Quantcast
Channel: PRI: Science, Tech & Environment
Viewing all 3123 articles
Browse latest View live

Facebook, Google and Twitter find more Russia-linked election meddling

0
0

Facebook, Google and Twitter are slated to share what they have learned from digging into possible connections between Russian entities and posts, ads and videos in a US Senate hearing on Wednesday. Officials from the tech giants are expected to tell Congress that Russian-backed content aimed at manipulating US politics during the 2016 election was more extensive than first thought.

Facebook now says 126 million US users, a potentially large portion of the voting public in the US, may have seen stories, posts or other content from Russian sources, according to tech news site Recode, the Wall Street Journal and other US media.

The reach is far broader than had originally been estimated by the world's leading social network.

Facebook did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

Google found that two accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency spent $4,700 on search and display ads during last year's US election cycle, Google general counsel Kent Walker and director of information security Richard Salgado said in a blog post.

The ads were not targeted based on which states people lived in or their apparent political leanings, the men said.

"Like other internet platforms, we have found some evidence of efforts to misuse our platforms during the 2016 US election by actors linked to the Internet Research Agency in Russia," Walker and Salgado said.

"While we have found only limited activity on our services, we will continue to work to prevent all of it, because there is no amount of interference that is acceptable."

Related: Here are some of the stories RT says it promoted on Twitter

There were 18 channels at YouTube "likely associated" with the campaign that made English language videos available that appeared to have politically-oriented clips in the mix of offerings.

A total of 1,108 such videos were uploaded, totaling 43 hours of content, and racked up 309,000 views in the 18 months leading up to the election won by US President Donald Trump.

The channels had relatively low view counts, with only about three percent of them logging more than 5,000 views. The channels identified have been suspended, according to Walker and Salgado.

Election-related Tweets

A source familiar with Twitter's testimony for Congress said the one-to-many messaging service identified 36,746 accounts that "generate automated, election-related content" during the three months leading up to the election and appeared linked to a Russian account.

Those accounts generated approximately 1.4 million automated, election-related Tweets, which collectively received approximately 288 million impressions, meaning responses or other engagement by readers.

All three firms are expected to appear on November 1 in an open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the rising evidence that they were covertly manipulated in a campaign to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

US justice officials are also probing the alleged Russian involvement, and possible collusion by the Trump campaign.

Two former Trump associates were indicted Monday and it was revealed another has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators, in the first substantial legal action stemming from the probe into Russia's US election interference.

There is nothing to date that directly ties the president to Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election. But actions by his aides, and his refusal to strongly condemn Moscow interference, have fueled lingering suspicions.

Moscow has denied any attempt to manipulate the US election.


How German 'wood detectives' protect endangered species

0
0

The words “endangered species” might make you think of tigers and panda bears. But in 183 countries, an international law also protects the wood from endangered trees — which can affect everything from kitchen tables to paper plates.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, was created in the 1970s, but it's been expanding and evolving ever since. It takes aim at the persistent problem of deforestation. One recent study suggested that half of Amazon tree species are at risk of extinction. In Madagascar, illegal rosewood logging has left a national park littered with tree stumps.

Germany is one country that has cracked down on the trade in protected wood, thanks in part to its role as an importer for the European Union. The country has a secret weapon in its fight against the illegal wood trade: a laboratory in Hamburg where a team of scientists calls itself “the wood detectives.”

Leading the team is Gerald Koch, an expert on rare woods who grew up working in his family's sawmill. “As a small boy, I went with my family and had to help,” he said. Now, his laboratory contains a library of wood species — 35,000 in all.

The samples — from thin sheets of eucalyptus to a thick hunk of expensive ebony — allow Koch's team to identify unknown types of wood. By comparing the unknown species to known samples, under a microscope, he and his colleagues can stop the trade in regulated wood before it's begun.

To illustrate his method, Koch pulled out an inexpensive guitar that was imported from a factory in China. “We have identified about 20 different timbers,” he said. “Altogether, this is the global market, we say. In one guitar.”

Koch said that the factories responsible for the cheapest products often cut corners by using leftover wood. “Mostly, they don't know what they use,” he said. “Wood is wood for them.”

This week, a fence post declared as chestnut arrived in the mail. It was sent in by German customs, which collects samples not only of imports but also products sold on platforms like eBay. Koch's colleagues cut off small pieces, boiled them, and then sliced off sheets so thin that they could be placed under a microscope. The fence posts turned out to be cheap hazelnut.

The idea behind the regulation is that most companies won't want to pay the high costs of going back to the drawing board and sourcing the right kind of wood. So, perhaps they'll be more careful next time. “It can be very expensive for them,” Koch said.

Not everyone is convinced that these regulations work. George Gruhn, a Nashville guitar salesman, says his industry has been paralyzed by regulations on rosewood, a crucial raw material. To sell used guitars built decades ago, you now need an expensive permit.

“You can’t get wood to make new guitars, and on vintage and used guitars, you still can’t export them without the bleeping permit,” said Gruhn, who also has a degree in zoology. He thinks that if countries could sustainably make money from trees, they’d have an incentive to protect their forests.

Still, for the time being, Koch feels it’s his job to enforce the existing laws. And he thinks it’s up to all of us to know where our products come from. "We say in German, 'Unwissenheit schütz vor Strafe nicht,'" he said. In other words: "What you don't know ... can still have legal consequences." 

So, the next time you spot some vintage wood furniture at a yard sale, be careful. The wood detectives may be watching.

