As age-verification laws continue to dismantle the adult industry—and determine the future of free speech on the internet—a Utah lawmaker proposed a bill this week that would enforce a tax on porn sites that operate within the state.

Introduced by state senator Calvin Musselman, a Republican, the bill would impose a 7 percent tax on total receipts “from sales, distributions, memberships, subscriptions, performances, and content amounting to material harmful to minors that is produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based” in Utah. If passed, the bill would go into effect in May and would also require adult sites to pay a $500 annual fee to the State Tax Commission. Per the legislation, the money made from the tax will be used by Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services to provide more mental health support for teens.

Musselman did not respond to a request for comment.

A new age of American conservatism commands the political arena, and more US lawmakers are calling for additional restrictions on adult content. In September, Alabama became the first state to impose a porn tax on adult entertainment companies (10 percent) following the passage of age-verification mandates, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content. Pennsylvania lawmakers are also eyeing a bill that would tax consumers an additional 10 percent on “subscriptions to and one-time purchases from online adult content platforms,” despite already requiring them to pay a 6 percent sales and use tax for the purchase of digital products, two state senators wrote in a memo in October. Other states have flirted with the idea of a porn tax in the past. In 2019, Arizona state senator Gail Griffin, a Republican, proposed taxing adult content distributors to help fund the border wall, a key priority during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. So far, 25 US states have passed a form of age verification.

Although efforts to criminalize participants in the sex work industry have been ongoing for years—with new regulations unfolding at a moment of heightened online surveillance and censorship—targeted taxes have failed to gain widespread approval because the legality around such laws are up for debate.

“This kind of porn tax is blatantly unconstitutional,” says Evelyn Douek, an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School. “It singles out a particular type of protected speech for disfavored treatment, purely because the legislature doesn’t like it—that’s exactly what the First Amendment is designed to protect against. Utah may not like porn, but as the Supreme Court affirmed only last year, adults have a fully protected right to access it.”

Utah, Alabama, and Pennsylvania are among the 16 states that have adopted resolutions declaring porn a public health crisis. “We realize this is a bold assertion not everyone will agree on, but it’s the full-fledged truth,” Utah governor Gary Herbert tweeted in 2016 after signing the resolution. One of Utah’s earliest statewide responses to the proliferation of adult content happened in 2001, when it became the first state to create an office for sexually explicit issues by hiring an obscenity and pornography complaints ombudsman. The position—dubbed the “porn czar”—was terminated in 2017.

“Age restriction is a very complex subject that brings with it data privacy concerns and the potential for uneven and inconsistent application for different digital platforms,” Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub, told WIRED in a previous conversation. In November, the company urged Google, Microsoft, and Apple to enact device-based verification in their app stores and across their operating systems. “We have seen several states and countries try to impose platform-level age verification requirements, and they have all failed to adequately protect children.” To comply with the new age gate mandates, Pornhub has currently blocked access to users in 23 states.

Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.

The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.

A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)

“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that’s the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”

The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.

Global temperature calculations—like the ones used to determine the hottest years on record—usually only capture measurements taken at the ocean’s surface. (The study finds that overall sea surface temperatures in 2025 were slightly lower than they were in 2024, which is on record as the hottest year since modern records began. Some meteorological phenomena, like El Niño events, can also raise sea surface temperatures in certain regions, which can cause the overall ocean to absorb slightly less heat in a given year. This helps to explain why there was such a big jump in added ocean heat content between 2025, which developed a weak La Niña at the end of the year, and 2024, which came at the end of a strong El Niño year.) While sea surface temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution, thanks to our use of fossil fuels, these measurements don’t provide a full picture of how climate change is affecting the oceans.

“If the whole world was covered by a shallow ocean that was only a couple feet deep, it would warm up more or less at the same speed as the land,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and a coauthor of the study. “But because so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures [than those on land].”

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