Clean Energy Saw as Much Investment as Fossil Fuels for the First Time in 2022

YALE E360
Fri, January 27, 2023 

Pexels

Solar, wind, electric vehicles, and other clean energy technologies saw a record-high $1.1 trillion in investment globally last year, matching investment in fossil fuels for the first time ever, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“Our findings put to bed any debate about how the energy crisis will impact clean energy deployment,” Albert Cheung, head of global analysis at BNEF, said in statement. “Investment in clean energy technologies is on the brink of overtaking fossil fuel investments, and won’t look back.”

Nearly every sector covered in the report — from renewable power to batteries to heat pumps to carbon capture technology — hit new highs. Investment in renewables, such as wind and solar, grew 17 percent last year, reaching $495 billion, while investment in electric vehicles grew a staggering 54 percent, hitting $466 billion. Nuclear power was the lone sector where investment stayed flat.

China accounted for nearly half of global clean energy investment, attracting some $546 billion. The EU saw $180 billion, while the U.S. saw $141 billion. “China is investing by far the most in building out its clean energy supply chain, and it remains to be seen if other regions can capture significant market share,” said Antoine Vagneur-Jones, head of trade and supply chains research at BNEF.

Last year’s record numbers still fell short of what is needed to reach zero emissions by 2050. BNEF estimates the world must invest $4.55 trillion every year for the rest of this decade to get on track for net zero.

Three Myths About Renewable Energy and the Grid, Debunked

Norway's last Arctic miners struggle with coal mine's end

Coal miner Jonny Sandvoll poses for a portrait in the break room of the Gruve 7 coal mine in Adventdalen, Norway, Monday, Jan. 9, 2023. Gruve 7, the last Norwegian mine in one of the fastest warming places on earth, was scheduled to shut down this year and only got a reprieve through 2025 because of the energy crisis driven by the war in Ukraine. Sandvoll said he wished people understood more about coal and its uses before deciding to close the mine. 

(AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO
Fri, January 27, 2023 

ADVENTDALEN, Norway (AP) — Kneeling by his crew as they drilled steel bolts into the low roof of a tunnel miles-deep into an Arctic mountain, Geir Strand reflected on the impact of their coal mine’s impending closure.

“It’s true coal is polluting, but … they should have a solution before they close us down,” Strand said inside Gruve 7, the last mine Norway is operating in the remote Svalbard archipelago.

It’s scheduled to be shut down in two years, cutting carbon dioxide emissions in this fragile, rapidly changing environment, but also erasing the identity of a century-old mining community that fills many with deep pride even as the primary activities shift to science and tourism.

“We have to think what we’re going to do,” Strand, a 19-year mining veteran, told two Associated Press journalists as his headlamp spotlighted black dust and the miners’ breath in the just-below-freezing tunnel. “(Mining) is meaningful. You know the task you have is very precise. The goal is to get out coal, and get out yourself and all your crew, safe and healthy.”

After the main village of Longyearbyen, 16 kilometers (10 miles) away, announced it would switch its only energy plant from coal-fired to diesel this year, and later to greener alternatives, mining company Store Norske decided it would close its last mine in Svalbard. The date was then postponed to 2025 because of the energy crisis precipitated by the war in Ukraine.

Puzzlement over the future mingles with grief for the end of an era. It permeates the underground room where the last five dozen soot-covered miners take a break during their 10-hour shifts and the stylish café where their retired predecessors gather on weekday mornings to trade news.

“A long, long tradition is fading away,” said foreman Bent Jakobsen. “We’re the last miners. Makes me sad.”

The history of mining and its perils are etched on the mountainside in Longyearbyen. Below abandoned coal conveyor towers on a mid-January day, a trail of footprints in the snow led to a memorial monument, floodlit in the constant darkness of winter’s polar night, listing the 124 miners who have died on the job since 1916.

“I’ve been there, and families go there,” said Trond Johansen, who worked in mining for more than 40 years.

The half dozen other retired miners sipping their morning coffee were quick with more examples of the sacrifice that mining entailed, citing the exact ages and dates when colleagues were killed.

Among the last was Bent Jakobsen’s older brother, Geir, who was 24 when he was crushed to death inside Gruve 3 in 1991. Their eldest brother, Frank, who also worked at the mine, rushed to the scene only to be told by the doctor that it wasn’t survivable. Frank did most of the research for the memorial, erected in 2016.

“We have a place to go and put flowers on Christmas Eve,” Frank said. “It’s not only our brother, it’s other colleagues, too.”

Longyearbyen’s only pastor, the Rev. Siv Limstrand, whose Svalbard Kirke was founded by the mining company a century ago and still plays a critical role in the community, said it’s important to recognize the pain.

“People ask themselves the question, ‘Was it (worth) nothing?’ So there’s a kind of sorrow,” Limstrand said in the church’s cabin, a retreat built in the broad valley below where Gruve 7’s entrance lights shone in the polar night. “It should upset us in the community.”

In nearly two decades at Gruve 7, Bent Jakobsen rose to production manager and is now working on the clean-up processes needed for the closure.

His pride in the job is palpable, whether he’s driving down a 6-kilometer (3.7 mile) tunnel dug with “a lot of time, a lot of sweat, a lot of swearing,” or scraping off a piece of 40-million-year-old coal, or checking one of the steel bolts, each 1.2 meters long (4 feet), that hold up 400 meters (1,300 feet) of mountain above the workers.

“We’re a really tight-knit group in the mine, because you actually trust and lay your lives in the hands of others every day,” he said.

Jakobsen has seen how the landscape outside the mine is rapidly changing, too. Scientists say this slice of the Arctic warms up faster than most of the rest of the world.

From his childhood, the Svalbard native recalls the rhythmic clanking of the coal carts making their way across town, every day except Sunday. Today, herds of reindeer dig through the snow for moss and grass by the disused mining conveyances.

