The company announced today that it’s phasing out a program launched in 2016 where it partners with independent fact-checkers around the world to identify and review misinformation across its social media platforms. Meta is replacing the program with a crowdsourced approach to content moderation similar to X’s Community Notes.
Meta is essentially shifting responsibility to users to weed out lies on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, raising fears that it’ll be easier to spread misleading information about climate change, clean energy, public health risks, and communities often targeted with violence.
“It’s going to hurt Meta’s users first because the program worked well at reducing the virality of hoax content and conspiracy theories,” says Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter.
“A lot of people think Community Notes-style moderation doesn’t work at all and it’s merely window dressing so that platforms can say they’re...
Workers outside the hydrogen production facility at the Constellation Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station in Scriba, New York, on Tuesday, May 9th, 2023. | Photo: Getty Images
The Biden administration finalized rules meant to boost domestic production of hydrogen fuel through a new tax credit, a move that might also keep struggling nuclear power plants on line for longer.
The highly anticipated guidelines stipulate what kinds of hydrogen projects can qualify for the tax credit. Hydrogen combustion releases water vapor instead of greenhouse gas emissions, which is why the Biden administration sees it as a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. But it takes energy to produce hydrogen, and where that energy ought to come from has been contentious.
After a lot of political wrangling, the Biden administration ultimately loosened the rules to include hydrogen made with the help of some existing nuclear power plants. Specifically, nuclear reactors at risk of shuttering because of financial reasons might be able to benefit from the tax credit.
“The final rule is an important step in the right direction,” Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of the largest nuclear power plant operator in the US, Constellation, said in a press statement. “The final rule allows a significant portion of the existing merchant nuclear fleet to earn credits for hydrogen production.”
The tax credit, called 45V, was established through the Inflation Reduction Act and is worth up to $3 per kilogram of hydrogen production. To qualify, companies have to meet strict requirements to limit pollution.
The more climate-friendly alternative is to create hydrogen through electrolysis, splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen using electricity. The electricity would have to come from carbon pollution-free sources like solar and wind farms — or nuclear reactors, of course.
But all the recent hype over hydrogen has sparked concerns that the burgeoning industry might use up too much of America’s still-limited carbon-free electricity supply. The worry is that power grids might try to meet rising electricity demand using gas and coal-fired plants, leading to higher greenhouse gas emissions.
To ease those concerns, the Biden administration proposed rules for the hydrogen tax credit more than a year ago that require companies to get electricity from new sources of clean energy. The hope was that, by doing so, the hydrogen industry might help add more renewable energy to the power grid rather than siphoning off limited resources.
It’s a lot harder to build new nuclear power plants than new solar and wind farms, however. The proposal subsequently faced backlash from the nuclear energy companies saying they wouldn’t be able to benefit from the hydrogen tax credit as a result.
After receiving more than 30,000 comments on the proposal, the Biden administration loosened its guidelines. The Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service released the final rules on Friday. They carve out scenarios in which an existing nuclear power plant at risk of retirement can benefit from the tax credit if it’s used to produce hydrogen and meets certain financial tests.
The final rules also ease requirements for renewable energy and make it easier for developers to qualify for the tax credit in states that already have tough clean electricity standards. There are also new carveouts for hydrogen produced with methane that wafts out of landfills, farms, wastewater facilities, or coal mines that might otherwise escape into the atmosphere. In addition, companies can take advantage of the tax credit if hydrogen is made with electricity from a fossil fuel power plant that installs technology to capture its carbon dioxide emissions.
“The extensive revisions we’ve made in this final rule provide the certainty that hydrogen producers need to keep their projects moving forward and make the United States a global leader in truly green hydrogen,” John Podesta, senior adviser to the president for international climate policy, said in a press release.
Most of America’s nuclear power plants were built in the 1970s or ’80s, and the average age of a nuclear reactor in the US is 42 years old. Construction of the first all-new nuclear reactor in the US in decades finished in 2023 — seven years past its original deadline and $17 billion over budget. Next-generation nuclear reactors are smaller and modular, which is supposed to make them easier and more affordable to build. But those designs aren’t expected to become commercially viable until the 2030s.
