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The race is on, but cooling industry needs to accelerate net zero efforts

First-ever report shows cooling industry slow to join race to net zero emissions; New tools released to support industry to join the race to zero; Major cooling industry player Johnson Controls reinforces commitment to net zero cooling

UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME

Research News

 

IMAGE: COVER OF THE NEW REPORT FROM THE COOL COALITION AND PARTNERS. UNEP HELPED FORM THE COALITION IN RECOGNITION THAT ALMOST ONE-THIRD OF HUMANITY FACES DANGEROUS TEMPERATURES FOR MORE THAN 20... view more 

CREDIT: UNEP / COOL COALITION

Paris, Nairobi, London, 29 March 2021 - Five major cooling suppliers are racing to net zero but they represent fewer than ten per cent of the 54 suppliers assessed in a new report, meaning the industry has a lot of work to do to catch up on climate action and reduce pollution from the sector, currently estimated at 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

With the world still falling short of meeting the Paris Agreement goals of holding global temperature rise this century to under 2 degrees C, and pursue 1.5 degrees C, action to reduce the climate impact of cooling will be essential.

According to the International Energy Agency, emissions from cooling are expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2100, driven by heat waves, population growth, urbanization, and a growing middle class. By 2050, space cooling alone will consume as much electricity as China and India today.

The UN has identified cooling as a key sector for action in its Race to Zero Breakthroughs, which are intended to galvanise action ahead of the next global climate meeting, COP26, which is due to take place later this year.

However, Cooling Suppliers: Who's Winning the Race to Net Zero (available at https://bit.ly/3sBhnt0), finds that 49 out of 54 companies assessed have yet to commit to ambitious net-zero targets, despite some efforts to reduce their emissions.

The report - released by the Race to Zero campaign, the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program (K-CEP), Carbon Trust and other partners in the UN Environment Programme-hosted Cool Coalition - assesses cooling firms against three key impact areas defined in the Cooling Climate Action Pathway.

These are:

• Super-efficient equipment and appliances: Making super-efficient cooling equipment and smart appliances powered by zero-carbon energy the norm;
• Ultra-low global warming potential refrigerants; and
• Passive cooling: Widespread adoption of measures that avoid or reduce the need for mechanical cooling, including reductions in cooling loads, human-centric design and urban planning.

The report calls on cooling firms to show increased ambition to line up with net-zero commitments from over 100 governments and many other private sector actors.

One company that recently announced new commitments is Johnson Controls, a global leader for smart, healthy and sustainable buildings and producer of cooling equipment. The company has committed to moving its operations to net-zero emissions by 2040. Johnson Controls, which employs 100,000 people in more than 150 countries, is also a member of the Cool Coalition - a group of over 100 companies, governments, cities and organizations working to lower the climate impact of the cooling industry.

"Johnson Controls is proud of its recent commitment to achieve the most ambitious science-based targets by 2030 and net zero carbon emissions before 2040," said Clay Nesler, vice president global energy and sustainability at Johnson Controls. "Smart, healthy and sustainable cooling solutions are key to accelerating the race to zero for our company as well as our customers."

New tools to accelerate cooling action

To help other companies and countries join the race to net zero, Cool Coalition partners are also releasing a suite of products to guide their actions - with the support of K-CEP and the technical expertise of the Carbon Trust.

The report comes alongside the Pathway to Net Zero Cooling Action Plan for the COP26 Champions Team which highlights the areas where progress is needed. The action table has been endorsed by a range of leading organisations and institutions including CLASP, E3G, the Environmental Investigation Agency, IGSD, RMI, UN Environment Programme, University of Birmingham and the University of Oxford.

A 'Cool Calculator' scenario planning tool is also being launched to help companies and governments run simple calculations on key aspects of cooling decarbonization to enable them to identify the set of solutions that works best for them.

Additionally, the UK's Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has launched a net-zero cooling product guide that will allow companies, governments and consumers to cut their cooling footprint by choosing products that are energy-efficient and run on natural refrigerants with ultra-low Global Warming Potential.

"As consumers and producers of cooling look to reduce their carbon footprint, urgent action on both refrigerants and energy efficiency is needed," said Fionnuala Walravens, Senior Campaigner at EIA. "EIA's Pathway to net-zero cooling product list offers a range of climate-friendly solutions available now."

The EIA list also calls on governments to do more to support the uptake of sustainable cooling, by outlining cooling plans in their commitments under the Paris Agreement and looking at legislation to speed up the phasing out of hydrofluorocarbons - climate-warming refrigerants that are now being phased out under an international agreement known as the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol.

"The development and expansion of net-zero cooling is a critical part of our Race to Zero emissions," said Nigel Topping, UK High Level Champion for COP26. "In addition to technological breakthroughs and ambitious legislation, we also need sustainable consumer purchasing to help deliver wholesale systems change, and as such I welcome the EIA cooling products guide as an important contribution to accelerating the race."

