Under Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh saw a tense period where the recourse to justice was curtailed, the banking sector crippled, and foreign investment virtually evaporated. As the country tries to build a brighter future, the authoritarian nature of Yunus’s interim administration - its series of endless legal witch hunts and laser-focus on political retribution - echoes on with questions building over the ‘reformer’ image Yunus worked to foster.

Rocketed to power off the back of a student-led revolution, Muhammad Yunus promised accountability and access to justice. Instead, he turned his sights on a series of political scores needing to be settled, using his temporary power to establish a firm, authoritarian rule.

Incredibly, Yunus himself knew what it felt like to be the victim of witch hunt, having become embroiled in a dispute with Sheikh Hasina whilst she was in power. He could have taken the opportunity to set a new path for Bangladesh; one where the courts no longer operated as a space of political persecution. Instead, he doubled down and drew on popular resentment for the Hasina administration to foster a culture of political retribution while leveraging the judicial system to target his enemies.

During his tenure, Human Rights Watch repeatedly raised the alarm about the number of political opponents that were being held in indefinite detention. His administration also pursued the death penalty for all those it associated with the former regime, discarding due processes in favour of stacking benches with unqualified judges who were likely to return harsher verdicts. Undeterred, the contradictions grew. Here was a founding member of Nelson Mandela’s Council of Elders, locking up vast numbers of political opponents and doing nothing to protect journalists.

Yunus also spearheaded a smear campaign against almost a dozen of the country’s leading business groups, dissolving boards and installing favored (and corrupt) advisers, the result has left the country’s economy in dire straits and the current government attempting to salvage the wreckage. Through a series of endless legal witch hunts and targeted campaigns, Yunus saddled the eleven business groups with hundreds of criminal and commercial charges, while doing precious little to support the wider economy. The attacks scared off would-be investors, concerned they may earn the ire of Yunus’s government and have left the economy with a rolling investment crisis.

To maximise this campaign’s impact, Yunus leveraged a court system which requires people to appear in-person before the court or face harsher, in-absentia sentences. In drumming up hundreds of legal claims Yunus effectively nullified the business groups from any effective response by making it virtually impossible for them to meet the claims in court. To ensure this would be as difficult as possible, Yunus strategically empowered the students who brought down Hasina, bringing them into his fold.

By withholding any repercussions for the attacks on Hasina’s residence or the fires started at government buildings during the uprising, Yunus tacitly permitted a general sense of lawlessness and attacks on perceived enemies of the state to spread. Former ministers, on their way to essentially sham trials, would be mobbed - including one minister who was assaulted by lawyers - by crowds calling for their execution. One former Justice even had to undergo surgery as a result of the violent injuries he suffered following a mob attack. Lawyers have even reported that they were prevented from carrying out their work if it involved representing people with ties to the former regime. In all, the government's permissiveness of vigilante justice, combined with a targeted campaign of lawfare against its perceived enemies undermined any hope for fair trials and it is little wonder businesses remain reticent to engage with Bangladesh.

Despite a rhetoric of justice and accountability, Yunus’ actions proved these were never truly on the table. In order for the country to move forward, Bangladesh needs a pathway to reconciliation, which cannot coexist with the legal witch hunts instigated by Muhammad Yunus. The new government needs to change course if it wants to bring the country on the path to a prosperous and fairer future.

In what environmental advocates describe as “another gift to the fossil fuel industry,” the Trump administration plans to end rules limiting the release of planet-heating emissions from power plants that burn coal and gas.

Power plants are considered the largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US and account for about a quarter of the nation’s climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In 2024, the EPA under the Biden administration used the Clean Air Act to require that many new gas plants and existing coal plants reduce their carbon emissions by 90%, including by installing carbon capture technology, by 2032.

The EPA estimated that the rule would reduce the amount of CO2 emissions by about 1.38 billion metric tons over the next two decades, the equivalent of about a year of emissions from the entire US electric power sector.

Another gift to the fossil fuel industry!
The US will allow power plant polluters to dump unlimited planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas.@maxinejoselow https://t.co/ZeiSaFkEpC

— Safe Climate Campaign now @safe-climate.bsky.soc (@safe_climate) September 14, 2026

On Monday, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator under President Donald Trump, announced an end to this policy at a meeting of energy ministers at the Group of 20 conference in Houston.

Not only will this prevent the enactment of a policy that the EPA has estimated would prevent around 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma cases by 2035. But the administration is also rolling out a proposal seeking to prevent future administrations from regulating carbon emissions as a health risk.

It is an effort that runs parallel to the administration’s rescission of the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allowed the EPA to regulate vehicle emissions under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act on the grounds that they are harmful to human health. That move is also being challenged in court.

Power plants are regulated under a different section of the Clean Air Act, Section 111, which allows the EPA to regulate facilities that “cause, or contribute significantly to” dangerous air pollution.

But whereas the courts have previously interpreted this statute to regulate the outputs of entire facilities, the Trump administration is asking courts to adopt a novel reading of the statute which says each individual chemical under scrutiny must “contribute significantly” to climate change.

