Luca

[Giulio Cavalli @giuliocavalli]

Fa caldo, vero? Allora facciamo due conti. Due miliardi di tonnellate di anidride carbonica in più: il conto è di Carbon Market Watch e del Wwf. Tanto può liberare la revisione dell’Ets, il mercato europeo delle quote di emissione, che la Commissione europea ha presentato il 17 luglio. Le quote gratuite ai settori esposti alla concorrenza estera slittano al 2038. Il ritmo di riduzione dei permessi scende dal 4,4% annuo al 3,7% fra il 2031 e il 2035, poi all’1,7% fino al 2040. La riserva che assorbe le quote in eccesso passa dal 24% al 12%. La Commissione di Ursula von der Leyen ripete che il traguardo del meno 90% al 2040 non cambia. Resta dov’era, senza più gli attrezzi per raggiungerlo.

Green Deal, la demolizione a rate

Il metodo ha un nome tecnico e un effetto politico. Da febbraio 2025 Bruxelles ha presentato dieci pacchetti “omnibus”, che riaprono più leggi insieme e le alleggeriscono in blocco. Il 13 novembre 2025 il Parlamento europeo ha svuotato gli obblighi di rendicontazione di sostenibilità e di dovuta diligenza delle imprese, con i voti del Ppe, dei conservatori e dell’estrema destra. È la prima volta che il gruppo di maggioranza relativa porta a casa una legge di peso scavalcando gli alleati centristi. La direttiva contro le pubblicità verdi ingannevoli è stata ritirata a giugno 2025, e il regolamento contro la deforestazione ha incassato un primo rinvio a fine 2024 e un secondo nell’autunno del 2025. E il 17 dicembre 2025 è caduto il divieto di immatricolare auto a motore termico dal 2035, sostituito da un taglio delle emissioni del 90% invece che del 100%.

Sul bersaglio grosso il compromesso è arrivato lo stesso. Il 10 febbraio 2026l’Eurocamera ha approvato in via definitiva l’obiettivo climatico al 2040, meno 90% rispetto al 1990, con 413 voti a favore e 226 contrari. Dentro ci sono fino a 5 punti di crediti di carbonio comprati fuori dall’Unione dal 2036. E il rinvio dell’Ets2 su edifici e trasporti al 2028, con una clausola di revisione periodica del traguardo. La valutazione d’impatto della Commissione raccomandava “almeno” il 90%, con la possibilità di spingersi al 95%, e taceva sui crediti internazionali. La relazione sul dossier, a luglio 2025, era finita al gruppo di estrema destra Patrioti per l’Europa.

Il conto arriva comunque

Intanto la crisi climatica presenta la fattura, e ignora i calendari legislativi. L’Agenzia europea dell’ambiente quantifica in 822 miliardi di euro le perdite provocate nell’Unione dagli eventi estremi fra il 1980 e il 2024. All’Italia ne toccano più di 145, seconda soltanto alla Germania. L’Osservatorio Città Clima di Legambiente ha censito 376 eventi meteorologici estremi con danni nel 2025, il 5,9% in più dell’anno precedente.

Poi ci sono le cifre di domani. Uno studio dell’Università di Mannheim stima in 11,9 miliardi di euro i danni italiani del 2025 da ondate di calore, siccità e alluvioni, e li proietta a 34,2 miliardi entro il 2029. Il Cmcc, Centro euromediterraneo sui cambiamenti climatici, con Deloitte e lo European University Institute, calcola che al 2050 il prodotto interno lordo italiano sarà fra l’1,6% e il 6% più basso rispetto a un’Italia senza danni climatici. Sempre il Cmcc chiama “spread climatico” i 42-46 punti base in più che il debito pubblico pagherebbe negli scenari a danni elevati. Il clima ignora le flessibilità.

A Roma il conto si paga due volte

Su un fronte il governo italiano ha lavorato benissimo. Al Consiglio Ambiente del 4 novembre 2025 il ministro dell’Ambiente e della sicurezza energetica Gilberto Pichetto Fratin ha giudicato «largamente insufficiente» la quota di crediti internazionali proposta da Bruxelles. E ne ha chiesta un’altra del 5%, “solo se necessario”. Il Consiglio ha ceduto proprio lì dove la valutazione scientifica taceva. L’11 marzo 2026, davanti alle Camere, Giorgia Meloni ha chiesto all’Unione di «sospendere urgentemente l’applicazione dell’Ets» al termoelettrico. Il ministro delle Imprese e del made in Italy Adolfo Urso aveva già invocato uno stop temporaneo dell’intero sistema.