Additional quotes:

"Efforts to race to net zero cooling present an incredible opportunity to meet ambitious climate, environment and development goals and unlock the clean energy transition" said David Aitken, Director, Innovation at the Carbon Trust. "These tools show how we can get there."

"From healthcare and agriculture, to transportation and buildings, the environmental performance of cooling impacts many sectors' pathways to zero carbon emissions," said Dan Hamza-Goodacre, K-CEP's Non-Executive Director. "We won't get to net zero without concerted and ambitious action on cooling."

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NOTES TO EDITORS

About the Race to Zero

Race To Zero is a global campaign to rally leadership and support from businesses, cities, regions, investors for a healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery that prevents future threats, creates decent jobs, and unlocks inclusive, sustainable growth.

It mobilizes a coalition of leading net zero initiatives, representing 471 cities, 23 regions, 1,675 businesses, 85 of the biggest investors, and 569 universities. These 'real economy' actors join 120 countries in the largest ever alliance committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest. Collectively these actors now cover nearly 25% global CO2 emissions and over 50% GDP.

The objective is to build momentum around the shift to a decarbonized economy ahead of COP26, where governments must strengthen their contributions to the Paris Agreement. This will send governments a resounding signal that business, cities, regions and investors are united in meeting the Paris goals and creating a more inclusive and resilient economy.

About the Cool Coalition

The Cool Coalition is one of the official outcomes and "Transformation Initiatives" put forward by the Executive Office of the Secretary-General for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. Hosted by UNEP, the Cool Coalition is a global multi-stakeholder network that connects a wide range of key actors from government, cities, international organizations, businesses, finance, academia, and civil society groups to facilitate knowledge exchange, advocacy and joint action towards a rapid global transition to efficient and climate-friendly cooling. For more information, visit http://www.coolcoalition.org

About the Carbon Trust

Established in 2001, the Carbon Trust works with businesses, governments and institutions around the world, helping them contribute to, and benefit from, a more sustainable future through carbon reduction, resource efficiency strategies, and commercialising low carbon businesses, systems and technologies.

About the Environmental Investigation Agency

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) investigates and campaigns against environmental crime and abuses. Our undercover investigations expose transnational wildlife crime, with a focus on elephants, pangolins and tigers, and forest crimes such as illegal logging and deforestation for cash crops such as palm oil; we work to safeguard global marine ecosystems by tackling plastic pollution, exposing illegal fishing and seeking an end to all whaling; and we address the threat of global warming by campaigning to curtail powerful refrigerant greenhouse gases and exposing related criminal trade.

About Johnson Controls:

At Johnson Controls (NYSE:JCI) we transform the environments where people live, work, learn and play. As the global leader in smart, healthy and sustainable buildings, our mission is to reimagine the performance of buildings to serve people, places and the planet.

With a history of more than 135 years of innovation, Johnson Controls delivers the blueprint of the future for industries such as healthcare, schools, data centers, airports, stadiums, manufacturing and beyond through its comprehensive digital offering OpenBlue. With a global team of 100,000 experts in more than 150 countries, Johnson Controls offers the world`s largest portfolio of building technology, software as well as service solutions with some of the most trusted names in the industry. For more information, visit http://www.johnsoncontrols.com or follow us @johnsoncontrols on Twitter.

About the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program

The Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program (K-CEP), a program of the ClimateWorks Foundation, is a philanthropic collaborative that works in tandem with the Kigali Amendment of the Montreal Protocol by helping developing countries transition to energy-efficient, climate-friendly, and affordable cooling solutions. K-CEP focuses on improving the energy efficiency of cooling in order to double the climate benefits and significantly increase the development benefits of the Kigali Amendment's efforts to phase down the production and use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

For more information:

• Sophie Loran, Communications Officer, UNEP, + 336 01 37 79 17, sophie.loran@un.org
• Michael Isaac, Leader, Global Public Relations & Media, Johnson Controls, +41 52 6330374, michael.isaac@jci.com
• Paul Woolwich, Head of Communications, EIA, paulwoolwich@eia-international.org
• Ainslie Macleod, Associate Director of Communications, Carbon Trust, Ainslie.Macleod@CarbonTrust.com
• Christina Hayes, Communications Consultant, K-CEP, christina.hayes@climateworks.org

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert syste

Probing wet fire smoke in clouds: can water intensify the earth's warming?

One-of-a-kind instrument measures humidity's effects on smoke, filling a key data gap in predicting the scale and long-term impact of fire

DOE/LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE NEW INSTRUMENT THAT SAMPLES SMOKE AND SCANS THE HUMIDITY WAS USED DURING THE RIO MEDIO FIRE ON AUG. 30. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY MANVENDRA DUBEY.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 29, 2021--A first-of-its-kind instrument that samples smoke from megafires and scans humidity will help researchers better understand the scale and long-term impact of fires--specifically how far and high the smoke will travel; when and where it will rain; and whether the wet smoke will warm the climate by absorbing sunlight.

