A record high number of dead trees are found as Oregon copes with an extreme drought

December 20, 2022
JULIANA KIM


Tree health specialists scan forests, looking for fir trees that have turned red, which indicates that they are dead.The U.S. Forest Service

Flying over Oregon's woodlands, tree health specialist Danny DePinte was stunned by what he saw: a stretch of dead fir that seemed to go on and on.

"As we continued to fly along, it just kept going. It didn't stop for miles and miles," DePinte, who conducts research in the Pacific Northwest region for the U.S. Forest Service, told NPR.

Since 1947, the U.S. has been conducting annual aerial surveys across the country to monitor the health of trees. Flying up to 2,000 feet in the air, observers scan terrain in a grid-like pattern, analyzing about 30 acres per second, DePinte said. With a tablet, a pen and a trained eye, they are able to spot and diagnose unhealthy trees based on their color, posture and fullness.

Climate Change Is Killing Trees And Causing Power Outages

This year, tree health specialists expected to see some mortality in Oregon following the state's recent droughts, but many were still shocked by the sheer number of trees that fell ill.

Preliminary figures indicate that 1.1 million acres showed fir trees with some signs of dying — almost double the previous all-time high for the state since the survey began 75 years ago. It's led some researchers to call the season of historic die-offs as "firmageddon."

Tree mortality is not inherently concerning, but some forest landowners describe the unprecedented number of dying trees, which were largely concentrated in southwest Oregon, as a warning sign.

"It is an indicator that we need to pay attention and do what we can to manage our forests to remain healthy," Mike Barsotti, the communications chair of the Oregon Tree Farms System, told NPR.
Severe droughts appear to be the main culprit for die-offs

Tree deaths in Oregon have been an issue over the past decade, and it's been especially prominent in recent years.

In 2019, about 470,000 acres contained dead trees, DePinte said. Last year, Oregon researchers identified at least 147,000 acres with fir tree deaths — though the survey was not complete because of summer wildfires, according to DePinte.

Still, the 2021 aerial survey report said that Oregon's forests, which make up nearly half the state, have been "pushed to the limit due to climate change."

There is still a lot to understand about all the factors that cause high levels of tree mortality, but DePinte said it's clear that Oregon's extreme drought has been a major stressor on the state's trees, making them more vulnerable to insects and diseases.

Study finds Western megadrought is the worst in 1,200 years

And it's not just Oregon.

A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change earlier this year found that the Western U.S. has been experiencing a "megadrought," a multidecade dry spell unlike any other period in more than a millennium — in part because of greenhouse gas emissions warming the world.

Alongside threatening trees, those dry conditions also have been hurting crops and wildlife.
Dead trees spark questions about the future of Oregon's forests

There is still a lot to understand about the widespread loss, according to DePinte.

"It's not apocalyptic," he said. "But when forests change in a dramatic way, it's noteworthy."

In response to the ongoing heat, some landowners have begun planting new species of trees that are able to better withstand dry conditions, according to Oregon Tree Farm Systems' Barsotti. Others have begun embracing thinner, less-crowded forests, which can bolster tree health.

"Trees are an important part of who we are, how we live," said Barsotti, who is also a forest landowner in northwest Oregon. "We need to work to have our forests as resilient and sustainable as possible."

Why suppressing wildfires may be making the Western fire crisis worse

While there's concern that the extreme heat and die-offs may reshape Oregon's woodlands, dead trees also play an important role in nature. They create habitats for wildlife and produce material that — once decomposed — becomes soil. They may also lead to forests that can better withstand droughts.

"The trees that were left are maybe in a better location, and that's how they got to survive through this drought," he said. "Or maybe they have some sort of special genetics that makes them more drought-resistant."

DePinte said only time will tell how Oregon's forests will fare. He and other tree health specialists across the country are expected to convene and share their aerial survey findings during a national meeting early next year.

Suncor faces charges related to injury of offshore Nfld. worker: regulator

The Canadian Press

Newfoundland and Labrador's offshore oil and gas regulator says it has laid charges against Suncor Energy Inc. for alleged offenses related to the injury of a worker on the company's Terra Nova offshore platform.

The Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board says the charges are related to the injury of a worker on Dec. 29, 2019, who fell from a ladder while conducting gas testing.

