Amazon Will Pay Gig Workers $61.7 Million for Stealing Their Tips

A Federal Trade Commission investigation found that Amazon baited drivers with promised earnings, and then secretly slashed wages by pocketing tips.

By Lauren Kaori Gurley
2.2.21



Amazon has agreed to pay $61.7 million to settle allegations that it stole its Amazon Flex drivers tips over a two-and-a-half year period, the Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday.

"Today, the FTC is sanctioning Amazon.com for expanding its business empire by cheating its workers," FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra wrote in a statement. "Amazon stole nearly one-third of drivers’ tips to pad its own bottom line."

The $61.7 million represents the total amount that Amazon allegedly withheld until it became aware of an investigation by a Federal Trade Commission in 2019.

“While we disagree that the historical way we reported pay to drivers was unclear, we added additional clarity in 2019 and are pleased to put this matter behind us,” Deborah Bass, a Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard. “Flex delivery partners play an important role in serving customers every day, which is why they earn among the best in the industry at over $25 per hour on average.”

Amazon Flex Drivers, who are independent contractors, deliver packages and groceries for Amazon and Whole Foods in more than 50 U.S. cities. As independent contractors, workers provide their own vehicles and do not receive healthcare benefits, sick pay, overtime pay, worker's compensation, or other benefits guaranteed to Amazon employees.

When Amazon launched its Flex program in 2016, the company regularly advertised that independent contractors who deliver packages in its Flex program would receive "100% of the tips" they earned and would be paid between $18 and $25 an hour, according to the FTC complaint. But shortly after it launched, Amazon quietly changed course and began slashing its payments to drivers and cutting into their tips to make it appear as if it was still paying the promised hourly rate, according to the FTC.

"This theft did not go unnoticed by Amazon’s drivers, many of whom expressed anger and confusion to the company," Chopra wrote. "But, rather than coming clean, Amazon took elaborate steps to mislead its drivers and conceal its theft, sending them canned responses that repeated the company’s lies."



According to the FTC complaint, drivers who complained about their earnings received formulaic email responses—falsely asserting that Amazon had continued to pay drivers 100 percent of their tips. Amazon used this model until 2019, when the company received notice of the FTC's investigation. At that time, it began to give drivers a breakdown of both their pay and tips.

In addition to the $61,710,583 Amazon must pay to compensate shorted drivers, the company will be prohibited from misleading drivers about their expected pay, the percentage of their tips that will go to them, and what qualifies as a tip.

Do you have a tip to share about Amazon Flex? We’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch with the author at Lauren.gurley@vice.com or privately on Signal (201)-897-2109.

Last year, Motherboard reported that Amazon was running a social media monitoring program to spy on the private social media groups of its Amazon Flex drivers in the United States and Europe, and collect data on their posts. The company promised to discontinue the program following Motherboard's report.

Amazon isn't the first tech company to come under heat for pocketing its gig workers tips, though it may be the most profitable. Last year, the food delivery platform DoorDash paid $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it had stolen drivers’ tips and misled customers to believe their tip money was going to drivers, and Instacart came under federal scrutiny for its tipping policies.

Amazon Will Pay Gig Workers $61.7 Million for Stealing Their Tips (vice.com)

An All-White Panel on German TV Decided Racism Wasn’t a Big Deal

The show is facing a backlash after one guest had described how

dressing up in blackface as Jimi Hendrix at a costume party had helped him understand how black people felt.

By Tim Hume
2.2.21

THE LAST RESORT. PHOTO: WDR/ MAX KOHR

German TV personalities have apologised for taking part in a controversial chat show discussion of racism, in which an all-white panel dismissed calls to rename a meat sauce that uses a pejorative name for Roma people.

The discussion on WDR’s “The Last Resort” — which originally aired last year but was rebroadcast on Friday night — featured guests dismissing calls to rename “Zigeunersoße,” or “gypsy sauce.” The show has sparked a huge social media backlash, fuelling a wider discussion about how race is debated in 


In response to the controversy, German broadcaster WDR issued a statement saying the criticism was warranted, and that the panel should have included people who were directly affected by racism.