Jakobsen remembers when the archipelago’s fjords regularly froze over in winter, giving polar bears easy passage, while earlier this month it was all open water. He’s unconvinced, however, that closing the mine will make a significant difference.

Environmental scientists agree that Svalbard’s own emissions are minuscule – its coal reserves could keep the global economy running for about 8 hours, according to Kim Holmén, a special advisor at the Norwegian Polar Institute and professor of environment and climate. But they counter that every pollutant counts, and the archipelago can set an example.

“We’re all part of the problem and should become part of the solution ... every action has a symbolism, is a value, period,” Holmén said.

Most of all, Jakobsen and others in mining worry about the alternatives, especially since Gruve 7 exports coal for Europe’s metallurgic industry – like car engine construction in Germany – in addition to feeding the local energy plant.

“If you don’t take coal from us, you’ll take coal from someone else where it’s not that good – the world needs to take coal for your Tesla battery,” he said.

Even windmill components need coal, added Elias Hagebø, his face smeared with coal dust as he grabbed a quick lunch in the mine’s underground break room.

“If they just throw away coal, it’s stupid,” he said. At 18, he’s the youngest worker, and hopes he’ll be able to make a career in the mine just like his father.

Furthermore, Russia has operated mines in Svalbard for 93 years under an international treaty that gave Norway sovereignty on the archipelago while allowing all signatory nations equal rights to commercial enterprise.

“There are no plans to decrease this operation,” Ildar Neverov, director general of Russia’s mining company Arcticugol, told AP in an email from Barentsburg, a village about 37 miles (60 kilometers) from Longyearbyen.

Given the race by global powers, including China, for increasingly profitable natural resources in Arctic, some in Longyearbyen worry that Norway might give up precious rights by closing the mine.

“It will be an unusual situation if the only nation doing mining is the Russians. This is a very geopolitical place,” Arnstein Martin Skaare, a businessman and former shareholder in Store Norske, said at the retired miners’ coffee hour in Longyearbyen’s café.

Back inside Gruve 7, crouched in a 1.3-meter-high (4.1 foot) tunnel, Jonny Sandvoll said he wished people understood more about coal and its uses before deciding to close the mine.

“It’s not the right way to do it,” said Sandvoll, a miner’s son with 20 years in mining. Then he refocused on the huge machine next to him that loudly burrowed into the shining black vein and extracted more coal.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Norwegian Arctic Coal Mine in Limbo

AP Photo/Daniel Cole

'Merry Christmas' is written in Norwegian on the wall at the bottom of the Gruve 7 coal mine in Adventdalen, Norway, Monday, Jan. 9, 2023. Gruve 7, the last Norwegian mine in one of the fastest warming places on earth, was scheduled to shut down this year and only got a reprieve through 2025 because of the energy crisis driven by the war in Ukraine. 

(AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Harvard students stage walkout in front of professor accused of sexual harassment



Ryan General
Fri, January 27, 2023 at 3:11 PM MST·2 min read

Over 100 students marched out of a Harvard classroom on Tuesday to protest the first lecture of professor John L. Comaroff this year.

Comaroff, who teaches African and African American Studies at Harvard University, was found to have violated the school’s sexual harassment and professional conduct policies after two internal investigations last year.

In February 2022, three anthropology graduate students — Margaret G. Czerwienski, Lilia M. Kilburn and Amulya Mandava — sued the school for allegedly ignoring complaints filed by victims against Comaroff over the years.

One of the plaintiffs alleged that Comaroff kissed her multiple times without her consent and groped her in public.

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The lawsuit, which remains ongoing, stated that the professor allegedly threatened the students’ academic careers if they reported him.

“When students reported him to Harvard and sought to warn their peers about him, Harvard watched as he retaliated by foreclosing career paths and ensuring that those students would have ’trouble getting jobs,’” read the complaint.

It further alleged that the university “allowed its investigatory process to be used in service of Professor Comaroff’s campaign of professional blacklisting.”

The complaint noted that the professor and the school “destroyed the educational opportunities and careers of countless students.”

Protesting Comaroff’s first lecture of the year, students posted signs on the walls outside of the building where he teaches, reported The Harvard Crimson.

The signs included statements such as “Abusers have no place on campus” and “Stop protecting sexual predators.”

The protest, organized by members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers’ Feminist Working Group and Our Harvard Can Do Better, involved students flooding Comaroff’s classroom before his class.

As soon as Comaroff began his lecture, students rose up from their seats and started chanting, “Justice for survivors,” and “No more Comaroff, no more complicity,” while walking out.

Comaroff reportedly smiled and nodded at the protesters as the students made their way out of the classroom.

A video clip showing the students as they marched out of the classroom was posted on Twitter by student Rosie Couture.

Comaroff’s students conducted a similar protest when he first returned to teaching in the fall 2022 semester after he completed his unpaid administrative leave.

High-level U.S. diplomatic mission to Middle East overshadowed by violence

Tracy Wilkinson
Sat, January 28, 2023 

Palestinians holding a Hamas flag protest by the Dome of the Rock Mosque at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem on Friday. The protest was a day after the deadliest Israeli raid in decades and raised the prospect of a major flare-up in fighting. (Mahmoud Illean / Associated Press)

America’s top diplomat headed out on a trip to Egypt, Israel and the West Bank on Saturday as a spiral of deadly violence gripped the Middle East, with any plans to focus on democracy now overshadowed as the region braces for the no-holds-barred retaliation to Palestinian attacks that the new extremist Israeli government has vowed.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will become the highest-level U.S. official to meet with Israel’s new government, led by perennial Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and populated with far-right nationalists and haredim.

After a month in office, the Netanyahu administration has announced numerous policies that many Israelis say will erode Israel’s democracy and civil rights, and that have alarmed U.S. officials.

