Researchers successfully build 

four-legged swarm robots

by University of Notre Dame

Swarm robots. Credit: University of Notre Dame

As a robotics engineer, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, gets her inspiration from biological systems. The collective behaviors of ants, honeybees and birds to solve problems and overcome obstacles is something researchers have developed in aerial and underwater robotics. Developing small-scale swarm robots with the capability to traverse complex terrain, however, comes with a unique set of challenges.

In research published in Science Robotics, Ozkan-Aydin presents how she was able to build multi-legged robots capable of maneuvering in challenging environments and accomplishing difficult tasks collectively, mimicking their natural-world counterparts.

"Legged robots can navigate challenging environments such as rough terrain and tight spaces, and the use of limbs offers effective body support, enables rapid maneuverability and facilitates obstacle crossing," Ozkan-Aydin said. "However, legged robots face unique mobility challenges in terrestrial environments, which results in reduced locomotor performance."

For the study, Ozkan-Aydin said, she hypothesized that a physical connection between individual robots could enhance the mobility of a terrestrial legged collective system. Individual robots performed simple or small tasks such as moving over a smooth surface or carrying a light object, but if the task was beyond the capability of the single unit, the robots physically connected to each other to form a larger multi-legged system and collectively overcome issues.

"When ants collect or transport objects, if one comes upon an obstacle, the group works collectively to overcome that obstacle. If there's a gap in the path, for example, they will form a bridge so the other ants can travel across—and that is the inspiration for this study," she said. "Through robotics we're able to gain a better understanding of the dynamics and collective behaviors of these biological systems and explore how we might be able to use this kind of technology in the future."

Using a 3D printer, Ozkan-Aydin built four-legged robots measuring 15 to 20 centimeters, or roughly 6 to 8 inches, in length. Each was equipped with a lithium polymer battery, microcontroller and three sensors—a light sensor at the front and two magnetic touch sensors at the front and back, allowing the robots to connect to one another. Four flexible legs reduced the need for additional sensors and parts and gave the robots a level of mechanical intelligence, which helped when interacting with rough or uneven terrain.

"You don't need additional sensors to detect obstacles because the flexibility in the legs helps the robot to move right past them," said Ozkan-Aydin. "They can test for gaps in a path, building a bridge with their bodies; move objects individually; or connect to move objects collectively in different types of environments, not dissimilar to ants."

Ozkan-Aydin began her research for the study in early 2020, when much of the country was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After printing each robot, she built each one and conducted her experiments at home, in her yard or at the playground with her son. The robots were tested over grass, mulch, leaves and acorns. Flat-ground experiments were conducted over particle board, and she built stairs using insulation foam. The robots were also tested over shag carpeting, and rectangular wooden blocks were glued to particle board to serve as rough terrain.

When an individual unit became stuck, a signal was sent to additional robots, which linked together to provide support to successfully traverse obstacles while working collectively.

Ozkan-Aydin says there are still improvements to be made on her design. But she expects the study's findings will inform the design of low-cost legged swarms that can adapt to unforeseen situations and perform real-world cooperative tasks such as search-and-rescue operations, collective object transport, space exploration and environmental monitoring. Her research will focus on improving the control, sensing and power capabilities of the system, which are essential for real-world locomotion and problem-solving—and she plans to use this system to explore the collective dynamics of insects such as ants and termites.

"For functional swarm systems, the battery technology needs to be improved," she said. "We need small batteries that can provide more power, ideally lasting more than 10 hours. Otherwise, using this type of system in the real world isn't sustainable." Additional limitations include the need for more sensors and more powerful motors—while keeping the size of the robots small.

"You need to think about how the robots would function in the real world, so you need to think about how much power is required, the size of the battery you use. Everything is limited so you need to make decisions with every part of the machine."

Daniel I. Goldman at the Georgia Institute of Technology co-authored the study.Collective worm and robot 'blobs' protect individuals, swarm together

More information: Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin et al, Self-reconfigurable multilegged robot swarms collectively accomplish challenging terradynamic tasks, Science Robotics (2021). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abf1628

Journal information: Science Robotics 

Provided by University of Notre Dame 

An online method to allocate tasks to robots on a team during natural disaster scenarios

by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Multi-robot task allocation for a 4-robot team performing a set of ~20 tasks – 

The top diagram shows the routes traced by 4 robots as they visited different

 tasks, as decided by simulated execution of our algorithm by each robot; each 

robot starts and ends at the same depot, marked by the yellow hexagon. The 

bottom diagram shows how our algorithm works at a particular task-planning 

instance of the robot R4 (marked by the yellow circle in the top diagram; the 

location of the peer robots at that instance are marked by the X symbol in the 

top diagram). Here, the bigraph on the left connects all robots with all available 

tasks, thus representing various potential allocation strategies. The bigraph on

 the right is the outcome of robot R4 executing our algorithm, which indicates 

that robot R4 has now selected to perform task-20 next. 

Credit: Dr. Payam Ghassemi.

Teams of robots could help users to complete numerous tasks more rapidly and efficiently, as well as keeping human agents out of harm's way during hazardous operations. In recent years, some studies have particularly explored the potential of robot swarms in assisting human agents during search-and-rescue missions; for instance, while seeking out survivors of natural disasters or delivering food and survival kits to them.

