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For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for various reasons, but the second point should be immediately obvious, since the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection. Below, I will list both the old and new service providers; this is not an advertisement, but simply the result of my research, which was aimed at achieving the same or better quality at affordable prices.
I would call this post an interim report, and I will expand on it if I end up migrating more services.
In my opinion, Fastmail is one of the best email providers. In all the years I’ve had my email accounts there, I’ve never had any problems. I paid 10 euros a month for two accounts, could use an unlimited number of my own domains, and could not only set up catch-all addresses but also send emails from any email address I wanted. This is important for my email setup. The calendar is also solid and was used within the family. All of this was also available in a well-designed Android app. Finding a European alternative that offers all of this proved difficult. First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaround, so the search continued. Eventually, I landed on Uberspace. This “pay what you want” provider offers a shell account, web hosting, email hosting, and more at fair prices. In addition, you can use as many of your own domains as you like for both web and email, and send emails from any sender address. There isn’t a dedicated app, which is why I now use Thunderbird for Android and am very satisfied with it.
Uberspace doesn’t offer a built-in calendar solution. So I tried installing various CalDAV servers, but none of them really convinced me. In the end, I simply installed NextCloud on my Uberspace Asteroid, which has CalDAV and CardDAV built in. On my desktop, I use Thunderbird as a client; on Android, I use DAVx5 and Fossil Calendar. It works great, even if NextCloud does come with some overhead. In return, I can now easily share files with others and, in theory, also use NextCloud’s online office functionality.
Now that I’m already using Uberspace for my email and calendar, I was able to host this website there as well. I previously had a VPS with Hetzner for this purpose, which I no longer need. The only minor hurdle was that I use SSI on this site to manage the header centrally. I had previously used Nginx, but Uberspace hosts on Apache, where the SSI implementation is handled slightly differently. However, adapting my HTML code was quite simple, so I was able to quickly migrate the site to Uberspace.
For a long time, I was a satisfied Namecheap customer. They offer good prices, a wide selection of available domains, their DNS management has everything you need, and their support team has helped me quickly on several occasions. But now it was time to look for a comparable provider in the EU. In the end, I settled on hosting.de. Some of the reasons were the prices, reviews, the location in Germany, and the availability of .is domains. So far, everything has been running smoothly; support helped me quickly and competently with one issue; and while prices for non-German domains are slightly higher, they’re still within an acceptable range.
At some point, pretty much everyone had their code on GitHub (or still does). I was no exception, though I had also hosted my own Gitea instance. Eventually, I got tired of that too and migrated all my Git repositories to codeberg.org. Codeberg is a German-based nonprofit organization, and it’s hard to imagine going wrong with this choice.
No changes here. I’ve always been a happy Mullvad customer. For 5 euros a month, I pay a Swedish company that has proven it doesn’t log any data and doesn’t even require me to create an account. No subscription traps, no weird Black Friday deals, no discounts: just 5 euros a month for a reliable, trustworthy service.
For many years, I used my work smartphone for personal use as well. I was more than satisfied with the Pixel 6, but understandably, I wasn’t allowed to install a custom ROM or use alternative app stores like F-Droid. That’s why I decided to buy a separate personal smartphone. I chose the Pixel 9a, which is supported by Graphene OS. I still installed the Google Play Store so I could install a significant number of apps that are only available there. However, I can now use alternative app stores, which allows me to install and use apps like NewPipe. This way, I can enjoy YouTube ad-free and without an account.
For casual use on the couch, a Chromebook has been unbeatable for me so far. It’s affordable, the battery lasts forever, and it wakes up from sleep mode extremely quickly. To break away from Google here as well, I recently bought a cheap used 11-inch MacBook Air (A1465) to install MX Linux with Fluxbox on it and use it for browsing and watching videos. I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet, but I’m hoping it will be able to replace the Chromebook.
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Scarcely a day goes by without an outage at a cloud service. Forget five nines — the way things are going, one nine is looking like an ambitious goal.
GitHub has had a rough month so far. On February 9, Actions, pull requests, notifications, and Copilot all experienced issues. The Microsoft tentacle admitted it was having problems with “some GitHub services” at 1554 UTC before it confessed to notification delays of “around 50 minutes”.