The board alleges that Suncor failed to ensure all workers had a properly attached safety harnesses, failed to ensure all employees followed protection equipment rules, and failed to produce a compliant report.

It says the first appearance on the matter is scheduled for Jan. 25, 2023 at Provincial Court in St. John's.

Suncor is already under heightened scrutiny for its safety record after at least 12 workers have died at its oilsands operations in northern Alberta since 2014.

Former CEO Mark Little pledged earlier this year to address the problem, including with a independent safety review, but he stepped down from the company a day after another Suncor contract worker died in July. 

Shutting huge copper project shows why miners worry about starting them

Thomas Biesheuvel, Bloomberg News

Panama’s decision to close a giant copper mine couldn’t come at a worse time for the market, and highlights the risk of investing big in some projects.

Just when the world faces a looming shortage of copper — a metal essential for the green revolution — Panama on Thursday said it will halt commercial operations at the Cobre Panamá operated by Canada’s First Quantum Minerals Ltd. It followed the breakdown of tax talks and is a rare move among Latin American countries.

The mine, which is one of the world’s newest and can produce about 300,000 tons a year of copper, cost at least US$10 billion to build.

The industry has long feared resource nationalism, where assets can be stripped from them in extreme cases. Investing can be a huge risk when billions of dollars must often be spent up to a decade before a mine turns a profit. The fear of losing assets or having to renegotiate terms with governments has led the sector to shy away from what are often perceived as the riskiest jurisdictions.

For example, mining heavyweight BHP Group for years only invested in what it saw as safe countries, while rich deposits remained undeveloped in the riskiest places.

In the short term, halting output at Cobre Panama will add to already tight supplies. In recent weeks both Glencore Plc and Anglo American Plc have lowered copper production goals for the coming years. But the impact on companies’ willingness to build more mines could be more significant, according to BMO Capital Markets.

“Perhaps more important however is the precedent this might set for government action, which would naturally make companies more cautious to invest (particularly in non-mining jurisdictions),” BMO analyst Colin Hamilton said.

Warnings that the world needs more copper keep coming. Glencore Chief Executive Officer Gary Nagle earlier this month said there’s a cumulative gap between projected demand and supply of 50 million tons between 2022 and 2030. That compares with current world copper demand of about 25 million tons a year.

Copper miners and analysts have forecast growing deficits starting in the mid-2020s, driven by rising demand for the metal in wind and solar farms, high voltage cables and electric vehicles.

CANNABIS CAPERS

Court case against ex-CannTrust leaders should prompt OSC 'soul-searching': experts

Tara Deschamps , The Canadian Press

Legal experts say the acquittal of three former cannabis executives should prompt the Ontario Securities Commission to do some "deep soul searching."

The Thursday acquittal of ex-CannTrust Holdings Inc. chief executive Peter Aceto, chairman Eric Paul and vice-chair Mark Litwin came a day after the regulator revealed it no longer had a reasonable prospect of convicting the men on charges linked to alleged unlicensed cannabis growing at a Niagara area facility.

The trio, who pleaded not guilty in October, were each charged with fraud and authorizing, permitting or acquiescing in the commission of an offence.

Litwin and Paul were also facing insider trading charges, and Litwin and Aceto were charged with making a false prospectus and false preliminary prospectus.

Industry observers were eagerly anticipating the outcome of the matter — the OSC's first court case involving a publicly traded cannabis company — and Doug Sarro saw it as a way the regulator could change its perception. 

"The OSC had a reputation for a while for being weak on enforcement and this outcome doesn't help," said the lawyer and University of Toronto adjunct professor.

The regulator also lost an insider trading case against Bre-X Minerals Ltd. chief geologist John Felderhof in 2007.

In 2010, it settled a 1986 civil lawsuit filed on behalf of shareholders of real estate company Mascan Corp. after 24 years of litigation.

Sarro thinks the Thursday acquittals further entrenched the OSC’s reputation for court losses and should prompt the OSC to look more closely at how it handles cases.

"This was a really high-profile prosecution that was supposed to really change that perception, and clearly with this outcome, the OSC is going to have some soul searching to do,” he said.

The OSC declined to comment Friday, but referred The Canadian Press to a Thursday statement saying it was "considering the implications of the (court’s) decision and assessing its options.”

Rather than acquit the accused, the OSC had asked the court to withdraw its case, which would have allowed it to pursue charges against the men again.