"Smoke containing soot and other toxic particles from megafires can travel thousands of kilometers at high altitudes where winds are fast and air is dry," said Manvendra Dubey, a Los Alamos National Laboratory atmospheric scientist and co-author on a paper published last week in Aerosol Science and Technology. "These smoke-filled clouds can absorb much more sunlight than dry soot--but this effect on light absorption has been difficult to measure because laser-based techniques heat the particles and evaporate the water, which corrupt observations."

The new instrument circumvents this problem by developing a gentler technique that uses a low-power, light-emitting diode to measure water's effect on scattering and absorbtion by wildfire smoke and hence its growth. By sampling the smoke and scanning the humidity from dry to very humid conditions while measuring its optical properties, the instrument mimicks what happens during cloud and rain formation, and the effects of water are measured immediately. Laboratory experiments show for the first time that water coating the black soot-like material can enhance the light absorption by up to 20 percent.

The instrument will next be tested and the water effects probed in smoke from wildfires sampled at Los Alamos' Center for Aerosol-gas Forensics (CAFÉ). Los Alamos will be deploying instruments to Houston next year as part of the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facility's Tracking Aerosol Convection Interactions Experiment (TRACER) campaign. Los Alamos's effort, called TRACER-CAT, will measure how water uptake by soot interacts with deep convective storms.

###

Dubey worked with Christian M. Carrico of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology on a research team that included scientists from Los Alamos, New Mexico Tech, and Michigan Technological University and Aerodyne Research, Inc. The novel findings of experiments were performed by the Los Alamos Director's postdoctoral fellow Kyle Gorkowski and Department of Energy graduate fellow Tyler Capek.

Paper: "Humidified Single Scattering Albedometer (H-CAPS-PMSSA): Design, Data-Analysis, and Validation," Christian M. Carrico, Tyler J. Capek, Kyle J. Gorkowski, Jared T. Lam, Sabina Gulick, Jaimy Karacaoglu, James E. Lee, Charlotte Dungan, Allison C. Aiken, Timothy B. Onasch, Andrew Freedman, Claudio Mazzoleni, and Manvendra K. Dubey, Aerosol Science and Technology, volume 55, issue 4,
https://doi.org/10.1080/02786826.2021.1895430

Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) under the Visiting Faculty Program (VFP) for Carrico and Lam and the DOE Student Undergraduate Laboratory Intern Program for Lam and Karacaoglu. Capek was partially supported by a fellowship through a DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program. Additional support was provided by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research's Atmospheric System Research program. Research at Los Alamos National Laboratory's was supported by the DOE's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) and Atmospheric System Research (ASR) Program, the Lab's Directed Research portion of the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and Gorkowski as a Director's postdoctoral fellow.

About Los Alamos National Laboratory (www.lanl.gov)

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is managed by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns. LA-UR-21-22850

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy

Jordan's worsening water crisis a warning for the world

Stanford study reveals a deepening water crisis in Jordan - and a way forward

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

Dwindling water supplies and a growing population will halve per capita water use in Jordan by the end of this century. Without intervention, few households in the arid nation will have access to even 40 liters (10.5 gallons) of piped water per person per day.

Low-income neighborhoods will be the hardest hit, with 91 percent of households receiving less than 40 liters daily for 11 consecutive months per year by 2100.

Those are among the sobering predictions of a peer-reviewed paper by an international team of 17 researchers published March 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jordan's deepening water crisis offers a glimpse of challenges that loom elsewhere as a result of climate change, population growth, intensifying water use, demographic shocks and heightened competition for water across boundaries, said study co-author and Stanford hydrologist Steve Gorelick, who directs the Global Freshwater Initiative at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. The World Health Organization estimates half of humanity may live in water-stressed areas by 2025, and the United Nations anticipates water scarcity could displace 700 million people by 2030.

In Jordan, flows in the region's biggest river system - the Jordan-Yarmouk - have declined as a result of upstream diversion in Israel and Syria. Groundwater levels in some areas have dropped by more than 1 meter per year, and a major aquifer along Jordan's boundary with Saudi Arabia is heavily pumped on both sides of the border.

Demand for water has climbed largely because of population growth punctuated by waves of refugees, including more than 1 million Syrian refugees in the past decade.

Extreme water scarcity and wide disparities in public water supplies are potent ingredients for conflict. Jordan's water situation - long deemed a crisis - is now on the brink of "boiling over" into instability, said lead study author Jim Yoon, a water security and resilience scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

"Jordan's unique role as a bastion of peace in the region makes these findings all the more cause for concern," said Yoon, who began work on the study as a PhD student at Stanford University.

The U.N. has committed to ensuring sustainable freshwater management and universal access to clean water and sanitation as one of its 17 sustainable development goals. But until now, analytic frameworks have been lacking, said Gorelick, who led the Jordan Water Project and its continuation, the FUSE Project (Food-water-energy for Urban Sustainable Environments).