The Blinken delegation had hoped to use two days of meetings in Jerusalem to press Netanyahu and other members of his Cabinet on a variety of issues including the normalization or recognition of Israel in the region, rights and freedoms for Palestinians as well as Israelis, and the importance of creating a Palestinian state.

“Normalization — advancing it and deepening it — will be on the agenda,” as will the Biden administration’s “unstinting commitment to a two-state negotiated solution,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf said in a briefing ahead of the trip.

But those issues now will take second chair to Blinken’s more pressing mission to urge de-escalation after violence over the last few days in Jerusalem and the West Bank, some of the deadliest in years.

Any serious criticism of the Israeli government’s more drastic proposals will probably be shelved, several analysts predicted.

The wave of violence began Thursday when a raid by Israeli troops on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank killed nine, most of whom Israel identified as militants planning a terrorist attack inside Israel. A woman in her 60s was among the dead, Palestinian authorities said.

A day later, as Israeli Jews observed Shabbat on Friday night, a suspected Palestinian gunman opened fire near a synagogue in East Jerusalem, killing seven and wounding several other people before police fatally shot the assailant. Palestinian militant groups praised the attack and celebrations were reported in several Palestinian towns.

In between those two deadly episodes, Palestinian militants fired rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, and Israel launched several airstrikes on Palestinian positions. No casualties were reported.

On Saturday, Israeli police said a 13-year-old Palestinian boy shot and wounded an Israeli father and son near Jerusalem’s Old City. Police wounded and captured the assailant.

Given history and the explosive tensions of the moment, the cycle of killing could continue. U.S. officials said they have been on the phone constantly since the Jenin operation with Israeli and Palestinian officials to urge calm.

President Biden telephoned Netanyahu on Friday night to condemn the deadly shooting at the synagogue, which Biden called “an attack against the civilized world.”

In response to the Jenin deaths, the Palestinian Authority, the weakened body that governs the West Bank, announced that it was suspending what has been quietly successful security cooperation with Israel.

“Obviously, we don’t think this is the right step to take at this moment,” Leaf said of the move. “Far from stepping back on security coordination, we believe it’s quite important that the parties retain — and if anything, deepen — security coordination.”

But several members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet have threatened to take an increasingly hard line with Palestinians. Now, the tough rhetoric will be tested as the government faces a genuine security crisis.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, convicted in Israel years ago for inciting anti-Arab hate but now a Cabinet minister, has been put in charge of national security. Ben-Gvir once advocated deporting “all Arabs,” but softened his position more recently to say Palestinian “terrorists” should be expelled. He has also proposed changing rules of engagement to make it easier for soldiers and police to open fire on Palestinian demonstrators and more difficult to hold them accountable.

Ben-Gvir’s presence in the Cabinet with such a powerful security role is especially unnerving for Palestinians. U.S. officials have also criticized some of his actions: He attended a recent memorial for his hero Meir Kahane, the slain racist rabbi whose organization was branded a terrorist group by the U.S. Blinken refuses to meet with Ben-Gvir, aides said.

Late Friday, Netanyahu promised “immediate actions” in response to the synagogue shooting.

“We must act with determination and composure,” he said, while urging citizens not to take the law into their own hands.

At the site of the shooting, Ben-Gvir seemed to deliver the opposite message, promising to make it easier to arm civilians.

Netanyahu had not wanted to confront the Palestinian issue this early in his tenure because a fierce retaliation risks angering Arab nations that only recently recognized Israel, and who Netanyahu wants to keep on board in the quest for normalization, said Nimrod Goren, a fellow at the Mideast Institute in Washington and head of a think tank in Jerusalem that studies regional politics.

“The region will react to whatever happens with the Palestinians,” Goren said from his home in Israel. “So far they’ve been willing to play along, but if things go badly on the Palestinian tract, they won’t.

“The question is how quickly” they would turn on Israel and its government, he added.

Although the death toll in the region over the last couple of days is striking, the pace of violence — particularly in the West Bank — has been steadily rising for nearly a year.

Following a series of Palestinian attacks, Israel last spring launched a campaign raiding villages across the West Bank in what it said was an effort to eliminate militant cells. About 150 Palestinians were killed last year in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with about 30 Israelis, according to local human rights groups that keep track. Before Thursday’s Jenin attack, an average of one Palestinian a day had been killed this year.

Netanyahu’s new government is advocating numerous policies that contravene U.S. goals, including a plan to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which is claimed by Palestinians for a future independent state. The settlements, which many countries consider illegal under international law, have proliferated exponentially to the point that a contiguous Palestinian state may now be impossible.

Netanyahu and his partners are also trying to overhaul the Israeli judiciary so that courts would no longer be able to vet laws, taking away an important checks-and-balances mechanism. Netanyahu’s critics say his aim is to have a criminal corruption case against him voided.

Ultra-Orthodox members of the Cabinet want to inject more religion into education, make it harder for non-Orthodox foreign Jews to obtain Israeli citizenship and have condemned LGBTQ rights. Some Cabinet members, led by Ben-Gvir, want to upset the traditional status quo of religious sites in the Holy City, which are delicately divided among the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Days after taking office, Ben-Gvir made a provocative trip to the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, where, under rules in place for years, only Muslims may pray despite the site being sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

“We oppose any unilateral actions that undercut the historic status quo,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said at the time. “They are unacceptable.”

Blinken’s trip to Israel, with a stop in Cairo, follows a visit earlier in the month by national security advisor Jake Sullivan and, reportedly, by CIA Director William Burns at about the same time.

The full-court press reflects concern over the new Israeli government, which some fear could destabilize the region.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

SAME OLD SAME OLD

Taliban warn women can't take entry exams at universities


This photo provided by Taliban Higher Education Ministry, UN officials meet with Taliban Higher Education Minister in Kabul, Afghanistan on Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023. The U.N. envoy met with the Taliban-led Afghan government’s higher education minister to discuss the ban on women attending universities.