Researchers at University of Buffalo have recently developed a technique that could enhance the performance of robot teams during disaster response missions. This technique, introduced in a paper published in Elsevier's journal Robotics and Autonomous Systems, is designed to allocate tasks to different robots in a team, so that they can complete missions most effectively.

"Over the past three to four years, we have been exploring unique ways to coordinate large teams of ground robots and drones for assisting in hazard mapping and search-and-rescue operations that are critical to emergency and disaster response applications," Dr. Souma Chowdhury, one of the researchers who led the study, told Tech Xplore. "During these research explorations, we converged upon the need for an algorithm that can quickly (on the go) allocate tasks among robots in the team."

When they reviewed previous research studies, the researchers found that very few of the existing methods for multi-robot task allocation were able to handle simultaneous tasks with strict time deadlines and adapt to new unexpected tasks that may arise during a mission, while also considering the flight range, payload capacity and onboard computing constraints of real-world robots. They thus set out to develop an approach that would successfully do all these things.

"A further objective of our study was to demonstrate the capabilities of this new method on an original flood response application, where a team of drones is employed to quickly deliver or drop survival kits at specified task locations during a simulated flood scenario over a 20x30 km2 area," Dr. Chowdhury said.

In their study, Dr. Chowdhury and his colleague Dr. Payam Ghassemi considered teams of robots and the tasks they are meant to complete as two distinct sets of data. This allowed them to reduce the task of allocating problems to them, so that it primarily entailed mapping or matching pairs of elements from these two sets (i.e., a robot in the team with the task it would complete). Essentially, at any point when the model is required to make a decision, it connects every idle robot in set 1 to one of the tasks remaining in set 2, via an "edge."

"Our technique then uses an incentive function to weight these edges, with a higher weight indicating a higher relative affinity of a robot to undertake the task connected by the concerned edge," Dr. Ghassemi, the other researcher involved in the study, said. "A weighted bigraph matching problem is then solved to produce a one-to-one mapping that yields the immediate next task to be assigned to each robot. By designing the incentive function to account for the robot's global state, the robot's state relative to a task and the remaining time to complete the task, our approach becomes uniquely cognizant of robot's constraints and task deadlines."

The technique has several advantages over alternative, existing optimization-based multi-robot task allocation methods. For instance, its execution times are significantly shorter, as it can make task allocation decisions within a few hundred milliseconds.

In addition to being faster than other existing methods, the researchers' technique alleviates the need for synchronous decision-making among robots. This means that its functioning has a lower dependence on the communication networks connecting robots in a team.

Drs. Chowdhury and Ghassemi evaluated their technique in a series of tests. Remarkably, they found that it could complete the same percentage of tasks as general optimization-based methods that provide provably optimal solutions, yet its computing times were almost 1,000 times lower.

"This observation, along with our technique's ability to make asynchronous decisions, implies that our method could be readily implemented on widely available and inexpensive ground robots and drones," Dr. Chowdhury said. "Such simple robots usually present frugal computing and communication capabilities."

Interestingly, the researchers showed that their method can also be scaled up to tackle highly complex problems that involve teams with up to 100 robots that are meant to complete 1,000 tasks, while retaining its sub-second computing time performance. So far, very few teams have tried to tackle these large-scale problems using existing task allocation tools.

"The outcome of our study represents an important step forward for the multi-robotics community in terms of providing tangible evidence for the vision that very large and scalable teams of robots could revolutionize disaster response and other time sensitive operations," Dr. Chowdhury said. "Lastly, by directly considering the realities of robot's range and payload constraints, task deadlines and appearance of new tasks on the go (the latter are ubiquitous to disaster response operations), our findings take us closer to transitioning multi-robot task allocation algorithms to practice in complex large-scale operations."

In the future, the online multi-robot task allocation technique developed by this team of researchers could facilitate the large-scale deployment of drone swarms or other robot teams during complex search and rescue missions. Meanwhile, Drs. Chowdhury and Ghassemi plan to conduct further experiments to evaluate their algorithm in more realistic simulations, created using contemporary gaming engines. This could finally allow them to deploy and test their technique on real teams of drones and four-wheeled ground robots.

"The University at Buffalo, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has recently unveiled a massive state-of-the-art outdoor drone testing facility, which would be a perfect setting for conducting these experiments in real-world conditions," Dr. Chowdhury added. "On a more fundamental level, we plan to alleviate the need for handcrafting the incentive function for different types of operations and robots, and further minimize inter-robot communication needs. To this end, under a new research grant from the National Science Foundation, we are exploring how machine learning approaches can be used to learn incentive functions that will allow our algorithm to generalize over a wide range of real-world scenarios with minimal human inputs."A framework for adaptive task allocation during multi-robot missions

More information: Payam Ghassemi and Souma Chowdhury, Multi-robot task allocation in disaster response: addressing dynamic tasks with deadlines and robots with range and payload constraints, Robotics and Autonomous Systems(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2021.103905

© 2021 Science X Network

Running shoe material inspired 3D-printed design to protect buildings from impact damage

by Queensland University of Technology

Dr Tatheer Zahra was inspired by a material used in running shoes and memory foam pillows to design a 3D-printed product that could help protect buildings from collision damage and other high impact forces, equivalent to a car traveling at 60km/hr. 