As Meredith Hankins, legal director for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained in a policy memo last week, it likely won’t be easy for the administration to prove that the CO2 emissions from US power plants aren’t a significant driver of climate change.

“Power sector emissions account for a quarter of total US emissions, so if they cannot be counted as significant, it’s hard to conceive of any emissions that would,” Hankins wrote. “In fact, if the US power sector were a nation, it would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter after China, the United States, India, and Russia. That’s a pretty ‘significant contribution’ to the problem.”

The effort to gut power plant regulations comes after the hottest meteorological summer recorded in US history and amid a year with one of the largest numbers of climate disasters on record, including widespread drought, destructive wildfires, and repeated flooding and tornado outbreaks.

As the planet has warmed over the last half-century, the US has seen a sharp, near-sevenfold increase in weather disasters costing over $1 billion, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” said Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, following news of the EPA’s rollback of power plant rules. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”

She added that “the Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country.”

If successful, the reversal of the power plant rules would be one of the most significant steps in Zeldin’s push to eviscerate the EPA’s authority to combat climate change on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. Earlier this summer, during a meeting of the National Coal Council, he bragged that “many of the items” on the industry’s “wish list are now done.”

He has put the wheels in motion to roll back virtually every Biden-era regulation on the coal industry, including rules limiting pollution from mercury and toxic metals, controls on toxic wastewater from coal plants, and limits on coal ash.

And while seeking to undermine the legal basis to regulate greenhouse gases, Zeldin’s EPA has also taken a sledgehammer to its practical ability to do so, dismantling offices that collect climate data, erasing information about human-caused climate change from the agency’s websites, and filling research panels with scientists employed by the fossil fuel industry.

Former State Department energy official Alan Eyre noted that on the world stage, the US “has always been obstructionist” when it comes to climate policy. Under Trump, he said, “we’re actively malevolent.”

Concerns about the water and energy demands of data centers have become prolific in recent weeks. But debates about their impact often overlook the rapid advances in cooling technology and cleaner energy that are already having an impact.

However, data centers’ resource consumption should be front and center of the AI conversion, as it is set to grow rapidly. By 2030, data centers’ water and energy consumption will double as AI demand leads to rapid construction of the infrastructure.

But data centers will not cause the world to run out of water or energy. Water- and energy-saving technologies already in use are reducing their impact, while Shanghai’s groundbreaking underwater data center demonstrates how innovative design can limit water, energy and land use.

Data centers have underpinned the internet since its founding. Apps, email, file storage and cloud services all run through them.

Modern AI workloads, however, have transformed their power demands beyond recognition. Today a single AI data center can match the electricity consumption of 100,000 homes, making them a significant drain on local energy grids, especially if a region is susceptible to shortages.

Data centers’ energy consumption is only rising as more are built across the world. In the US, data centers could increase from 4.4% to 12% of national electricity usage by 2028 — that is equivalent to adding eight New York Cities to the American grid.

Data centers also consume large amounts of water in two main ways. Water is used directly to cool servers and storage systems, which generate considerable heat, and indirectly to produce electricity at fossil fuel power plants where it is heated into steam to drive turbines.

In the UK, data centers have been estimated to use up to eight times as much water as average on hot summer days, underlining how their impact can rise when local resources are already under strain.

As the effects of climate change intensify, the location of data centers, and methods to reduce their water and energy consumption, are becoming ever more important.

Fortunately, resource-saving measures are already being implemented. Data centers on land use closed-loop cooling systems that recycle water rather than continually evaporating it. This can reduce freshwater use by up to 70% compared to traditional open evaporative methods.

China has also pioneered a revolutionary new type of data center in Shanghai: wind-powered, and underwater. The facility, which began full commercial operations in May 2026, uses seawater as a coolant instead of using refrigerated fresh water as land-based data centers do, reducing the electricity required to cool the computers.

It uses at least 30% less electricity than traditional data centers, and offshore wind turbines reduce reliance on fossil fuels and cut the data center’s carbon emissions. Innovative solutions such as these will go a long way to reducing data centers’ resource consumption.

AI is also part of the solution to data centers’ draw on resources. AI can optimise electricity grids and shift computing workloads towards periods when cleaner energy is more efficient, making energy use more effective overall. AI can also anticipate fluctuations in demand and adjust energy consumption accordingly, reducing waste.

It might sound obvious, but some areas are just better equipped to accommodate a data center than others. For example, facilities in hot or water-stressed regions will impose a heavier burden on resources than those supplied by cleaner energy with plentiful water and located in cooler climates.

AI’s growing demand for data centers will increase electricity and water consumption, that is true. But it does not mean the technology will exhaust regional or global supplies of either resource.

The AI boom and the infrastructure buildout accompanying it are well underway. To manage its impact, the industry needs to plan ahead. Cleaner energy, efficient cooling, and sites that have significant water and energy supplies will all limit the infrastructure’s drain on resources.

Estati sempre più torride rendono meno piacevoli le vacanze. E se il turista non ha un buon ricordo dell’esperienza, difficilmente tornerà nella stessa località. Vale anche per chi va al mare e si aspetta il caldo. Un problema per i paesi del Mediterraneo.

L'articolo Troppo caldo, non ci torno più proviene da Lavoce.info.