“With such a sensitive topic, people who bring other perspectives with them, and/or are directly affected by it, should definitely have been involved,” read the statement from the producers of the show, which bills itself as a forum for celebrity guests to air controversial opinions.




“We will learn from it and do better.”

In the broadcast, the four celebrities discussed the push to rename “Zigeunersoße,” the name by which a popular spicy sauce of tomato paste, paprika, bell peppers and onions has been known for more than a century.

The term “Zigeuner” is viewed as a derogatory slur by the Roma community, who have repeatedly called for the name of the sauce to be changed. Last year, those calls gathered momentum as the Black Lives Matter movement triggered a global reckoning around racism, and in August, the German food giant Knorr said it was renaming its version of the product “Paprika Sauce Hungarian Style.”

But during the discussion on “The Last Resort,” when asked whether the end of Zigeunersoße was “a necessary step,” the four guests — author Micky Beisenherz, entertainer Thomas Gottschalk, actress Janine Kunze and pop singer Jürgen Milski — all answered no.

Gottschalk, digging himself deeper, went on to explain how he had once dressed up in blackface as Jimi Hendrix at a party, and it had been "a kind of awakening experience" that made him understand for the first time how black people felt.

While the episode attracted little attention when it first aired, the repeat airing generated a massive backlash on social media, with viewers slamming the guests for their thoughtless and tone-deaf defence of racist terms, and the monocultural makeup of the panel.

RACISM
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PALLAVI PUNDIR11.1.21


“This is by far the most ignorant, arrogant and discriminatory thing I've seen on German TV for a long time!” wrote one Twitter user. “Four white people who explain how exhausting and silly it is to deal with criticism of racism.”

Germany’s Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency condemned the “unspeakable statements,” while SPD politician Saskia Esken tweeted that she was “lost for words.”

“This is really [something] to be ashamed of,” she wrote.

Roma advocate Zeljko Jovanovic, director of the Open Society Foundations’ Roma Initiative, told VICE World News that of the various words used to describe the Roma community across Europe, the German term was the most offensive, because of its close association with the Nazi genocide of the Roma.

“No other slur is so strongly associated with the genocidal experience of our people,” he said.

“This is why when the racial slur is used in German language… it resonates deeply. We as Roma, we feel it in our bones, in the bones of our ancestors, as something that is horrifying.”

He said that while some Roma in parts of Europe used terms like gypsy or tzigane to refer to themselves, “this is far from being an adequate rationale for all of us being called this way.”

“You don’t say to somebody that he or she is a gypsy, tzigane or Zigeuner because you respect the person,” he said.

“When people want to humiliate us, consider us as moral unequals, or subordinate us, they communicate in this way. Then they want to respect us and regard us as moral equals, they call us the way we call ourselves, which in our own language is Roma.”

The controversy has prompted a wave of apologies and vows to do better from those who appeared on the show, with host Steffen Hallaschka writing on Facebook that he despised racism and was devastated to learn the discussion had been received by so many as “massively hurtful and racially discriminatory.”

“I understand well that many have long been tired of this kind of careless everyday racism,” he wrote. “The bitter lesson: In terms of society, we are obviously not yet where we thought we were the year after ‘Black Lives Matter’.”

'Bad Date’ Reporting Tool for Sex Workers to Launch in Canada

The first province-wide database of its kind in Canada will allow sex workers in B.C. to report violent encounters and access information about alleged offenders.

By Anya Zoledziowski
TORONTO, CA
2.2.21

Community groups in B.C. are building a “bad date” database that will allow sex workers to report violent encounters and access information about alleged predators.

Experts say the “bad date reporting system,” the first of its kind in Canada, is built for and by sex workers who already rely on informal networks to spread information about predators.

According to Alison Clancey, the executive director of SWAN Vancouver, a nonprofit supporting migrant and immigrant sex workers involved in the project, there is a “100 percent chance” SWAN clients won’t go to police if they experience violence.

Canada Just Opened Its First Shelter Exclusively for Sex Workers
6.11.20

“Criminal justice is woefully inadequate,” Clancey said. “Reporting to police is just not an option for these women.” VICE World News previously reported how authorities detain and deport migrant sex workers under the guise of anti-trafficking raids, which makes them unlikely to report to police.