It took until 1929 UTC for the company to confirm that things were back to normal, although the delay was down to “approximately 30 minutes” by 1757 UTC.
One of its flagship technologies, Copilot, also suffered. From 1629 UTC on February 9 to 0957 UTC on February 10, GitHub reported problems in Copilot policy propagation for some users. The code shack said: “This may prevent newly enabled models from appearing when users try to access them.”
And so it goes on. GitHub changed its status page a while ago, making it harder to visualize the availability of its services. Yes, the details are front and center, but getting a sense of how things have gone over the last 90 days, particularly overall uptime, is trickier.
The “missing” status page exists in reconstructed form via the public status feed, though this is an unofficial source so requires caution. It reveals that GitHub’s stability has been poor: uptime dropped below 90 percent at one point in 2025.
The code shack isn’t alone in experiencing service instability. While five nines (99.999 percent uptime) represents the gold standard, some vendors struggle to maintain even 90 percent — a concern for customers relying on these platforms.
GitHub’s Service Level Agreement for Enterprise Cloud customers specifies 99.9 percent uptime, although the company does not guarantee this for all users.
The travails of GitHub customers highlight the need to plan for downtime as well as uptime. ®
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Read the original on www.theregister.com »
The Tin Can phone is meant for kids, like an old school landline.
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Tin Can is a kid-friendly WiFi phone that replicates an old-fashioned landline.
It’s aimed at parents who want to delay giving their kids a cellphone.
“It’s important for kids to have social autonomy,” the cofounder tells Business Insider.
Alison Bennett, a mom in Los Angeles, has been going “full ’90s” in her efforts to avoid buying her 8-year-old a phone. Bennett bought her an MP3 player for music, rents DVDs for movies, and gets paper delivery of the Los Angeles Times.
Now, she’s found another way to put off getting her daughter a cellphone: She ordered three $75 Tin Can “landline” phones — one for her 8-year-old daughter, and two for friends.
“I want my daughter to be able to chat with her friends, like I did as a child in the ’90s” Bennett said — without worrying about all the other stuff that comes with a mobile phone. She said she heard about the Tin Can on a Facebook group.
Tin Can is a phone that runs off your home’s WiFi. It’s similar to a regular VoIP phone, except that it has parental controls so that only approved contacts can call, and only during approved hours. There’s also a free plan where Tin Can users can call only other Tin Can users.
The company was founded last fall by three friends in the Seattle area. Two of them were dads, and they wanted to create a phone for their own kids. They sat around the kitchen table with soldering irons, working on a prototype with an old corded landline phone.
“We didn’t know if this would be a business or a cool walkie-talkie,” Chet Kittleson, cofounder of Tin Can, said in an interview.
Soon, they started giving a few of these phones to their kids’ friends so they would have someone to talk to.
“I was like, ‘Let’s just see if our kids use it,’” Kittleson said. “They lost their minds. Kids used the crap out of the thing. They were so excited when it rang, they would jump over the couch.”
The company has raised $3.5 million so far, a spokesperson said, including from Pioneer Square Ventures, Newfund Capital, Mother Ventures, and Solid Foundation, among a few others. The are seven full-time employees, including Kittleson and his co-founders, Max Blumen and Graeme Davies.
Kittleson said they’ve sold “tens of thousands” of the phones since launching in early 2025 — and tens of thousands just in the last month. They’re backordered until December.
The Tin Can comes as a newish movement of parents are wanting to delay giving older kids and tweens a phone until as late as possible — some not until high school, even.
But that leaves kids stuck without a way to communicate with friends, and forces parents to act as their kids’ social secretary, fielding texts from other parents to set up playdates or other communications.
There’s also a market for older kids who aren’t quite ready for a full cellphone, but need to communicate with parents or friends. This market is mainly served by a variety of smartwatches, flip phones, or devices from companies like Gabb, Troomi, or Pinwheel that are usually Android smartphones with heavy parental control software.
But a WiFi “landline” phone is something different than just a safe cellphone — and some parents are rediscovering it.
