Committee

A sweeping bit of legislation designed to cut red tape could speed up the buildout of energy infrastructure in the US. With the dust barely settled on this week’s momentous midterms, the Senate is set to vote on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) on November 9. It’s a plan that could finally start an overhaul of the slow, complicated process for getting energy projects approved, as part of something called permitting reform. People on both sides of the political aisle have been pushing for this type of change for some years.  The key question is whether this will cut greenhouse-gas emissions from the US energy sector or push them higher still.   The federal permitting system is designed to protect the environment against industrial pollution from large projects like power plants, transmission lines, and natural-gas pipelines. Today, permitting is governed by a range of laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. And if there’s one thing you might know about the current state of permitting in the US it’s that it’s slow and incredibly complicated. So in its 417 pages, BAAJA attempts to tighten things up. The bill has provisions that narrow the sorts of projects that need to apply for federal permits and others that enact deadlines in hopes of speeding up a process that today can take years. (There are also specific provisions about transmission planning, mining, and the rest of the kitchen sink; this thing is dense.) One thing to know about this bill is that it’s largely technology neutral: It opens the doors for the buildout of projects involving both fossil fuels and renewables. So there’s a weird mishmash of legislators and outside groups supporting it. The bill’s four sponsors in the Senate are two Republicans and two Democrats. The White House has backed this permitting reform bill, with its Council of Economic Advisors finding that it would reduce review times and have economic benefits like boosting GDP. Clean energy groups like the American Clean Power Association have largely come out in favor of the bill too, with the group’s analysis finding that it could unlock 350 gigawatts of new clean energy for the grid. Some environmental groups, however, oppose the bill, or parts of it. An assessment from the Natural Resources Defense Council says the parts about transmission could have substantial benefits for the grid, but the narrowing of environmental reviews could be damaging for public and private lands. Many in the climate world have long been calling for permitting reform, arguing that renewables stand to benefit more than fossil fuels. The thinking is that solar and wind power are some of the cheapest sources available today, so if we unlock the ability to build more energy, they are likely to win out economically. A few early analyses have tried to quantify just what BAAJA would mean for emissions in the US. One, from the think tank Rhodium Group, found that in the best-case scenario, the bill would cut economy-wide emissions by 4%, reduce annual energy bills by $78 per household, and add 200 gigawatts of new clean energy by 2040. In the worst case, emissions would stay about the same. Another report, from the nonprofit research group Resources for the Future, found that the bill could cut power-sector emissions 6% by 2041 and save more than $350 billion on system costs by midcentury. But there are some concerns that this permitting bill’s real effect would be to open the floodgates for new natural-gas plants. As data centers have put more pressure on the grid, a wave of such plants have been announced. “You get down to a trade-off between essentially growing the clean electricity industry on the one hand and then, as a compromise, growing the fossil-fuel industry on the other,” says Kevin Kircher, an energy modeler and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue. To quantify that trade-off, Kircher also modeled the potential emissions effects of the bill and found that if BAAJA had been in place in 2025, energy sector emissions would have been higher than the actual baseline. Health and mortality risks associated with air pollution would also have increased. This bill is scheduled for a Senate vote on November 9, well before the next Congress takes control. It’s not clear what the dramatic victories for Democrats might mean for the legislation, which was expected to pass the Senate with largely Republican support if a few Democrats got on board. Democrats could decide to wait for next year, when they’ll have control of both chambers. But any deal would ultimately need to win Trump’s signature, limiting what a future bill might be able to change.  In a world where permitting new projects is easier, we’ll see more clean energy, but we’ll see more natural gas, too. And while prices could get lower, that could push demand for electricity higher, leading to more emissions overall. Simplifying the permitting system and cutting red tape is a worthy goal. But when it comes to emissions, it still really matters what, exactly, you want to build.

arXiv:2608.10459v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As LLM-generated content becomes more sophisticated, detection systems for distinguishing those texts from human-written text must operate at scale while handling diverse writing styles, domains, languages, and generator models. Input-only encoder detectors are suitable for practical deployment setting, but standard binary classification supplies only the class label and does not explicitly organize the substantial variation within either class. We propose MD-ProTector, which represents each class with multiple trainable reference vectors in the encoder embedding space, referred to as prototypes. These prototypes provide separate decision boundaries for different groups of texts within the same class. However, adding multiple prototypes alone does not determine which variation each prototype should represent. MD-ProTector addresses this problem with Prototype Positioning loss, which separates class-level structure from the within-class variation that differentiates individual prototypes. Evaluated across five settings from three large-scale benchmarks covering domain, generator, language, and adversarial variation, MD-ProTector achieves the highest AvgRec on MAGE CDCM and RAID and the highest AUROC and lowest FPR95 on RAID among the compared encoder-based methods.