Justice Victor Giourgas rejected the withdrawal ask, telling the OSC’s lawyers, “The law seems to be against you.”

The acquittal leaves the OSC few options to move forward on this case, though Sarro said the regulator could bring an administrative proceeding in front of the Ontario Capital Markets Tribunal, where jail time wouldn’t be possible but the accused could be banned from serving as a directors of public companies.

Like Sarro, University of Ottawa law professor Jennifer Quaid suspects the OSC’s next move is most likely a "deep soul-searching session" to address why it does not have a high rate of success, especially when compared with the more resource-laden U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The outcome of the case against the ex-CannTrust leaders is “not a very flattering look for the OSC," she said.

"It won't help their reputation, that's for sure, because I'm pretty sure that the public interpretation of what happened is not going to be favourable to them,” she said.

In the years proceeding the case, CannTrust, which is now called Phoena Holdings Inc., admitted to partaking in “unlicensed” growing in at least one news release and after halting cannabis sales and shipments from the company, Health Canada suspended CannTrust’s license.

Yet the OSC's case still crumbled a few weeks into hearings, when Litwin's lawyer Scott Fenton cross-examined Graham Lee, a former CannTrust director of quality and compliance. 

Fenton presented Lee with documents showing the entire Niagara facility was licensed between 2017 and Sept 2019.

Lee testified the documents, which he was not shown by the OSC before court proceedings, did not include any restrictions on what rooms the company could grow pot in. 

Cross-examination also uncovered documents where CannTrust was seeking ministerial approval to add rooms where unlicensed growing was alleged to that licence. But in May 2020, Health Canada relieved cannabis producers of the need to get ministerial approval before using growing rooms.

Days after the cross-examination, the OSC announced it no longer had a reasonable prospect of convicting the men.

Observers felt a strong ruling in favour of the financial regulator would deter other pot companies from skirting the law and bring comfort to investors who lost money, when the unlicensed growing was revealed by the company in July 2019.

"Maybe (the OSC) felt that if they came down hard on people who didn't follow the rules, it would sort of send a message that 'hey, cannabis is not a free for all,'" said Quaid.

"It would have been powerful, if they had gone through a 50-day trial and got a conviction, but that's not what happened."

Early retirement 'biggest cause' of labour shortage in UK economy

People opting to retire rather than return to work following the pandemic has led to a tightening of the labour market

Retirement, increased sickness, changes to migration and the UK's ageing population

 have all contributed to tightness in the labour market. PA

Matthew Davies
London
Dec 20, 2022

A wave of people leaving the workforce and choosing early retirement following the Covid-19 pandemic is the single biggest cause of current shortages in the UK labour market, according to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee.

The committee said the outlook for the labour market was “bleak” and that the government should do more to reduce levels of inactivity in the economy.

The report by the investigative committee looked at the number of people who were not in work and not actively seeking work, compared with the number of job vacancies.

READ MORE

UK unemployment rises amid record surge in basic pay

It found than an extra 565,000 people have become economically inactive since the start of the pandemic.

Titled “Where have all the workers gone?", the report highlighted that retirement, increased sickness, changes to migration and the UK's ageing population have all contributed to the current tightness in the labour market.

“We are unable to say exactly why, but a lot of people over 50 who left work or were furloughed during the pandemic did not come back,” said the chairman of the influential committee, George Bridges.

“There are a number of reasons why people left the workforce but as we kept looking it became clear that retirement was the biggest factor, the biggest change from the start of the pandemic.

“We can't hypothesise too much, but one potential explanation is that people experimented with different lifestyles during the pandemic — they were forced to stay at home or work fewer hours — and then changed their working lives as a result, even when the pandemic restrictions changed back”, he added.

People at an 'Enough is Enough' rally at Belfast City Hall, protesting against rising energy bills and the rising cost of living. PA

Cost of living crisis

However, there is some evidence that the current cost-of-living crisis is reversing the trend and some early retirees are returning to work.

Last week the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that economic activity dropped slightly in November.

The ONS said there were 76,000 people considered economically inactive over the three months to November, and that there was a fall of 49,000 in people citing retirement as a reason for inactivity.

Nonetheless, Mr Bridges said it was “critical the government does more to understand the causes of increased inactivity, and whether this trend is likely to persist.”