In Myanmar, fake news spread on Facebook stokes ethnic violence

0
0

When lawyers from Google, Facebook and Twitter gathered on Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon for oversight hearings, most of the questions were about the Russian use of misinformation to influence the 2016 presidential elections in the United States.

But misinformation can cost more than votes. It can cost lives.

Related: Watch: Facebook, Twitter and Google testify in Russia hearings

In Myanmar, human rights groups say false information and hate speech spread on Facebook are stoking violence against the Rohingya ethnic group. The brutal crackdown on the Rohingya minority by the military and ultranationalist groups in the Rakhine state has caused more than 600,000 refugees to flee to Bangladesh.

New York Times technology reporter Paul Moyer says in Myanmar, Facebook is everywhere. 

"The entire internet is Facebook and Facebook is the internet. Most people don't necessarily know how to operate or get on and navigate regular websites. They live, eat, sleep and breathe Facebook." Facebook users in Myanmar grew from about 2 million in 2014 to more than 30 million today.

Which is why the misinformation spread on Facebook can be so dangerous.

Related: Myanmar's critics call Rohingya-only enclaves '21st-century concentration camps'

Moyer says Facebook has become a breeding ground for pernicious posts about the Rohingya. "In particular, the ones that seem most problematic are government channels that have put a lot of propaganda out there, saying everything from the Rohingya are burning their own villages, to showing bodies of soldiers who may be from other conflicts but saying this is the result of a Rohingya attack, to more nuanced stuff like calling the Rohingya 'Bengalis' and saying they don't belong in the country."

These posts are widely shared and generate thousands of likes.

Related: More than half of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are kids. Many are fleeing Myanmar alone.

At the hearing, Facebook came under pressure to do more to monitor and remove the posts. But Moyer says, it's complicated.

"This is a company that largely employs English speakers in America," he says. "The idea that they're going to be parsing Burmese and be able to surf the cultural currents to understand what is hate speech and what isn't, and what is real and what's not, stretches belief."

Saudi Arabia has a new citizen: Sophia the robot. But what does that even mean?

0
0

What does it mean to grant citizenship to a robot?

That's the question many have been asking since last week, when a robot was granted Saudi citizenship at an economic and financial summit in Riyadh.

The robot in question is Sophia — the product of a Hong Kong-based company called Hanson Robotics.

According to its makers, Sophia was designed to look like Audrey Hepburn. (Although the author finds it hard to see the resemblance.)

"I'm always happy when surrounded by smart people who also happens to be rich and powerful," Sophia said at the summit in Riyadh, propped up behind a podium.

Then, to the cheer and applause of the crowd, CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin awarded her the citizenship.

"I want to thank very much the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," she said in a robot voice. "I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction."

Sophia was well-known even before she made headlines for her Saudi citizenship. She has appeared as a guest on the Jimmy Fallon show, been interviewed by Charlie Rose and graced the cover of Elle magazine.

Which is exactly why, some analysts say, she was made part of the summit.

"The crown prince is trying to appeal to an international investor audience by portraying a narrative that Saudi Arabia is changing," says Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

"The citizenship was more of a public relations exercise," he adds, "appealing to the sort of Silicon Valley tech sectors that the crown prince has been moving in."

The prince has laid out an ambitious program called Vision 2030 in which he wants to see his country's economy move beyond oil. One of his most ambitious projects is a $500 billion city built from scratch. Neom, as it's called, is going to be a city of the future, with more robots than people. The prince's goal is to create the world's top business hub with advanced manufacturing, biotech, media and airlines.

In order to achieve that, says Ulrichsen, the country needs foreign investments. And that was the point of last week's summit: To get international business giants interested in investing in Saudi Arabia.

But awarding citizenship to a foreign-made machine didn't sit well with some Saudis. Some pointed out the irony that Sophia, who appeared on stage without a hijab and abaya (full-length robe), enjoys more rights than women in the kingdom.

“It hit a sore spot that a robot has citizenship and my daughter doesn’t,” Hadeel Shaikh told Reuters. Shaikh is a Saudi woman whose 4-year-old child with a Lebanese man doesn’t have citizenship. Saudi Arabia doesn't grant citizenship to children of women married to a foreign man. It also doesn't allow foreign workers to become citizens no matter how long they have been in the country.

It's not clear what rights Sophia has as a robot with citizenship. PRI made an inquiry about this to Hanson Robotics and asked whether Sophia will stay in Saudi Arabia. As of this writing, the company hasn't responded.

Meanwhile, other critics point out the ethical questions that come with bestowing human rights to robots. Typically a citizen of a country has rights such as owning property or voting in elections. If we start handing out citizenship to robots, are we trivializing these rights?

Kate Darling, a researcher at MIT's Media Lab, says she doesn't see a movement to give robots human rights.

"The robots that we have today are very primitive machines that are much dumber than insects," she explains, "and so I think that conversations about civil rights or these machines inherently deserving any kind of right is pretty far away."

Darling adds that we usually award rights to people in the scope of what they are capable of. For example, she says, children don't have the same rights as adults because they are not able to make their own choices and decisions.

"Given that robots today are still primitive pieces of technology, they are not going to be able to make use of their rights."

Yet last January, the European Parliament debated whether it should grant robots "personhood" status. Mady Delvaux, a member of European Parliament from Luxembourg and author of a report presented at the bloc's legislature, argued that “a growing number of areas of our daily lives are increasingly affected by robotics. In order to address this reality and to ensure that robots are and will remain in the service of humans, we urgently need to create a robust European legal framework.”

There could be a time, Darling says, when we might want to start thinking about certain legal protections for robots. Not for the robot's sake, but for our own.