I’ve been locked in to my various screens since results from midterm elections started to roll in last night. And it didn’t take long to see the beginning of the blue wave: Democrats took control of both the US House of Representatives and the Senate, a dramatic swing from Donald Trump’s victory two years ago.   While the results are striking, we probably won’t be seeing some of the big climate and energy policy shifts that have come in recent years as Congress and the presidency have changed hands. Instead, we’re entering a period of divided government, with a Congress that will likely do battle with Trump’s White House over the next two years. But even if the federal government isn’t likely to pass laws that overhaul energy and climate policy, the midterm results could be a big deal for energy, especially at the state and local level.  Let’s step back for just a moment to put these results in context. Readers might remember huge laws affecting climate and energy that were passed in just the last four years. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included massive support for clean energy, including tax credits and government grants and loans.Then the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act essentially slashed much of the support and financial incentives in the IRA from two years before. What those two laws had in common was a period when the government was entirely united, with the Senate, House of Representatives, and presidency all controlled by the same party—the Democrats in the first case and the Republicans in the second Now Democrats have captured a majority in both the Senate and the House. But Donald Trump is still in the White House. And crucially, neither chamber is anywhere close to a two-thirds Democratic majority. That’s the ratio that would be needed to override a presidential veto. So even if Congress puts together new legislation to boost climate measures and clean energy, Trump will need to sign it—and that dramatically narrows the scope of what might happen legislatively between now and the next election. There could be some bipartisan compromises. One interesting bit of legislation to watch immediately after the election is what happens with permitting reform. In late September, a bipartisan group of senators put forward a bill that would overhaul how new energy projects are reviewed and approved in the US. The law aims to cut red tape and speed up the permitting process. The Senate is set to vote on that package, called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, on November 9, before the new Congress takes control in January. The White House has supported the bill, and it could pass the Senate if just a handful of Democrats join the Republican majority. But now, we might see Democrats wait until next year to try to renegotiate a deal, though anything would still need to pass muster with Trump. With Democratic control of Congress, we’ll likely see much more scrutiny of Trump and agencies controlled by his appointees. Democratic leaders have already signaled plans to go after leaders like EPA commissioner Lee Zeldin over cuts to staff and investments. Democrats will have the power to subpoena cabinet members and open investigations. Looking beyond the national results, a major trend to watch moving forward will be local action. Democrats swept local control of Pennsylvania, and officials there have signaled plans to support renewable energy and efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Democrats also took control of the Georgia Public Service Commission for the first time in 30 years. The group regulates electric utilities, essentially controlling much of the grid’s buildout.  Among the broadest effects of these election results, though, will be for the data center industry. According to tracking from Ballotpedia, there were 41 local ballot questions related to data centers. And overwhelmingly, voters chose to restrict their development. Nearly every single one of these measures looks set to come down against data center development, as of the morning of November 4.  And AI critics fared well in their races, too. Democrat Gina Hinojosa won the governor’s seat in Texas, ousting Republican incumbent Greg Abbott. During her campaign, Hinojosa called for a law to completely pause data center development; if passed, it could have major implications for both the state’s grid and the data center industry more broadly. We might not see dramatic new climate- or energy-related federal legislation between now and the next major US election. But many voters signaled, and quite loudly, that they wanted a change. We’ll see how much will shift in the next two years, and where that leaves us.  This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Texas is the fastest-growing data center market in the US and ground zero for Big Tech’s largest AI buildouts. But the blue wave that swept the Lone Star State may jeopardize that position. Democrat James Talarico won the US Senate seat against Ken Paxton. Gina Hinojosa won the race for governor against the Republican incumbent, Greg Abbott. At the state level, Democrats will take control of the Texas House for the first time in 24 years. Talarico and Hinojosa made data centers a central issue, discussing them constantly on the campaign trail. Even before the polls closed, insiders in the data center industry noticed that the times were changing. At the industry’s DCD conference in Ashburn, Virginia, on Tuesday, panelists lamented that Texas had been the easiest place to build for years—until September. That’s when Abbott, perhaps seeing the increasingly bipartisan distaste for these facilities, began changing course himself.  Developers said the governor’s office had stopped responding to their emails. On September 21, Abbott directed a key state regulator to halt data center permits. Many panelists at the conference were expecting this to mean that existing projects might be slowed and new ones could be halted altogether.  The governor-elect indeed seems eager to do that. Hinojosa supported tax breaks for data centers in 2023 as a way to boost construction jobs, but during her campaign she began pushing for a full-fledged moratorium. That would be a problem for the hyperscalers of Big Tech, which have ambitious plans for AI training facilities in the state. The scale of projects already underway in Texas is massive. The Stargate Frontier data center in Shackelford County is projected to serve 1,820 megawatts—about as much as the nation’s largest data center, SpaceX’s Colossus 2 in Tennessee, and more than twice as much as the largest data center currently operating in Texas. Nexus Hubbard, also under construction and intended mostly to serve Anthropic, has a planned size of 6,400 megawatts and is the second-largest data center being built in the US, behind only Meta’s Hyperion project in Louisiana.  The potential for Democrats to order delays to these projects or moratoriums on new ones adds to growing anxiety that the AI buildout could stall. Banks and lenders are already getting pickier about the projects they back. And given the extent to which the data center buildout is underpinning growth in the economy right now, those forces combined could have ripple effects. Voters around the country, though, were unambiguous in the midterms, sending a similar message on everything from state ballot questions to national offices. Voters supported efforts to protect ratepayers from increases in their electricity bills caused by data centers, and they favored some larger bans on new data centers altogether. If we needed any more convincing that Big Tech has fumbled its effort to sell voters on the idea that AI-powered abundance will make health care better, goods cheaper, and scientific breakthroughs more common, this was it. A key question is whether the Texas counties with the largest data center presence were part of the reason these Democrats got elected, or if the anti-data-center vote came from elsewhere.  It’s complicated: The counties where much of the data center buildout is happening are around Dallas. Dallas County and others closest to it predictably went blue, but nearby Ellis County, which leads in permitting requests for data centers, went for Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton. Cameron County, near the state’s southern border, is a hot spot for data centers and voted blue in the midterms, which was a shift. But Mitchell County and Scurry County, where a bunch of projects in west Texas are located, went red.  This is a big deal, because no single office in the state decides whether a project goes ahead or is halted. Decisions often reflect an interplay between city governments, county officials, and state offices.  Local officials who have some say over data center development may resist sweeping restrictions from the state. And Democrats pushing for a moratorium might also face pushback from the construction unions that supported some of their campaigns. So while the blue wave spells a death knell for Texas data centers in theory, election winners may find that following through on their opposition once in office is much more complicated than campaigning on it.