(Taliban Higher Education Ministry via AP) 

RIAZAT BUTT
Sat, January 28, 2023 

ISLAMABAD (AP) — The Taliban on Saturday doubled down on their ban on women's education, reinforcing in a message to private universities that Afghan women are barred from taking university entry exams, according to a spokesman.

The note comes despite weeks of condemnation and lobbying by the international community for a reversal on measures restricting women's freedoms, including two back-to-back visits this month by several senior U.N. officials. It also bodes ill for hopes that the Taliban could take steps to reverse their edicts anytime soon.

The Taliban barred women from private and public universities last month. The higher education minister in the Taliban-run government, Nida Mohammed Nadim, has maintained that the ban is necessary to prevent the mixing of genders in universities — and because he believes some subjects being taught violate Islamic principles.

Work was underway to fix these issues and universities would reopen for women once they were resolved, he had said in a TV interview.

The Taliban have made similar promises about middle school and high school access for girls, saying classes would resume for them once “technical issues” around uniforms and transport were sorted out. But girls remain shut out of classrooms beyond sixth grade.

Higher Education Ministry spokesman Ziaullah Hashmi said Saturday that a letter reminding private universities not to allow women to take entrance exams was sent out. He gave no further details.

A copy of the letter, shared with The Associated Press, warned that women could not take the “entry test for bachelor, master and doctorate levels" and that if any university disobeys the edict, “legal action will be taken against the violator.”

The letter was signed by Mohammad Salim Afghan, the government official overseeing student affairs at private universities.

Entrance exams start on Sunday in some provinces while elsewhere in Afghanistan, they begin Feb. 27. Universities across Afghanistan follow a different term timetable, due to seasonal differences.

Mohammed Karim Nasari, spokesman for the private universities union, said the institutions were worried and sad about this latest development.

“The one hope we had was that there might be some progress. But unfortunately, after the letter, there is no sign of progress,” he told the AP. “The entire sector is suffering.”

He expressed fears that if education did not restart for girls, then nobody would take entrance exams because student numbers would be so low.

Also, Nasari said private universities want the authorities to waive land taxes for universities built on government property, and waive taxes on universities in general, because they are suffering huge financial losses.

Afghanistan has 140 private universities across 24 provinces, with around 200,000 students. Out of those, some 60,000 to 70,000 are women. The universities employ about 25,000 people.

Earlier this week, U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths and leaders of two major international aid organizations visited Afghanistan, following last week’s visit by a delegation led by the U.N.’s highest-ranking woman, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. The visits had the same aim — to try and reverse the Taliban’s crackdown on women and girls, including their ban on Afghan women working for national and global humanitarian organizations.

Oil leases in New Mexico could worsen climate change, should be canceled, lawsuit argues



Adrian Hedden, Carlsbad Current-Argus
Fri, January 27, 2023 

A lawsuit challenged thousands of acres of public land leased to the oil and gas industry in southeast New Mexico, amid pressure from environmental groups in the state to see the federal government tighten restrictions on fossil fuel pollution.

The leases in question were granted to oil and gas companies in May 2021 after an auction by the Bureau of Land Management, under approval by the administration of former-President Donald Trump, but after President Joe Biden took office in January of the that year, the suit read.

These leases were approved without adequate environmental oversight, the suit read, as they did not follow regulations later updated by the Biden administration to consider the climate change impacts of oil and gas operations on the lands.

More:Oil and gas companies moving into Permian Basin in $100M string of deals, as region expands

The auction offered 6,850 acres in 37 parcels – six in Eddy County on 720 acres and 26 parcels on 5,220 acres in Lea County, records show.

Another 500 acres in Wise County, Texas were offered in the sale, along with 320 acres in Decatur County, Kansas.

In Oklahoma, 88 acres were sold on three parcels in Coal, Kingfisher and Major counties.

More:Pro-oil candidates lost out in New Mexico's 2022 election, as environment took center stage

In total, the sale netted $4.1 million, according to BLM data and the leases were issued by the BLM’s New Mexico office on May 12, 2021.

The lawsuit, which challenged only the New Mexico leases issued by the BLM and was filed in New Mexico U.S. District Court, called on the court to vacate the leases and require the agency adopt stricter environmental regulations for future sales.
Permian Basin oil and gas blamed for dirty air in New Mexico

Kayley Shoup, organizer with Carlsbad-area group Citizens Caring for the Future, plaintiff in the suit, said air quality continued to decline in the Permian Basin region leading to health problems for the community.

More:Oil company goes to court with Intrepid Potash over freshwater sales in Permian Basin

This was caused directly by oil and gas production, Shoup said, allowed by the continued use of public land by oil companies.

“Those of us living in Carlsbad continue to be alarmed by our ever-degrading air quality and environment in the region,” Shoup said. “Any direction you look in southeast New Mexico your eyes will be met with rigs, flares and pollution at a mass scale.”

Shoup said expanding oil and gas development and its environmental impacts threatened other industries like agriculture in the region.

More:Eddy County oil and gas collections near $10 million despite drop in oil prices

“Unmitigated oil and gas production on public lands here in New Mexico has already taken away our health and has stifled our ability to nurture industries such as agriculture,” she said. “We see leasing out our public lands for years to come as a direct attack on our ability to build a viable economy in our region in the future.”

Penny Aucoin, whose home south of Carlsbad was showered with a leaking produced water line, contaminating soil and leading to the death of animals on the Aucoin property, wrote in public comments submitted Nov. 19, 2020 that oil and gas production in the area risked the health of residents.

“You cannot expect oil and gas to police themselves,” read Aucoin’s written comments. “They have proven time and time again with accidents that could be avoided, leaks and equipment failures that could have been prevented if they had the proper oversight.”