The nuclear energy industry has also seen a boom of interest over the past year from tech companies in need of more carbon-free energy for AI data centers. Microsoft inked a deal with Constellation to help restart a retired reactor at Three Mile Island, while Google and Amazon announced plans to support the development of advanced small modular reactors.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency building is seen on August 21st, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Photo by Tierney L. Cross / Getty Images
An alliance of grassroots environmental groups could lose $60 million in federal funding after calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) was named one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “grantmakers” more than a year ago, putting it in charge of distributing subgrants for locally led environmental projects. But out of 11 of the EPA’s grantmakers, the CJA is the only one that has yet to receive any funding. The group has faced a barrage of attacks for publicly opposing the Israel-Hamas war, and some EPA staffers say the group has been singled out as a result.
“We have been deeply disappointed to witness EPA’s current withholding of $60 million to the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), the only one of the eleven grantees that courageously spoke out against the environmental toll and human rights violations in Palestine,” a group of anonymous EPA and Department of Energy employees wrote in an open letter in December.
The money could disappear if it isn’t dispersed before President-elect Donald Trump steps into office. Trump has said he would rescind unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act that set aside money for the grants. And if his second term is anything like his first, he’s likely to gut the EPA and roll back environmental protections.
With a deregulatory agenda at the national level, local efforts become even more crucial to safeguarding Americans’ air, water, and climate. It’s those kinds of grassroots initiatives that the EPA’s grantmakers are supposed to support and what’s at risk if the agency doesn’t disburse the funds before it’s too late.
“What this would do is further strip away funds that our communities have been counting on,” says CJA executive director KD Chavez. “We need people to be resourced so that at least on a local level they can do clean up projects, they can have air quality monitoring,” Chavez says, citing examples of how the money might be used.
Money for the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program came from the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $369 billion for clean energy and climate action. The 11 grantmakers include universities and nonprofit organizations charged with doling out a total of $600 million to locally led environmental projects.
The CJA, in particular, was chosen to distribute subgrants to EPA regions 8–10, which encompass most of the Western US. It’s also the national grantmaker responsible for outreach to tribal communities. The CJA says it has already spent $1.6 million from its own operational budget to get the organizational infrastructure in place needed to allow community groups to apply for subgrants. It’s supposed to receive $50 million for those subgrants, plus an additional $10 million for technical capacity.
As of January 3rd, only $461 million of the funding from the grantmaking program had been awarded, according to data on the EPA website, leaving the rest of the funds vulnerable to the incoming Trump administration.
“There are questions we have about the singling out of us as an organization. Why have we been singled out as anti-American? Is it because we’re led by working class people, Black Indigenous, and people of color communities?” Chavez says.
Over the past year, conservative media and some Republican lawmakers have accused the CJA of being “radicals,” antisemitic, and “Anti-American” for its stance on the Israel-Hamas war. Even before the EPA announced its selection of 11 grantmakers, the CJA had released a statement in October 2023 calling on President Joe Biden and Congress to demand a ceasefire by Israel and Hamas.
“I was surprised to learn that $50 million has been designated for Climate Justice Alliance, a group which explicitly publishes a ‘free Palestine’ section on its website. On the website, there are dozens of antisemitic and alarming images,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said to former EPA administrator Michael Regan when he testified before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in July of last year. (Regan stepped down from his post in December.)
The CJA has published its ceasefire statement on its website. “We call on Biden and the US Congress to support an immediate end to the violence by publicly demanding a ceasefire within the region. We stand firmly on the side of peace and support the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, decolonization and life,” the statement says.
“At our core CJA has always been anti war and pro communities,” Chavez says. “We are just collateral damage in a war against regulations,” they add.
The group has also caught flak for its environmental advocacy. A letter from Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Buddy Carter (R-GA) to Regan last May accuses the CJA of supporting “partisan, and in some cases extreme, environmental activism” including “mass organization of climate alarmism protests” and the “litigation of fossil fuel projects.” The letter similarly castigates other grantmakers chosen by the EPA, but the CJA has faced more heat as protests in the US against the war in Gaza gained momentum.
The letter published by EPA and DOE staffers last month (first reported on by The Intercept) urges the agencies to “end their collaboration with Israel until there is a permanent ceasefire” and “release all designated federal funds to Climate Justice Alliance.” It says the funding is needed for Indigenous communities and other groups that have historically been “left out” of environmental protections.
According to Chavez, the EPA told the CJA in a meeting in September that it was under investigation by the agency’s office of general counsel (OGC) without any explanation as to why. The group says the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights then told the group to expect funding by January 6th — even though grantmakers were initially anticipated to be able to start doling out subgrants in the summer of 2024.