A representative from the Department for Work and Pensions said: “Older workers are a huge asset to our economy and jobs market. That's why we are investing an extra £22 million in employment support for the over 50s — expanding our Jobcentre Mid-Life MOT service and providing tailored support through our Older Worker Champions.”

Updated: December 20, 2022, 1:49 a.m.

'It is your new normal': Canada's aging work force root of national labour shortage

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

When Dan Gallagher looks around his company, he sees a lot of retirement parties in his future.

While it's not something he formally tracks, the CEO of Mikisew Group — a Fort McMurray, Alta.-based company that specializes in oilsands site services, maintenance, logistics and construction — knows he's got more employees approaching the end of their careers than just starting out.

“I take a walk around our shop, and around our field services workforce, and I can clearly see that demographic. It's aging," Gallagher said.

The implications of that make him nervous. 

Mikisew Group is already struggling with a shortage of labour, even recruiting as far away as Australia just to keep its fleet of heavy equipment moving. And basic demographics suggest the company's problem is set to get worse, not better.

"The ratio of apprentice to older worker here has been so low for so long that there just isn’t the bench strength to offset the people who are leaving," Gallagher says.

For years, experts have been warning of a looming wave of retirements as baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 and Canada's largest generation by size — grow older and start to exit the work force en masse.

This country's labour force growth rate has been trending downward since 2000, but the trend has intensified in recent years. This "grey wave" has been on the horizon for a while, but experts say it's now crashing ashore.

According to Statistics Canada, between 2016 and 2021 more than 1.4 million Canadians entered the ranks of those aged 55 and older.

Last year alone, one in five Canadians of working age were aged 55 to 64 — an all-time high in the history of the Canadian census. 

“It’s like a truck pulling up in your rear-view mirror. You see it there, and it’s moving slowly, and then you look away for a while and suddenly it’s completely on your tail," said Mike Holden, chief economist for the Business Council of Alberta.

The arrival of the grey wave is occurring at the same time that businesses of every size, in every industry, and in every province are complaining of labour shortages. As of the second quarter of 2022, there were more than a million vacant jobs in Canada — the highest quarterly number on record.

That's not a coincidence. While the COVID-19 pandemic did disrupt labour markets, it has borne a lot of the blame for ongoing labour shortages. 

But Canada's labour force participation rate is currently only slightly below where it was pre-pandemic. In fact, young and middle-aged Canadians have returned to the workforce at levels either close to or well above that observed in 2019, a Scotiabank report points out.

The same report says the decline in overall workforce participation that does exist is entirely due to Canadians aged 60 and above exiting the workforce. That means the real root of the current problem is Canada's aging population, and it has broad implications for the country's economy.

“I think the most important thing that gets overlooked is, what are the consequences of these labour challenges?" says Patrick Gill, senior director with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce's business data lab.

He points out that around one in three Canadian businesses (36 per cent) already report they are currently facing a shortage of labour. That figure climbs to about 45 per cent within the manufacturing and construction industries and 58 per cent in the food and accommodation sector.

"It translates to everyone working more hours, and that ultimately affects quality of life. It means slower growth, and it's also a factor in supply chain delays.”

Concerned business groups have proposed a number of possible solutions to the looming demographic crisis, from boosting immigration levels to finding ways to retain older Canadians in the workforce for longer. (Some observers have even suggested the government should increase the age for Old Age Security, partly in order to discourage early retirement).

But even a significant increase in immigration won't be enough to halt the coming tide, says Rafael Gomez, director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources. 

The last of Canada's baby boom generation will turn 65 in 2030, and once this cohort is out of the workforce entirely, the working age population — those aged 15 to 64 — will make up a smaller proportion of the overall Canadian population.

"This was always going to bite us," Gomez says. "Demographic trends are not easy to shift in a short-term way. In fact, it’s true that for 20 years we’re going to see a decline (in the labour force)."

While governments should employ every policy lever at their disposal to address labour shortages, Gomez says, employers also need to accept the fact that the challenges they're having right now filling vacancies are not going to go away.

“It is your new normal. And even if the economy goes in the tank, it’s not going to change the labour conditions," he says.

"We are entering a time where we are going to have a younger workforce — doing more, being asked to do more, being bidded for and competed for," Gomez adds. 

"Labour is going to be very difficult to find and employers are going to have to work hard to attract employees."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 11, 2022.