"As people interact more and more with these lifelike devices, we tend to treat them like living things," she explains, "and that can have an impact on our own behavior."

For example, she says, "if it's desensitizing to children or even to adults to be violent towards very life-like robots ... then there would be an argument for restricting what people can and cannot do."

Dr. Jane Goodall on her work with chimpanzees, and the new documentary ‘JANE’

0
0

It’s been more than 50 years since Dr. Jane Goodall first traveled to Gombe, Tanzania, as an amateur scientist and began amassing observations that would change the way we understand chimpanzees and even humans. Now a new documentary, “JANE,” reconstructs Goodall’s time in the Gombe forest, drawing on a trove of recently discovered archival footage.

“Back then, it was a very naïve, innocent sort of world,” Goodall says. “The magic of being able to interact with creatures who'd been running away from you for almost a year was something real special, and that comes out very strongly in this film.”

Goodall spoke with Science Friday about at length about the film, her fieldwork, encouraging the next generation of conservationists and even why she believes in Bigfoot. Highlights from their conversation are below, and you can listen to the full interview using the audio player.

On what it felt like to make contact with the Gombe chimpanzees for the first time

“It was absolutely extraordinary. I mean, it was when the one chimp who began to lose his fear first. ... I called him David Greybeard because he has a beautiful white beard — I'm not quite sure why David Greybeard, but anyway, that came to be his name. And he came into my camp and pinched some bananas. So then I asked the cook, Dominic, to put bananas out.

“I was still going into the hills every single day, into the forest. ... Eventually, [David Greybeard] began coming fairly regularly and so I stayed down, got to know him better. And the first time he actually approached and took a banana from my hand, it was like the stories you read about people approaching uncontacted human tribes. That's how it felt.”

On what chimpanzees taught her about motherhood — particularly one chimp mother named Flo

“Over the years, I've learned there are good mothers and not good mothers; there’s very few bad mothers — just one or two we've known. And Flo is just the perfect example of the very best kind of mother. She was affectionate, protective but not overprotective, and above all, supportive. And of course, that's what I attribute so much of my own success to: The way Mom brought me up, my mother. She supported my dream of going to Africa when everybody else laughed at me. I was 10 years old at the time. So finding out that chimpanzee offspring who have had a supportive mother have tended to do better, be better mothers, rise higher in the hierarchy if they’re males — it just stresses the importance of the first couple of years of life and the kind of upbringing that you have.”

On her best teachers

“First of all, there was nobody who could have trained me because nobody had done it before. That was, you know, the luck — I was sort of out there first. And [my mentor] Lewis Leakey deliberately chose me because he said he wanted somebody whose mind was uncluttered by the — in his opinion —sometimes not good scientific thinking. And you know, I completely agree with him. So when I got to Cambridge to do a Ph.D. because he insisted, I was told I couldn't talk about chimpanzees having personalities, minds capable of thinking, and certainly not emotions — you know, I was guilty of anthropomorphism.

“But fortunately, though I was really intimidated by these clever, clever professors at Cambridge, I’d had this wonderful teacher when I was a child who taught me that in this respect, they were wrong — and that was my dog. You know, you can't share your life in a meaningful way with a dog, a cat, a bird or a cow, I don't care what, and not know of course we're not the only beings with personalities, minds and emotions.”

On how the study of chimpanzees has changed since she began her fieldwork

“When I began, it was a notebook and pen — or pencil in the wet season — and typing it up at night, so that they were very long days. And then we graduated to filling a lot of the stuff in on check sheets and tape recorders. But you know, the only thing really different today is that we no longer have the banana feeding, we no longer have any interaction with the chimpanzees. But otherwise, the study has really gone on very much the same.”

On inspiring the next generation of conservationists

“My greatest reason to hope — and this is what I share — is that the young people, once they know what the problems are and we empower them to take action, to become involved in something they care about, then they're filled with hope, because they know that what they're doing is making a difference. And then they know that through our Roots and Shoots network and other similar groups, young people all around the world care, just like they do.

“And you know, I believe we have a window of time to put things right, so that along with the human brain, our amazing inventiveness, along with how incredibly resilient nature is if we give her a chance, even places totally destroyed can once again support life, and animals on the brink of extinction can be given another chance.

“And then there's the indomitable human spirit. You know, people who recover from terrible illnesses, they cope with disabilities, they tackle projects, problems that seem insoluble and don't give up. And it's really lucky that we have this indomitable spirit. 

“You know, I'm looking out of my window here in San Francisco and it's thick with smoke. So when I was coughing earlier, it's these terrible wildfires. And if young people give up from things like wildfires and floods and hurricanes and climate change — which actually is real, I've seen it for myself and I know that we are a great contributor to it. So it's desperately important now more than ever that young people don't lose hope, because if you don't have hope — well, why bother to do anything?”

On solving the mystery of whether Bigfoot exists

“We haven't and you know, it's so peculiar. I want to believe there is a creature, whether it's a yeti, whether it's Sasquatch, whether it's the Yowie in Australia or the Wildman in China. ... My best story, which I'll tell very quickly — I went to a place in Ecuador, flew over miles and miles of untouched rainforest, landed with a little community of about 30 people. And in the area, there were six, seven such little communities, and the only communication between them were these hunters who went from village to village with news, like the old minstrels.

“And so I asked a translator, next time you see one of these hunters, please ask them if they've seen a monkey without a tail. That's all I said. So this guy had no idea why I was asking, and about six months later, I received a reply that four of the hunters had — and they're all separate from each other — they'd all seen monkeys without tails, and they walked upright and they were about six foot tall. That's pretty amazing, isn't it?"