The newly announced system will be developed over the next three years, with a focus on making it as accessible as possible. Considerations include language barriers, and access to in-person resources for people without the internet or smartphones.

Heather Paddison, a community health educator with Positive Living North, an advocacy group that covers northern B.C., said the tool will not only help sex workers bypass the RCMP—it will ideally help them protect themselves from temporary workers at mines, pipelines, and other resource extraction sites who are known for violently targeting Indigenous women.

“Someone could be working in Fort St. John, then sent out to camp closer to Fort Nelson, travelling all over this oil and gas region, and there’s no way at all to track a predator right now,” Paddison said.

A centralized list that includes locations of the incident as well as detailed information about the (perpetrator) will change that, she said.

Organizations in Vancouver already have various bad date reporting systems. SWAN, for example, offers an online abuser alert tool in multiple languages because it caters to migrants specifically, Clancey said. Sex workers file a report that outlines who the abuser was—a client, police, or bylaw officer, among others—as well as the type of abuse, Clancey said. Then, notifications go out to other women. 

A Man Threatened Her. Police Said Death Threats Come With Being a Sex Worker
6.10.20


But there is no resource in Canada that connects all sex workers, with various accessibility needs, across a massive geographical area. In the U.K., National Ugly Mugs offers a country-wide database that allows sex workers to report incidents and receive alerts about offenders.

An anonymous group in the province and Law Foundation of B.C. are funding the $1 million project, which will include input from more than 20 sex work advocacy group.

Follow Anya Zoledziowski on Twitter.

Novavax submits COVID-19 vaccine for authorization in Canada

Feb 1 (Reuters) - Novavax Inc has submitted its COVID-19 vaccine candidate to the Canadian health regulator for emergency-use authorization after the pharmaceutical company said last week its vaccine was 89% effective in a UK trial.

The vaccine candidate will be reviewed in real-time once the Canadian government accepts the application, which was submitted by the company on Friday, according to a notice on Health Canada's website. https://bit.ly/3oCuFTr

Real-time reviews could speed up the process of approving a successful vaccine by allowing researchers to submit findings in real-time, even before the final trial data is ready.

Novavax has an agreement with the Government of Canada to supply up to 76 million doses of its vaccine.

A large late-stage trial in the United States and Mexico that began in December is also underway.

Vaccines from Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc have already been authorized for emergency use in Canada.

Last week, Novavax said its vaccine was 89.3% effective in preventing COVID-19 in a trial conducted in the United Kingdom, and was nearly as effective in protecting against the more highly contagious variant first discovered in the island nation.

 (Reporting by Dania Nadeem in Bengaluru, Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)

Canada-based coronavirus vaccine maker working to get government attention

© Nathan Denette/THE CANADIAN PRESS A health-care worker prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a UHN COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Toronto on Thursday, January 7, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

As Canada hits bumps in the road with international manufacturers of both approved coronavirus vaccines, one vaccine manufacturer says it hopes the federal government will take more interest in its made-in-Canada coronavirus vaccine.

Read more: Moderna joins Pfizer in cutting back on vaccine deliveries to Canada next week

The vaccine, however, isn't ready yet.

“We’re in our Phase 1 trial. We will be able to complete all of our clinical trials this year and we will be able to roll out vaccines to Canadians as soon as we have emergency authorization from Health Canada,” said Brad Sorenson, CEO of Providence Therapeutics, in an interview with The West Block’s Mercedes Stephenson.

Still, he says he’s still working to get the government’s attention.

“What we are trying to do now is get the government to engage us so that we can start stockpiling and building vaccines on spec, anticipating that approval.”

Read more: How can we get more vaccines faster? Experts say ‘it’s just not that easy’

Without a home-grown vaccine producer, Canada has hit multiple hurdles with its vaccine rollout.

Pfizer recently announced plans to scale up its European manufacturing capacity – a move that has led to Canada receiving no vaccines during the last week of January, and fewer deliveries in early February.

On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced Moderna was cutting back February shipments of its vaccine to multiple countries – including Canada. The company will ship only about three-quarters of the expected supply next week, cutting Canada’s next shipment by more than 50,000 doses.