Keystone boosted oil flows just before Kansas crude spill

Robert Tuttle, Bloomberg News

TC Energy Corp., the operator of the Keystone pipeline, raised the volume of oil flowing through it before the system suffered its worst leak on record.

Crude flows on the conduit carrying heavy crude from Western Canada to the U.S. Midwest reached nearly 650,000 barrels a day on the night of the spill, according to data from WoodMackenzie. That’s an increase from a baseline of about 622,000 barrels a day. TC Energy said in October it would temporarily raise flows in November and December to test the system’s operational efficiency. 

The company declined to comment on specific flow rates at the time of the spill, saying in a statement: “At the time of the incident, the pipeline was operating within its design and regulatory approval requirements.” 

Keystone has spilled more oil than any other US pipeline since 2010, when the system began operation, according to preliminary data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. The severity of its spills has worsened in recent years, with construction issues being a key contributor, the Government Accountability Office found in a 2021 study.

The company continued to boosts flows on the line following at least six leaks between 2016 and 2020 that released more than 11,000 barrels of crude. In September, the Keystone system transported 639,000 barrels a day, Canada Energy Regulator data show.

Keystone also operates at a higher pressure rate than other U.S. liquid pipelines, having obtained a special waiver to operate above the federal maximum. 

A 2019 spill in North Dakota “was caused by flaws in the pipeline’s original construction,” specifically defective pipe, David Vanderpool, president of Vanderpool Pipeline Engineers Inc., an engineering consulting firm, said in testimony before the Canada Energy Regulator in January. TC Energy also uses drag-reducing agents to raise capacity on the pipeline, which wasn’t designed to carry the volumes its transporting, he said. 

U$A

Big Tech Divided and Conquered to Block Key Bipartisan Bills

Emily Birnbaum, Bloomberg News

,

(Bloomberg) -- A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.The years-long US legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public. 

The closely-watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat  David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple and Google’s control over app stores.Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package released Monday, the final shot this year.

The companies have been forced to make significant changes in Europe to comply with similar European Union laws set to take effect in the coming years. US advocates believe that will happen here, too — but it will take time.

The opposition campaign exploited contrasting concerns of the two parties. To Democrats, tech lobbyists argued that the bills would harm minority groups and reduce online privacy. To Republicans, they focused on free speech and free markets. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose daughters work for Amazon and Meta, declined to put the measures on the floor this session, saying they didn’t have the votes despite insistence from the bill’s co-sponsors that they did have enough support.  Key Republican House leaders have made clear the legislation will not come up when they retake control of the lower chamber. 

This account is based on 45 interviews with lawmakers, congressional aides, lobbyists, tech experts and advocates. 

Factors in addition to lobbying led to the bills’ demise: partisan gridlock, personal animosity among lawmakers, bigger legislative priorities, a lack of action by Schumer and perceived inflexibility by Klobuchar. But the lobbying was titanic in scope.

 “Big tech companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in a brazen attempt to thwart any progress on tech policy in Washington,” said Klobuchar spokeswoman Jane Meyer. She added that Klobuchar and the bill’s House and Senate co-sponsors “did not back down despite that onslaught.”

The bills had well-organized support. A coalition of smaller tech companies, civil society groups, and companies owned by Rupert Murdoch lobbied hard for them. Murdoch’s companies Fox and News Corp., which have long battled Google over its dominance in search and news distribution, worked to get Republicans on board. The small technology companies and consumer groups spent $2 million on ads, blanketed Capitol Hill and organized protest after protest. 

It was no match for what they were up against.

The big tech companies put aside rivalries and joined forces. They and their trade groups spent more than $100 million on lobbying in two years, outpacing high-spending industries such as pharmaceuticals and defense. They donated more than $5 million to politicians, and tech lobbyists bundled more than $1 million to the PAC in charge of defending the Democrats' majority. And they put millions more into dark-money groups, nonprofits and trade associations that aren’t required to disclose the source of their funding. Several congressional aides said they received more outreach on the bills than any other they’d worked on in years. 

The companies poured $130 million into advertising campaigns, primarily targeting swing states such as Georgia, New Hampshire and Arizona, according to ad analytics service AdImpact. Many of the ads implied that Democrats could lose the Senate and Republicans could miss their chance at a legislative majority if they supported the legislation.