More:Federal oil and gas reforms debated by New Mexico environmental, industry groups

The suit also alleged the BLM unduly denied contentions filed by both national and statewide environmental groups, and local residents in New Mexico.
Feds deny New Mexicans' fossil fuel concerns

In letters date Jan. 14, 2021, records show the BLM argued it was able to use past standards like resource management plans (RMP) and environmental impacts statements (EIS) despite development, at the time, of new regulations and that its analysis of the leases in question was adequate to move forward with the sale.

This was allowed, the BLM contended, under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

More:Federal methane restrictions needed, New Mexicans say, amid growing oil and gas drilling

“Contrary to the Protesting Party’s assertions, the BLM may rely on an existing RMP-EIS to support the NEPA analysis for a new, proposed oil and gas action,” read a letter filed by the BLM to the Sierra Club’s Rio Grande Chapter.

Similar letters were sent to Santa Fe-based WildEarth Guardian and the National Wildlife Federation, records show.

“Contrary to the Protesting Party’s assertions, the BLM adequately considered potential impacts from the proposed leasing action and the impacts from development to the extent reasonably foreseeable,” read a BLM letter responding to WildEarth Guardians.

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The Biden administration approved more leases than Trump’s, despite commitments by the President to enact stronger regulations on oil and gas in the U.S. to address climate change, read a report from the Center for Biological Diversity.

Since Biden took office two years ago, the Department of the Interior issued 6,430 permits to drill on public lands, records show, compared to 6,172 permits under Trump in his first two years in office.

About 4,000 of those permits were issued by the BLM’s New Mexico Office, in the state that ranks second in the nation in oil and gas production, with more than half of that occurring on federal public land.

More:New Mexico congressmembers call for federal work to plug abandoned oil and gas wells

Taylor McKinnon with the Center was critical of the President and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland for “failure”, McKinnon said, to respond to warnings from the scientific community that continued oil and gas leasing was exacerbating climate change and extreme weather events like wildfires.

“Two years of runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership by President Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland,” McKinnon said. “Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires phasing out fossil fuel extraction, but instead we’re still racing in the opposite direction.”

To prevent global warming, new fossil fuel developments must be stopped, according to a report from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.

Without any new projects, the study showed by 2030 existing developments worldwide will produce 35 percent more oil than is consistent with avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming – a standard devised by the international community believed to create disastrous weather events.

“The president and Interior secretary have the power to avoid a climate catastrophe, but they need to change course rapidly,” McKinnon said. “Strong executive action can meet the climate emergency with the urgency it demands, starting with phasing out fossil fuel production on public lands and waters.”

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Oil leases in New Mexico could worsen climate change, lawsuit argues

Hijab rules have nothing to do with Islamic tenets and everything to do with repressing women

Deina Abdelkader, Associate Professor of Political Science, UMass Lowell

THE CONVERSATION
Sat, January 28, 2023 

Thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to protest the death of Mahsa Amini.

AP Photo/Emrah Gurel

The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was held by Iran’s morality police for not complying with the country’s hijab rules has drawn global attention to the repression of women in Iran. Neighboring Saudi Arabia, a Sunni country, theologically and politically opposed to Shiite Iran, has similar restrictive rules when it comes to women.

The connection between faith and practice in the Muslim world at large lies at the heart of my research. A wider look at some of the Muslim majority countries shows that even when they may claim to be diametrically opposed ideologically, they often have similar religious police, or other rules for enforcing faith in everyday life. Moreover, it is my belief, they have nothing to do with Islamic tenets.

In many Muslim majority countries, imposing barriers on women has been a way of informing the world what kind of policy and ideology the government believes in.

Market inspectors turned into morality police

The closest thing to the morality police of today to be found in early Islamic history is the “Muhtasib,” or observers. The Muhtasib, who had to know Islamic law, were appointed by the ruler, such as the sultan in Ottoman times, to oversee matters of trade. The Muhtasib’s job was to make sure that traders were using correct measures and weights, paying taxes and maintaining hygienic conditions in their establishments.

More generally they would observe public actions and had the jurisdiction to reprimand and at times penalize people. They were not known to target women, and they respected the beliefs of multiple faiths that existed at the time. In contemporary Iran, the rules on head covering are upheld for all women, even if they’re not Muslim.

Islam’s basic tenets are that humans share a direct relationship with God without the interference of individuals or any organizations. The Quran does not stipulate that women shouldn’t drive, as in Saudi Arabia, or that women should be forced to wear conservative dress. While the Quran asks both men and women to dress modestly, it does not discriminate.

Politics of the veil

In today’s political environment, women’s bodies and their sartorial modesty are often the quickest way for governments to express whether the country is secular.

In the 1970s, for example, the Syrian government forbade women from wearing the veil in public because President Hafez-al-Assad wanted to convey to the outside world that the Baathist regime was secular and left of the center. The policy continued under President Bashar al-Assad and, in 2010, over a thousand veil-wearing primary school teachers were removed from their teaching jobs and given administrative posts.

In Iran, however, following the 1979 revolution, as observers have pointed out, the hijab came to be the “central symbol,” of Islamist rule. Compulsory hijab wearing was enforced in Iran through law, and any violation was penalized with fines and a two-month prison sentence.

Egypt provides another example. In 2011, the image of a woman whose face was veiled but whose upper garment had come apart exposing her blue bra while she was being dragged by the Egyptian police, captured the media’s attention. The image, which came to be known as the “girl in the blue bra,” soon became a symbol of women’s oppression by the Egyptian military.

The 2011 image known as ‘The Girl in the Blue Bra,’ taken during the Egyptian Revolution. Stringer/Reuters/Landov

The fact is that women face police brutality regardless of how they dress. The “girl in the blue bra” was attacked by the police because she dared protest the country’s conditions. I believe disrobing her and kicking her in her abdomen was being done on purpose to deter other women from joining the revolution. In 2011, many female protesters were put through a virginity test by the Egyptian police when in captivity.