Credit: QUT

A material used in running shoes and memory foam pillows has inspired the design of a 3-D-printed product that could help protect buildings from collision damage and other high impact forces, equivalent to a car traveling at 60km/hr.

Published in Smart Materials and Structures, Dr. Tatheer Zahra from the QUT Centre for Materials Science and QUT School of Civil and Environmental Engineering used off-the-shelf bioplastic to 3-D print geometric shapes that mimic the behavior of auxetic materials.

"Rather than flattening when stretched or bulging when compressed, auxetic materials expand or contract in all directions at once, which makes them highly energy-absorbent and load resistant," Dr. Zahra said.

"But existing commercial auxetic material is expensive and not locally available, so I designed geometric shapes that achieved the same behavior."

Dr. Zahra said 3-D printing auxetic geometries could potentially replace steel and fiber reinforced polymer mesh reinforcements in composites, and could also be used as a flexible and widely applicable protective wall render.

She said the energy absorption would be equivalent to a 20mm thick reinforced composite protective render over a full-scale building wall, which could potentially withstand the impact force of a car traveling at 60km/hr.

Play VIDEO

A 180g auxetic geometry resists 25kN force (approx. 2500kg) by contracting in all directions to absorb energy of around 260 J without showing damage or changes in shape when released. If scaled-up, these geometries may be useful in saving buildings and other structures from collision impact. Credit: QUT

"At scale, composites embedded with these geometries could theoretically resist high impact or shock energy caused by gas explosions, earthquakes and wind forces, and car collisions."

"In Australia, there's an estimated 2000 vehicular crashes each year. Direct building damage cost at 2.5 per cent would put the damage bill at about $38.65M/year for housing."

"Since vehicles also crash into apartments, office building, restaurants and convenience stores, this cost of building damage would probably be higher."

"Loss of life would be the highest cost."

Dr. Zahra said protection for masonry walls was especially important because it was an essential part of most commercial and residential buildings.

"Masonry is a very cheap material that is resilient to noise, heat, and has better fire protection properties compared to wood or steel, but its mortar joints weaken the overall structural strength."

Credit: QUT

"If auxetic geometries were embedded into the mortar to make protective composites, they would also be protected from microorganisms and temperatures over 60°C, and should last the design life of the structure," she said.

Proven at lab scale, Dr. Zahra now aims to test the designs on full scale masonry and concrete structures at the QUT Banyo Pilot Plant.

"The designs would be good prospects for commercialisation through additive manufacturing because the production process is flexible and materials are readily available," Dr. Zahra said.

"3-D printing would also allow us to change the material, size or design of geometric shapes to suit different structures and load requirements."

Dr. Zahra said bioplastics provided a more sustainable, low carbon emission alternative to fiber-reinforced plastic or other non-biodegradable polymers.

She said it was also more cost effective than using available auxetic fabrics, which could cost up to $400 per square meter and were not biodegradable.

Explore further2D materials offer unique stretching properties

More information: Tatheer Zahra, Behaviour of 3D Printed Re-entrant Chiral Auxetic (RCA)

 Geometries under In-Plane and Out-of-Plane Loadings, Smart Materials and Structures (2021). DOI: 10.1088/1361-665X/ac2811

Provided by Queensland University of Technology

HIS KINDA GAL

Mike Pence endorses a fringe dissident group to lead Iran, calling the leader of the group that forbids members from sexual thoughts 'an inspiration'

Bryan Metzger

Fri, October 29, 2021

Former Vice President Mike Pence and Mujahedin-e Khalq leader Maryam Rajavi. Attila Kisbenedek and Siavosh Hosseini/Getty Images

• Mike Pence endorsed the MEK, a fringe Iranian dissident group with little support in Iran.

• The group forbids members from thinking sexual thoughts, considering them a distraction from their goals.

• Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo have also endorsed the group.

Former Vice President Mike Pence offered his support on Thursday to a fringe Iranian dissident group that seeks to overthrow the Iranian government, calling the group's long-time leader, Maryam Rajavi, an "inspiration to the world."

Pence, along with former Sen. Joe Lieberman, spoke at the 2021 Free Iran Summit in Washington, DC, a conference held by an organization affiliated with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which maintains a secretive compound in Albania.

"One of the biggest lies the ruling regime has sold the world is that there's no alternative to the status quo," Pence said, referring to Iran's theocratic government, where an ayatollah wields supreme power and influences who can run for elected positions. "But there is an alternative, a well-organized, fully prepared, perfectly qualified and popularly supported alternative called the MEK."

The room then erupted in cheers, with members of the audience chanting the phrase "M-E-K" repeatedly.

"The MEK is committed to democracy, human rights, and freedom for every citizen of Iran. And it's led by an extraordinary woman. Mrs. Rajavi is an inspiration to the world," Pence declared.

