term increase in energy use could offset the decline. Even if that happens, it won't erase the fact that green energy is starting to have a noticeable impact on the fast-growing nation.

China has invested gobs of cash into green energy in recent years, as part of its 14th five-year national plan, which kicked off in 2021. By 2024, green energy infrastructure made up over 10 percent of China's total GDP, surpassing even the country's real estate market.

Now nearing the end of the five-year plan, sustainability forecasting indicates that China could command more than half of all renewable energy in the world by 2030.

Though The People's Republic of China as we know it today still has a ways to go on breaking its massive dependence on coal, it's come remarkably far on energy since its inception in 1949 — growing from a semi-feudal collection of fiefdoms to a world-leader in a fraction of the time it's taken countries like the United States.

China is already the global frontrunner in electric cars, solar infrastructure, and robotics production. They're working on a world-first Thorium-powered nuclear reactor, which, when up and running, would all but eliminate the threat of a nuclear meltdown.

All this while Chinese citizens are set to become the largest consumer base on the planet — throwing a bit of a wrench into the Western stereotype of sweatshops and poverty.

More on China: All AI-Generated Material Must Be Labeled Online, China Announces

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ChatGPT Is Absolutely Butchering Reporting From Its “News Partners”

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A review found that OpenAI's

A review by Columbia's Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that OpenAI's ChatGPT search — a newer version of OpenAI's flagship chatbot designed to paraphrase web queries and provide links to proper sources — is routinely mangling reporting from news outlets, including OpenAI "news partners" that have signed content licensing deals with the AI industry leader.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the Tow Center's findings analyzed "two hundred quotes from twenty publications and asked ChatGPT to identify the sources of each quote." The chatbot's accuracy was mixed, with some responses providing entirely accurate attributions, others providing entirely incorrect attribution details, and others offering a blend of fact and fiction.

ChatGPT's search function operates via web crawlers, which return information from around the web as bottled into AI-paraphrased outputs. Some publications, for example The New York Times — which last year sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright violations — have blocked OpenAI's web crawlers from rooting around their websites entirely by way of their robots.txt pages. Others, including OpenAI news partners that have signed licensing deals to give the AI company access to their valuable troves of journalistic material in exchange for cash, allow OpenAI's web crawlers to dig through their sites.

Per the CJR, the Tow Center found that in cases where ChatGPT couldn't locate the correct source for a quote due to robots.txt restrictions, it would frequently resort to fabricating source material — as opposed to informing the chatbot user that it couldn't find the quote or that it was blocked from retrieving it. More than a third of all ChatGPT replies returned during the review reportedly contained this type of error.

But no one was spared — not even publications that allow ChatGPT's web crawlers to sift through their sites. According to the review, ChatGPT frequently returned either fully incorrect or partially incorrect attributions for stories penned by journalists at OpenAI-partnered institutions. The same was true for publications not subject to OpenAI licensing deals, but that don't block the AI's crawlers.

It's a terrible look for the AI-powered search feature, which OpenAI billed in a blog post last month as a tool that provides "fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources," and has received praise from prominent media leaders for its purported potential to benefit journalists and news consumers.

"As AI reshapes the media landscape, Axel Springer's partnership with OpenAI opens up tremendous opportunities for innovative advancements," Mathias Sanchez, an executive at the OpenAI-partnered publisher Axel Springer, said in an October statement. "Together, we're driving new business models that ensure journalism remains both trustworthy and profitable." (According to the Tow Center's review, ChatGPT search frequently returned entirely inaccurate answers when asked to find direct quotes from the Axel Springer-owned publication Politico.)

According to the CJR, the investigators also found that ChatGPT sometimes returned plagiarized news content in cases where the bot's crawlers were blocked by a publisher. We reported on the same phenomenon back in August, when we found that ChatGPT was frequently citing plagiarized versions of original NYT reporting published by DNyuz, a notorious Armenian content mill.

The review further showed that ChatGPT search's ability to provide correct attributions for the same query is wildly unpredictable, with the bot often returning alternately inaccurate and accurate sourcing when given the same prompt multiple times.

A spokesperson for OpenAI admonished the Tow Center's "atypical" testing method, adding that "we support publishers and creators by helping 250M weekly ChatGPT users discover quality content through summaries, quotes, clear links, and attribution."

"We've collaborated with partners to improve in-line citation accuracy and respect publisher preferences, including enabling how they appear in search by managing OAI-SearchBot in their robots.txt," the spokesperson added. "We'll keep enhancing search results."

The media industry is still largely powered by click-based ad revenue, meaning that the Tow Center's findings could be concerning on a business level. If ChatGPT continues to get things wrong, are licensing deals and subscriptions lucrative enough to make up for the loss in traffic? And zooming out, there's the issue of what machine-mangled inaccuracy does to the complicated, much-untrusted news and information landscape: should generative AI become internet users' primary method of finding and metabolizing news, can the public rely on web-surfing tools like ChatGPT search not to muddy the information landscape at large?

That remains to be seen. But in the meantime, a word to the wise: if you're using ChatGPT search, you might want to triple-check that you know where its information is coming from.