As opposed to a misconception that Muslim women are always forced to act conservatively in their respective countries, the truth is that women are violated for being nonconformist citizens in their respective political regimes.

What is important to note is that these patriarchal practices often are not limited to policing modest dressing for women and penalizing them brutally, but also in forcing them to remove their veil. Following the 2013 coup in Egypt, when Egyptian army chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi overthrew the democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, widespread changes were introduced, including a crackdown on women who chose to wear the niqab.

Women’s rights and choices over their bodies need to be respected – by Muslim majority nations and the rest of the world.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

It was written by: Deina Abdelkader, UMass Lowell.

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Big Tech was moving cautiously on AI. Then came ChatGPT



LONG READ

Nitasha Tiku
Fri, January 27, 2023

Three months before ChatGPT debuted in November, Facebook's parent company Meta released a similar chatbot. But unlike the phenomenon that ChatGPT instantly became, with more than a million users in its first five days, Meta's Blenderbot was boring, said Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun.

"The reason it was boring was because it was made safe," LeCun said last week at a forum hosted by AI consulting company Collective[i]. He blamed the tepid public response on Meta being "overly careful about content moderation," like directing the chatbot to change the subject if a user asked about religion. ChatGPT, on the other hand, will converse about the concept of falsehoods in the Quran, write a prayer for a rabbi to deliver to Congress and compare God to a flyswatter.

ChatGPT is quickly going mainstream now that Microsoft - which recently invested billions of dollars in the company behind the chatbot, OpenAI - is working to incorporate it into its popular office software and selling access to the tool to other businesses. The surge of attention around ChatGPT is prompting pressure inside tech giants including Meta and Google to move faster, potentially sweeping safety concerns aside, according to interviews with six current and former Google and Meta employees, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak.

At Meta, employees have recently shared internal memos urging the company to speed up its AI approval process to take advantage of the latest technology, according to one of them. Google, which helped pioneer some of the technology underpinning ChatGPT, recently issued a "code red" around launching AI products and proposed a "green lane" to shorten the process of assessing and mitigating potential harms, according to a report in the New York Times.

ChatGPT, along with text-to-image tools such as DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, is part of a new wave of software called generative AI. They create works of their own by drawing on patterns they've identified in vast troves of existing, human-created content. This technology was pioneered at big tech companies like Google that in recent years have grown more secretive, announcing new models or offering demos but keeping the full product under lock and key. Meanwhile, research labs like OpenAI rapidly launched their latest versions, raising questions about how corporate offerings, like Google's language model LaMDA, stack up.

Tech giants have been skittish since public debacles like Microsoft's Tay, which it took down in less than a day in 2016 after trolls prompted the bot to call for a race war, suggest Hitler was right and tweet "Jews did 9/11." Meta defended Blenderbot and left it up after it made racist comments in August, but pulled down another AI tool, called Galactica, in November after just three days amid criticism over its inaccurate and sometimes biased summaries of scientific research.

"People feel like OpenAI is newer, fresher, more exciting and has fewer sins to pay for than these incumbent companies, and they can get away with this for now," said a Google employee who works in AI, referring to the public's willingness to accept ChatGPT with less scrutiny. Some top talent has jumped ship to nimbler start-ups, like OpenAI and Stable Diffusion.

Some AI ethicists fear that Big Tech's rush to market could expose billions of people to potential harms - such as sharing inaccurate information, generating fake photos or giving students the ability to cheat on school tests - before trust and safety experts have been able to study the risks. Others in the field share OpenAI's philosophy that releasing the tools to the public, often nominally in a "beta" phase after mitigating some predictable risks, is the only way to assess real world harms.

"The pace of progress in AI is incredibly fast, and we are always keeping an eye on making sure we have efficient review processes, but the priority is to make the right decisions, and release AI models and products that best serve our community," said Joelle Pineau, managing director of Fundamental AI Research at Meta.

"We believe that AI is foundational and transformative technology that is incredibly useful for individuals, businesses and communities," said Lily Lin, a Google spokesperson. "We need to consider the broader societal impacts these innovations can have. We continue to test our AI technology internally to make sure it's helpful and safe."

Microsoft's chief of communications, Frank Shaw, said his company works with OpenAI to build in extra safety mitigations when it uses AI tools like DALLE-2 in its products. "Microsoft has been working for years to both advance the field of AI and publicly guide how these technologies are created and used on our platforms in responsible and ethical ways," Shaw said.

OpenAI declined to comment.

The technology underlying ChatGPT isn't necessarily better than what Google and Meta have developed, said Mark Riedl, professor of computing at Georgia Tech and an expert on machine learning. But OpenAI's practice of releasing its language models for public use has given it a real advantage.

"For the last two years they've been using a crowd of humans to provide feedback to GPT," said Riedl, such as giving a "thumbs down" for an inappropriate or unsatisfactory answer, a process called "reinforcement learning from human feedback."

Silicon Valley's sudden willingness to consider taking more reputational risk arrives as tech stocks are tumbling. When Google laid off 12,000 employees last week, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that the company had undertaken a rigorous review to focus on its highest priorities, twice referencing its early investments in AI.

A decade ago, Google was the undisputed leader in the field. It acquired the cutting edge AI lab DeepMind in 2014 and open-sourced its machine learning software TensorFlow in 2015. By 2016, Pichai pledged to transform Google into an "AI first" company.

The next year, Google released transformers - a pivotal piece of software architecture that made the current wave of generative AI possible.

The company kept rolling out state-of-the-art technology that propelled the entire field forward, deploying some AI breakthroughs in understanding language to improve Google search. Inside big tech companies, the system of checks and balances for vetting the ethical implications of cutting-edge AI isn't as established as privacy or data security. Typically teams of AI researchers and engineers publish papers on their findings, incorporate their technology into the company's existing infrastructure or develop new products, a process that can sometimes clash with other teams working on responsible AI over pressure to see innovation reach the public sooner.