The former vice president criticized the Biden administration for its "embrace" of the JCPOA, or the Iran nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew the United States in 2018. Negotiations between the US and Iran over reviving the nuclear accord remain stalled.

Pence also said Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi should be removed from office by the people of Iran and "prosecuted for crimes against humanity and genocide," referring to Raisi's involvement in the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.

A secretive group that forbids sexual thoughts

Maryam Rajavi has been the leader of the mysterious group ever since the group's previous leader, Rajavi's husband Massoud, disappeared during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, where the group was formerly headquartered.

The group was delisted as a terrorist group by the US in 2012 after a lobbying campaign, despite killing American citizens in Iran.

The MEK has been labeled a "cult-like group" and does not appear to have significant support within the country it aims to lead. That's because the MEK was protected for 20 years by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein - who waged a brutal 8-year war against Iran - and has reportedly collaborated with Israel to kill Iranian nuclear scientists and received funding from Iran's leading regional foe, Saudi Arabia.

Both the New York Times and BBC report that the group forbids members from thinking sexual thoughts, participating in "self-criticism rituals" and record any such thoughts in a notebook.

"We had a little notebook, and if we had any sexual moments we should write them down. For example, 'Today, in the morning, I had an erection,'" a former member of the group told the BBC.

"You can't have a personal life when you're struggling for a cause," a current member told the Times.

The MEK is also well-funded, paying American political figures like former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak at their events. And prominent Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Advisor John Bolton, have also spoken at MEK events or endorsed the group.

It is unclear whether Pence was paid to speak to the group, and a spokesperson for Pence did not respond to a request for comment.

Brazil scientists test frozen jaguar semen to help species
 

DIANE JEANTET and TATIANA POLLASTRI
Fri, October 29, 2021,

JUNDIAI, Brazil (AP) — Brazilian and American scientists on Thursday tranquilized a wild-born female jaguar now living in a protected area in Sao Paulo state. They're hoping the 110-pound feline named Bianca could make history for the second time in two years.

In 2019, Bianca gave birth to the first jaguar cub ever born from artificial insemination. Now, the 8-year-old could once again advance the cause of preserving her species. That is, if all goes according to plan and she becomes pregnant using semen that is frozen.

Scientists say frozen semen would be easy to transport, and so help ensure genetic diversity of jaguars whose populations are increasingly fragmented by habitat destruction, according to Lindsey Vansandt, a theriogenologist — a specialist in veterinary reproductive medicine — at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden.

“The population sort of becomes smaller and smaller, and then you get inbreeding which has lots of bad consequences,” Vansandt told The Associated Press moments after performing the procedure on an unconscious Bianca atop a surgery table.

“If we can take sperm from one male and inseminate a female from another location, we can keep their gene flow moving and keep the population more healthy," Vansandt said.

Wildlife experts from the Cincinnati Zoo, the Federal University of Mato Grosso and the environmental organization Mata Ciliar have for years developed their insemination program for the Western Hemisphere's largest feline. They work with individuals rescued from habitat loss in the Amazon rainforest, Cerrado savanna and Pantanal wetlands, all of which have suffered a surge of deforestation and fires in recent years.

Some jaguars badly injured by blazes in the Pantanal last year required transport to specialized facilities for care. Others either died or were displaced.

“Look what happened in the Pantanal, the Cerrado,” said Cristina Adania, a veterinarian and coordinator of Mata Ciliar. "They are being killed before we even get to treat them, so something has to be done.”

This year, a study published by wild cat conservation group Panthera, the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul and partners estimated that almost 1,500 jaguars were killed or displaced by fire and habitat loss in Brazil's Amazon from 2016 to 2019.

Displaced jaguars are unlikely to thrive in new environments, which may be the range of another territorial individual, according to Panthera. Plus, they are unfamiliar with where best to find prey, which can leave them hunting livestock, putting them in ranchers' crosshairs.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List classifies jaguars as “near threatened” — a grade above vulnerable — though their population is on the decline and their habitat “severely fragmented.”

Bianca was still a cub in the Amazon when she was rescued and delivered to Mata Ciliar. Like some of the wild-born cats living at the Brazilian Center for the Conservation of Neotropical Felines in Jundiai, she can't be reintroduced to the wild, Adania said. Another female jaguar at the facility, named Tabatinga, was also artificially inseminated on Thursday.

Unfrozen jaguar semen only stays good for a few hours, Vansandt said. Frozen semen can be used for years, but typically has a lower success rate for felines than with humans.

If Bianca's case is successful, it would remove the strain and stress of transporting carnivores that weigh as much as 300 pounds to mate in person. Even when a jaguar is transported, there's no guarantee it will get along with its would-be mate, said Adania.

“This is good for genetic diversity, but also towards that larger goal of increasing the number of jaguars,” said Vansandt. "The dream is to increase the numbers to a stable population.”