The new predictions derive from a first-of-its-kind computer model of Jordan's freshwater system that simulates interactions among natural processes and human behaviors. Under a range of climate and socioeconomic scenarios, the researchers quantified the effects of maintaining status quo versus introducing measures such as fixing leaky pipes, eliminating water theft, raising tariffs for big water users and reallocating a quarter of water from farms to cities.

The team's modeling suggests efforts to simultaneously increase supply, slash demand and reform distribution are likely to deliver "exponential" improvements in national water security.

Access to Jordan's public water supply today is highly unequal, with wealthier households and firms often supplementing rationed municipal supplies with costly deliveries from private tanker truck operators. German economist and study co-author Christian Klassert said, "Avoiding large disparities in public water supply will be necessary to avoid water stress under growing water scarcity in Jordan and regions around the world."

The many facets of Jordan's water crisis make it an especially valuable place to explore the impacts of individual versus simultaneous interventions, Gorelick said. Now that a model exists for this complex environment, it can be adapted with relative ease to other regions.

The single most effective step Jordan can take is to increase supply through large-scale desalination. One proposal among many Jordan has pursued to this end since the 1960s would desalinate water from the Red Sea in the south, transport freshwater north to the capital city Amman and dispose of the leftover highly saline water in the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea.

While water policy debates often present selected supply and demand interventions as opposing alternatives, the authors write, suites of interventions in both modes actually work best in concert.

"You would think that any one of these interventions would have a greater impact. But it turns out you have to do everything," Gorelick said.

For a country whose economic output per person is less than one-tenth that of the U.S., the scale and cost of near-total reform of its water sector are particularly daunting. "In water-scarce regions where sustainability planning is most needed, it is challenging to think beyond how to distribute scarce freshwater tomorrow, next month, and to some extent, in the next several years," Gorelick said. "It's in these places where our long-term policy evaluations are most valuable."

###

Read a blog post by Gorelick, Klassert and Yoon highlighting key points for policymakers.

Watch a 4-minute video about the research.

Gorelick is the Cyrus Fisher Tolman Professor at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). Additional co-authors on the paper, titled "A coupled human-natural system analysis of freshwater security under climate and population change," are affiliated with the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ; University of Manchester; Université Laval; King's College London; Jordan University of Science and Technology; Leipzig University; University of California, Merced; Bechtel Corporation; and Texas A&M University.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Germany's Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the Belmont Forum. Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and USAID provided additional funding.

AND THE TEN HOUR WORK WEEK

Silicon Valley leaders think A.I. will one day fund free cash handouts. But SO CALLED experts aren’t convinced

In as little as 10 years, AI could generate enough wealth to pay every adult in the U.S. $13,500 a year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in his 2,933 word piece called "Moore's Law for Everything."

But critics are concerned that Altman's views could cause more harm than good, and that he's misleading the public on where AI is headed.

Glen Weyl, an economist and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, wrote on Twitter: "This beautifully epitomizes the AI ideology that I believe is the most dangerous force in the world today."

 Provided by CNBC Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator

Artificial intelligence companies could become so powerful and so wealthy that they're able to provide a universal basic income to every man, woman and child on Earth.

That's how some in the AI community have interpreted a lengthy blog post from Sam Altman, the CEO of research lab OpenAI, that was published earlier this month

In as little as 10 years, AI could generate enough wealth to pay every adult in the U.S. $13,500 a year, Altman said in his 2,933 word piece called "Moore's Law for Everything."

"My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe," said Altman, the former president of renowned start-up accelerator Y-Combinator earlier this month. "Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do."

But critics are concerned that Altman's views could cause more harm than good, and that he's misleading the public on where AI is headed.

Glen Weyl, an economist and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, wrote on Twitter: "This beautifully epitomizes the AI ideology that I believe is the most dangerous force in the world today."

One industry source, who asked to remain anonymous due to the nature of the discussion, told CNBC that Altman "envisions a world wherein he and his AI-CEO peers become so immensely powerful that they run every non-AI company (employing people) out of business and every American worker to unemployment. So powerful that a percentage of OpenAI's (and its peers') income could bankroll UBI for every citizen of America."

Altman will be able to "get away with it," the source said, because "politicians will be enticed by his immense tax revenue and by the popularity that paying their voter's salaries (UBI) will give them. But this is an illusion. Sam is no different from any other capitalist trying to persuade the government to allow an oligarchy."

Taxing capital

One of the main thrusts of the essay is a call to tax capital — companies and land — instead of labor. That's where the UBI money would come from.

"We could do something called the American Equity Fund," wrote Altman. "The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars."

He added: "All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution, in dollars and company shares, into their accounts. People would be entrusted to use the money however they needed or wanted — for better education, healthcare, housing, starting a company, whatever."

Altman said every citizen would get more money from the fund each year, providing the country keeps doing better.

"Every citizen would therefore increasingly partake of the freedoms, powers, autonomies, and opportunities that come with economic self-determination," he said. "Poverty would be greatly reduced and many more people would have a shot at the life they want."