Trudeau did pledge, however, that Canada is "still on track to receive four million doses" of Pfizer's vaccine "before the end of March."

The delivery delays are proving confusing for medical professionals who are trying to anticipate when people can expect to receive their vaccines.

“It's upsetting and it's confusing, not only to health-care providers, but to Canadians in general,” said Dr. Ann Collins, president of the Canadian Medical Association, in an interview.

“It is distressing to hear that there's been a decrease in the anticipated dose delivery numbers in the next coming weeks.”

Read more: Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose coronavirus shot appears less effective than others

While the government continues to assure Canadians that the country remains on track with its vaccination timeline, Collins said she’s beginning to have doubts.

“We keep hearing messaging from the prime minister that things are on track, everything will be still as it should be by the end of March. And of course, that doesn't really add up,” Collins said.

“So that is distressing to health-care providers who are looking to this vaccine to help move us out of the pandemic, these individuals that are already stressed from the system under which they've been working the last 10 months.”

A key difficultly Canada has been facing in its quest to inoculate the population against the deadly virus is the fact that Canada lacks the capacity to produce the approved vaccines within its own borders.

That’s because Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines both use mRNA technology, and while Canada has multiple vaccine manufacturing facilities, none are currently capable of producing an mRNA-based vaccine.

The mRNA technology works by delivering genetic instructions for our cells to make viral proteins themselves. The body then begins to train itself to fight these proteins, building its immunity to the same protein found in COVID-19.

Read more: Canada has approved 2 coronavirus vaccines. How are other candidates progressing?

Calgary-based Providence Therapeutics’ vaccine candidate is also mRNA based. In a bid to get started on shoring up capacity for coronavirus vaccine production within Canada’s borders, the company has partnered with Northern RNA Inc. to start to build manufacturing infrastructure.

Still, Sorenson said that he’s having a hard time getting support from the Canadian government.

“I guess size matters, they were the first out of the gate,” said Sorenson, reflecting on why Canada has focused its early efforts on Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines.

“The prime minister mentioned that he's cast a wide net. He's secured vaccines from basically any company that he could. But now we see as the results are rolling out that the mRNA technology is clearly superior … so with that new information, that new context, we hope that the federal government will take a look at what capacity we have for messenger RNA within Canada.”

He said that his company has reached the point where they plan to send an unsolicited vaccine proposal to the federal government.

“We're going to be sending a proposal, unsolicited, to the federal government detailing what we can do for Canadians. And so we hope that we'll get some feedback from that proposal by next week and that we will be able to move this along,” Sorenson said.

“We're going to send it straight to the top and see if we can't engage them in a strategic discussion.”

VIDEOS

Canada-based coronavirus vaccine maker working to get government attention (msn.com)

Exports empty Canada's canola bins, driving prices to near records

CANOLA;IS MONANTO GMO RAPESEED

By Rod Nickel

© Reuters/Todd Korol A deer feeds in a Western Canadian canola field in full bloom in 2019

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - Canada, the world's biggest canola grower, is running short of the oilseed six months before the next harvest, with strong export demand driving prices to nearly 13-year highs last week.

Supplies of major commodity crops are dwindling worldwide as buyers hoard food supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic. China is loading up on grains and oilseeds that it can feed to animals, raising food inflation and causing some nations to restrict exports of their crops.

Canola, known for its bright yellow flowers, is crushed mainly for oil to make French fries, mayonnaise and salad dressings. Its meal is also fed to livestock like pigs.

To Manitoba farmer Bill Craddock, it seemed like a good decision in autumn to sell all of his canola at high prices, only to see them spike even more this month. Still, Craddock profited off last week's rally by trading small numbers of futures contracts.

"I'm entering my 51st year of trading and the market is as volatile as I ever remember," Craddock said. "To try and make money from it, you have to stand your ground, and be right, or get killed."

The roots of Canada's canola shortage trace back to the autumn, when farmers reaped their smallest harvest in five years. Strong export demand for canola seed and oil then drove a late-summer rally that prompted farmers to sell more crop earlier than usual.

Those early deliveries to commercial handlers have helped Canada export nearly 33% more canola year-to-date over last year, according to government data. Top buyer China more than doubled purchases to 1.2 million tonnes as of December, despite continuing restrictions against Canadian exporters Richardson International and Viterra.