Sul fronte interno il registro cambia. Dei ricavi delle aste delle quote di emissione l’Italia ha certificato di averne spesi per il clima il 9%, secondo il think tank Ecco, contro un obiettivo del 50%. Le rinnovabili installate nel 2025 sono state 7,2 gigawatt, il 6% meno del 2024. Il totale si ferma a 81,7, e ne mancano 49 per i 131 che il Pniec promette entro il 2030: di questo passo, calcola Legambiente, l’Italia ci arriverà con 5,7 anni di ritardo. La bolletta elettrica intanto viaggia a 130,5 euro per megawattora contro i 42,5 della Spagna.

Nel 2022, alla Camera, la presidente del Consiglio prometteva di difendere la natura «con l’uomo dentro», contro l’«ambientalismo ideologico». Quattro anni dopo l’uomo dentro c’è, e paga. Nelle raccomandazioni del Semestre europeo di giugno 2026 la stessa Commissione che smonta la mitigazione scrive all’Italia che servono oltre 10 miliardi di euro l’anno in adattamento fino al 2050. Per firmare quella cifra il governo deve smentire quattro anni di comizi. I due miliardi di tonnellate, intanto, arrivano lo stesso.

(il mio articolo per @LaNotiziaTweet)
https://t.co/HdjpkDUBBQ

[Stop Killing Games Official @StopKilingGames]

You don’t own your movies, your games, anything.

It’s all a license they can take away at any given point for any given reason.

That’s why they are dismantling physical, that’s why the lobby meets with lawmakers 13 days before responding to us or lies in the Senate.

[Clare Daly @ClareDalyIRL]

In layman's terms the proposal here is to take
€10 billion of our public money, pile it up and set it on fire, in an obviously futile attempt to "catch up" in the data centre race with Silicon Valley, where ignorant trillionaire psychopaths are torching historically unprecedented amounts of money, causing irreparable harm to the environment and bringing about a financial apocalypse, in the delusional hope of finding a profitable business model for so-called "AI", a vastly overhyped technology that by now many of us are sick of, so that they can create a capitalist nirvana where they fire us all from our jobs and replace us with chatbots, and sell us subscriptions to slop they've recycled out of our common cultural and intellectual heritage, which they stole from us, scanned and then incinerated.

"Europe" does not want to "become the first AI continent."

[Barbarian Herodotus @BBHerodotus]

After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books.

They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude.

They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong.

An internal memo from 2024 stated:

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Why used books?

Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work.

So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet.

The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft.

Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website.

When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!”

Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.

They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling.

Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country.

But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning.

Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever.

AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils.

May the most moral company win.

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Terrifying thread.

Due to a legal ruling which lets AI companies off the hook for copyright infringement as long as they destroy the original book, they're buying up millions of rare books, scanning them as AI training data, and then destroying them.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”

it was called project panama.

here's exactly what happened:

1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”

2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.

it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”

3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.

so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”

4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.

those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.

5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.

6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.

a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.

7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.

the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Reclaim The Net @ReclaimTheNetHQ]

The EU Commission says Instagram & Facebook could be acting illegaly in Europe.

Reason: infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications and recommendation algorithms are designed to hold your attention.

They’re threatening Meta with fines up to 6% of global revenue, over $12 billion, until the apps are redesigned to Brussels’ liking: autoplay & infinite scroll OFF by default, screen time breaks, and algorithms retuned to be less engaging.

This is under the Digital Services Act, the same censorship law that polices speech now dictates product design...

https://t.co/MzN3J23SrK

[Reid Southen @Rahll]

IBM 1979.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

AI costs more than the people it replaced, per Forbes.

[Fidias Panayiotou @Fidias0]

The EU Parliament REJECTED Chat Control, but now they are forcing us to vote it AGAIN to revive it. What kind of democracy is this if we're forced to vote on the same issue over and over until they get the result they want?

My colleague @MarketkaG explained the situation very well in plenary👇🏻

[Aydin Dikerdem @AydinDikerdem]

It’s wild how Gaza is being erased from the narrative surrounding Starmer’s unpopularity. Over 50% of Labour switchers at the locals said it influenced them. It came up on the doorstep over & over again. It’s one of the greatest moral stains of our era. And yet media silence.

[Kate @Shortwoman93]

It’s been collapsing for a few of years, but today it became so clear to me how google search has been obliterated. I can’t find anything on it, and especially not old information searches (newspaper & magazine stories, blogs) I could find, with more difficulty, 5 months ago.

[Katherine Stiles @_K_Stiles]

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself

Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education. https://t.co/k6zUL1ZNCy @curaffairs

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[팬텀크로/fevercell @PT_CROW]

Let me summarize it simply

Data inbreeding is occurring

[Utkarsh Sharma @techxutkarsh]

If you have a Gmail account, you need to read this.