___ Jeantet reported from Rio de Janeiro. AP reporter David Biller contributed from Rio de Janeiro.

Veterinarians intubate a jaguar in preparation for an artificial insemination procedure at the Mata Ciliar Association conservation center, in Jundiai, Brazil, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. According to the environmental organization, the fertility program intends to develop a reproduction system to be tested on captive jaguars and later bring it to wild felines whose habitats are increasingly under threat from fires and deforestation. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Brazil Jaguar BreedingA jaguar that was rescued from illegal captivity walks on a tree trunk at the Mata Ciliar Association conservation center, in Jundiai, Brazil, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. The association treats animals that have been victims of fires, environmental disasters or traffickers, and rehabilitates the wild animals in order to release them to their natural habitat. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)More

G-20 will back a global minimum corporate tax, a win for Biden, U.S. officials 
Chris Megerian
Fri, October 29, 2021,

President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden take part in a ceremony with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi in Rome on Friday, the eve of the start of the G-20 summit. (Gregorio Borgia / Associated Press)

World leaders are expected on Saturday to endorse plans for a global minimum tax on corporations during the first day of the G-20 summit, senior Biden administration officials said.

The policy is intended to prevent businesses from skipping from country to country in search of lower tax rates, an approach that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called a "race to the bottom."

"It’s a game changer for American workers, taxpayers and businesses," said one of the senior officials, who requested anonymity to speak before the announcement. "In our judgment, this is more than just a tax deal. It's a reshaping of the rules of the global economy."

The deal will buoy President Biden, who has been pushing for such an agreement since taking office. It's unclear if he'll be able to push the policy through a sharply divided Congress. Republicans are opposed to any tax increases, and some moderate Democrats are wary of such measures.

Biden will have a busy first day at the summit, which brings together world leaders to discuss economic and other issues. The president will meet with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, with whom Biden held a pre-summit sidebar Friday, to discuss how to proceed with negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

Although President Obama reached an international deal to prevent Tehran from building a nuclear bomb, President Trump withdrew from the pact.

Biden campaigned on reentering the agreement, and talks are scheduled to begin in November in Vienna.

Dutch, Canadian leaders hope for climate progress at G-20


Netherlands CanadaCanada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, right, and Dutch caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte, greet prior to a meeting in The Hague, Netherlands, Friday, Oct. 29, 2021. 

(AP Photo/Peter Dejong)More

Fri, October 29, 2021, 10:30 AM·2 min read

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Canada and the Netherlands are counting on the weekend Group of 20 summit in Rome to make significant progress toward clinching an acceptable deal at the United Nations climate meeting starting immediately afterward.

After a bilateral meeting Friday with his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte in The Hague, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the timing of the G-20 summit in Rome could help the climate talks known as COP26 that start in Glasgow on Sunday.

“The fact that the G-20 is immediately before COP26 allows some of the major countries around the world responsible for significant emissions to actually meet and work in advance of hopefully what will be a very successful COP,” meeting, Trudeau said.

At the moment, plans from nations around the world submitted ahead of COP26 would still fall far short of the headline goal set in Paris six years ago: to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times. The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since that era.

Rutte estimated that plans combined so far ahead of the climate summit that runs Oct. 31-Nov. 12 in Glasgow would still mean a rise of 2.7 C.

“So there is still a gap. And there is still a lot we need to do,” he said.

Despite the daunting challenge, Rutte said he had two reasons for optimism: "One is that there’s no way not to do this because then we collectively have such a big problem and everybody understands,” he said.

“Secondly, because it is such a big opportunity — the huge opportunity we see in this country for creating so many new jobs and new economic prosperity at the same time. Building a clean country,” Rutte said.

US Democratic governors to participate in U.N. climate talks




KATHLEEN RONAYNE
Fri, October 29, 2021

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — U.S. governors want a seat at the table as international leaders prepare to gather in Scotland at a critical moment for global efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions and slow the planet's temperature rise.

At least a half dozen state governors — all Democrats — plan to attend parts of the two-week United Nations' climate change conference in Glasgow, known as COP26. Though states aren't official parties to talks, governors hold significant sway over the United States' approach to tackling climate change by setting targets for reducing carbon emissions and transitioning to renewable energy.

Take California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged to halt the sale of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035, a move aimed at accelerating the nation's transition to electric vehicles. Or Washington, where Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee backed legislation requiring the state's electricity be carbon-neutral by 2030.

“Governors can do a lot," said Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institute. “When they're talking to people on the sidelines and sharing policies and ideas and helping to demonstrate the commitment of the U.S. as a whole, there's quite a bit that they can do."

Governors slated to attend are Inslee, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Hawaii Gov. David Ige, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown. All six governors are part of the U.S. Climate Alliance, an effort started by Inslee and former Govs. Jerry Brown of California and Andrew Cuomo of New York in 2017 as the Trump administration backed away from U.S. climate goals. The alliance plans to announce “ambitious" new climate commitments in Scotland, though it hasn't shared specifics.

Newsom announced Friday he would participate virtually due to unspecified family obligations. California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis will instead lead the state's delegation, which includes more than a dozen lawmakers and top administration officials.

“All eyes will be on Glasgow, with the world asking the question: ‘What are we doing to do about (climate change)?’” Kounalakis said. “And California has answers.”

Other states sending officials include Maryland and Massachusetts, which have Republican governors.