Other exporters can still ship Canadian canola, helping meet China's voracious demand for animal feed as its hog herd recovers from a deadly disease.

With the market soaring, canola importers locked in their purchase prices under terms of their sales agreements last week, fearing even higher prices, said Tony Tryhuk, manager of commodity trading at RBC. That forced Canadian exporters on the other ends of those sales to buy canola futures at high prices to fill them, likely registering big losses in the process, he said.

ICE canola futures retreated late in the week to less than C$700 per tonne, remaining close to levels unseen since the record 2008 commodity boom.

Strong canola oil demand has also spurred Canadian crush plants to process brisk volumes domestically, further straining supplies.

Both crush plants and exporters may already be short canola to fulfil orders, a Canadian exporter said.

Archer-Daniels-Midland Co, Bunge Ltd and Richardson, major crushers, declined to comment. Cargill Inc did not respond.

The canola rally is not necessarily over, Tryhuk said. Bigger than usual futures positions for November delivery indicate that seed exporters and crushers are already worried about the shortage continuing through the next harvest, he said.

Statistics Canada will estimate Canadian crop stockpiles on Friday in a report likely to garner more attention than usual.

With prices so high, Canadian farmers are likely to plant this spring a 6% bigger canola crop, said LeftField Commodity Research analyst Chuck Penner, in a presentation.

(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Carbon capture technology has been around for decades — here's why it hasn't taken off

While trees and other plants can remove some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, most climate change experts agree we can't plant enough, fast enough, to do the job alone.

Carbon capture technology has been around for decades, and is used to strip carbon out of factory emissions as well as remove carbon that's already in the air.
But it's expensive, and until the cost of releasing carbon into the air rises, there's little economic incentive to use it.

© Provided by CNBC People tend to vegetables growing in a field as emission rises from cooling towers at a coal-fired power station in Tongling, Anhui province, China, on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2019.

Elon Musk is going to pay $100 million towards a prize to come up with the best carbon capture technology. (Or so he tweets. Details are scarce so far.)

The maverick tech CEO's promise is not particularly notable for its generosity. With a net worth of over $200 billion, $100 million is 0.05% of Musk's wealth.

But still, the richest person in the world's tweet brings attention to an often-overlooked technology that has been around since the 1970s but has mostly been relegated to niche corners of the energy community.

"Mr. Musk's announcement reflects a maturation in the private sector around climate change and investment," Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, tells CNBC via email. "As in the past, Mr. Musk's announcement has shaken up the gumball machine."
Why not just plant more trees?

One popular reaction to Musk's tweet was that he would be better to spend his money planting trees. Trees, like other plants, consume carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis and release oxygen. There is an international initiative, 1t.org, which aims to restore and grow one trillion trees by 2030 to mitigate climate change. The trillion trees campaign is run by the World Economic Forum and funded by the Marc R. Benioff Foundation, an eponymous philanthropic effort funded by the billionaire Salesforce CEO.

But even 1t.org knows planting trees is not a silver bullet.

"Addressing climate change will require investment in technologies that help to limit future emissions, such as electric vehicles, and also the drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere. Nature-based solutions can help with both of these, but we will need thousands of solutions in combination," says Tom Crowther, a tenure-track professor of Global Ecosystem Ecology at ETH Zürich and the chief scientific advisor to the United Nation's Trillion Tree Campaign. "There is huge potential for direct carbon capture technology as part of a diverse climate plan," Crowther tells CNBC from Switzerland via email.

So does Musk. In response to one tweet recommending tree-planting, Musk said trees "are part of the solution, but require lots of fresh water & land. We may need something that's ultra-large-scale industrial in 10 to 20 years."

In that vein, here's a look at where carbon capture, utilization and storage or sequestration (CCUS), which is often shortened to "carbon capture," technology stands now and why it has, thus far, not been more broadly deployed.
Carbon capture from factory emissions: Where it stands

There are currently 21 large-scale CCUS commercial projects around the globe where carbon dioxide is taken out of factory emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental energy organization. The first one was set up in 1972.