More on ChatGPT attributions: Amid New York Times Lawsuit, ChatGPT Is Citing Plagiarized Versions of NYT Articles on an Armenian Content Mill

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ChatGPT Is Absolutely Butchering Reporting From Its “News Partners”

When They Took Fluoride Out of the Water Like RFK Jr. Wants to Do Everywhere, People’s Teeth Started Rotting Out of Their Heads

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An Alaskan city removed fluoride from its drinking water like RFK wants to do for the whole country — and tooth decay surged.

Our next potential leader of US health policy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, wants to ban adding fluoride to public drinking water — a practice that experts agree has remarkably elevated teeth health for millions of Americans at little cost.

In a country where many people don't have access to dental care, a widespread crackdown on this naturally occurring mineral could be a disaster. To see how, we turn to the sobering case of Juneau, a city in Alaska that voted to stop fluoridating its water in 2007, citing many of the same fears that RFK touts today.

In a 2018 study published in the journal BMC Oral Health, researchers examined the dental records of adolescents in the Alaska community who sought Medicaid dental care in the years surrounding either side of the ban.

They divided them into two treatment groups: a 2003 group, when public drinking water had optimal levels of fluoride, and a 2012 group, well after the fluoride ban.

The results were damning. On average, the 2012 group had a significantly higher number of cavity-related procedures for adolescents than the 2003 group. Similarly, the odds of someone 18 years-old or younger undergoing the same type of procedure was 25 percent higher in 2012.

Children born after the fluoride ban were the hardest hit age group, receiving not only the most tooth decay treatments, but also having the most expensive treatments on average.

Additionally on the economic side of things, the researchers found that dental care costs for adolescents soared by 73 percent as a result of the fluoride policy, even after adjusting for inflation. In sum, it seems clear cut that removing fluoride caused tooth rot to surge — and with it, medical costs.

Today, nearly three-quarters of the US population has access to fluoridated water, reducing tooth decay in children and adults by an estimated 25 percent. The US Centers for Disease Control has hailed fluoridation as one of the top ten greatest public health interventions in history.

So why does RFK, who was nominated by president-elect Donald Trump to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, want to ban it? Well, according to him and other critics, fluoride is dangerous "industrial waste" that's associated with everything from IQ loss to cancer.

While fluoride does have its complications, RFK's criticisms haven't been proven or are overblown — and most of fluoridation's drawbacks come from doses that are extremely high compared to the amount added to public water.

According to Scientific American, at three times the recommended level in water, fluoride can cause a condition called dental fluorosis, which damages — typically cosmetically — the developing teeth of young children. It can also cause more serious and painful skeletal fluorosis, but that's exceedingly rare.

As far as the effects on a child's mental acuity goes, the evidence is highly disputed. A 2024 review conducted by the US National Toxicology Program linked high levels of fluoride to lower IQs in children — but the study only focused on the effects of fluoride at twice the recommended level in the US, and couldn't draw as strong a link at reasonable fluoride concentrations. It also failed to pass scientific review twice, and bypassed independent review on its most recent version, per SciAm.

In short, there's not nearly enough evidence yet to justify a nationwide ban on fluoridation — and plenty of evidence to show it'd be a bad idea.

More on RFK: If You Take Adderall, RFK Jr. Should Probably Make You Quite Nervous

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Woman Annoyed When She Gets on Wegovy and It Does Nothing

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For some, the issue with GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy isn't getting access to these game-changing medications, but having them not work.

The fever-pitch hype around GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro makes them sound like game-changing medications, and for many they are — but for other patients, the experience is totally underwhelming.

In an interview with the Associated Press, 38-year-old Danielle Griffin said that although she was able to get a prescription for Novo Nordisk's weight loss shot Wegovy — and even got it covered by her insurance, which is still often a struggle — the medication just didn't work for her.

"I have been on Wegovy for a year and a half," Griffin said, "and have only lost 13 pounds."

Despite doing "everything right," including dieting, exercising, and drinking lots of water, she's had "no success" with the popular weight loss injectable.

"It’s discouraging," Giffin said.

While there's been scrutiny on a laundry list of side effects that can come with glucagon-like peptide-1 drugs, which seem to work by mimicking the body's feeling of fullness, non-responsiveness of this sort hasn't captured much attention.

Obesity experts told the AP, however, that up to 20 percent — or one in every five patients — may not lose weight on the drugs at all.

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the news wire that because "different people have different responses," these drugs won't work the same for everyone who takes them.

From medications that stymie weight loss to differences in brain and gut chemistry, lots of factors influence how people metabolize GLP-1s, the Mass General doctor said.

"[Obesity] is a disease that stems from the brain," Stanford said. "The dysfunction may not be the same."

Endocrine specialist Jody Dushay of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center said that she's also seen people have issues losing weight with GLP-1s — though generally, she and her patients are able to tell whether they're going to work within a few weeks.

Between non-responsiveness and undesirable gastrointestinal side effects like vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea, those who run into issues with drugs like Wegovy often feel at wit's end, Dushay said. There are plenty of other options, however, including switching to a different GLP-1.

"I tell them: it's not game over," the endocrinologist said.

Indeed, Griffin told the AP that she eventually switched over to Zepbound, a similar drug made by Eli Lilly — and that within just three months, she'd lost seven pounds.

"I’m hoping it’s slow and steady," the woman said.

More on GLP-1s: The Diet Industry Is Reportedly in Total Meltdown Over GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs

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