The campaign argued the bills would destroy Google Search and Amazon Prime and disrupt the global economy. Amazon and tech-funded nonprofit Connected Commerce brought dozens of small business owners to Washington to argue that they would suffer. Google tapped former national security officials on its payroll to say the bills could harm national security. Apple poured money into a free-market group, Taxpayers Protection Alliance, to launch the “App Security Project,” which argued that the bills would make phones vulnerable to hacking and spying. 

The companies’ top executives worked the halls. Apple Chief Executive Officer  Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Delaware Democrat  Chris Coons, a close ally of President Joe Biden. 

"There has been very forceful lobbying against this legislation," Coons said in an interview. "Every one of us has seen dozens and dozens of TV ads, emails, social media posts." He added that he sympathized with some of the tech leaders' concerns, including arguments that the bills could harm US competitiveness with China.

During markup, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act passed 16-6. But a handful of Democrats, channeling big tech talking points, asked Klobuchar to address their concerns. 

The coalition of small tech companies – including Yelp Inc., DuckDuckGo and Proton AG – joined civil society groups, creating an “anti-big tech” infrastructure, meeting every Friday to strategize. “It was a historic moment,” said Kate McInnis, senior public policy manager at DuckDuckGo. 

The Open App Markets Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee 20-2 in early February, but ruptures emerged. During the markup, conservative Louisiana Republican John Kennedy criticized Klobuchar. “I’m tired of being told that if I ask a question, I’m in the pocket of big tech,” Kennedy said. 

He later told allies he was out. “You don’t generally convince senators by trying to force feed them,” Kennedy said in an interview. “They just either gag or spit it out.” Though Grassley counted 20 Republican votes, more GOP senators dropped their support. 

Beginning in February, senators including Coons, Vermont Democrat  Patrick Leahy, and Georgia’s  Jon Ossoff suggested tweaks on issues including privacy and cybersecurity, many of them initially raised by the companies. They found Klobuchar’s office unwilling to make significant changes. 

Klobuchar's office said it made over 150 changes to her legislation, some based on feedback from other offices.

Meanwhile, the flood of ads surged in swing states with vulnerable Democrats.

They served their purpose. New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Arizona’s Mark Kelly urged Senate leadership to delay putting the bills on the floor before the elections. 

By March, Schumer’s office pledged to bring the legislation to the floor but told the bills’ advocates that they had to prove they had the needed 60 votes.

Later in the spring, a group of internet law academics, some of whom had received funding from Google, argued the bill could affect the tech companies’ ability to remove misinformation and hate speech from their platforms. This proved deadly. 

Four Democratic senators began to press Klobuchar to amend the legislation. Her staff negotiated new language. But the trade-off was fatal: If Klobuchar made speech-related changes, the bill would lose Republicans. Without the changes, Democrats walked. 

Supporters kept up momentum into the fall with protests, ad campaigns, public letters and Capitol Hill meetings. But by November, when Klobuchar attended a book party, it was increasingly clear that the battle was over. She addressed the party, saying that she would “try” to pass the legislation. 

Cicilline said he was “frustrated” that Schumer did not ultimately put the bills on the floor for a vote. “It’s just wrong,” he added.

Advocates are already regrouping, filled with hope.

"Big tech is delaying the inevitable, and the bigger fight continues," said Alex Harman of the Economic Security Project. "They aren't winning, they are just losing in slow motion."

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

FOREVER CHEMICALS

Japanese officials survey US Navy bases for PFAS remediation

ALEX WILSON AND HANA KUSUMOTO
STARS AND STRIPES • December 20, 2022

Japanese government officials on Dec. 19, 2022, inspected the water treatment facility at Naval Air Facility Atsugi, shown here Dec. 20, 2022, following improvements meant to address PFAS contamination on the base in September. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)

Japanese government officials surveyed water treatment facilities at Naval Air Facility Atsugi on Monday, three months after toxic organic compounds were released into a waterway on the base.

A heavy rain at Atsugi on Sept. 24 caused a hangar control panel to malfunction, causing the release of organic fluorine compounds known as PFAS into a small stream that runs through the base 26 miles southwest of Tokyo, according to a Monday news release from Kanagawa prefecture and an official in the prefecture’s environmental division. Both sources cited unnamed U.S. military officials as the source of the information.

Some Japanese government officials are required to speak to speak to the media only on condition of anonymity.