Few U.S. states are as influential as California, which is home to nearly 40 million people and would be the world's fifth-largest economy if it were its own nation. It's led the nation in vehicle emissions standards, was the first state to launch a carbon pollution credit program known as cap-and-trade and has set some of the nation's most ambitious goals on reducing emissions.

It's the nation's seventh-largest oil producing state, though Newsom officials say the state has six times as many jobs in clean energy as it does in the oil industry. Newsom has made strides to lower demand and eventually end production, but some environmental groups say he's got to act significantly faster.

Several other state leaders heading to Glasgow also come from places that rely on oil and gas production as a key piece of the economy. New Mexico's Lujan Grisham travels to the climate conference as she juggles competing pressures from environmental activists and the fossil fuel industry while running for reelection in 2022.

New Mexico is one of the top oil states. Amid surging oil output, Lujan Grisham has pushed to rein in leaks and emissions of excess natural gas by the industry and signed legislation that mandates and incentivizes New Mexico’s own transition to zero-emissions electricity by 2045.

“We — as a state, as a nation, as a planet — must go further by pursuing bold, equitable and just climate solutions. I am looking forward to this significant opportunity for collaboration and action at the global level,” Lujan Grisham said in a recent statement.

In March, Lujan Grisham wrote President Joe Biden, asking to exempt New Mexico from an executive order halting gas and oil production on federal land. Oil field royalties, taxes and lease sales account for more than one-quarter of the state's general fund budget, underwriting spending on public schools, roads and public safety.

Edwards of Louisiana, a state that's suffered significant flooding and damage from hurricanes, plans to promote his state as a hub for clean energy projects. He's set a goal to cut the state's net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, though his administration is still putting together a strategy document for reaching that goal.

“No state in our nation is more affected by climate change than Louisiana, but it’s also true that no state is better positioned to be part of the solution to the problems facing our world," he said recently.

The governors will participate on panels through the U.S. Climate Alliance alongside members of the Biden administration. They'll also participate alongside 65 subnational governments in announcing “dozens" of new commitments on Nov. 7. The panel will also focus on politics that can “turbocharge greenhouse gas emissions reductions," according to an alliance press release.

“Governors and mayors around the world do not believe we should rely just on our federal governments," Inslee, of Washington, said during a Thursday news conference.

It's critical for U.S. and world leaders to move from planning to implementation of aggressive climate strategies, said Katelyn Sutter, senior manager for U.S. climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.

“We need policy to back up pledges to reduce emissions," she said. “That’s where a state like California, and now Washington and others that have momentum moving forward, can really be impactful."

As for California, Newsom administration officials said they hope to demonstrate that tackling the climate crisis can be good for the economy and that pollution targets should be made with historically underserved communities in mind. The administration recently proposed banning new oil wells within 3,200 feet (975 meters) of homes, schools and hospitals, and Newsom has directed the state's air regulator to develop a plan to end oil production by 2045.

“We can help push national governments to increase their ambition," said Lauren Sanchez, Newsom’s senior adviser for climate.

___

This story has been corrected to say the Republican-led states sending representatives are Maryland and Massachusetts, not Maryland and North Carolina.

___

Associated Press writers Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, N.M., Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., and John O'Connor in Springfield, Ill., contributed reporting.

COPOUT26

Scientists express doubt that Glasgow climate change conference will be successful

David Knowles

·Senior Editor

Thu, October 28, 2021

If there is a consensus about the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, it is that it represents, in the words of U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, the “last best hope” for the world to keep the worst consequences of global warming at bay.

But for many of the scientists whose work has informed the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in recent years, the chances that an agreement will be reached to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels seem dim, at best. With the currently insufficient actions from developed countries to limit greenhouse gas emissions and fund developing nations in that pursuit, temperatures are forecast to smash through that threshold. And a growing body of research, some conducted by scientists who spoke with Yahoo News’ “The Climate Crisis Podcast,” shows that a cascade of dire consequences is all but certain to follow.

“Well, it is a critical time. You know, this is COP26, which means there have been 25 of these things already,” said Peter Gleick, a climate scientist, referring to the conference’s acronym. “We’re way behind the curve in acting on what we have known for many, many years to be the reality, which is that humans are changing the climate, that those changes are going to be bad, that they’re going to accelerate as we move forward if we don’t get emissions under control, and that we're running out of time to prevent the worst-case scenarios from occurring.”

A co-founder of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, Calif., Gleick has spent decades warning that rising temperatures have begun to wreak havoc with the water cycle, including more severe drought, deadly flash flooding and crop instability.

People in Milan, Italy, demonstrate for climate justice in advance of COP26 on Oct. 2. (Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters)

“A lot of us are looking forward to COP26 as an opportunity to make some real progress, but of course we’re worried that COP26 will turn out to be like COP25 and COP24 and COP23 beforehand, before us, and not really produce the kinds of changes that we know are necessary,” Gleick said, referring to previous U.N. climate change conferences that have inspired good intentions but not substantial enough actions from the wealthier countries that produce most of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

As far as the scientific community is concerned, there’s little mystery about what’s responsible for climate change. A review published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters looked at 88,128 scientific papers on climate change published between 2012 and 2020 and concluded that 99.9 percent of the studies agreed that human beings were responsible for the current spike in global temperatures.

For UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, the only real suspense heading into Glasgow concerns whether world leaders will forge a consensus on how to act on what, scientifically speaking, is an open-and-shut case.

The Windy Fire blazes through Sequoia National Forest near California Hot Springs, Calif. (David McNew/Getty Images)

“We know how to solve this problem. We know the kinds of specific things we need to be doing even to fix the problem,” Swain told “The Climate Crisis Podcast.” “But that will involve a significant amount of social and economic, you know, inertia, that needs to shift pretty quickly. And that’s hard to do.”

A lead author of one of the IPCC reports that have synthesized the research on climate change and helped guide policymakers on how to keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh has not been encouraged by the actions taken since COP21 in 2015, when many nations signed on to the Paris Agreement.

“The United Nations actually just issued a report in advance of the Glasgow negotiations that are coming up, basically tracking where the countries of the world are relative to the the Paris Agreement goals, and that puts the world on a trajectory that’s a lot above two and a half degrees [Celsius] of warming, and approaching three,” Diffenbaugh said.

This year, a string of deadly extreme weather events in the U.S. showed many Americans that the threat from climate change is real. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, weather-related disasters in 2021 have already totaled over $100 billion in damages and killed 538 people in the U.S.

President Biden at the White House on Tuesday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Yet a Yahoo News poll released last week finds that while 50 percent of Americans now view climate change as an “emergency,” there is a partisan divide on the question. Though 78 percent of Democrats see climate change as “an existential threat that requires major legislation,” just 24 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents do.

At the same time, armed with more advanced computer modeling and thousands of new studies to back them up, climate scientists have grown increasingly confident linking those events to climate change.

Researchers like Benjamin Strauss, president and CEO of Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes climate science, have long warned exactly what rising temperatures will mean for life on Earth. In 2012, Strauss testified before Congress on the number of homes in the U.S. that would be put at risk due to rising seas. He knows firsthand that domestic political gridlock on climate change could weigh heavily on Glasgow.

“I know that President Biden and the administration really want — as represented by John Kerry in the talks — to be ambitious and to encourage other nations of the world to be ambitious,” Strauss said. “And it’s going to be really hard to do if in the United States we don’t have some form of legislation or policy either in place or, you know, imminent, that’s going to be a big step in our own effort.”

While Congress continues to debate the legislation that will determine how aggressively the U.S. will go about the task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has already killed the most powerful weapon in the president’s plan to do so: the Clean Electricity Performance Program. 

People wade through a flooded street in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in July. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP via Getty Images)

The failure to enact an agenda that would be seen as restoring American climate leadership on the world stage comes as a stark reminder that any promises of future U.S. emissions cuts will require action in Congress. Yet the inward focus of many Republicans and some moderate Democrats like Manchin worries climate experts. Klaus Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute who served for more than a decade on the New York City Panel of Climate Change, stresses that for new Glasgow commitments to have real impact, they’ll need to look beyond America’s borders.

“We’ve got to have a global plan that works both on the mitigation side, namely to reduce greenhouse gases as quickly as possible and get that financed internationally,” Jacob said, “and not just the main emitters — nations like the U.S., China, Brazil or Europe, and maybe India. But we also have to address it on the adaptation side, and just think about nations like Bangladesh or Vietnam, that have tens and hundreds of millions of people that by the end of the century will have to be moved.”

For many climate scientists, the mood ahead of Glasgow can best be described as one of grim realism. Despite that, many of those who spoke to Yahoo News also expressed a measure of optimism that human beings can still significantly slow climate change.

“We’re still where we were five or 10 years ago. You know, there’s a lot of pledges, there’s a lot of commitments that even then aren’t enough to solve the problem, but we aren’t really on track to meet a lot of those pledges that we’d previously made,” Swain said. “That's kind of the world that we live in right now, which is this tension between the fact that this is at a fundamental level a solvable problem, but we’ve so far not taken it seriously enough. I liken it more to being on a train, not a runaway train where the brakes don't work, but a train where the brakes are perfectly functional, but the conductor is just actively choosing not to apply them. So if we choose to apply the brakes, the train will slow down and come to a halt. But so far, we’re still just thinking about tapping the brakes lightly. It's not enough.”

Ben Adler contributed reporting to this story.

What Big Oil knew about climate change, 

in its own words


Benjamin Franta, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Stanford University
Fri, October 29, 2021

The oil industry was aware of the risks of climate change decades ago. 

Barry Lewis/InPictures via Getty Images

Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change – and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it.

I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ‘70s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it wasn’t so clear.

What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. The industry’s own words, as my research found, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world.

On Oct. 28, 2021, a Congressional subcommittee questioned executives from Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute about industry efforts to downplay the role of fossil fuels in climate change. Exxon CEO Darren Woods told lawmakers that his company’s public statements “are and have always been truthful” and that the company “does not spread disinformation regarding climate change.”

Here’s what corporate documents from the past six decades show.

Surprising discoveries

At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware – now a museum and archive – I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.

1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles’ first single, before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before the first modern aluminum can was ever made. It was decades before I was born. What else was out there?