The EPA didn’t verify the CJA’s claims or answer specific questions from The Verge about an investigation into the CJA. “EPA continues to review the grant for the Climate Justice Alliance,” EPA spokesperson Nick Conger said in an email to The Verge. “EPA continues to work through its rigorous process to obligate the funds under the Inflation Reduction Act, including the Thriving Communities Grantmakers program.” The agency is “on track” to award more than 90 percent of the funding by the end of the Biden administration, Conger added.
When The Verge asked the EPA last year how it chose grantmakers for the program, Regan said in a call with reporters that they each “demonstrated a very strong governance structure that creates accountability” and that the agency selected the 11 “knowing that they would be able to operationalize these resources in a way that the communities that need these resources the most would absolutely get them.”
Two cooling towers being rehabilitated for nuclear power generation under Microsoft at Crane Clean Energy Center, previously known as Three Mile Island, stand tall over the residential and farm lands to the east across the Susquehanna River, on Wednesday, October 30th, 2024, in Middletown, Pennsylvania. | Photos by Wesley Lapointe for The Washington Post via Getty Images
The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages government buildings, just announced a major nuclear energy contract. The announcement comes on the heels of several big tech companies making a flurry of nuclear energy deals last year.
The 10-year, $840 million contract is for 10 million megawatt-hours of electricity, which the GSA says is the equivalent of what’s needed for more than 1 million homes annually. The agency awarded the contract to Constellation, which operates the nation’s largest nuclear fleet, and recently announced an agreement with Microsoft to restart a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. Nuclear energy makes up a significant portion of the GSA deal, about 4 million megawatt-hours, according to Constellation spokesperson Paul Adams.
Silicon Valley is increasingly turning to nuclear energy to satiate rising electricity demand from AI data centers. The federal government is the nation’s single largest energy consumer, making this contract a big boon to the nuclear industry.
“Frustratingly ... nuclear energy was excluded from many corporate and government sustainable energy procurements. Not anymore. This agreement is another powerful example of how things have changed,” Joe Dominguez, Constellation president and CEO, said in a press release. “The United States government joins Microsoft and other entities to support continued investment in reliable nuclear energy that will allow Constellation to relicense and extend the lives of these critical assets.”
Constellation says it generates 10 percent of the nation’s carbon pollution-free energy. A majority of its output is nuclear energy, but it also produces hydro, wind, and solar power. It also generates electricity from gas-fired power plants, although the company has set a goal of reaching 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 compared to close to 90 percent today.
Constellation and the GSA declined to answer questions about how much of the electricity included in the contract will come from each source aside from nuclear power plants. Altogether, it’s the biggest energy procurement contract the GSA has signed in its history.
“This historic procurement locks in a cost-competitive, reliable supply of nuclear energy,” GSA administrator Robin Carnahan said in a press release. “We’re demonstrating how the federal government can join major corporate clean energy buyers in spurring new nuclear energy capacity and ensuring a reliable, affordable supply of clean energy for everyone.”
The contract will allow Constellation to extend licenses for existing nuclear power plants as well as “invest in new equipment and technology” that should result in 135 megawatts of additional capacity. The GSA agreed to purchase 2.4 million megawatt-hours of electricity from that added capacity over 10 years. Outside of GSA buildings, the deal also extends to 13 other agencies, including the departments of Veterans Affairs and Transportation as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the National Park Service, the Social Security Administration, and the US Mint.
The GSA is framing the contract as a way to lock in more affordable prices as data centers drive up electricity demand and increase competition for limited clean energy sources:
In the face of uncertainty over future electricity prices and increasing electricity demand from data centers and AI facilities, for instance, this contract provides federal agencies with budgetary stability and protections from future price increases by keeping their electricity costs fixed for 10 years, while also continuing to bolster the domestic nuclear industry.
Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have all inked splashy nuclear energy deals over the past year. In September of last year, Microsoft and Constellation announced a plan to restart a shuttered reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of the worst nuclear energy accident in US history.
The Biden administration has also made nuclear energy a key part of its plan to transition the US away from fossil fuels to energy sources that don’t cause climate change. Last October, the Department of Energy announced a $1.52 billion loan to help restart a retired nuclear generating station in Covert Township, Michigan. And while President-elect Donald Trump plans to undo progress made toward clean energy, the Trump campaign agenda included efforts to “support nuclear energy production.”