The earliest CCUS technology was used for enhanced oil recovery, meaning the carbon dioxide is pumped into an oil field to help oil companies retrieve more oil from the ground, Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative and author of the book "Carbon Capture," tells CNBC.

It wasn't until the 1980s that carbon capture technology was studied for climate mitigation efforts, but even then, it was "mainly lone wolves," Herzog says. By the 1990s, "activity really ramped up," he says.

One example in the United States is in Decatur, Ill., where the food processing giant Archer Daniels Midland Company launched a carbon capture and storage project in 2017. It has the capacity to take 1.1 million tons of carbon per year out of the emissions released by a corn processing factory, and stores that carbon a mile and a half underground.

© Provided by CNBC One part of the carbon capture project at Archer Daniels Midland Company in Decatur, Illinois.

For factory carbon-capture, emissions are routed through a vessel with a liquid solvent which essentially absorbs the carbon dioxide. From there, the solvent has to be heated up in a second tower — called a "stripper" or "regenerator" — to remove the CO2, where it's then routed for underground storage. The solvent can then be re-used in the first vessel or tower, Herzog says.

If the storing is done carefully, "you should be okay," Herzog says. "We don't have experience on the scale we want to go to," Herzog says, "but we've demonstrated you could do it correctly."

The U.S. Department of Energy is on the case, "developing models that simulate the flow of stored carbon dioxide, to help understand and predict chemical changes and effects of increased pressure that may occur."

Carbon capture from the air: Where it stands

In terms of reversing global climate change, there's already been too much carbon released into the atmosphere for us not to try and capture carbon and store it, says Klaus Lackner, the director of Center for Negative Carbon Emissions and professor at Arizona State University.

"The question of whether you want to store or not to store [carbon] was a very good question in 1980," Lackner tells CNBC. "But you needed to have this discussion 30, 40 years ago because back then you still had a chance to stop the train before we collide with something."

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is tracked as in parts per million, or PPM. As of December, atmospheric carbon dioxide stands at 414.02 ppm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"We started the industrial revolution with 280 parts per million in the atmosphere," Lackner tells CNBC. "By now we have 415 [ppm], and we are going up 2.5 ppm a year at this moment." The consequences of that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already dire and will get worse. "The oceans have started to rise, hurricanes have gotten way worse, climate has become more extreme, and this will only get worse over the next decade," Lackner says.

The only choice, Lackner says, is to "draw down" the atmospheric carbon dioxide — or to suffer unknown, devastating consequences.

Capturing carbon from the air, not from a factory smokestack, is called "direct air capture," and there are currently 15 direct air capture plants in Europe, the United States and Canada, according to the IEA. "Carbon removal is expected to play a key role in the transition to a net-zero energy system," the IEA says, but currently it is a very expensive technology.

Direct air capture is "very expensive because the CO2 in the atmosphere is only .04%," Herzog tells CNBC, and the technical process of removing carbon dioxide from a gas gets more expensive the lower the concentration of the carbon dioxide gets. "But it is very seductive. A lot of people jumped on this," he says.

Lackner sees it as a necessity. "In the end, I see CO2 as a waste management problem. We have for two centuries simply dumped the waste from energy production — which is carbon dioxide — in the atmosphere and not thought about it any further, and we are gradually waking up to the fact that that's not acceptable," Lackner says.

The future of carbon capture technology

The technology exists to capture carbon and there is a grave need for climate change to be mitigated. So why isn't it being used everywhere already?

The problem is economics, says Herzog. "It's cheaper to put [carbon dioxide] in the atmosphere. It is cheaper to let it go up the smokestack than put this chemical plant on the back of the smokestack to remove it," Herzog says. "Who is going to pay for that?"

To change that reality, there must be economic costs to releasing carbon dioxide pollution into the atmosphere.

"The best capture technology will reduce these costs, but it will never be zero. Hence, even the best carbon capture technology will be useless if the world is not willing to put a price on carbon," Berend Smit, a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley, tells CNBC by email. His research focuses on finding the optimal material for carbon capture.

In the meantime, scientists and researchers are working to make current carbon capture technologies better.