In Wyoming, I found another speech at the university archives in Laramie – this one from 1965, and from an oil executive himself. That year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization for the U.S. oil industry, the group’s president, Frank Ikard, mentioning a report called “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” that had been published just a few days before by President Lyndon Johnson’s team of scientific advisers.

“The substance of the report,” Ikard told the industry audience, “is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.” He continued that “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate.”

Ikard noted that the report had found that a “nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”

Transportation is now the leading source of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., followed by electricity. David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that before San Francisco’s Summer of Love, before Woodstock, the peak of the '60s counterculture and all that stuff that seemed ancient history to me, the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences.

Secret research revealed the risks ahead

While I traveled the country, other researchers were hard at work too. And the documents they found were in some ways even more shocking.

By the late 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had formed a secret committee called the “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.

In 1980, the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University, John Laurmann, to brief them on the state of climate science. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann’s presentation, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be “barely noticeable” by 2005, but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.

A slide from John Laurmann’s presentation to the American Petroleum Institute’s climate change task force in 1980, warning of globally catastrophic effects from continued fossil fuel use.

Exxon had a secretive research program too. In 1981, one of its managers, Roger Cohen, sent an internal memo observing that the company’s long-term business plans could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).”

The next year, Exxon completed a comprehensive, 40-page internal report on climate change, which predicted almost exactly the amount of global warming we’ve seen, as well as sea level rise, drought and more. According to the front page of the report, it was “given wide circulation to Exxon management” but was “not to be distributed externally.”

And Exxon did keep it secret: We know of the report’s existence only because investigative journalists at Inside Climate News uncovered it in 2015.

A figure from Exxon’s internal climate change report from 1982, predicting how much carbon dioxide would build up from fossil fuels and how much global warming that would cause through the 21st century unless action was taken. Exxon’s projection has been remarkably accurate.

Other oil companies knew the effects their products were having on the planet too. In 1986, the Dutch oil company Shell finished an internal report nearly 100 pages long, predicting that global warming from fossil fuels would cause changes that would be “the greatest in recorded history,” including “destructive floods,” abandonment of entire countries and even forced migration around the world. That report was stamped “CONFIDENTIAL” and only brought to light in 2018 by Jelmer Mommers, a Dutch journalist.

In October 2021, I and two French colleagues published another study showing through company documents and interviews how the Paris-based oil major Total was also aware of global warming’s catastrophic potential as early as the 1970s. Despite this awareness, we found that Total then worked with Exxon to spread doubt about climate change.
Big Oil’s PR pivot

These companies had a choice.

Back in 1979, Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding global warming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from fossil fuels and instead focused on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major climate crisis could be avoided.

But the industry didn’t pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute climate science, block fossil fuel controls and keep their products flowing.

We know about it through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now beginning to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called the Global Climate Coalition – but it wasn’t an environmental group like the name suggests; instead, it worked to sow doubt about climate change and lobbied lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s.

For example, in 1997, the Global Climate Coalition’s chairman, William O'Keefe, who was also an executive vice president for the American Petroleum Institute, wrote in the Washington Post that “Climate scientists don’t say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth,” contradicting what the industry had known for decades. The fossil fuel industry also funded think tanks and biased studies that helped slow progress to a crawl.

Today, most oil companies shy away from denying climate science outright, but they continue to fight fossil fuel controls and promote themselves as clean energy leaders even though they still put the vast majority of their investments into fossil fuels. As I write this, climate legislation is again being blocked in Congress by a lawmaker with close ties to the fossil fuel industry.

People around the world, meanwhile, are experiencing the effects of global warming: weird weather, shifting seasons, extreme heat waves and even wildfires like they’ve never seen before.

Will the world experience the global catastrophe that the oil companies predicted years before I was born? That depends on what we do now, with our slice of history.

This article was updated Oct. 28, 2021, with quotes from the hearing.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Benjamin Franta, Stanford University.

Read more:

4 key issues to watch as world leaders prepare for the Glasgow climate summit


A court ruling on Shell’s climate impact and votes against Exxon and Chevron add pressure, but it’s the market that will drive oil giants to change


Climate change is relentless: Seemingly small shifts have big consequences

Benjamin Franta has served as a consulting expert for climate change lawsuits in the US and internationally. His work has been supported by the Stanford University Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, the Climate Social Science Network, and the Center for Climate Integrity.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Ecuador suspends mountain-climbing after deadly avalanche

Glaciers are seen on Ecuador's Chimborazo volcano 

MARTIN BERNETTI AFP/File

Issued on: 30/10/2021 -
Quito (AFP)

Ecuador suspended climbing on five mountains Friday due to bad weather, after an avalanche killed three climbers and left three others missing.

Climbers will not be able to access the snow-capped peaks of Cayambe, Cotopaxi, Illiniza Sur, Antisana and Chimborazo for at least a week, the Environment Ministry said.

An avalanche last Sunday struck a group of 16 mountaineers ascending Chimborazo, a volcano which is the highest peak in the country, leaving three dead and three missing.

The restrictions will remain in force until the weather improves, the ministry added.

Ecuador begins a five-day holiday on Saturday, the longest of the year, during which more than a milion people are ikely to travel, according to estimates.