Arjun Mehta
Arjun covers the technologies rewiring the global economy — chips, cables, AI and the labs behind them — and what the science actually shows.
Articles by Arjun Mehta
Data Centres Are Now an Electricity Story, and the Grid Is the Constraint
The International Energy Agency puts data-centre power use at around 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 and expects it to more than double by 2030. The binding limit on artificial intelligence is turning out to be transformers, transmission lines and permits.
Europe's Carbon Border Tax Started Charging This Year. Here Is Who Pays.
After a two-year reporting phase, the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its definitive period on 1 January 2026. Importers of steel, cement, aluminium, fertiliser, electricity and hydrogen now owe for the carbon in what they bring in.
Half the World's Power Capacity Is Renewable. That Is Not the Same as Half Its Electricity
IRENA counts machines; the IEA counts output. The two datasets describe the same energy transition and produce very different-looking numbers, because a gigawatt is a ceiling and a terawatt-hour is a result.
The Paris Agreement's Compliance Committee Is Non-Punitive by Treaty Design — and in 2025 It Opened Consideration of 171 Parties at Once
Article 15 requires an "expert-based and facilitative" committee that functions in a manner that is "transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive". Its annual report shows what that looks like in practice: hundreds of missing documents, a round of notifications, and a guide to where help can be found.
The Outer Space Treaty bars national appropriation of outer space: what a satellite operator actually holds is a frequency assignment recorded by the ITU, and a seven-year clock to use it
The 1967 treaty states that outer space “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”, and no instrument consulted here confers title to a point 35,786 km above the equator. What exists instead is a queue run under the ITU Radio Regulations, in which priority is fixed by the date a filing is received and lost if a satellite is not brought into use in time.
An air crash report is not a verdict, and the rules that govern it forbid it from becoming one
The international rulebook for accident investigation, now in its thirteenth edition, states that apportioning blame or liability is not the purpose of the exercise. The organisation most people assume conducts these inquiries almost never does.
The IPCC Does Not Carry Out Any Research. The Document Everyone Quotes Is Agreed Line by Line With Member Governments in the Room.
In the Panel's own procedures, “approval”, “adoption” and “acceptance” are three different acts with three defined meanings. The thousands of assessment pages beneath the famous summary are accepted, not approved — they never go through the line-by-line stage at all.
A Kyoto Protocol Amendment Set Targets for 2013 to 2020. It Entered Into Force on 31 December 2020.
The Doha Amendment created a second round of legally binding emission targets for the years 2013 through 2020, and became law on the last day of that period. The delay was not an accident of politics so much as a mechanical consequence of how the Kyoto Protocol wrote its own amendment clause.
World Time Has Been Adjusted Twenty-Seven Times Since 1972. In 2022 the Metrology Conference Voted to Loosen the Rule Behind Them.
Leap seconds keep Coordinated Universal Time within 0.9 seconds of the Earth's rotation, and every one of them has been an insertion rather than a deletion. In 2022 the General Conference on Weights and Measures resolved to raise that tolerance in or before 2035 without deciding what the new value should be, and asked for a plan to be drafted for its 2026 meeting.
Every Country on Earth Joined the Ozone Treaty. Twenty-Four Have Not Joined Its Climate Amendment.
The Montreal Protocol is the rarest object in international law: a treaty with 198 parties and a measurable result in the sky above Antarctica. In 2016 it was rewritten to control a family of gases that do nothing to the ozone layer at all — and that amendment, nine years after adoption, still has fewer parties than the treaty it amends.
There Is No Such Thing as a World Patent. Nearly 276,000 Applications a Year Are Mistaken for One.
The Patent Cooperation Treaty produces a document called an international application, filed at a single office and effective in more than 150 countries at once. It grants nothing. What it actually buys is eighteen extra months, a search report nobody is obliged to follow, and an irreversible publication of the invention at month eighteen.
Every Phone, Plane and Satellite Obeys One Rulebook. It Is Rewritten Once Every Four Years.
The Radio Regulations — a four-volume treaty covering 8.3 kilohertz to 3,000 gigahertz — mark their 120th anniversary this year, and the edition currently in force took effect on 1 January 2025. The next revision will be negotiated in Shanghai between 18 October and 12 November 2027. This is how governments divide the invisible resource that everything wireless depends on.
Almost Everyone Now Lives Under a Mobile Signal. Two Billion Still Do Not Use It
The ITU's latest edition nowcasts 74 per cent of humanity online, yet only about 312 million people live beyond any mobile broadband network. The distance between coverage and use is now the harder problem.
Eight Datasets, One Number: How the World Settles on the Global Temperature
The WMO put 2025 at 1.44 C above the 1850-1900 average by consolidating eight independent records. The method, and the long-term warming level - typically over 20 years - that the Paris 1.5 C goal actually refers to, explain most of the confusion.