Matt Clifford, the co-founder of start-up builder Entrepreneur First, wrote in his "Thoughts in Between" newsletter: "I don't think there is anything intellectually radical here ... these ideas have been around for a long time — but it's fascinating as a showcase of how mainstream these previously fringe ideas have become among tech elites."

Meanwhile, Matt Prewitt, president of non-profit RadicalxChange, which describes itself as a global movement for next-generation political economies, told CNBC: "The piece sells a vision of the future that lets our future overlords off way too easy, and would likely create a sort of peasant class encompassing most of society."

He added: "I can imagine even worse futures — but this the wrong direction in which to point our imaginations. By focusing instead on guaranteeing and enabling deeper, broader participation in political and economic life, I think we can do far better."

Richard Miller, founder of tech consultancy firm Miller-Klein Associates, told CNBC that Altman's post feels "muddled," adding that "the model is unfettered capitalism."

Michael Jordan, an academic at University of California Berkeley, told CNBC the blog post is too far from anything intellectually reasonable, either from a technology point of view, or an economic point of view, that he'd prefer not to comment.

In Altman's defense, he wrote in his blog that the idea is designed to be little more than a "conversation starter." Altman did not immediately reply to a CNBC request for an interview.

An OpenAI spokesperson encouraged people to read the essay for themselves.

Not everyone disagreed with Altman. "I like the suggested wealth taxation strategies," wrote Deloitte worker Janine Moir on Twitter.
A.I.'s abilities

Founded in San Francisco in 2015 by a group of entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, OpenAI is widely regarded as one of the top AI labs in the world, along with Facebook AI Research, and DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014.

The research lab, backed by Microsoft with $1 billion in July 2019, is best known for creating an AI image generator, called Dall-E, and an AI text generator, known as GPT-3. It has also developed agents that can beat the best humans at games like Dota 2. But it's nowhere near creating the AI technology that Altman describes, experts told CNBC.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, told CNBC: "There is an incredible mistaken optimism of what AI is capable of doing."

Acemoglu said algorithms are good at performing some "very, very narrow tasks" and that they can sometimes help businesses to cut costs or improve a product.

"But they're not that revolutionary, and there's no evidence that any of this is going to be revolutionary," he said, adding that AI leaders are "waxing lyrical about what AI is doing already and how it's revolutionizing things."

In terms of the measures that are standard for economic success, like total factor productivity growth, or output per worker, many sectors are having the worst time they've had in about 100 years, Acemoglu said. "It's not comparable to previous periods of rapid technological progress," he said.

"If you look at the 1950s and the 1960s, the rate of TFP (total factor productivity) growth was about 3% a year," said Acemoglu. "Today it's about 0.5%. What that means is you're losing about a point and a half percentage growth of GDP (gross domestic product) every year so it's a really huge, huge, huge productivity slowdown. It's completely inconsistent with this view that we're just getting an enormous amount of benefits (from AI)."

Technology evangelists have been saying AI will change the world for years with some speculating that "artificial general intelligence" and "superintelligence" isn't far away.

AGI is the hypothetical ability of an AI to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can, while superintelligence is defined by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest."

But some argue that we're no closer to AGI or superintelligence than we were at the start of the century.

"One can say, and some do, 'oh it's just around the corner.' But the premise of that doesn't seem to be very well articulated. It was just around the corner 10 years ago and it hasn't come," said Acemoglu.

'Lighting a fuse': Amazon vote may spark more union pushes

What happens inside a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, could have major implications not just for the country's second-largest employer but the labour movement at large.

© Provided by The Canadian Press UNION YES SIGN

Organizers are pushing for some 6,000 Amazon workers there to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union on the promise it will lead to better working conditions, better pay and more respect. Amazon is pushing back, arguing that it already offers more than twice the minimum wage in Alabama and workers get such benefits as health care, vision and dental insurance without paying union dues.

The two sides are fully aware that it's not just the Bessemer warehouse on the line. Organizers hope what happens there will inspire thousands of workers nationwide — and not just at Amazon — to consider unionizing and revive a labour movement that has been waning for decades.

“This is lighting a fuse, which I believe is going to spark an explosion of union organizing across the country, regardless of the results,” says RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum.

The union push could spread to other parts of Amazon and threaten the company's profits, which soared 84% last year to $21 billion. At a time when many companies were cutting jobs, Amazon was one of the few still hiring, bringing on board 500,000 people last year alone to keep up with a surge of online orders.

Bessemer workers finished casting their votes on Monday. The counting begins on Tuesday, which could take days or longer depending on how many votes are received and how much time it takes for each side to review. The process is being overseen by the National Labor Relations Board and a majority of the votes will decide the final outcome.

What that outcome will be is anyone's guess. Appelbaum thinks workers who voted early likely rejected the union because Amazon’s messaging got to them first. He says momentum changed in March as organizers talked to more workers and heard from basketball players and high-profile elected officials, including President Joe Biden.