Google released its AI principles in 2018, after facing employee protest over Project Maven, a contract to provide computer vision for Pentagon drones, and consumer backlash over a demo for Duplex, an AI system that would call restaurants and make a reservation without disclosing it was a bot. In August last year, Google began giving consumers access to a limited version of LaMDA through its app AI Test Kitchen. It has not yet released it fully to the general public, in spite of Google's plans to do so at the end of 2022, according to former Google software engineer Blake Lemoine, who told The Washington Post that he had come to believe LaMDA was sentient.

But the top AI talent behind these developments grew restless.

In the past year or so, top AI researchers from Google have left to launch start-ups around large language models, including Character.AI, Cohere, Adept, Inflection.AI and Inworld AI, in addition to search start-ups using similar models to develop a chat interface, such as Neeva, run by former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy.

Character.AI founder Noam Shazeer, who helped invent the transformer and other core machine learning architecture, said the flywheel effect of user data has been invaluable. The first time he applied user feedback to Character.AI, which allows anyone to generate chatbots based on short descriptions of real people or imaginary figures, engagement rose by more than 30 percent.

Bigger companies like Google and Microsoft are generally focused on using AI to improve their massive existing business models, said Nick Frosst, who worked at Google Brain for three years before co-founding Cohere, a Toronto-based start-up building large language models that can be customized to help businesses. One of his co-founders, Aidan Gomez, also helped invent transformers when he worked at Google.

"The space moves so quickly, it's not surprising to me that the people leading are smaller companies," said Frosst.

AI has been through several hype cycles over the past decade, but the furor over DALL-E and ChatGPT has reached new heights.

Soon after OpenAI released ChatGPT, tech influencers on Twitter began to predict that generative AI would spell the demise of Google search. ChatGPT delivered simple answers in an accessible way and didn't ask users to rifle through blue links. Besides, after a quarter of a century, Google's search interface had grown bloated with ads and marketers trying to game the system.

"Thanks to their monopoly position, the folks over at Mountain View have [let] their once-incredible search experience degenerate into a spam-ridden, SEO-fueled hellscape," technologist Can Duruk wrote in his newsletter Margins, referring to Google's hometown.

On the anonymous app Blind, tech workers posted dozens of questions about whether the Silicon Valley giant could compete.

"If Google doesn't get their act together and start shipping, they will go down in history as the company who nurtured and trained an entire generation of machine learning researchers and engineers who went on to deploy the technology at other companies," tweeted David Ha, a renowned research scientist who recently left Google Brain for the open source text-to-image start-up Stable Diffusion.

AI engineers still inside Google shared his frustration, employees say. For years, employees had sent memos about incorporating chat functions into search, viewing it as an obvious evolution, according to employees. But they also understood that Google had justifiable reasons not to be hasty about switching up its search product, beyond the fact that responding to a query with one answer eliminates valuable real estate for online ads. A chatbot that pointed to one answer directly from Google could increase its liability if the response was found to be harmful or plagiarized.

Chatbots like OpenAI routinely make factual errors and often switch their answers depending on how a question is asked. Moving from providing a range of answers to queries that link directly to their source material, to using a chatbot to give a single, authoritative answer, would be a big shift that makes many inside Google nervous, said one former Google AI researcher. The company doesn't want to take on the role or responsibility of providing single answers like that, the person said. Previous updates to search, such as adding Instant Answers, were done slowly and with great caution.

Inside Google, however, some of the frustration with the AI safety process came from the sense that cutting-edge technology was never released as a product because of fears of bad publicity - if, say, an AI model showed bias.

Meta employees have also had to deal with the company's concerns about bad PR, according to a person familiar with the company's internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Before launching new products or publishing research, Meta employees have to answer questions about the potential risks of publicizing their work, including how it could be misinterpreted, the person said. Some projects are reviewed by public relations staff, as well as internal compliance experts who ensure the company's products comply with its 2011 Federal Trade Commission agreement on how it handles user data.

To Timnit Gebru, executive director of the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute, the prospect of Google sidelining its responsible AI team doesn't necessarily signal a shift in power or safety concerns, because those warning of the potential harms were never empowered to begin with. "If we were lucky, we'd get invited to a meeting," said Gebru, who helped lead Google's Ethical AI team until she was fired for a paper criticizing large language models.

From Gebru's perspective, Google was slow to release its AI tools because the company lacked a strong enough business incentive to risk a hit to its reputation.

After the release of ChatGPT, however, perhaps Google sees a change to its ability to make money from these models as a consumer product, not just to power search or online ads, Gebru said. "Now they might think it's a threat to their core business, so maybe they should take a risk."

Rumman Chowdhury, who led Twitter's machine-learning ethics team until Elon Musk disbanded it in November, said she expects companies like Google to increasingly sideline internal critics and ethicists as they scramble to catch up with OpenAI.

"We thought it was going to be China pushing the U.S., but looks like it's start-ups," she said.

WISCONSIN

Panel of right-wing activists claim schools are 'sexually grooming' children by teaching gender identity, event at Pewaukee hotel draws protests


Quinn Clark, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Fri, January 27, 2023 

Community organization Trans Advocacy Madison held a protest outside of the Ingleside Hotel to speak out against Parents on Patrol's "Stolen Innocence" panel. The panel was held to educate parents and taxpayers on how to combat "sexual grooming" of children in schools, according to Parents on Patrol's description of the event on Eventbrite.

Demonstrators organized by grassroots group Trans Advocacy Madison gathered outside the Ingleside Hotel Thursday night to protest a scheduled panel that, they said, was formed to spread harmful propaganda against trans and nonbinary youth.

"There should be no hate in the state of Wisconsin," said longtime LGBTQ+ activist AJ Reed, the demonstration's spokesperson. "If we're really, truly following the mantra of the state, which is 'forward,' then how are we moving forward (by) having events like this?"