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2023/06/29: Governor Kathy Hochul speaks during a press briefing at office on 3rd Avenue in Manhattan. | Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
New York governor Kathy Hochul signed landmark climate legislation into law last week, showing how states can keep holding polluters accountable even when President-elect Donald Trump rolls back environmental protections.
New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act will require the biggest multinational oil and gas companies to contribute to a fund that’ll be used for infrastructure projects meant to protect New York residents from increasingly dangerous climate disasters like storms and sea level rise.
Trump will soon step back into office and is expected to dismantle existing climate policies and gut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), having openly disparaged clean energy and federal environmental regulations on the campaign trail. So for the next four years at least, Americans will have to rely on local and state efforts like this to deal with the pollution from fossil fuels that’s causing climate change.
“New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world: the companies most responsible for the climate crisis will be held accountable,” State Senator Liz Krueger said in a statement after Hochul...
Google, Salesforce, H&M and other brands have turned to unlikely allies to help them clean up their carbon pollution: sewage treatment plants and paper mills. The companies joined an $80 million plan to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, though the strategies they’re using have yet to show whether they can have a meaningful impact on climate change.
They’re paying $32.1 million to a startup called CREW that aims to trap carbon dioxide emissions produced at wastewater treatment facilities. And $48 million will go to another startup called CO280 that retrofits pulp and paper mills with controversial carbon capture technologies. The two agreements were facilitated by a carbon removal initiative called Frontier that’s led by led by Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability on behalf of those founding companies and other brands trying to meet their own sustainability goals.
Companies are increasingly looking for ways to try to cancel out the damage caused by their greenhouse gas emissions. They’ve funneled millions into startups building new-fangled industrial...
Terradot’s pilot program in Brazil involves spreading crushed basalt over farmland. | Image: Terradot
To try to counteract the impact their pollution has on the climate, Google and other big companies have bought into a plan to trap carbon dioxide using rocks. They recently announced multimillion dollar deals with a Sheryl Sandberg-backed startup called Terradot.
Google, H&M Group, and Salesforce are among a gaggle of companies that collectively agreed to pay Terradot $27 million to remove 90,000 tons carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The deals were brokered by Frontier, a carbon removal initiative led by Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability.
Separately, Google announced its own deal to purchase an additional 200,000 tons of carbon removal from Terradot. Both companies declined to say how much that deal is worth. If the cost is similar to the Frontier agreement — roughly $300 per ton of CO2 captured — it could add up to $60 million, although Google says it expects the price to come down over time for this larger deal.
Google says it’s the biggest purchase yet of carbon removal through enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the strategy Terradot uses to try to slow climate change. It’s a relatively low-tech tactic for taking carbon dioxide out of...
National climate adviser Ali Zaidi speaks at the daily press briefing at the White House on January 26th, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
The Biden administration set ambitious new goals to slash US greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris climate accord, urging states and local governments to stay on course regardless of President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to purposefully ignore climate change.
The nearly 200 countries that have joined the Paris agreement face a deadline in February to update their national climate plans. Biden’s team decided to put out its own plan before Trump steps into office, setting a new target today of cutting net emissions by 61–66 percent in 2035 compared to a 2005 baseline. It also sets a specific target of cutting methane emissions by at least 35 percent by the same date. Methane comes from livestock, landfills, and leaking oil and gas infrastructure and is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and has vowed to pull the US out of the Paris agreement. So Biden’s last-ditch effort to keep the US on track to meet global climate goals is more symbolic — seemingly designed to encourage a grassroots movement in defiance of Trump’s national agenda.
“Across the country, we see decarbonization efforts to reduce our emissions in many ways achieving escape velocity, an inexorable path, a place from which we will not turn back,” White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in a call with reporters.
It helps that new solar and onshore wind farms have become cheaper sources of electricity than coal or gas. Around 95 percent of new sources of electricity queued up to connect to US power grids is carbon-free — mostly solar and wind energy and batteries. The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have also authorized hundreds of billions of dollars of funding for clean energy. Current policies put the US on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by around 40 percent by the end of the decade compared to 2005.