Google's AI now scans your emails and attachments, bank statements, tax files, medical letters, all of it. It turned on by default, and there's a class-action lawsuit over how.

Here are 5 moves to shut it off, the switch is hidden in two places:

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

Entire chapters of internet culture grew up in Flash. When it was switched off, most of it should have disappeared forever. But it didn't, thanks to the efforts of the software preservation community.

Flash is just part of the story of VANISHING CULTURE, a new book exploring the fight to preserve our fragile digital history.

Join us at the book launch. 📖
📅 Thu, April 23
🕠 5:30 PM: Doors open & entertainment
📍 300 Funston Ave, SF
🎟️ https://t.co/fBrSesWFOn

#flash #SFevents #VanishingCulture @InternetArchive #BookTwitter @funcheapsf

[Alexander McCoy @AlexanderMcCoy4]

When I was in college Palantir did a recruitment presentation for students, and at one point a student asked about civil liberties and the Palantir guys said “oh don’t worry we have a Civil Liberties Team that takes care of that” and another student asked “so what happens if that team finds something the company is doing is violating civil liberties” and the lead Palantir guy just laughed out loud.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

The journalist who took down Harvey Weinstein just spent 18 months investigating Sam Altman.

And what he found out is genuinely insane:

The people who built OpenAI went on record saying he can't be trusted with the future of humanity.

A Microsoft executive even compared him to Bernie Madoff.

This isn't just some hit piece.

It's 100+ interviews, secret memos, HR documents, Slack messages, and private notes that had never been seen before.

Here's everything you have to know about Ronan Farrow's investigation:

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist and CO-FOUNDER, compiled 70 pages of internal evidence against Altman. Slack messages. HR files. Behavioral analysis.

The word at the top of his list of Altman's "consistent patterns": lying.

He sent the documents as disappearing messages because he was "terrified" someone would find them. They became legendary in Silicon Valley. Insiders just call them "the Ilya Memos."

Dario Amodei, another co-founder who left to start Anthropic, kept his own private notes. One line: "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself."

Paul Graham, the man who RECRUITED Altman to run Y Combinator, told colleagues Altman had been "lying to us all the time." Multiple YC partners had complained about Altman's behavior by 2018. He was effectively forced out in 2019 despite publicly claiming for YEARS that he left voluntarily.

Former board members described him as "unconstrained by truth."

And the investigation found that Altman reportedly lied to the board about obtaining safety approvals for some of ChatGPT's most controversial features.

That's the man running an $852 billion company with 900 million weekly users and a Pentagon contract.

But here's where this gets really crazy:

The New Yorker investigation dropped on Sunday.

SAME DAY, Altman publishes a 13 page policy paper proposing robot taxes, a public wealth fund, and a four-day workweek. The most ambitious social policy document in OpenAI's history.

Dropped within HOURS of the most damaging article ever written about him.

That's not coincidence.

Monday: Elon Musk files a court motion demanding Altman be REMOVED as CEO. He wants the for-profit conversion completely unwound.

Then Friday at 3:45 AM: a 20yo throws a Molotov cocktail at Altman's San Francisco mansion. It bounces off the house. Lights the gate on fire. An hour later, same guy shows up at OpenAI HQ threatening to burn the building down. Police arrest him on the spot.

Nobody was hurt.

But within hours, Altman posts a photo of his husband and 1yo child on his blog. Writes that he hopes the image "might dissuade the next person." Then blames the New Yorker article for making things "more dangerous" for him.

In 5 days, Altman went from the target of the most devastating investigation in tech history to the sympathetic father whose family was attacked.

Now anyone who criticizes him has to do it in the shadow of a firebombing.

The New Yorker spent 18 months building the case that Altman is dangerous. Altman turned it into the reason HE'S in danger.

And none of this changes what Farrow actually found:

- The co-founders don't trust him
- The former board doesn't trust him
- The chief scientist documented 70 pages of evidence and was too scared to send them through normal channels
- Paul Graham says he was lied to
- A Microsoft executive put him in the same sentence as Madoff

The trial starts in 16 days.

If Musk wins, the for-profit conversion gets unwound and Altman is removed.

If Altman wins, the man that every person who helped build OpenAI has publicly warned about gets permanent, unchecked control of the most powerful AI company on Earth.

Either way, one thing is now undeniable...

The people closest to Sam Altman are the ones screaming the loudest warnings.

And this week proved he knows exactly how to make sure nobody listens.

Peak manipulation.