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. “JANE” is now playing in select theaters

Is tourism harming the Galápagos Islands?

0
0

Mathías Espinoza has a deeply crinkled brow as he squints at the vast ocean around the Galápagos Islands on a July morning. “Bien brava,” he murmurs softly, meaning, “rough.” He has looked out on the ocean many times over his years in the Galápagos Islands, but it never ceases to intrigue him.

Espinoza is inhaling the crisp morning air slowly and deliberately. The small speedboat that is tied to the dock right behind him batters noisily against the wooden palings with force. Shortly, this boat will take a handful of international divers out to a spot where they will descend to see the marine creature Espinoza knows better than any other guide: hammerhead sharks.

The ferocity of the ocean (and its inhabitants) isn’t concerning to Espinoza. He knows the divers are in for a rare treat: He's taking them to an area called Gordon Rocks, where they will dive through a uniquely Galápagos underwater wildlife habitat, a tuff cone. 

“A tuff cone is a sediment of ashes that, because of a strong [volcanic] eruption, those ashes went up into the sky and they settled down in the form of a cone,” he tells the divers before they board the boat.

Yet, Espinoza is acutely aware of how precarious and delicate areas like Gordon Rocks are, and that one day they might not exist, especially if human traffic coming to see them puts stress on the ecosystem.

“The question on this very fragile ecosystem is, how you can do tourism in the long term that’s not going to affect the wildlife here,” says Espinoza.

So, he guides the divers to not cause harm to the underwater world. He’s at the forefront of a movement in the Galápagos Islands to manage the tourist influx in a way that respects and protects the environment — a concept called “sustainable tourism.” It’s an idea that has gained currency in some countries where tourism is the base of the economy, yet where tourist traffic might also be causing degradation of the very sites people come to see.

And while Espinoza’s tours might be the model for putting as little stress on the ecosystem as possible, he is also worried about a different threat that comes from the tourism influx — what could sail in on cargo ships that bring supplies to the hotels and tour boats. 

“With the cargo ships, you can have insects that are hurting the ecosystems, from introduced ants to introduced flies,” says Espinoza. “Small animals, they are big problems.”

The Philornis downsi fly attacking the famous finch bird might be the starkest example of these introduced insects damaging the Galápagos ecosystem, according to Espinoza.

“The [Philornis downsi] females are laying their eggs in the nests of the finches, and then those eggs are turning into larvae and those larvae are attacking the small finches. They’re sucking their blood,” Espinoza says. “Some species of finches are suffering a mortality of 90 percent.”

Tourist kids on Charles Darwin Ave Galapagos

So, the Ecuadorian government has gotten very strict. What can be brought on and off the islands, and even between islands, is vigilantly monitored. So, too, is the people flow from mainland Ecuador.

“Since I've been here, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the local community just within 16 years,” says Stuart Banks, an oceanographer with Conservation International. While the local population has grown over the years to be just under 30,000, the number of tourists each year dwarfs that. Last year, over 200,000 foreigners visited.

Yet, due to national park protections, much of the islands are not open for anyone to live on or freely visit. This cuts down the human traffic considerably.

“Luckily, because of steps that have been taken in the development of the island, in protecting the national park in the Galápagos, the great part of the natural ecosystems is still pretty much as it was 200 years ago, before all this rapid development.”

Galapagos national park decal

Much of the islands are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and 97 percent of the islands are protected national parklands where no one can live or build. While tourists can visit some of these areas with a certified guide, human traffic on much of the Galápagos islands is minimal, helping with the preservation.

This keeps the boundaries of tourism very manageable, according to Jonathan Romero, a Galápagos National Park veteran who is currently based on the largest of the Galápagos Islands, Isabela.

“The most important thing is to protect our island’s biodiversity,” he says. “But there are external threats — like bad tourist behaviors — that affect us quite severely.”

Romero says that while conservation is a way of life for many locals, some tourists don’t know how to minimize their impact by being frugal with electricity, water and plastics. Many don’t know national park rules. And in this wildlife wonderland, where animals are all around and largely unafraid of humans, tourists seem to routinely break one key rule — they cannot go within six feet of the wildlife.

“There was just a girl who isn’t from here, who climbed on the back of a tortoise and put this photo of herself on the tortoise on her social media networks,” Romero says. “Locals were upset and posted strong rebukes of her.” She apologized.

Selfies with famous Galápagos creatures might not matter hugely if it was just an odd person here or there. But, Romero says in a world of instant photo sharing, the stress on animals from all of these selfies can add up.

On the Isabela beachfront, despite the sandy streets, tourism infrastructure has developed as more foreigners come to see the volcanoes, pink flamingos and marine turtles.

Ramón Martínez runs a small, beachfront hotel in a corner spot close to mangroves and rock pools. He and his wife started this hotel back when the shoreline was barely developed. He says it's often hard to meet all the demands of tourists.

“There’s a list of things that are restricted, that can’t be brought to the islands,” explains Martínez. It is hard when his guests want certain types of meats or fruits, and they don’t understand why he can’t get them.

Martínez  has also learned tourists have needs that locals have learned to live without — like hot showers multiple times a day. So, he came up with an environmentally friendly solution. “I installed solar panels to help with heating hot water,” he says.

Isabela Beach House hotel

So far, Isabela Island does not have big chain hotel-resorts that other beach destinations are full of. Martínez says that if big hotel chains were to set up shop on Isabela, they would have to find a way to meet a traveler's every little need, and he worries that the big hotels wouldn’t respect the environment. But he says locals have resisted moves by big tourism to enter Isabela.

“Locals here see their island as their patrimony — something they must protect and respect,” says Martínez. “Their island is not for sale.”