That’s a big drop in pollution, but still shy of the initial goal Biden set upon stepping into office. Shortly after Biden’s inauguration in 2021, the US rejoined the Paris agreement (which Trump had previously pulled the US out of) and set a target of reducing emissions by 50 to 52 percent by 2030. That’s in line with the pollution cuts needed globally to meet the most ambitious target in the Paris agreement, keeping global average temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above what they were before the Industrial Revolution.
Keeping that global goal alive is increasingly dubious, especially since the US is the second-biggest climate polluter after China. The planet is about 1.2 degrees warmer today than it was before humans started pumping out massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions by burning fossil fuels. All that pollution has already triggered more intense storms, wildfires, droughts, and other climate disasters. And things could get worse with Trump’s plans to dismantle environmental policies, encourage the development of more energy-hungrycrypto mines and AI data centers, and increase oil and gas drilling.
Even so, Trump didn’t completely kill US climate action during his first stint as president. State and cities crafted their own climate plans and local leaders created a coalition called We Are Still In after Trump moved to take the US out of the Paris agreement. Thanks in large part to their work, the US still surpassed the Obama administration’s climate goal of cutting emissions 17 percent by 2020. Biden raised the bar with his climate goals, so there’s far more work to do to keep up the pace this time around. A University of Maryland analysis from September found that local action can reduce US greenhouse gas pollution by 48–60 percent by 2035 even without federal support.
A worker handles wafers at the GCL Technology production plant in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, on Tuesday, July 2, 2024. GCL Technology is one of the world’s largest makers of polysilicon, a key material in solar panels. | Photo: Getty Images
Tariffs on solar wafers, polysilicon, and certain tungsten products from China are going to rise dramatically come January 1st, 2025, the Biden administration announced Wednesday. That means higher price tags on key materials needed to make solar panels at a time when solar is the fastest growing source of electricity in the US.
Polysilicon is used to make solar wafers, which are the semiconductors in solar panels. Tungsten — the same material in old-school incandescent lightbulbs — has many uses in electronics because of its high melting point. The metal is also part of supply chains for the aerospace, automotive, defense, medical, and oil and gas industries.
It’s the latest instance of the Biden administration hiking up tariffs on goods from China — which dominates solar manufacturing — as part of its plan to build up domestic supply chains for clean energy.
“The tariff increases announced today will further blunt the harmful policies and practices by the People’s Republic of China,” ambassador Katherine Tai said in a statement. “These actions will complement the domestic investments made under the Biden-Harris Administration to promote a clean energy economy, while increasing the resilience of critical supply chains.”
American manufacturers welcomed the changes. “These trade measures will begin to counter the pervasive Chinese government subsidies in solar manufacturing. It is a step in the right direction,” Mike Carr, executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America (SEMA) Coalition, said in an emailed statement.
To be sure, Chinese policies aimed at boosting solar manufacturing have led to economies of scale that have allowed prices for solar panels to plummet around the world. Chinese companies also make much more affordable electric vehicles than US manufacturers. EVs from China have been similarly subject to soaring tariffs during the Biden administration to 100 percent from 25 percent this year. In May, Biden also announced that tariffs on battery parts and lithium-ion batteries would rise to 25 percent from 7.5 percent. In addition, he increased the tarifff rate on solar cells from 25 percent to 50 percent. And by 2025, the rate on semiconductors from China will double to 50 percent.
President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to hike tariffs on imported goods from China even more than his predecessor, which is expected to increase prices on everything from cars to electronics.
For millennia, the Arctic tundra has helped stabilize global temperatures by storing carbon in the frozen ground. Wildfires have changed that, according to the latest Arctic Report Card released yesterday at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference.
Fires, intensified by climate change, release carbon trapped in soil and plants. More frequent infernos have now transformed the tundra into a net source of carbon dioxide emissions. It’s a dramatic shift for the Arctic, and one that will make the planet even hotter.
“Climate change is not bringing about a new normal. Instead, climate change is bringing ongoing and rapid change,” Twila Moon, lead editor of the Arctic Report Card and deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said at the conference yesterday.
The Arctic’s permafrost, which stays frozen year-round, has kept planet-heating carbon sequestered for thousands of years. Northern permafrost has been estimated to hold about twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere. Tundra describes the Arctic’s tree-less plains, where shrubs, grasses, and mosses grow and take in carbon dioxide through...
In what it’s calling a “first-of-its-kind partnership,” Google will collaborate with developers to build data centers powered by renewable energy generated on-site.
