In addition to those non-binding targets, the White House is meeting on Wednesday with stakeholders from the commercial vehicle, shipping and infrastructure industries to help execute its agenda. The roundtable is designed to advance the Biden Administration’s goal of “supercharging the buildout of the infrastructure necessary to make a zero-emissions freight ecosystem a reality in the United States.”

Unsurprisingly, the freight industry uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of pollution to match. Bloomberg notes that the transportation sector emits about 29 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and freight (including shipping, trucking and trains) makes up about a third of that figure. So, you can ballpark that the American freight industry is responsible for roughly 10 percent of the country’s carbon emissions.

As part of the election-year rollout, the Biden Administration plans to ask the public to comment on charging infrastructure for heavy-duty vehicles, signaling that the specifics of the plan aren’t yet finalized. The White House wants to avoid a fragmented industrial EV charging system without a universally agreed-upon standard. The industry has seemingly settled on Tesla’s NACS as the de facto choice in the lightweight consumer sector.

Alongside the newly announced industrial goals, the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is opening up about $1 billion in Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding to replace Class 6 and 7 vehicles (school buses, garbage trucks and delivery trucks) with electric equivalents.

The IRA requires that at least $400 million of that funding goes to local communities hit the hardest by industrial pollution. The White House says 72 million Americans live near truck freight routes and bear the brunt of their short-term output. Sadly but unsurprisingly (given the nation’s history), people of color and those from low-income households are most likely to be heavily affected by high environmental toxin levels.

The White House’s goals are admirable, given the urgency of the global climate crisis and the freight industry’s role. However, one significant problem remains: These are voluntary, non-binding resolutions that could — and, given public comments, almost certainly would — be undone by a second Trump Administration, should the serial napper return to office next year. As with many other aspects of the nation’s and world’s future, US voters will decide the outcome this November.

The post The White House wants a zero-emission freight industry by 2040 appeared first on Best News.

In the excerpt below, contributing author and Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, Holly Jean Buck, explores how accelerating climate change, the modern internet and authoritarianism’s recent renaissance are influencing and amplifying one another’s negative impacts, to the detriment of us all.

Excerpted from Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, edited by David W. Orr. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.

Burning hills and glowing red skies, stone-dry riverbeds, expanses of brown water engulfing tiny human rooftops. This is the setting for the twenty-first century. What is the plot? For many of us working on climate and energy, the story of this century is about making the energy transition happen. This is when we completely transform both energy and land use in order to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change — or fail to.

Confronting authoritarianism is even more urgent. About four billion people, or 54 percent of the world, in ninety-five countries, live under tyranny in fully authoritarian or competitive authoritarian regimes. The twenty-first century is also about the struggle against new and rising forms of authoritarianism. In this narration, the twenty-first century began with a wave of crushed democratic uprisings and continued with the election of authoritarian leaders around the world who began to dismantle democratic institutions. Any illusion of the success of globalization, or of the twenty-first century representing a break from the brutal twentieth century, was stripped away with Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine. The plot is less clear, given the failure of democracy-building efforts in the twentieth century. There is a faintly discernable storyline of general resistance and rebuilding imperfect democracies.

There’s also a third story about this century: the penetration of the Internet into every sphere of daily, social, and political life. Despite turn-of-the-century talk about the Information Age, we are only beginning to conceptualize what this means. Right now, the current plot is about the centralization of discourse on a few corporate platforms. The rise of the platforms brings potential to network democratic uprisings, as well as buoy authoritarian leaders through post-truth memes and algorithms optimized to dish out anger and hatred. This is a more challenging story to narrate, because the setting is everywhere. The story unfolds in our bedrooms while we should be sleeping or waking up, filling the most quotidian moments of waiting in line in the grocery store or while in transit. The characters are us, even more intimately than with climate change. It makes it hard to see the shape and meaning of this story. And while we are increasingly aware of the influence that shifting our media and social lives onto big tech platforms has on our democracy, less attention is devoted to the influence this has on our ability to respond to climate change.

Think about these three forces meeting — climate change, authoritarianism, the Internet. What comes to mind? If you recombine the familiar characters from these stories, perhaps it looks like climate activists using the capabilities of the Internet to further both networked protest and energy democracy. In particular, advocacy for a version of “energy democracy” that looks like wind, water, and solar; decentralized systems; and local community control of energy.

In this essay, I would like to suggest that this is not actually where the three forces of rising authoritarianism x climate change x tech platforms domination leads. Rather, the political economy of online media has boxed us into a social landscape wherein both the political consensus and the infrastructure we need for the energy transition is impossible to build. The current configuration of the Internet is a key obstacle to climate action.

The possibilities of climate action exist within a media ecosystem that has monetized our attention and that profits from our hate and division. Algorithms that reap advertising profits from maximizing time-on-site have figured out that what keeps us clicking is anger. Even worse, the system is addictive, with notifications delivering hits of dopamine in a part of what historian and addiction expert David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism.” Society has more or less sleepwalked into this outrage-industrial complex without having a real analytic framework for understanding it. The tech platforms and some research groups or think tanks offer up “misinformation” or “disinformation” as the framework, which present the problem as if the problem is bad content poisoning the well, rather than the structure itself being rotten. As Evgeny Morozov has quipped, “Post-truth is to digital capitalism what pollution is to fossil capitalism — a by-product of operations.”