Kenyans mourn the loss of a wildlife advocate and leading ivory trade investigator

0
0

Trafficking in ivory and rhino horn is a scourge of Kenya's tourism-based economy. 

This week that economy took a big hit. 

Esmond Bradley Martin, the American conservationist and leading ivory trade investigator was found stabbed to death in his Nairobi home Monday. Four suspects have been arrested in connection with the murder.

"He was not just an asset for Kenya, he was an asset for pachyderms where ever they were, elephants and rhinos," says Kenyan Paula Kahumbu, who leads the conservation group Wildlife Direct, and worked closely with Martin. "There is this real sense of loss for the nation and for our wildlife."

Kahumbu says Martin was relentless in his pursuit of illegally traded ivory and rhino horn. 

"He went into places where these things were happening very openly, in markets, for example, in China and Hong Kong where ivory is simply being sold in shops because it was legal," she notes. "But he also went where it was being sold in places like Angola or Congo."

Martin worked extensively in Asia, investigating ivory and rhino horn trafficking in China, Vietnam, Laos and most recently Myanmar.

"He was trying to understand how the international agreements were translating into actions on the ground, in terms of factories where they were carving ivory, or shops where ivory was being retailed," Kahumbu says. 

Martin was among the first to recognize that the volume of illegal ivory trade in the US was second only to China. 

He took immense personal risk, in no small part because he did not blend into many of the settings where he investigated trafficking. Kahumbu says his large stature and shock of white hair made him stand out. 

"He would openly go into shops to ask questions, take photographs, gather data and he believed that people were very open to him because he was honest about what he was doing," she notes. "He wasn't carrying hidden cameras or anything like that."

As New Delhi’s pollution crisis persists, so do widespread public denial and complacency

0
0

In early November, there was no escaping the fact New Delhi was facing a public health crisis. The city’s Air Quality Index (AQI), by some readings, soared as high as the maximum, 999. Schools were closed, questions of governmental competency were raised and high-level meetings were convened.

Though conditions have improved since then, they’re still far from healthy. Over the past few months Delhi’s AQI has largely fluctuated between “poor,” “very poor,” “severe” and “severe plus.” And it’s not a new problem — on only two days since May 2015 has the city’s air been classified as “good.”

But you wouldn’t know it by observing daily life. The city’s frenetic pace persists, unperturbed. Commuters go to work on the Delhi Metro, or in one of the city’s 10-million-plus registered vehicles. Beggars and street children knock on car windows at traffic lights and the city’s several thousand homeless residents seek refuge on sidewalks and under overpasses.

A street cleaner works in heavy smog in Delhi, India, Nov. 10, 2017.

A street cleaner works in heavy smog in Delhi, India, Nov. 10, 2017.

Credit:

Cathal McNaughton/Reuters

Nothing much betrays the notion that the pollution everyone’s breathing is toxic — except, of course, the air itself. But even that is debatable to some, including those supposedly working to keep the air clean.

“We are not polluted really. We are dusty.” D. Saha, the top scientist at the Air Quality Lab of India’s Central Pollution Control Board told PRI.

“If you compare the variables triggering the numbers then it’s a different story,” he says of Delhi’s high pollution levels. “Protocol followed in other countries is not acceptable [here].”  

Saha also insisted that “dust is actually good” for people, that the human body deals with it sufficiently through “self-purification” mechanisms, that there is no direct correlation between pollution, hospital visits and mortality, and that those who wear smog masks actually worsen their respiratory problems.

Many of Saha’s comments are at odds with the findings of numerous studies and the opinions of many experts. His comments, however, do recall comments by India’s environment minister, who asserted there was no need to panic about November’s pollution spike because the situation was not as bad as the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, widely viewed to be the world’s worst industrial disaster.

Vehicles drive through heavy smog in Delhi during the peak of the most recent pollution crisis, Nov. 8, 2017.

Vehicles drive through heavy smog in Delhi during the peak of the most recent pollution crisis, Nov. 8, 2017.  

Credit:

Cathal McNaughton/Reuters

But government officials are not alone in suggesting Delhi’s pollution is often exaggerated — it’s a view also held by many of the public at large. Challenging that view isn’t easy.

In 2015, then New York Times South Asia Bureau Chief Gardiner Harris ignited a firestorm by writing that he and his family were leaving Delhi because of the air. Among other things, Harris’ assessment was labeled in Indian media as entitled, “smug” and a hyperbolic “drain inspectors report.”   

Similar levels of indignation were reached in December when Sri Lankan cricket players wore masks during a match against India in Delhi. Play was interrupted multiple times while the Sri Lankans complained about air quality levels, which were at least 15 times higher than World Health Organization standards.  

In response, a former Indian player quipped that the Sri Lankans were hiding behind masks because they were losing, rather than due to health concerns. Many fans voiced similar views, and even India’s top cricket administrators joined the chorus.

“If 20,000 people in the stands did not have problems and the Indian team did not face any issue, I wonder why the Sri Lankan team made a big fuss?” said C.K. Khanna, the acting president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India.

Harris’ article and the cricket match both could have been opportunities for national conversations about pollution. Instead, the overwhelming reaction was defensive, something those working to spread awareness say reflects the state of pollution discourse in India. Various activists and organizations have long tried to spread information to New Delhi residents about the damaging health effects of air pollution. In recent years, initiatives like the Help Delhi Breathe collective have used online videos and social media to try and raise awareness. But it's not an easy task.

“We are in denial,” says Jai Dhar Gupta, an entrepreneur who founded Nirvana Being, a company that sells high-end smog masks and air purification products.