For Amazon, which employs more than 950,000 full- and part-time workers in the U.S. and nearly 1.3 million worldwide, a union could lead to higher wages that would eat into its profits. Higher wages would also mean higher costs to get packages to shoppers’ doorsteps, which may prompt Amazon to raise prices, says Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Any push to unionize is considered a long shot, since labour laws tend to favour employers. Alabama itself is a “right-to-work” state, which allows workers in unionized shops to opt out of paying union dues even as they retain the benefits and job protection negotiated by the union.

Kent Wong, the director of the UCLA Labor Center, says companies in the past have closed stores, warehouses or plants after workers have voted to unionize.

“There’s a history of companies going to great lengths to avoid recognizing the union,” he says.

Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and biggest private employer, has successfully fought off organizing efforts over the years. In 2000, it got rid of butchers in 180 of its stores after they voted to form a union. Walmart said it cut the jobs because people preferred pre-packaged meat. Five years later, it closed a store in Canada where some 200 workers were close to winning a union contract. At the time, Walmart said demands from union negotiators made it impossible for the store to sustain itself.

The only other time Amazon came up against a union vote was in 2014, when the majority of the 30 workers at a Delaware warehouse turned it down.

This time around, Amazon has been hanging anti-union signs throughout the Bessemer warehouse, including inside bathroom stalls, and holding mandatory meetings to convince workers why the union is a bad idea, according to one worker who recently testified at a Senate hearing. It has also created a website for employees that tells them they’ll have to pay $500 in union dues a month, taking away money that could go to dinners and school supplies.

Amazon's hardball tactics extend beyond squashing union efforts. Last year, it fired a worker who organized a walkout at a New York warehouse to demand greater protection against coronavirus, saying the employee himself flouted distancing rules. When Seattle, the home of its headquarters, passed a new tax on big companies in 2018, Amazon protested by stopping construction of a new high-rise building in the city; the tax was repealed four weeks later. And in 2019, Amazon ditched plans to build a $2.5 billion headquarters for 25,000 workers in New York after pushback from progressive politicians and unions.

Beyond Amazon is an anti-union culture that dominates the South. And unions have lost ground nationally for decades since their peak in the decades following World War II. In 1970, almost a third of the U.S. workforce belonged to a union. In 2020, that figure was 10.8%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private sector workers now account for less than half of the 14.3 million union members across the country.

Advocates say a victory would signal a shift in the narrative about unions, helping refute the typical arguments from companies, including Amazon, that workers can win adequate compensation and conditions by dealing with management directly.

“It is because of unions that we have a five-day work week. It is because of unions that we have safer conditions in our places of work. It is because of unions that we have benefits,” says Rep. Terri Sewell, whose congressional district includes the Amazon facility. “Workers should have the right to choose whether they organize or not.”

Union leaders are circumspect about specific organizing plans after the Bessemer vote, and Appelbaum says he doesn't want to tip off Amazon to any future efforts. But there is broad consensus that a win would spur workers at some of the 230 other Amazon warehouses to mount a similar union campaign.

It’s less clear whether any ripple effects would reach other prime targets like Walmart and the expansive auto industry that has burgeoned across the South in recent decades. Both have largely succeeded at keeping unions at bay.

The auto workers union has had some of the largest union pushes of the last decade, but their most intense and publicized efforts ended in failure. In 2017, a years-long campaign to unionize a Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, ended with a decisive 2,244-1,307 rejection of the union — the kind of margin that would be devastating in Bessemer. Two years later, however, Volkswagen workers in Tennessee had a much more evenly split vote, with 776 workers supporting unionization and 833 voting against it.

Besides the number of Amazon workers involved, the Alabama campaign has stood out because of how explicitly many advocates have linked the effort to the civil rights movement of the 20th century. The RWDSU estimates that more than 80% of the warehouse workers in Bessemer are Black.

Robert Korstad, a Duke Emeritus professor and labour history expert, says those dynamics could help in Bessemer.

“The history of the Black struggle in Alabama is pretty deeply entrenched in the social, political and religious institutions there,” he says. “We’re starting to see people rise up again. So this Amazon struggle is part of a larger struggle that’s gone on a long time.”

The question, Korstad says, is whether a win in Bessemer truly becomes a “ripple effect” that inspires workers across racial and ethnic lines elsewhere.

Joseph Pisani And Bill Barrow, The Associated Press

Kimmel Jokes the Suez Canal Blockage Means 'Capitalism Had a Heart Attack' 

© TheWrap Jimmy Kimmel Suez Canal

On Monday, Jimmy Kimmel celebrated the end of the Suez Canal blockage during his opening monologue by joking that the whole thing was basically "capitalism had a heart attack" and wondering how the hell it happened in the first place.

"I have to say — after all the fighting and the tooth-gnashing over the past few years – it was nice to see the whole world come together to make fun of a boat," Kimmel said as he got into the joke.

"The container ship – known as the Ever Given — was wedged in the Suez Canal for the last six days — it was finally freed this morning by a fleet of tug boats. Same way they got Trump out of the White House," Kimmel continued.