A number of works outline the contours and dynamics of the current media ecology and what it does — Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media, Safiya U. Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Geert Lovink’s Sad by Design, Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s writing on how to understand the social relations of Internet technologies through racial capitalism, and many more. At the same time, there’s reasonable counter-discussion about how many of our problems can really be laid at the feet of social media. The research on the impacts of social media on political dysfunction, mental health, and society writ large does not paint a neat portrait. Scholars have argued that putting too much emphasis on the platforms can be too simplistic and reeks of technological determinism; they have also pointed out that cultures like the United States’ and the legacy media have a long history with post-truth. That said, there are certainly dynamics going on that we did not anticipate, and we don’t seem quite sure what to do with them, even with multiple areas of scholarship in communication, disinformation, and social media and democracy working on these inquiries for years.

What seems clear is that the Internet is not the connectedness we imagined. The ecology and spirituality of the 1960s, which shaped and structured much of what we see as energy democracy and the good future today, told us we were all connected. Globally networked — it sounds familiar, like a fevered dream from the 1980s or 1990s, a dream that in turn had its roots in the 1960s and before. Media theorist Geert Lovink reflects on a 1996 interview with John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder and Grateful Dead lyricist, in which Barlow was describing how cyberspace was connecting each and every synapse of all citizens on the planet. As Lovink writes, “Apart from the so-called last billion we’re there now. This is what we can all agree on. The corona crisis is the first Event in World History where the internet doesn’t merely play ‘a role’ — the Event coincides with the Net. There’s a deep irony to this. The virus and the network … sigh, that’s an old trope, right?” Indeed, read through one cultural history, it seems obvious that we would reach this point of being globally networked, and that the Internet would not just “play a role” in global events like COVID-19 or climate change, but shape them.

What if the Internet actually has connected us, more deeply than we normally give it credit for? What if the we’re-all-connected-ness imagined in the latter half of the twentieth century is in fact showing up, but manifesting late, and not at all like we thought? We really are connected — but our global body is neither a psychedelic collective consciousness nor a infrastructure for data transmission comprising information packets and code. It seems that we’ve made a collective brain that doesn’t act much like a computer at all. It runs on data, code, binary digits — but it acts emotionally, irrationally, in a fight-or-flight way, and without consciousness. It’s an entity that operates as an emotional toddler, rather than with the neat computational sensing capacity that stock graphics of “the Internet” convey. Thinking of it as data or information is the same as thinking that a network of cells is a person.

The thing we’re jacked into and collectively creating seems more like a global endocrine system than anything we might have visualized in the years while “cyber” was a prefix. This may seem a banal observation, given that Marshall McLuhan was talking about the global nervous system more than fifty years ago. We had enthusiasm about cybernetics and global connectivity over the decades and, more recently, a revitalization of theory about networks and kinship and rhizomes and all the rest. (The irony is that with fifty years of talk on “systems thinking,” we still have responses to things like COVID-19 or climate that are almost antithetical to considering interconnected systems — dominated by one set of expertise and failing to incorporate the social sciences and humanities). So — globally connected, yet divided into silos, camps, echo-chambers, and so on. Social media platforms are acting as agents, structuring our interactions and our spaces for dialogue and solution-building. Authoritarians know this, and this is why they have troll farms that can manipulate the range of solutions and the sentiments about them.

The Internet as we experience it represents a central obstacle to climate action, through several mechanisms. Promotion of false information about climate change is only one of them. There’s general political polarization, which inhibits the coalitions we need to build to realize clean energy, as well as creates paralyzing infighting within the climate movement about strategies, which the platforms benefit from. There’s networked opposition to the infrastructure we need for the energy transition. There’s the constant distraction from the climate crisis, in the form of the churning scandals of the day, in an attention economy where all topics compete for mental energy. And there’s the drain of time and attention spent on these platforms rather than in real-world actions.

Any of these areas are worth spending time on, but this essay focuses on how the contemporary media ecology interferes with climate strategy and infrastructure in particular. To understand the dynamic, we need to take a closer look at the concept of energy democracy, as generally understood by the climate movement, and its tenets: renewable, small-scale systems, and community control. The bitter irony of the current moment is that it’s not just rising authoritarianism that is blocking us from good futures. It’s also our narrow and warped conceptions of democracy that are trapping us.

This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.

The post Hitting the Books: We are the frogs in the boiling pot, it's time we started governing like it. appeared first on Best News.

The study didn't just look into image and text generation by machine learning programs. The researchers examined a total of 13 tasks, ranging from summarization to text classification, and measured the amount of carbon dioxide produced per every 1000 grams. For the sake of keeping the study fair and the datasets diverse, the researchers said they ran the experiments on 88 different models using 30 datasets. For each task, the researchers ran 1,000 prompts while gathering the “carbon code” to measure both the energy consumed and the carbon emitted during an exchange.