“My child in one of the leading schools of Delhi gets reprimanded for wearing a mask. The teacher makes fun of him, forget about the kids.”

For those who might take pollution more seriously, however, even Gupta’s cheapest masks might be prohibitively costly, at 1,800-2,200 rupees (around $30-$35). And though more affordable options exist on the market, seeing people wear masks of any kind in Delhi is still quite rare. Gupta notes that there is a greater demand for masks in Beijing, even though the pollution there is no longer as bad.

“There’s an apathy towards health and the environment," he says of India. “I don’t think people have been able to connect air pollution with the health effects of it, [which are] delayed. It’s not instant like [contaminated] food or water.”

Sri Lankan cricket players wear masks during a match against India in Delhi, Dec. 5, 2017. Play was interrupted multiple times while the Sri Lankans complained about air quality levels, which were at least 15 times higher than World Health Organization st

Sri Lankan cricket players wear masks during a match against India in Delhi, Dec. 5, 2017. Play was interrupted multiple times while the Sri Lankans complained about air quality levels, which were at least 15 times higher than World Health Organization standards. 

Credit:

Reuters

Imran Khan, a local “autowallah” — a driver of a motorized three-wheel passenger vehicle — bucks that trend. One of Gupta’s masks costs at least two days worth of Khan’s earnings. But for the past two years he’s been wearing cheaper ones, which he sees as a matter of personal safety.

“The pollution is very bad. I know this because when we drive at night the light from the headlights falls on [the particles] and they shine in a different way that you can’t see in the daytime,” he says.

Delhi's pollution poses a particularly high risk to autowallahs because of how much time they spend on the road, and Khan tries to get more to wear masks. 

“I keep trying to make them understand that they should and that it’s a very good thing.”

Few, though, have followed his lead. As Gupta and others note, awareness is a major problem. A lack of reliable pollution data is another commonly cited issue and is even more pronounced in other Indian cities, some of which are actually more polluted than Delhi.

But plugging the information gap may not make the general public less complacent about pollution. For many low-income Indians, there are simply too many problems to solve on a daily basis to worry about pollution and its long-term effects.

“Most of our population is just trying to make ends meet. [Pollution] is irrelevant,” says Gita Prakash, a doctor who sees many low-income patients at her home-based clinic. “[They] are just trying to see where to get food for their six kids.”

Prakash says many parents she talks to are unfazed by the pollution-related illnesses of their children. Their mindset, as she sees it, is: “They have a cough and cold? So what? At least they’re alive. At least they have food to eat.”

Reecha Upadhyay, an activist with Help Delhi Breathe, agrees.

“Right now air pollution in India is a rich people’s problem. It is not a poor person’s problem,” she says, referring to the circles where pollution is regularly discussed.

In terms of who actually bears the brunt of pollution, though, Upadhyay stresses that it is the poor. Still, she believes the onus should not be on them to effect change.

“Let’s not expect poor people to have yet another burden of care on them,” she says. Upadhyay’s focus is to get the privileged to lead the way. “How do we mobilize people who have the influence and power to change … to do more and demand more?”

Imran Khan, a local “autowallah” — a driver of a motorized three-wheel passenger vehicle — wears a mask to protect himself from polluted air. Khan tries to get more autowallahs to wear masks, too, but few have followed his lead.

Imran Khan, a local “autowallah” — a driver of a motorized three-wheel passenger vehicle — wears a mask to protect himself from polluted air. Khan tries to get more autowallahs to wear masks, too, but few have followed his lead.

Credit:

Ashish Malhotra/PRI

The answer to that question may be difficult to find. In India, those with means have grown accustomed to finding their own private solutions where public services fall short. Private security guards are hired in the absence of effective policing and filter systems are installed in homes for drinking water. Smog masks and air purifiers are just another workaround, critics of the government response say, necessary because of political inaction.

It should be noted that while unveiling its most recent budget, the central government announced its intention to tackle one contributor to pollution: crop burning by farmers in Delhi's neighboring states. The Delhi government has also laid out plans to impound and dismantle cars over 15 years old. But how these announcements get implemented remains to be seen. The response of government at the height of the crisis meanwhile, was marked by state governments bickering over who should address the problem, and the prime minister remaining glaringly silent.

In such a political landscape, it’s no surprise that those who can afford workarounds see them as a quicker fix than pressing the government for change. After finding their own solutions people move on with their lives, and complacency seeps in.

“Most people feel, ‘What’s the big deal [about pollution]?’” says Prakash. “We say we have to survive here. … Let’s just carry on the way we are. As long as we’re not dead, we’re alive.”

Ashish Malhotra reported from New Delhi.


Trump's EPA chief pushes 'cooperative federalism' for food and farming

0
0

Since assuming leadership of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last February, Scott Pruitt has found himself at odds with environmental organizations, community advocates, farmers and, increasingly, lawmakers.

Just last week, Cory Booker (D-NJ) confronted Pruitt in a Senate hearing about his recent efforts to roll back regulations that set a minimum age for farmworkers who handle pesticides. The rules include requirements for a minimum age of 18 for applying pesticides and for buffer zones around pesticide-spraying equipment. Booker said he feared that the rollback would have a “disproportionate impact on low-income folks and minorities.”

Booker’s concerns mirror many aired by others invested in the country’s environmental policies. Pruitt has made wholesale changes to the EPA over the last year, and his impact on food and farming have been no less sparing. His rollbacks of Obama-era regulations on pesticides, water safety and farm runoff and close alignment with the seed and chemical industry has caused deep concern for both advocates and scientists. And as Pruitt’s EPA marches forward in rolling back or delaying environmental protections, many longtime staffers are opting to leave the agency they’ve supported for decades rather than supporting his agenda.