PFAS, which includes the chemicals PFOS and PFOA, is found in firefighting foam, aircraft grease, water-repellent materials and other products that use fluorine chemicals. Studies involving lab animals show exposure to the chemicals can increase the risk of certain tumors, according to the American Cancer Society. PFOS and PFOA are called “forever chemicals” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because they persist without breaking down in the environment.

Studies involving human exposure show an increased risk of cancer, reproductive issues, developmental issues in children and other adverse health effects, according to the EPA.

The September incident led to the discharge of water contaminated with fire extinguishing foam, according to the news release. The survey, which included representatives from Japan’s national government, Kanagawa prefecture and the cities of Yamato and Ayase, included an inspection of the hangar and a nearby retention basin.

Naval Forces Japan confirmed the incident, but said it is still investigating the cause of the contamination, according to spokeswoman Cmdr. Katie Cerezo.

“We care deeply about the safety and health of every person, and are committed to the care and preservation of the environment,” Cerezo said Tuesday by email to Stars and Stripes.

U.S. officials explained the cause of the incident and the preventative measures taken, including the removal of fire extinguishers that use the chemicals and the installation of a granular activated carbon filter, the Kanagawa official told Stars and Stripes by phone Tuesday.

The Japanese officials inspected the new water filter and reviewed the sampling test results, which were not immediately published. The results were not immediately available from the U.S. side, Cerezo said.

On Thursday, Yokosuka city officials and Japanese government representatives also surveyed Yokosuka Naval Base, 33 miles south of Tokyo, which detected high concentrations of PFOA in its industrial wastewater on Sept. 29, according to a Yokosuka city news release that day.

The survey included an examination of Yokosuka’s new granular activated carbon filter – a model identical to the one installed at Atsugi - and reviewed the most recent water sampling results. The last sample, taken Nov. 18, showed PFAS levels below Japan’s provisional target value, according to the release. Cerezo confirmed the results, adding that the chemicals are at “non-quantifiable” levels.

Tests by the U.S. Navy and the South Kanto Defense Bureau in May discovered PFAS in wastewater from Yokosuka Naval Base. The chemicals repeatedly showed up again in follow-up tests throughout the year.

The base immediately removed all firefighting foam containing the chemicals immediately after the contamination was discovered in May, Cerezo told Stars and Stripes on Sept. 16. The water filter installed Nov. 1 was another counteractive measure taken by the base, she said.

Concerns about the chemicals have been raised elsewhere in Japan. An Okinawa civic group, Liaison to Protect the Lives of Citizens Against PFAS Contamination, released survey results on Oct. 15 that found PFOS in blood samples at 1.5 to 3.1 times higher than a Japanese government survey last year.

Three days later, Japanese Environment Minister Akihiro Nishimura announced the ministry would work with the Okinawan municipalities involved in the survey to gather information and consider mitigation measures.

The group believes U.S. military bases on the island prefecture could be the source of contamination and called for their cooperation, group spokesman Toshio Takahashi said Oct. 17.

HANA KUSUMOTO
Hana Kusumoto is a reporter/translator who has been covering local authorities in Japan since 2002. She was born in Nagoya, Japan, and lived in Australia and Illinois growing up. She holds a journalism degree from Boston University and previously worked for the Christian Science Monitor’s Tokyo bureau.

ALEX WILSON
Alex Wilson covers the U.S. Navy and other services from Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. Originally from Knoxville, Tenn., he holds a journalism degree from the University of North Florida. He previously covered crime and the military in Key West, Fla., and business in Jacksonville, Fla.

How AI-generated text is poisoning the internet

Plus: A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

By Melissa Heikkilä
December 20, 2022

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR


This has been a wild year for AI. If you’ve spent much time online, you’ve probably bumped into images generated by AI systems like DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, or jokes, essays, or other text written by ChatGPT, the latest incarnation of OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3.

Sometimes it’s obvious when a picture or a piece of text has been created by an AI. But increasingly, the output these models generate can easily fool us into thinking it was made by a human. And large language models in particular are confident bullshitters: they create text that sounds correct but in fact may be full of falsehoods.

While that doesn’t matter if it’s just a bit of fun, it can have serious consequences if AI models are used to offer unfiltered health advice or provide other forms of important information. AI systems could also make it stupidly easy to produce reams of misinformation, abuse, and spam, distorting the information we consume and even our sense of reality. It could be particularly worrying around elections, for example.