An added benefit is giving kids a crash course in phone etiquette. (Alarmingly, some Gen Zers don’t say “hello” when they answer a phone call; they expect the caller to just start talking.)
I started seeing moms talk about the Tin Can on a few different Facebook groups in late August. (That’s where I heard Bennett say she had bought one.) By the time I mentioned to other parents at Business Insider that I was working on this story, a bunch of them had already heard about the product.
Kittleson said part of his motivation in creating the phone was mental health. “I want to create a world where, structurally, my kids are less likely to be anxious,” he said. “And I think all this stuff [social media] can definitely be a cause of anxiety.”
When Kittleson gave the first Tin Can prototype to his daughter and a few of her friends, he said they were thrilled. But he was even more delighted when he discovered that his daughter and her friend had set up a playdate all on their own — using their Tin Cans — no parents needed. He dropped her off at the friend’s house and marveled at how easy it was.
“It’s important for kids to have social autonomy — independence to connect with people they want to connect with,” Kittleson said. “If we push back the age for cellphones, which I believe we should, then we must find an alternative. That’s the role I see Tin Can playing.”
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GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork, said in a post on X on Friday that it will not comply with emerging laws requiring operating systems to collect user age data at setup. “GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification or an account,” the project stated. “If GrapheneOS devices can’t be sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it.”
The statement came after Brazil’s Digital ECA (Law 15.211) took effect on March 17, imposing fines of up to R$50 million (roughly $9.5 million) per violation on operating system providers that fail to implement age verification. California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB-1043), signed by Governor Newsom in October 2025, takes effect on January 1, 2027, and requires every OS provider to collect a user’s age or date of birth during account setup and pipe that data to app stores and developers through a real-time API. Colorado’s SB26-051 passed the state senate on March 3 with similar requirements.
GrapheneOS is developed by the GrapheneOS Foundation, a registered Canadian nonprofit. None of these laws originate in Canada, but questions around jurisdiction remain open. U. S. federal prosecutors successfully extradited and convicted the developers of Samourai Wallet, a privacy-focused Bitcoin mixer, in a case where one defendant lived in Portugal. California’s AB-1043 carries civil penalties of up to $2,500 per affected child for negligent violations and $7,500 for intentional ones, enforced by the state attorney general.
Motorola and GrapheneOS announced a long-term partnership at MWC on March 2, to bring to bring the hardened OS to future Motorola hardware, ending GrapheneOS’s long-standing exclusivity to Google Pixel devices. A GrapheneOS-powered Motorola phone is expected in 2027. If Motorola sells devices with GrapheneOS pre-installed, those devices would need to comply with local regulations in every market where they ship, or Motorola may need to restrict sales geographically.
GrapheneOS isn’t the first and won’t be the last company to outright refuse compliance with incoming age verification laws. The developers of open-source calculator firmware DB48X issued a legal notice recently, stating that their software “does not, cannot and will not implement age verification,” while MidnightBSD updated its license to ban users in Brazil.
California’s law doesn’t require photo ID or biometric verification; users simply self-report their age during setup. Critics, including over 400 computer scientists who signed an open letter, have argued that the laws create surveillance infrastructure without meaningfully protecting children, since self-declaration is trivially bypassed.
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As of 08:00 local time at Terminal B, from where Air Canada operates, a board showed every departing flight for Monday morning, bar one, had been cancelled. Confused passengers were seen huddled on benches or sleeping on the floor. Many had small children with them.
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In 1944, the Wehrmacht launched into Hitler’s last ditch effort to save the Third Reich. The Battle of the Bulge was a doomed campaign and a doomed gamble from a doomed regime, but its brutality was a true second test of the US Army on the Western Front. During the battle, Army historian S. L.A Marshall began interviewing infantry companies who’d been baptised in combat. Published 3 years later in his 1947 book, Men Against Fire, Marshall’s research showed that just 15-20% of riflemen in active combat positions ever fired their weapons - most kept their heads down. They moved when they were ordered and they held their positions, and they mimicked the outward appearance of a soldier in battle - but shoot, they did not. By any standard organisational metric, the men were present and accounted for, but 4 out of 5 never pulled the trigger.