“This EPA is not interested in protecting people from harmful pesticides,” says Karen Perry Stillerman, a senior analyst at the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s more interested in bowing to the wishes of Dow [Agrochemical].”

Before his tenure at the EPA, Pruitt infamously sued the agency 14 times. While most of those lawsuits were focused on preventing new regulations to limit carbon and mercury pollution from power plants, his approach to ending regulation has remained constant throughout.

In November 2016, he signed on to a lawsuit against the Waters of the United States rule (WOTUS), which details which bodies of water are regulated under the federal Clean Water Act, and was updated and expanded with the 2015 Clean Water Rule.

As EPA chief, Pruitt has worked quickly to stop implementation of the rule, which many conventional farm and industry groups have opposed, arguing that it is an example of the agency’s overreach. In June, the EPA began its efforts to rescind the rule, and last month the Supreme Court ruled that challenges to WOTUS would be sent back to federal district courts, several of which have issued stays against implementing the rule. Then, Pruitt responded last week by announcing a two-year delay in implementing WOTUS while his EPA works to repeal and replace it.

Pruitt rejected the EPA’s own scientists’ recommendation to ban the insecticide chlorpyrifos after years of internal and external research on the pesticide’s potentially harmful health effects. The chemical was banned in 2000 for household use, but is still used in some commercial farming. A New York Times investigation found that new EPA staff appointed by Trump had pushed career employees to shift the agency’s position on the chemical, and in early February Pruitt noted he would also urge the federal Marine Fisheries Service to also reconsider its findings that chlorpyrifos threatens fish species. A number of states have sued the agency in an effort to force it to implement the ban; California has also moved to ban the chemical’s use in the state in hopes of skirting the EPA’s inaction.

Pruitt has defended his deregulatory efforts, saying they’re in the interest of “cooperative federalism.” In his view, this type of deregulation empowers the states to take on more regulatory responsibility, while preventing the overreach of federal agencies.

Among advocates, anger at changes and the status quo

Many agriculture and environment advocates don’t think Pruitt’s deregulatory efforts will improve the working relationship between the federal government and the states. John O’Grady, president of the American Federation of Government Employees National Council #238, which represents over 1,000 EPA employees, says “we’ve been doing cooperative federalism for years.” But “this administration is kind of twisting it” to justify incorporating direct input from more corporations and to defund environmental regulatory work that has been happening in the states, he says.

Pruitt has supported Trump’s budget proposals, which would cut 20 percent of the funding states rely on for staffing and environmental program work, such as one program established in 2009 to restore and clean up contamination — from agriculture and other sources — in the Chesapeake Bay. More environmental regulations have been targeted for rollback than in any other sector.

And despite his stated interest in diffuse governance, Pruitt is reportedly keeping a tight rein on the EPA’s ongoing work. Michele Merkel, co-director of Food & Water Watch’s Food & Water Justice program, and Tarah Heinzen, a staff attorney of the program, note that since many top positions at EPA remain unfilled, much of the agency’s business is flowing through Pruitt himself. Heinzen says that, consequently, there is “far less autonomy at the regional level,” and that state agencies are finding it challenging “to even gather information.”

Conventional agriculture groups, however, are mostly in agreement with the newly defined priorities of Pruitt’s EPA. When Pruitt addressed meetings of the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in early 2017, he was reportedly given standing ovations. Others say it is still too early to tell whether the changing priorities of this EPA will dramatically affect the relationship between the EPA and farmers.

On the one hand, the biggest players in the “[agriculture] industry have always had the EPA pretty captured,” says Merkel. Indeed, EPA’s regulatory trends have shown a shift toward more self-regulation in the agribusiness sector. There has also been a decline in the number of inspections and enforcement actions by the agency against concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) since the final years of the Obama administration.

And while many farmers have traditionally had an antagonistic relationship with the agency, Tom Driscoll of the National Farmers Union says the idea that farmers have a “knee-jerk distrust of EPA is a bit overstated.” He adds that the farmers he works with are “invested in a clean and healthy environment” and many farmers are still hoping to work with the EPA toward better conservation practices.

Plummeting morale inside the agency

Between April and December, 770 employees left the EPA, many taking buyouts and early retirements. O’Grady says that some of these departures could be unrelated to the political environment. But, he says, some could be “related to people being disgusted with the program that this [administration] is putting in place.” Regardless of their reasons for leaving, many are not being replaced — barely one-third of the 624 EPA positions that require Congressional confirmation have been filled, with another third sitting vacant with no nominees.

Other EPA employees have gone to the media or other forums to speak out against the current administration — but not without consequence. Several employees who’ve spoken out publicly against the recent actions of the EPA have had their emails scrutinized. Many reports suggest that the internal staff morale is low. While the administration fears information leaks, many employees fear the agency will retaliate without proof if they are suspected of leaking information.

Pruitt has repeatedly condemned the EPA under Obama for treating states and industry as “adversaries,” preferring to see them as “partners.” That philosophy has translated into bringing many former industry representatives in to fill major EPA roles.

A November 2017 Center for Public Integrity investigation into 46 political appointees at the EPA found that the majority had worked for either an organization with a history of climate change denial or an industry commonly regulated by the agency. The appointees include a former senior director of the American Chemistry Council (whose members include Dow, Monsanto and Bayer), former senior counsel at the American Petroleum Institute and former legislative affairs director for the National Association of Chemical Distributors.