The ticketed event, "Stolen Innocence: A Panel on the Insidious Ideology Infecting Your Children's Education," took place inside the Pewaukee hotel, 2810 Golf Road. Hosted by local organization Parents on Patrol, five panelists explained to the sold-out venue how schools are "sexually grooming" children by teaching them about gender identity and sexual orientation. A reporter covering the protest was not allowed access to the event.

Fact check:LGBTQ community rejects false association with pedophiles

"The reality is, they are coming for your child," read the event's description on Eventbrite. "You need to stand in the way."

The event comes at a time when Muskego-Norway, Germantown, Arrowhead and Waukesha school boards have enacted policies that prohibit staff from referring to students by their preferred name and/or pronouns without express parental permission. Nationally, over 200 anti-trans bills have been introduced this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Around 30 protesters stood for hours in the snow holding signs that supported anti-hate and trans acceptance.

"If we're going to actually truly understand things, talk to us, talk to people," Reed said. "If you're going to do events like this because you're stuck in your own conservative isolation, then you're going to get more public blowback."

Locals Stephani Lohman, Pippa Linzwright and MJ Hubert joined the group of trans advocates on Golf Road to protest the "Stolen Innocence" panel hosted by Parents on Patrol inside the Ingleside Hotel.

Behind Parents on Patrol is southeastern Wisconsin parent-activist Alexandra Schweitzer. The organization's Twitter banner asks, "What is the transgender movement doing to your child?"

Schweitzer, also president of the Wisconsin chapter of right-wing group No Left Turn in Education, was sent a cease-and-desist letter last year from the Oconomowoc Area School District after she claimed students had access to age-inappropriate books on their school-issued Chromebrooks. The books in question, such as "It's Perfectly Normal" and "Queer," make references to gender and sexuality.

In response, the conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty sent OASD a letter on Schweitzer's behalf to assure that her statements are protected by the First Amendment.

OASD denied that students had access to literature unsuitable for their age groups.

Accredited medical organizations such as the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, American Psychiatric Association and Yale School of Medicine support gender-affirming care for youth, meant to treat a diagnosable condition called gender dysphoria, which causes psychological distress from feeling one's biological sex does not match their gender identity.

Research shows that transgender youth who have access to gender-affirming medical care experience improvements in mental health, according to professional association the Society for Research in Child Development.

Among the panelists was activist Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old from California who "destransitioned" at 16 years old. Cole travels the country speaking out against gender-affirming care after, she says, she was coerced by social media and medical professionals into taking puberty blockers and undergoing a double-mastectomy when she was 15.

Cole recently spoke in favor of a bill proposed in Utah that would prohibit minors from undergoing "sex-transitioning procedures."

Researchers at Princeton University last year found that trans youths very rarely "detransition." For five years, Princeton studied over 300 early-transitioning youth and, of the group, 94% remained transgender.

The Endocrine Society's guidelines, which are followed by most hospitals, including Children's Wisconsin, advise against prescribing hormone-replacement therapy before a patient is 16, as well as against performing sex reassignment surgery before a patient is 18.

Protest remains peaceful

A few days before the "Stolen Innocence" panel, Schweitzer issued a statement that said, in order to protect attendees and speakers from "potential plans to disrupt" the event, Parents on Patrol was working with the Waukesha County Sheriff's Department and Waukesha Police Department.

As protesters arrived, local law enforcement asked that anyone who was not a hotel resident to park elsewhere. Ingleside Hotel management was also quick to approach those on the premises who seemed to be part of the group. Protesters complied, agreeing to remain off of hotel property, including the parking lot.

Protest organizers never planned to be a danger to speakers or attendees, Reed said.

"I've been in communication with some of these folks, at least the core organizers of this event, and nothing has been like that whatsoever," Reed said.

Protesters did, however, repeatedly contact the Ingleside Hotel for the past month, calling for them to cancel the event, Reed said.

"At this point, they have not really communicated back to us about this event other than saying that this event is still going to go on," Reed said.

The Ingleside Hotel confirmed that it received requests to cancel the panel but said it cannot comment on any particular groups who use the venue.

More:Republican lawmakers vote to allow 'conversion therapy' aimed at changing a patient's sexual orientation

More:A second Black transgender woman has been murdered in Milwaukee. Her family believes it was a hate crime.

Quinn Clark can be emailed at QClark@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @Quinn_A_Clark.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Parents on Patrol event at Ingleside Hotel in Pewaukee draws protest

Brazil's government eyes compensation deal for 2015 Vale-BHP dam burst

Fri, January 27, 2023 at 12:09 PM MST

BRASILIA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Brazil's government will try to reach a deal "as soon as possible" on compensation for the 2015 burst of a tailings dam owned by Samarco, a joint venture between Vale and BHP, Institutional Relations Minister Alexandre Padilha said on Friday.

In a news conference in Brasilia, Padilha said the matter had been discussed at a meeting with state governors earlier in the day.

The dam collapse in the southeastern city of Mariana killed 19 people and severely polluted the Rio Doce river, compromising the waterway all the way to its outlet in the Atlantic Ocean.

Padilha said President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's chief of staff would set up a meeting with the governments of Minas Gerais, where Mariana is located, and Espirito Santo, where the Doce river also flows, for further discussions.

The states are seeking compensation for the damage done by the disaster.

"We will try and reach this compensation agreement as soon as possible in light of the environmental crime that was committed in Mariana," Padilha said. "We want to speed up the final negotiations for this deal."

In late 2021, a study done by a company contracted by prosecutors showed the "socio-environmental" damage caused by the dam rupture was between 37.6 billion reais ($7.35 billion) and 60.6 billion reais ($11.85 billion).

($1 = 5.1126 reais) (Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu; Editing by Isabel Woodford and Paul Simao)