You can debate the extent of Marshall’s numbers, and you can debate his methodology, but his ratio shows up, again and again. IBM stumbled onto it in the ’60s when they discovered that 80% of computer usage came from 20% of the system’s features. The pattern recurs because it describes something real about how effort is distributed inside groups, where a fraction of the people do most of the work, and the rest provide what you might ~charitably call “structural support.”
Anyone who has worked in any large organisation knows exactly what I’m talking about.
The modern tech industry looked at the problem of human coordination and participation and decided the solution was “collaboration.” If only 20% of us are operating with a “killer instinct” we need to be better at managing the shared instincts of the other 80%. And so collaboration became our shared obsession. We pursue “teamwork” as a holy grail.
The teamwork revolution, if you can call it that, gave us Notion for our documents, ClickUp for our tasks, Slack for our conversations, Jira for our tickets, Monday for our boards, Teams for the calls that should been emails, emails for the things that we couldn’t squeeze in anywhere else, and now agents attempting to re-invent the whole stack. The average knowledge worker maintains accounts across system after system, switching between applications hundreds of times per day. And they produce, in aggregate, a staggering amount of coordinated and collaborative activity that never actually becomes anything resembling ~output.
When you strip away the product marketing and the dev relations and the blog posts and the funding rounds and the fuckery-upon-fuckery of it all, we’re left with a simulation of collective engagement - but very little else. Transparency got confused with progress, visibility got confused with accountability, and being included in the thread became the same thing, socially and organizationally, as owning the outcome.
Once that confusion set in at the cultural level it became nearly impossible to dislodge. The feeling of collaboration is pleasant in a way that personal accountability can never be. Owning something means you, specifically and visibly you, can fail at it, specifically and visibly, in ways that attach to your name.
Collaborating means the failure belongs to the process.
So everyone chose collaboration, and we called it culture.
Marshall’s riflemen were ordinary people responding to the diffusion of responsibility that happens inside any group. Maximilien Ringelmann measured the same phenomenon with ropes in 1913, long before there were Slack workspaces to offer an emoji-react to it. Individual effort drops predictably as group size increases. The presence of others dissolves the sense of personal responsibility in a way that feels, to everyone experiencing it, entirely reasonable. You’re part of a team, you’re contributing, you’re also (measurably) pulling less hard than you would if the rope were yours alone. Every single person on the rope is doing this simultaneously, which is why the total force never adds up the way the headcount says it should.
Frederick Brooks identified the same dynamic in software development in 1975, watching IBM’s System/360 project illustrate his emerging thesis that adding people to a late project makes it later. Communication overhead grows faster than headcount, coordination costs compound, and every new person contributes their capacity along with their relationships to everyone else. Those relationships require maintenance and produce misalignment and generate the need for more meetings to address the misalignment those meetings created.
Brooks might as well have described your company’s Q3 roadmap planning cycle and your startup’s sprint retrospective, all of which have gotten longer every year and produced, relative to their investment, less.
The collaboration industry has spent a fortune obscuring a dirty truth: most complex, high-quality work is done by individuals or very small groups operating with clear authority and sharp accountability, then rationalized into the language of teamwork afterward. Dostoevsky wrote _The Brothers Karamazov_ alone. The Apollo Guidance Computer came from a team at MIT small enough to have real ownership, hierarchical enough that Margaret Hamilton’s name could go on the error-detection routines she personally designed.
Communication matters, and shared context matters. But there’s a huge difference between communication and collaboration as infrastructure to support individual, high-agency ownership, and communication and collaboration as the primary activity of an organisation. Which, if we’re honest, is what most collaboration-first cultures have actually built. They’ve constructed extraordinarily sophisticated machinery for the social management of work, without actually doing the work they’re socialising about.
If and when it exists, ownership looks like an individual who deeply gives a shit, making a call without waiting for group-consensus. That individual will be right sometimes, and they’ll be wrong other times, and they’ll own it. They won’t sit around waiting to find out who has the authority to move a card from one column to another and post about it in the #celebrations channel.