It’s partnering with energy company Intersect Power and investment firm TPG Rise Climate on a $20 billion initiative to develop an unspecified number of “industrial parks” across the US this decade. The first one is supposed to be partially operational by 2026 and completed by 2027.
If successful, it would be a big change to how data centers are typically built and operated. Google and its competitors are racing to find clean sources of electricity for energy-hungry AI data centers. But the US electricity mix is still dominated by fossil fuels; connecting new data centers to the power grid leads to more pollution as a result. With this new partnership, Google can bypass that problem by connecting directly to solar and wind farms and batteries for renewable energy.
“To realize AI’s potential, the growth in electricity demand must be met with new, clean power sources. The scale of AI presents an opportunity to completely rethink...
A thin layer of ice thaws on a puddle in the sunshine in Bavaria, Marktoberdorf. | Photo: Getty Images
Scientific advisers to the European Commission are calling for a moratorium across the EU on efforts to artificially cool Earth through solar geoengineering. That includes controversial technologies used to reflect sunlight back into space, primarily by sending reflective particles into the atmosphere or by brightening clouds.
Proponents argue that this can help in the fight against climate change, especially as planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb. But small-scale experiments have triggered backlash over concerns that these technologies could do more harm than good.
There’s “insufficient scientific evidence” to show that solar geoengineering can actually prevent climate change, says the opinion written by the GCSA.
People shelter under umbrellas from the wind and rain as they cross a road near Shinjuku train station on October 12, 2019 in Tokyo, Japan ahead of Typhoon Hagibis’ expected landfal later in the evening. | Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images
GenCast, a new AI model from Google DeepMind, is accurate enough to compete with traditional weather forecasting. It managed to outperform a leading forecast model when tested on data from 2019, according to recently published research.
AI isn’t going to replace traditional forecasting anytime soon, but it could add to the arsenal of tools used to predict the weather and warn the public about severe storms. GenCast is one of several AI weather forecasting models being developed that might lead to more accurate forecasts.
“Weather basically touches every aspect of our lives ... it’s also one of the big scientific challenges, predicting the weather,” says Ilan Price, a senior research scientist at DeepMind. “Google DeepMind has a mission to advance AI for the benefit of humanity. And I think this is one important way, one important contribution on that front.”
Price and his colleagues tested GenCast against the ENS system, one of the world’s top-tier models for forecasting that’s run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). GenCast outperformed ENS 97.2...
That’s much easier said than done. The first all-new nuclear reactor to be built in the US in decades started running in 2023 — seven years overdue and $17 billion over budget. Developers are now designing next-generation technology called small modular reactors (SMRs) that are supposed to make it easier to build and site a project, ostensibly cutting down costs. Those advanced reactors aren’t expected to become commercially viable until the 2030s.
Google officials had concerns about potential human rights violations that might be linked to its $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government before ever even signing the deal, according to documents first reported on by TheNew York Times today.
“Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank,” Google lawyers, members of the company’s policy team, and outside consultants wrote in the documents prepared for executives and reviewed by the Times. The documents date to several months before Google announced the deal in May 2021 and show that the company was worried about whether the contract might be bad for its reputation.
The company has staunchly defended the deal since inking it in 2021, going so far as to fire dozens of employees who protested the contract they believed might involve them in violence against Palestinians. Now, it seems Google was weighing those risks, too — but ultimately decided to move forward with the deal anyway.
Dubbed Project Nimbus, the contract gives the Israeli government access to cloud services from Google and Amazon. Project Nimbus enabled the use of AI tools to analyze and identify objects in images and videos, according to the Times. It also included videoconferencing and “services to store and analyze large amounts of data.”
The most profitable part of the deal was $525 million from Israel’s Ministry of Defense expected between 2021 and 2028, the Times reports. That’s not a huge sum for Google, which reportedly made $258 billion in sales in 2021. But it was enough to give the company some clout with other potential military and intelligence customers.
Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge. But in April, it said in an emailed statement that “the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy. This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” A Google spokesperson provided a similar statement to the Times.
However, separate Israeli government contract documents recently reported on by The Intercept suggest that Project Nimbus is subject to “adjusted” terms of service rather than Google’s general terms of service.