"Over the past 10 years, there are a number of innovations and improvements to enable us to save more energy and cost up to 70% less for new carbon capture processes," Paitoon (P.T.) Tontiwachwuthikul, a professor of industrial and process systems engineering at the Canadian Academy of Engineering and a co-founder of the Clean Energy Technologies Research Institute University of Regina, tells CNBC by email. "These include novel solvents (and their mixtures) as well as new process hardware items (e.g. new columns, catalysts, etc.)."

Smit is also working on how to use a kind of sponge "with a strong affinity for carbon dioxide," he says. "Hence if we flow air through the sponge, the CO2 gets removed. Once the material is saturated with CO2, we need to heat it, pure CO2 comes out, which we can then store. The sponge is empty and we can start over again."

© Provided by CNBC An artist's impression of a mechanical tree farm.

Lackner has developed a free-standing device to take carbon dioxide out of the air. "Everybody's a machine out there right now, they are sucking carbon dioxide or pushing carbon dioxide with fans and blowers ... we think that the wind alone is good enough to move the air around and our design aims to just be passively standing in the wind, just like a tree." While the technology has been demonstrated on campus, it's still in its infancy.

Fundamentally, it all comes down to money. "You need regulatory frameworks where basically if you want to dig up carbon, you better show that you put an equal amount away," Lackner says. "If you have a cheaper way by all means do it first. if you don't have a cheaper way, you have no excuse because this one will work."

 USask professor creates pig plotted map for locating wild boars on Google Earth

Duration: 01:59 

Using GPS tracking systems, trail cams, and first-person sightings, Ryan Brook and the Canadian Wild Pig Research Project have developed a virtual wild pig population map.

 

GameStop saga makes

Wall Street an issue for Biden team

Updated Mon., February 1, 2021

WASHINGTON — The drama surrounding the trading in shares of GameStop, AMC Entertainment, Blackberry and other beaten-down companies has suddenly thrust Wall Street near the top of a crowded list of issues that President Joe Biden's regulatory team needs to tackle early in its term.

A number of wealthy institutions on Wall Street bet the stocks of these companies would fall, only to be thwarted by small investors who banded together on social media and sent the prices higher. Many of the small investors trade on online platforms such as Robinhood, which suddenly restricted the buying of shares of GameStop and other companies, sparking outrage from the social media crowd and politicians alike.

Biden's financial regulators — especially the Securities and Exchange Commission — will likely have to address questions about a number of Wall Street practices, such as short-selling and whether the business model of online trading platforms is as investor-friendly as the companies say it is. The airing of complex issues will come in addition to anticipated efforts by regulators at the SEC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies to overturn Trump-era rules deemed more favourable to the financial industry than to consumers or retail investors.

Biden is naming as the new SEC chairman Gary Gensler, who set a record as a tough regulator heading the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the financial crisis. The SEC took a deregulatory tilt under chair Jay Clayton, a former Wall Street lawyer appointed by President Donald Trump.

The GameStop saga has drawn expressions of outrage over Wall Street's treatment of the “little guy" from lawmakers from both parties. The populist strain recalls the anger fueling the Occupy Wall Street movement over the big bank bailouts that Congress brought in response to the financial crisis.

The uproar is occurring at a time when the small investor appears to be winning. Some prominent hedge funds are reeling with losses due to the collective efforts of the online community. At least two of them have closed out January's trading with losses of more than 40%, according to reports by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

Even so, when Robinhood took the step of preventing investors from buying shares of GameStop and a dozen other companies last week, some in Washington immediately called for action by regulators. Robinhood said it acted to meet regulatory capital requirements. Politicians and critics said Robinhood changed the rules of the road midway through, in favour of Wall Street firms who were still able to trade these shares.

Both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee plan to hold hearings on the GameStop controversy.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., who heads the Financial Services subcommittee on investor protection, entrepreneurship and capital markets, said lawmakers will examine, for example, whether Robinhood may have blocked customers from buying the stocks at the behest of other market players with competing interests — who are also Robinhood clients.

Another issue to be aired is that of short-selling, where firms bet that a company's stock price will drop. Lawmakers could look at the need for fuller disclosure requirements for short sellers, as now prevail in Europe and Britain, Sherman suggested.