But being that person sucks when “collaboration” is the reigning value, because every unilateral decision gets read as a cultural violation and a signal that you aren’t a team player. Collaboration-as-ideology has made ownership and responsibility feel antisocial, which is a hell of a thing, given that ownership is the only mechanism that gets anything across the finish line.
You can see this excess everywhere. Standups where people announce their busy work and as long as everyone’s “on the same page” nobody changes course. Documents that are written to perform thinking so somebody else can perform thinking, with no decision in sight. Retros, and kickoffs, and WIP meetings that spawn their own retros, kickoffs and WIP meetings like cells dividing and re-dividing, with zero connection to the work that it’s nominally organising around.
Every project now seems to carry more coordination overhead than execution time, and when it fails the postmortem just recommends more collaboration…
At some point (and I think that point was fucking yesterday) we have to ask ourselves - what are we actually producing and who is actually responsible for producing it?
Because at some level, the answer for “who is responsible for X” has to be one single person, no matter how much the collaborative apparatus layered over modern work has been engineered to make that person invisible and dissolve accountability.
We need to find some path back to trusting that individuals will do their jobs, without every responsibility being visible to an entire organisation, without follow-ups being scheduled by a cadre of overpaid managers with their overfed metrics.
Maybe - just maybe - we could make our lives a little easier. Maybe we could let human beings keep their own lists of tasks, and we could let them sink or swim by how they manage those tasks, and we could assign blame to them and to them alone when they fuck up. Maybe we could do it without needing to have team-level views of every Kanban, calendar and task list. And maybe - if we let go of the warm, expensive fiction of collective endeavour - we could make it a little easier to see who among us are pulling the trigger and who are just keeping their heads down.
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Runs in your local developer environment, in CI, and inside Antithesis.
Bombadil is new and experimental. Stuff is going to change in the early days. Even so, we hope you’ll try it out!
Learn all about Bombadil with the following resources:
Or, if you want to hack on it, see Contributing.
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
Bugs have never fooled him yet, for Tom, he is the Master:
His specs are stronger specs, and his fuzzer is faster.
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If DSPy is So Great, Why Isn’t Anyone Using It?
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The evolution of every AI system Stage 2: “Can we tweak the prompt without deploying?” Stage 6: “How do we know if this is getting better?” What this looks like with DSPy What you should actually do
For a framework that promises to solve the biggest challenges in AI engineering, this gap is suspicious. Still, companies using Dspy consistently report the same benefits.
They can test a new model quickly, even if their current prompt doesn’t transfer well. Their systems are more maintainable. They are focusing on the context more than the plumbing.
So why aren’t more people using it?
DSPy’s problem isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s hard. The abstractions are unfamiliar and force you to think a litle bit differently. And what you want right now is not to think differently; you just want the pain to go away.
But I keep watching the same thing happen: people end up implementing a worse version of Dspy. I like to jokingly say there’s a Khattab’s Law now (based off of Greenspun’s Law about Common Lisp):
You’re going to build these patterns anyway. You’ll just do it worse, after a lot of time, and through a lot of pain.
Let’s walk through how virtually every team ends up implementing their own “Dspy at home”. We’ll use a simple structured extraction task as an example throughout. Don’t let the simplicity of the example fool you though; these patterns only become more important as the system becomes more complex.
Let’s say you need to extract company names from some text, you might start out with the OpenAI API:
It basically works. So you ship it and life is good.
But inevitably, Product will want to iterate faster. Redeploying for every prompt change is too annoying. So you decide to store prompts in a database:
Now you have a prompts table, a little admin UI to edit it. And of course you had to add version history after someone broke prod last Tuesday.
You notice the model sometimes returns “Company: Acme Corp” instead of just “Acme Corp”. So you add structured outputs:
You now have typed inputs and outputs and higher confidence the system is doing what it should.
After running for a while, you’ll notice transient failures like 529 errors or rare cases where parsing fails. So you add retries:
Now each call has a bit more resilience. Though, in practice you might fallback to a different provider because retrying against an overloaded service returning 529s is a recipe for… another 529 error.