In the months leading up to the contract in 2021, Google reportedly sought input from consultants including the firm Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). Consultants apparently recommended that the contract bar the sale and use of its AI tools to the Israeli military “and other sensitive customers,” the report says. BSR reportedly recommended “due diligence” on Google’s part to make sure its services weren’t being misused and that Google add its AI principles that prohibit surveillance or weapons to the contract.
Ultimately, the contract reportedly didn’t reflect those recommendations. The contract did, however, include a right to suspend customers for breaching Google’s terms of service and acceptable use policy.
Before signing the deal, the Times says, Google had additional concerns about the company itself potentially running into legal quandaries because of the contract:
The company also worried that it would be forced to accept “onerous” risks, such as the possibility that it could run into conflicts with foreign or international authorities if they sought Israeli data and that it might have to “breach international legal orders” under the deal terms, according to the documents.
Project Nimbus has become an even bigger flashpoint within the company since the Israel-Hamas war, which has killed more than 44,000 people in Gaza. Google has fired roughly 50 employees for their alleged involvement in protests against Project Nimbus.
“We did not come to Google to work on technology that kills. By engaging in this contract leadership has betrayed our trust, our AI Principles, and our humanity,” Billy Van Der Laar, a Google software engineer, said in an emailed statement following protests in April that called on Google to exit Project Nimbus.
Plastic waste on a beach in Iki, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, on Friday, October 29th, 2021. | Photo: Getty Images
International negotiations to create a legally binding treaty to stem the tide of plastic pollution ended in a stalemate on Monday — pushing talks past their initial deadline and into next year.
More than 100 countries have shown support for limits on plastic manufacturing. They’ve faced fierce opposition from other countries that are major fossil fuel producers and who want to focus on managing waste rather than tamping down plastic production.
But there’s no way to get a handle on the plastic pollution building up in our landfills, oceans, and bodies without stopping the problem at its source, according to supporters of a production cap. Setting manufacturing limits would have the added benefit of curbing the greenhouse gas emissions...
The US Department of Energy (DOE) thinks AI can speed up the process of connecting new energy projects to the power grid.
It announced $30 million in funding now available through its Artificial Intelligence for Interconnection (AI4IX) program. The DOE is interested in fostering partnerships between grid operators and software and energy project developers to get new sources of electricity online faster.
The plan is to use AI to streamline the interconnection application process that’s currently painfully slow. The delay is holding up efforts to get new solar and wind farms up and running. Pressure is building to clear that backlog with electricity demand on the rise — ironically in no small part because of the artificial intelligence...
A hurricane specialist works on tracking Hurricane Beryl at the National Hurricane Center on July 1st, 2024, in Miami, Florida. | Photo by Joe Raedle / Getty Images
This is the last week of a truly shitty Atlantic hurricane season. It was record-breaking. People are still recovering. Misinformation managed to make things even worse. Now, we get a six-month-ish break before it starts over again — perhaps with fewer federal resources to respond in the US.
At the very least, we knew what was coming this year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast an “above normal” season before it started in June. The agency published a recap yesterday with some data on how it all played out; the TLDR: these are some big numbers.
There’s also some subtext in there. It took a huge coordinated effort within the agency to put out forecasts and communicate risks to the public. Any efforts to...
Activists protest against fossil fuels and for climate finance on day 11 at the UNFCCC COP29 climate conference on November 22nd, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. | Photo by Sean Gallup / Getty Images
Maybe it was the host of the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan this month calling oil and gas a “gift of God.” Or the US, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, reelecting a president who says “we don’t have a global warming problem” just before the conference. Then again, the biggest outcome — or disappointment, depending on how you look at it — was an incremental increase in the amount of climate aid wealthier nations committed to less affluent countries dealing with the consequences of other people’s pollution.
Any way you look at it, the summit (called the Conference of the Parties, or COP) that fizzed out over the weekend was exasperating, particularly for delegates from parts...
A tentative proposal totax cryptocurrency mining to raise funds for climate action took off during a United Nations climate conference that’s set to come to a close today.
A levy on energy-hungry crypto mining, at $0.045 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity used, could generate $5.2 billion in revenue annually, according to a report released last week by the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, led by Kenya, Barbados, and France.
The Bitcoin network is estimated to use more electricity annually than a majority of the world’s countries do individually. The idea is that a climate tax could reduce emissions by incentivizing mining firms to clean up their operations. And it could provide desperately needed funding to help less affluent...