“There is a casino. To the extent there’s a casino, it ought to be fair,” he said in a telephone interview. “The capital markets need to be less of a casino and more of a place where people ... can invest in companies that are leading the new economy.”

Also under Washington’s microscope will be the business model of companies like Robinhood. At issue is the common practice in the securities markets of payment for order flow, in which Wall Street trading firms pay companies like Robinhood to send their customers' orders to those firms for execution.

In addition, much as Facebook and other tech giants provide users' personal data to online advertisers, platforms like Robinhood give the trading firms data on stocks its users are buying and selling.

Last year, Robinhood agreed to pay $65 to settle SEC charges of providing misleading or incomplete information on its order-flow payments, its largest revenue source.

The practice of firms like Robinhood lending money to customers to make trades, which can fuel trading frenzies by small investors, also will be scrutinized. Questions also will be raised on whether the SEC's existing rules on market manipulation are sufficient.

Wall Street brokerages, big banks and other financial companies were already expecting the Biden administration to be tougher on them than the Trump regime.

Regulators largely took a hands-off approach to the financial industry under the Trump administration, with some exceptions like Wells Fargo. Fines became a fraction of what they used to be, and rules and regulations designed to curtail abusive practices like payday lending or lending discrimination were repealed or significantly rolled back, to the dismay of consumer advocates.

There were already signs that Biden was planning to do more to look out for consumers. He fired Trump's head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathy Kraninger, and nominated consumer advocate Rohit Chopra to replace her.

Chopra, appointed by Trump to the Federal Trade Commission, was one of two Democrats on the five-member commission. While in the minority, Chopra used his perch to try to push the FTC to be more aggressive in going after bad behaviour , particularly in the technology industry.

"I think his purpose (as CFPB Director) will be two-fold: more deterrence and to make consumers whole,” said Ori Lev, a partner at Mayer Brown and a former official at the CFPB.

“I think the people the president has nominated ... will have a more pro-consumer attitude, and a bit more antagonistic toward Wall Street,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who is set to become chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

____

Sweet reported from Charlotte

ESG Risks Top the List of Near-Term Concerns for Bank Executives

Yalman Onaran
Updated Mon, February 1, 2021

ESG Risks Top the List of Near-Term Concerns for Bank Executives

(Bloomberg) -- Risks related to climate change and social issues will intensify the most in the next two years, finance executives predicted in a survey, and firms will have to find ways to cope.

Environmental, social and governance issues topped the list of risk managers’ concerns in a Deloitte poll to be released on Monday, followed by cybersecurity and credit matters. More than half of the 57 firms surveyed were banks while the rest were in insurers, asset managers and other financial-services providers.

“For financial firms, it’s harder to adapt to changes in the ESG environment because it’s not only about their own carbon footprint or other impact, they also have to look at their clients’ footprint, social impact,” said J.H. Caldwell, head of the financial services risk advisory group at Deloitte.

Among the first things new U.S. President Joe Biden did was rejoin the Paris climate agreement. Last week, the main banking regulator froze a rule that would require firms to do business with companies such as oil drillers and gun manufacturers that they might avoid because of perceived reputational risk. The largest banks have committed billions of dollars to help racial minorities after nationwide protests last year rekindled awareness of systemic oppression.

Looking at the potential impact of regulatory and supervisory changes in the next two years, risk managers predicted cybersecurity rules are most concerning, with ESG coming in fourth. That probably indicates regulators are closer to coming up with stronger rules on cybersecurity than on environmental issues, especially in the U.S., said Caldwell.

U.K. and France supervisors are already including climate-change scenarios in their big-bank stress tests this year. The European Banking Authority is working on a dedicated climate-related test. The U.S. Federal Reserve has just formed a committee to supervise banks on climate matters.

A global financial crisis and further pandemics could emerge as macro trends affecting the industry in the next two years, risk managers also predicted in Deloitte’s survey, which was conducted between March and September last year. Credit-quality deterioration followed those two trends closely.

“Especially in the first half of last year, there was a lot of uncertainty about the economy, which still lingers somewhat,” said Caldwell. “And the pandemic has made people realize we might get other pandemics in the future.”

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

Originally published Mon, February 1, 2021