Eventually, you might start parsing more esoteric company names, and the model might not be good enough to recognize an entity as a company name. So you want to add RAG against known company information to help improve the extraction:
Now we have two prompts: one to create the query and one to create parse the company. And we have also introduced other parameters like k. It’s worth noting that not all of these parameters are independent. Since the retrieved documents feed into the final prompt, any changes here affect the overall performance.
You keep changing both prompts, the embedding model, k, and any parameter you can get your hands on to fix bugs as they are reported. But you’re never quite sure if your change completely fixed the issue. And you’re never quite sure if your changes broke something else. So you finally realize you need those “evals” everyone is talking about:
Data extraction tasks are amongst the easiest to evaluate because there’s a known “right” answer. But even here, we can imagine some of the complexity. First, we need to make sure that the dataset passed in is always representative of our real data. And generally: your data will shift over time as you get new users and those users start using your platform more completely. Keeping this dataset up to date is a key maintenance challenge of evals: making sure the eval measures something you actually (and still) care about.
Inevitably, some company will release a new model that’s exciting that someone will want to try. Let’s say Anthropic releases a new model. Unfortunately, your code is full of openai.chat.completions.create, which won’t exactly work for Anthropic. Your prompts might not even work well with the new model.
So you decide you need to refactor everything:
You now have typed signatures, composable modules, swappable backends, centralized retry logic, and prompt management separated from application code.
Congrats! You just built a worse version of Dspy.
Here’s the same company extraction task — with RAG, evaluation, and model swapping — in DSPy:
That’s it. Typed I/O, RAG, chain-of-thought reasoning, model-agnostic. No prompt management table. No retry decorators. No get_prompt(“extract_company_v3”).
Want to try Claude instead? One line:
No refactor. No new API client. No re-tuning prompts by hand. The optimizer can even re-optimize for the new model automatically!
Dspy packages important patterns every serious AI system ends up needing:
These are just software engineering fundamentals. Separation of concerns. Composability. Declarative interfaces. But for some reason, many good engineers either forget about these or struggle to apply them to AI systems.
So engineers do what works in the moment. Inline prompts. Copy-paste with tweaks. One-off solutions that become permanent.
But 6 months later, they are drowning in the complexity of their half-baked abstractions.
DSPy has adoption problems because it asks you to think differently before you’ve actually felt the pain of thinking the same way everyone else does.
The patterns DSPy embodies aren’t optional. If your AI system gets complex enough, you will reinvent them. The only question is whether you do it deliberately or accidentally.
You don’t have to use DSPy. But you should build like someone who understands why it exists.
If this resonated, let’s continue the conversation on X or LinkedIn!
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Read the original on skylarbpayne.com »
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HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — The war in Iran is exposing the world’s reliance on fragile fossil fuel routes, lending urgency to calls for hastening the shift to renewable energy.
Fighting has all but halted oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas, or LNG. The disruption has jolted energy markets, pushing up prices and straining import-dependent economies.
Asia, where most of the oil was headed, has been hit hardest, but the disruptions also are a strain for Europe, where policymakers are looking for ways to cut energy demand, and for Africa, which is bracing for rising fuel costs and inflation.
Unlike during previous oil shocks, renewable power is now competitive with fossil fuels in many places. More than 90% of new renewable power projects worldwide in 2024 were cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
Oil is used in many industries beyond generating electricity, such as fertilizer and plastics production. So most countries are feeling the impact, while those with more renewable power are more insulated since renewables rely on domestic resources like sun and wind, not imported fuels.
“These crises regularly occur,” said James Bowen of the Australia-based consultancy, ReMap Research. “They are a feature, not a bug, of a fossil fuel-based energy system.”
China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, face the same challenge of generating enough electricity to power growth for over a billion people. Both have expanded renewable energy, but China did so on a far larger scale despite its continued reliance on coal-fired power.
Today China leads the world in renewables. About one in 10 cars in China are electric, found the International Energy Agency. It’s still the world’s largest importer of crude oil and the biggest buyer of Iranian oil. But electrifying parts of its economy with renewables has reduced its reliance on imports.
Without that shift, China would be “far more vulnerable to supply and price shocks,” said Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. China also can rely on reserves built when prices were low and shift between using coal and oil as fuel in factories, he said.
