On June 1, 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, the governors of New York, Washington, and California announced that they were forming the US Climate Alliance and committed to reducing their states’ greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28%. During Trump’s first term, the alliance made good on its promise to reduce state emissions, widened access to clean energy, and created clean energy jobs.

The group’s work didn’t stop while President Joe Biden was in office, but now that Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Agreement again, the alliance is ready to leverage its collective power against climate rollbacks. Tech Brew talked with Casey Katims, USCA’s executive director, about Trump’s second term, climate-focused executive orders, and what’s next for the group.

What are the US Climate Alliance’s plans for the second Trump administration? How is this going to be different from his first term?

Governors understand that the climate crisis demands action, and that the crisis doesn’t pause just because there’s a change in federal administration. So, governors across the US Climate Alliance are committed to advancing climate solutions and continuing to press forward toward our climate goals and climate targets because it is a scientific imperative, regardless of what happens at the federal level.

Our coalition got its start seven and a half years ago when President Trump yanked the US out of the Paris agreement the last time. So we were quite literally built for this moment.

Keep reading here.—TC

“Pretty freaking scary” is how Clint Kneip remembers one of his first interactions with an autonomous vehicle.

At the time, Kneip was with the California Highway Patrol, from which he retired in 2020 as the captain commander of the law enforcement agency’s commercial vehicle section.

What a difference time and tech advancements can make: Kneip is now a big enough believer in AVs that he’s on the other side of the equation, serving as the head of first responder engagement for autonomous trucking company Gatik AI. Kneip acts as a liaison between the company and the police officers, dispatchers, emergency medical services workers, firefighters, and other first responders who are increasingly likely to encounter a driverless vehicle in their line of work.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started requiring companies to report crash data related to AVs and advanced driver assistance systems in June 2021. For vehicles with higher levels of autonomy, there were 165 crashes reported in 2022, 288 in 2023, and 543 in 2024, per NHTSA.

“A lot of first responders across the US have never interacted with an autonomous vehicle. They’ve never even seen one,” Kneip told Tech Brew. “The only ones that come up [are] in the news when something bad happens. An AV got hit, or they caused some type of damage, or they didn’t interact well with the first responder. They never hear about all the good things that they’re doing.”

Keep reading here.—JG

At a global gathering formerly known as the AI Safety Summit last week, Vice President J.D. Vance declared that “the AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety.”

It was a somewhat predictable sentiment from an administration that was already widely expected to put no-holds-barred innovation ahead of regulatory concerns. But a similar attitude seems to be fashionable right now even outside Washington, whether because of the Trump administration’s cues or not.

News items from the past week or so point to a fast-evolving AI safety space.

• The UK government renamed its AI Safety Institute last week, dropping the “Safety” in favor of “Security.” While the announcement insisted that the work wouldn’t change, Politico noted several language shifts on the institute’s website that matched themes in Vance’s speech.
• The Trump administration is set to gut the US’s own AI Safety Institute, housed within the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Axios first reported this week. Firings will also target staff at Chips for America, the initiative to ramp up domestic semiconductor production.

Keep reading here.—PK

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

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