The proliferation of these easily accessible large language models raises an important question: How will we know whether what we read online is written by a human or a machine? I’ve just published a story looking into the tools we currently have to spot AI-generated text. Spoiler alert: Today’s detection tool kit is woefully inadequate against ChatGPT.

But there is a more serious long-term implication. We may be witnessing, in real time, the birth of a snowball of bullshit.

Large language models are trained on data sets that are built by scraping the internet for text, including all the toxic, silly, false, malicious things humans have written online. The finished AI models regurgitate these falsehoods as fact, and their output is spread everywhere online. Tech companies scrape the internet again, scooping up AI-written text that they use to train bigger, more convincing models, which humans can use to generate even more nonsense before it is scraped again and again, ad nauseam.

This problem—AI feeding on itself and producing increasingly polluted output—extends to images. “The internet is now forever contaminated with images made by AI,” Mike Cook, an AI researcher at King’s College London, told my colleague Will Douglas Heaven in his new piece on the future of generative AI models.

“The images that we made in 2022 will be a part of any model that is made from now on.”

In the future, it’s going to get trickier and trickier to find good-quality, guaranteed AI-free training data, says Daphne Ippolito, a senior research scientist at Google Brain, the company’s research unit for deep learning. It’s not going to be good enough to just blindly hoover text up from the internet anymore, if we want to keep future AI models from having biases and falsehoods embedded to the nth degree.

“It’s really important to consider whether we need to be training on the entirety of the internet or whether there’s ways we can just filter the things that are high quality and are going to give us the kind of language model we want,” says Ippolito.

Building tools for detecting AI-generated text will become crucial when people inevitably try to submit AI-written scientific papers or academic articles, or use AI to create fake news or misinformation.

Technical tools can help, but humans also need to get savvier.

Ippolito says there are a few telltale signs of AI-generated text. Humans are messy writers. Our text is full of typos and slang, and looking out for these sorts of mistakes and subtle nuances is a good way to identify text written by a human. In contrast, large language models work by predicting the next word in a sentence, and they are more likely to use common words like “the,” “it,” or “is” instead of wonky, rare words. And while they almost never misspell words, they do get things wrong. Ippolito says people should look out for subtle inconsistencies or factual errors in texts that are presented as fact, for example.

The good news:her research shows that with practice, humans can train ourselves to better spot AI-generated text. Maybe there is hope for us all yet.
Deeper Learning

A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

This story made my skin crawl. Earlier this year my colleague Eileen Guo got hold of 15 screenshots of private photos taken by a robot vacuum, including images of someone sitting on the toilet, posted to closed social media groups.


Who is watching? iRobot, the developer of the Roomba robot vacuum, says that the images did not come from the homes of customers but “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes. But it’s not clear whether these people knew that humans, in particular, would be viewing these images in order to train the AI.

Why this matters: The story illustrates the growing practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms, as well as the surprising, globe-spanning journey that a single image can take—in this case, from homes in North America, Europe, and Asia to the servers of Massachusetts-based iRobot, from there to San Francisco–based Scale AI, and finally to Scale’s contracted data workers around the world. Together, the images reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of. Read the story here.
Bits and Bytes

OpenAI founder Sam Altman tells us what he learned from DALL-E 2
Altman tells Will Douglas Heaven why he thinks DALLE-2 was such a big hit, what lessons he learned from its success, and what models like it mean for society. (MIT Technology Review)

Artists can now opt out of the next version of Stable Diffusion
The decision follows a heated public debate between artists and tech companies over how text-to-image AI models should be trained. Since the launch of Stable Diffusion, artists have been up in arms, arguing that the model rips them off by including many of their copyrighted works without any payment or attribution. (MIT Technology Review)

China has banned lots of types of deepfakes
The Chinese Cyberspace Administration has banned deepfakes that are created without their subject’s permission and that go against socialist values or disseminate “Illegal and harmful information.” (The Register)

What it’s like to be a chatbot’s human backup
As a student, writer Laura Preston had an unusual job: stepping in when a real estate AI chatbot called Brenda went off-script. The goal was that customers would not notice. The story shows just how dumb the AI of today can be in real-life situations, and how much human work goes into maintaining the illusion of intelligent machines. (The Guardian)