The findings highlight that the most energy-intensive tasks are those that ask an AI model to generate new content, whether it be text generation, summarization, image captioning, or image generation. Image generation ranked highest in the amount of emissions it produced and text classification was classified as the least energy-intensive task.

The researchers urge machine learning scientists and practitioners to “practice transparency regarding the nature and impacts of their models, to enable better understanding of their environmental impacts.” While the energy consumption associated with charging a smartphone per AI image generated may not seem dire, the volume of emissions can easily stack up when considering how popular and public AI models have become. Take ChatGPT for instance – the authors of the study point out that at its peak, OpenAI’s chatbot had upward of 10 million users per day and 100 million monthly active users today.

The post Researchers quantify the carbon footprint of generating AI images appeared first on Best News.

The eSoil is made up of organic substances mixed with a conductive polymer called PEDOT, which can be found in things like sensors and OLED displays. Eleni Stavrinidou, the supervisor of the study, told Engadget that the soil’s conductivity was necessary for stimulating the plant roots. In this particular study, the researchers examined the effect of sending signals to barley seedlings over the span of 15 days before harvesting them for analysis. Applying a voltage as small as 0.5V on the eSoil electrically stimulates the roots, Stavrinidou explained. This, in turn, resulted in a recordable increase in the biomass of the electrically stimulated plants when compared to the non-stimulated seedings.

The stimulation’s effect on the barley seedlings was described as “steady” and “transient.” Stavrinidou told Engadget that nitrogen, one of the main nutrients involved in plant growth, was processed more efficiently through the stimulation. "We found that the stimulated plants could process the nutrients more efficiently however we don't understand how the stimulation is affecting this process,” Stavrindou explained, adding that the reason behind the growth process will be a focus of future studies.

While hydroponic techniques are mainly used to grow leafy greens and some vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes, the eSoil could offer a solution to create new ways to increase crop yields in commercial settings and especially in places where environmental conditions impact plant growth. The study highlights that this technique could minimize the use of fertilizers in farming.

The opportunity for technological innovation in farming is huge considering the number of US farms has steadily declined since 1982, according to the Department of Agriculture. Last year, the number of US farms reached 2 million, down from 2.2 million in 2007. Not only are farms on the decline, but the US is losing acres of land due to a host of reasons that range from climate change to worsening economic outlook for farmers due to inflation, making farming in controlled environments more popular.

But beyond improving crop yield, the implementation of eSoil in hydroponic farms could make them more energy-conscious. While traditional hydroponic farms use up less water, they require more energy to run. “The eSoil consumes very little power in the microwatt range,” Stavrinidou said. Before this technology can be applied to large-scale agriculture and other types of crops, more studies need to be conducted to observe how electrical stimulation can impact the whole growth cycle of a plant throughout its entire lifespan and not just in the early stages of seedling maturation. Stavrinidou also said that her team plans on studying how the technique affects the growth of other plant species.

The post Swedish Researchers develop ‘electronic soil’ that speeds up plant growth appeared first on Best News.

Compared to the 1880s, the planet was 2.5 degrees warmer in 2023. If you do the math, you’ll find that the vast majority of that increase occurred after NASA’s baseline period. In other words, the past several decades have been the worst of the worst. July of 2023 was the hottest month ever measured, which is a record nobody wanted or asked for but, well, here we are.

“NASA and NOAA’s global temperature report confirms what billions of people around the world experienced last year; we are facing a climate crisis,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “From extreme heat, to wildfires, to rising sea levels, we can see our Earth is changing.”

NASA’s not burying its head in the sand and pretending this is a natural phenomenon. We did this, with Gavin Schmidt, director at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), saying the temperature shift was primarily caused by “our fossil fuel emissions.”

2023 was not an outlier. The past ten consecutive years have been the warmest on record. To that end, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently reported that 2024 has a one-in-three chance of being even hotter. Yay.

It’s also worth noting that 2023 featured some cooling events that actually worked to lower temperatures a bit, including volcanic aerosols in the atmosphere due to the January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano. However, these events couldn’t keep up with constant greenhouse gas emissions and the heating effects of this year’s El Niño weather event.

“We will continue to break records as long as greenhouse gas emissions keep going up,” Schmidt said. “And, unfortunately, we just set a new record for greenhouse gas emissions again this past year.”

The Biden-Harris administration has done a few things to try to slow down our transformation into a Mad Max dystopia. The White House recently launched the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center to make critical climate data readily available and last year’s Inflation Reduction Act set aside $369 billion for climate and clean energy programs. President Biden has also pledged to bring emission levels to at least 50 percent below what we experienced in 2005 by 2025. These are good incremental moves, of that there’s no doubt, but we seem to have sped past “f*ck around” and are careening wildly into “find out.” What was that curse again? Oh yeah. May you live in interesting times.

The post NASA confirms 2023 was the hottest year on record appeared first on Best News.