India also has expanded its use of clean energy, especially solar power, but more slowly and with less government support for manufacturing renewable energy equipment and connecting solar to its power grid.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, India prioritized energy security by buying discounted Russian oil and boosting coal production. It also ramped up solar and wind, helping to cushion supply disruptions but not avoid them entirely, said Duttatreya Das of the think tank Ember.
“Everyone cannot be China,” Das said.
India is now facing a shortage of cooking gas. That’s driving a rush to buy induction cooktops and raising fears of restaurant shutdowns. Fertilizers and ceramics industries may also be hit.
The energy shock is familiar to wealthy countries in Europe and East Asia.
In 2022, some European governments tried to cut dependence on fossil fuels. But many soon focused on finding new fossil fuel suppliers instead, said Pauline Heinrichs, who studies climate and energy at King’s College London.
Germany rushed to build LNG terminals to replace Russian gas with mostly American fuel while the energy transition, including efforts to cut demand, slowed, she said.
Europe’s excess spending on fossil fuels since the Russia-Ukraine War amounted to about 40% of the investment needed to transition its power system to clean energy, according to a 2023 study.
“In Europe, we learned the wrong lesson,” Heinrichs said.
In import-dependent Japan, policy responses to past shocks have focused on diversifying fossil fuel imports rather than investing in domestic renewables, said Ayumi Fukakusa of Friends of the Earth Japan.
Solar and wind make up just 11% of Japan’s energy production, on a par with India but behind China’s 18%, according to Ember. Japan’s energy use is much lower than both nations.
The Iran war led the agenda during Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi ’s meeting this week with U. S. President Donald Trump. Trump, who has long urged Japan to buy more American LNG, recently called on allied nations like Japan to “step up” in assisting secure The Strait of Hormuz.
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung said the crisis could be “a good opportunity” to shift faster to renewable energy.
Poorer nations in Asia and Africa are competing with wealthy European and Asian countries and big buyers like India and China for limited gas supplies, pushing up prices.
Import-dependent economies — such as Benin and Zambia in Africa and Bangladesh and Thailand in Asia — could face some of the biggest shocks. Costly fuel makes transport and food more expensive, and many countries have limited foreign-exchange reserves, restricting their ability to pay for imports if prices stay high.
Africa may be especially exposed because many countries rely on imported oil to run their transport and supply chains.
It makes strategic sense for African countries to build their long-term energy security by investing in cleaner energy, said Kennedy Mbeva, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
But not all are opting for renewables: South Africa is considering building an LNG import terminal and new gas-fired power plants.
Others, like Ethiopia which banned gasoline and diesel fueled cars in 2024 to promote electric vehicles, are doubling down on renewables.
The real challenge is not just to withstand the next shock, but to ensure it doesn’t “derail the country’s development trajectory,” said Hanan Hassen, an analyst at Ethiopia’s government-linked think tank, the Institute of Foreign Affairs.
Increased use of renewable energy has helped shield some Asian countries from the energy shock.
Pakistan’s solar boom has preempted more than $12 billion in fossil fuel imports since 2020 and could save another $6.3 billion in 2026 at current prices, according to think tanks Renewables First and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
Vietnam’s current solar generation will help the country save hundreds of millions of dollars in potential coal and gas imports in the coming year, based on current high prices, according to the research group, Zero Carbon Analytics.
Bangladesh has closed universities to save electricity. It has limited storage capacity to absorb supply shocks, so the government started rationing fuel after a flurry of panic buying at filling stations, said Khondaker Golam Moazzem, an economist with the Centre for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka.
For now, governments must just manage shortages and control prices. Thailand has suspended petroleum exports, boosted its gas production and begun drawing on reserves.
If the conflict bleeds into April, Thailand’s finite reserves and limited budget for subsidies mean prices will shoot higher, warned Areeporn Asawinpongphan, a research fellow with the Thailand Development Research Institute.
“The time for promoting domestic renewables should have happened a long time ago,” Asawinpongphan said.
Delgado reported from Bangkok, Thailand, and Olingo reported from Nairobi, Kenya.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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