Also read: Suez Canal Ship Has Been Freed -- and So Have All the Memes

Kimmel then described how the canal, "one of the main arteries for ships carrying goods around the globe," ended up being "completely blocked by this ship. Basically, capitalism had a heart attack over this last week," he joked.

Kimmel joked that the delivery delays caused by the canal blockage caused all sort of problems, for instance Ikea had a lot of products suck in transit. "Which means thousands of men in their twenties now have an excuse for why they don't own a headboard," said Kimmel.

"But still, it's crazy that something like this can bring the world of commerce to a halt," Kimmel said, later adding "if this was a urethra — they'd have to operate."

"They're still investigating how this happened," he said, concluding the gag. The shipping company is blaming a strong gust of wind. Which, don't know. They finished this canal in 1869. In 150 years, this is the first time they had wind?"

Watch the whole monologue above. Kimmel's canal jokes happen at the very beginning.

Joe Biden plans to build huge offshore wind farms to tackle the climate crisis

President Joe Biden's administration has detailed a plan to build huge offshore wind farms in the United States.

The White House said the plans would create up to 44,000 jobs by 2030.

President Biden has called climate change one of the four "major crises" he plans to tackle as president.

President Joe Biden's administration has detailed a plan to build huge offshore wind farms in the United States as part of his plans to tackle climate change.

The project, which was unveiled on Monday, aims to create 30 extra gigawatts of offshore wind generation to US coastlines by 2030, while creating tens of thousands of jobs.

The White House said meeting that target would cost $12 billion a year in capital investment on both US coastlines and would employ 44,000 workers, as well as 33,000 additional jobs in communities supported by offshore wind generation.

The wind farms would supply power to 10 million homes and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 78 million metric tons, the White House said.

As one part of the efforts, Interior Department announced a new "priority wind energy area" in the New York Bight, a shallow area between Long Island and the New Jersey coastline, where the agency hopes to construct a wind farm by 2030.

"The announcements we're making today I hope will just jump-start everyone's understanding of the potential for offshore wind energy, and move this industry forward in a way that's going to allow us to really focus on the supply chain issue as well, because we're not just talking about erecting wind turbines in the oceans, we're talking about massive turbines that are actually manufactured in the United States," national climate adviser Gina McCarthy said Monday, in comments reported by Politico.

President Biden pledged to make tackling climate change a central part of his agenda in the White House, describing it as one of the four "major crises" facing the United States.

In his first week in office, he issued an executive order calling on the United States to create a "clean energy economy" and create millions of new jobs.

Biden administration plans major reboot for U.S. offshore wind power

The federal government will create a New Wind Energy Area offshore between Long Island and the New Jersey coast.

A wind farm shares space with corn fields in Latimer, Iowa, on Feb. 2, 2020.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters file



March 29, 2021, 

By Josh Lederman


WASHINGTON — The offshore wind industry is getting a major boost from the Biden administration as the White House aims to reinvigorate a potential source of renewable, emissions-free electricity that has never fully taken off in the United States.

As part of a government-wide effort announced Monday, the White House set a new target to deploy enough offshore windmills to power millions of American homes — 30 gigawatts — by 2030.


To accomplish that goal, the Interior Department will create a New Wind Energy Area offshore between Long Island and the New Jersey coast, where the administration will lease space, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said.

The Interior Department also announced it would move ahead with a key environmental review needed to proceed with permitting for Ocean Wind, a major project planned off the coast of New Jersey, which would be the third commercial offshore wind project for the U.S.

‘The science is screaming at us’: John Kerry reboots U.S. climate cooperation

MARCH 9, 2021   01:41

The White House said hitting their new target would directly employ more than 44,000 people, with tens of thousands more jobs created by increased economic activity in nearby communities.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the approach to offshore wind in the past has “looked like a chicken with its head cut off.”

“It is a new day under the Biden administration,” Granholm said.

Offshore wind — in which gigantic wind turbines located in waters off the coast churn out electricity to power homes and businesses onshore — is an untapped opportunity to expand electrical generation from sources that don’t produce heat-trapping greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

But in the U.S., while on-land wind farms have flourished in recent years, offshore wind has yet to take off in a significant way, in part due to bureaucratic and permitting hurdles that were a source of major frustration for renewable energy companies during the Trump administration. As of now, the U.S. has only one operational offshore commercial wind farm, with just five turbines.

In contrast, wind energy from onshore wind farms made up more than 8 percent of U.S. electricity generation in 2020, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, a number that is expected to grow.

Biden administration designates new offshore wind energy area

Wind Energy Areas(WEAs)

NEW YORK

Long Island

NEW

JERSEY

Barnegat Light

New York/New Jersey Bight

10 miles

Source: U.S. Department of the Interior

Graphic: Jiachuan Wu / NBC News

Another reason offshore wind has been slow: The Energy Department has said that more than 58 percent of offshore wind resources are in “deep water,” where it’s impractical to attach massive structures to the seabed and floating platforms must be used instead, a nascent technology that until recently has often been cost-prohibitive.

To accelerate offshore wind growth, the Energy Department plans to make $3 billion in funding available through its loan guarantee program, which will also target equipment suppliers and development of transmission for power generated from offshore wind.


“President Biden believes we have an enormous opportunity in front of us to not only address the threats of climate change, but use it as a chance to create millions of good-paying, union jobs that will fuel America’s economic recovery,” Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate advisor, said in a statement.

Moving the U.S. toward renewable, low-carbon energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal is critical to Biden’s goals of zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 2035 and from the entire U.S. economy by 2050.

Yet to meet global goals to keep climate change in check, the U.S. must also “electrify” other sectors that currently are powered by burning fossil fuels, such as cars and trucks, heating for homes and businesses, and gas cooking stoves. That means the U.S. must plan to use far more electricity in the coming years than it does now. To achieve the intended emission reductions, that electricity must come from renewable sources like wind rather than from coal- or gas-fired power plants, creating yet more pressure for the U.S. to quickly ramp up production of offshore wind power.


In one early action aimed to speed up the industry’s growth, shortly after Biden took office his administration renewed the permitting process for the stalled Vineyard Wind project off Martha’s Vineyard. The developer has said the project will create enough electricity to power 400,000 Massachusetts homes.

The White House’s push to ramp up offshore wind was quickly praised by environmental groups and climate hawks in Congress. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., said the U.S. would “benefit tremendously” from the Biden administration’s commitment to clean energy such as wind.

“The positive contrast with the Trump administration couldn’t be more obvious,” Grijalva said.

TO JUSTIFY NOT TAKING NO FOR AN ANWSER

The Alberta government has tasked a five-member committee with finding out how people feel about open-pit coal mining in the Rocky Mountains and their eastern slopes. 

Here's a description of committee members as provided by the Alberta Energy Department:

Ron Wallace: Is to chair the committee. He's an internationally recognized expert in regulatory policies associated with environmental assessment and monitoring. He has served on numerous regulatory boards dealing with energy and environmental issues, in addition to having extensive experience in the private sector. He was also a permanent member of the National Energy Board.

Fred Bradley: Minister of the environment in former Progressive Conservative premier Peter Lougheed's government. He served as member of the legislature for Pincher Creek-Crowsnest. After retiring from politics, he served as chairman of the Alberta Research Council.

Natalie Charlton: Executive director of the Hinton and District Chamber of Commerce. She has served on various boards and has experience advocating for alternative energy resources.

Bill Trafford: President of the Livingstone Landowners Group, which represents landowners and supporters of the Livingstone-Porcupine area of Alberta. He has 35 years of experience in the IT industry and the health sector.

Eric North Peigan: A small business owner and member of Pikanii First Nation. He operates a teepee camp that provides an immersive cultural experience for tourists.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 29. 2021

NO ENVIRONMENTALISTS, UNIONS, GEOLOGISTS, ENGINEERS, ETC ETC

IS THIS COMMITTEE FULL TIME OR PART TIME

STILL UP FOR DEBATE

Did volcanoes kill the dinosaurs? 

New research says no

If you asked Joe Blow on the street how the dinosaurs went extinct, he'd mostly likely say an asteroid wiped them out, but the truth is a little more complex than that. By this stage, we're well aware that a massive asteroid around 10 to 15 kilometers wide struck Earth around 66 million years ago. We even know where it hit: the Chicxulub crater, located in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, is 150 kilometers wide. Pretty difficult to miss.

© Provided by CNET The rock got them. 

© Oli Scarff/Getty Images

But many scientists still subscribe to the theory that a massive volcanic range, located in India, was the main driver of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. That volcanic range, named the Deccan Traps, is at the center of that debate.

We know lava was spewing from the Deccan Traps during the period in which the dinosaurs went extinct, but we don't know the precise timing of those eruptions or if the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere was significant enough to cause the type of global warming consistent with extinction events in the past.

Until now.

Recent research by a multi-institutional team led by scientists from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York has attempted to measure how much carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere, hoping to understand the role volcanoes played in the fifth extinction event.

The results? Volcanic eruptions most likely weren't a significant driver of dinosaur extinction.

"Our team analyzed Deccan Traps CO2 budgets that coincided with the warming event," said Andres Hernandez Nava, a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Center CUNY's Earth and Environmental Science program, "and we found that carbon outgassing from lava volumes alone couldn't have caused that level of global warming."

The team used lasers and ion beams to measure the carbon dioxide of frozen magma trapped inside Deccan Traps crystals from the end-Cretaceous period and performed modeling of that climate in an attempt to test the impacts of Deccan Traps release on surface temperatures. The data revealed that most likely the Deccan Traps contributed to a temperature increase of around 3 degrees Celsius. Significant, for sure, but most likely not enough to create a fifth extinction event.

In short, as my 5-year-old son says when I ask who killed the dinosaurs: "A big rock got them."

Dust devil shatters ice on frozen lake

Duration: 01:03

A photographer was left flabbergasted when a dust devil suddenly appeared in front of him on a frozen lake near Copenhagen, Denmark.