And the appointees go beyond the agriculture and energy industries. In May, Pruitt appointed his friend and personal banker, Albert Kelly, to lead the new Superfund Task Force. Just two weeks prior, Kelly had been fined by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for financial misdeeds that resulted in his being banned from rejoining the banking industry by the FDIC.

Pruitt has also reportedly spent much more of his time in meetings with industry reps than environmental organizations or citizen groups. A trove of documents detailing his schedule during his first three months at the helm of the agency show dozens of meetings with or travel to events sponsored by General Motors, Shell Oil executives, CropLife America, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Cement Association and the National Mining Association. Meanwhile, between March and September, Pruitt met with just five environmental groups.

Some of Pruitt’s deregulatory actions, particularly those targeted at Obama-era executive orders, could only last for a short while if they were soon overturned by a new administration. But others, like unwinding WOTUS, would take years of litigation and rulemaking to get back to where the Obama administration left off.

And staff at EPA could also prove hard to replace. John O’Grady points out that the agency has shrunk from 18,000 employees in 1999 to around 14,500 today, and he predicts the Trump administration will cut several thousand more jobs. After all the cuts, “there’s still the same amount of work,” he says. The staff that remain at EPA “are dedicated, they’re trying to get the work done.” But as morale falls, many are burning out. And those who stay must face an agency that seeks to unwind decades of its own efforts to fight climate change, regulate harmful chemicals, and protect the country’s waterways.

A version of this story originally appeared on Civil Eats

New book sheds light on the amazing capabilities of jellyfish, addresses myths and misperceptions

0
0

How much do you know about jellyfish? OK, you might have been stung by one that one time on vacation in Florida, but what other information do you have?

The general public has based its relationship with the aquatic animals on fear. First, there is the fear of being stung — and now there is a growing concern that warmer waters caused by climate change will result in a surge in the creatures in waters worldwide

Juli Berwald says that jellyfish are largely misunderstood — and she hopes to change some of those misperceptions and myths with her new book, “Spineless,” which has an autobiographical quality to it, as well as being full of scientific information about jellyfish.

"I really wanted to tell a story where the author wasn't sort of this mystery person telling you really smart things all the time,” says Berwald. “And I felt like connecting with my audience was super important to me. It may be just because I like reading memoir and fiction a lot, but I wanted to make that connection with my reader.

"Every time I dug into the story of jellyfish ... I would find these gems, just these science stories I really felt like I hadn't been told. It was so fascinating.”

Berwald says that the lack of information dates back to the 20th century ever since oceanographers started to plunge into the deep waters to attempt to classify lifeforms, using nets and winches. The jellyfish, gelatinous in nature, did not come up in those devices.

“What happened along the way is we biased ourselves away from jellyfish because the things that come up in those nets are durable,” Berwald says. “They have bones or shells or something like that to allow them to come up in those nets. Our understanding of jellyfish for the 20th century is really poor and we can't get that back. So that when we started seeing larger blooms in coastal places, it's easy to say they're taking over."

One of Berwald’s favorite findings during the research for her book came during a visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, where scientists use robotic jellyfish to better understand the creatures’ movement. Through their work, they discovered that the peplum around the main body structure of the jellyfish (known as the bell) actually drives the organism forward without using any muscles by creating a low-pressure system on top of it. So, the jellyfish moves through the water, essentially, by sucking itself through the water rather than pushing itself through water.

“It turns out jellyfish are the most efficient movers out there,” Berwald says. “They use the least amount of energy to go a certain distance for a certain way."

At the same time, the jellyfish’s stinging cell can whip around at five million times the acceleration of gravity, making it the fastest motion in the animal kingdom that has ever been observed.

There are estimates that jellyfish stings account for about 40 human deaths a year, making it four or five times more probable than dying from a shark bite, says Lucas Brotz, a post-doctoral researcher in the Institute for Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. 

When it comes to the question of overpopulating, it turns out that jellyfish populations are highly variable in nature, Brotz says.

“So, one year there'll be millions. The next year there'll be none. The next year will be thousands. So, there's a lot of noise in the signal and it's difficult to extract an increase,” says Brotz.

Brotz says that he gets asked all the time if jellyfish are increasing globally. He immediately answers back with a series of questions that show just how many variables one has to take into consideration: What do you mean by jellyfish? What do you mean by an increase? What do you mean by global and over what timeframe?

“There’s no agreed-upon definitions for a lot of those things and so you can come up with different definitions that will lead you to a yes, no or maybe. I think that the major conclusions we took away from our study was it's definitely not all jellyfish increasing in all places,” Brotz says.

“But we did see a signal around the globe that says jellyfish definitely appear to be increasing in more places than they're decreasing, so we're seeing a lot of sustained increases in different places around the world and a lot of those places are very disparate from each other, so they don't appear to be directly connected."

Brotz says there are thousands of species of jellyfish that have been identified, but probably thousands more that have yet to be discovered. Furthermore, by looking at the evolution, taxonomy and phylogeny of the different organisms, researchers have determined that many of the types of jellyfish are “quite distantly related on an evolutionary time scale” that might cover three different phyla.

“And so with these distantly related organisms, lumping them into the same category can be problematic,” Brotz says.

Jellyfish can vary greatly in size, Brotz says, from a giant variation found off the coasts of Japan that can reach up to 500 pounds to the “immortal” kind that is found in the Mediterranean and also near Japan that is no bigger than the size of a human pinky finger.

The immortal jellyfish, which has the ability to actually go from the mature medusa stage to its initial polyp stage, has become the subject of many studies given the fact that the creature’s cells actually go back to being stem cells.

Although such techniques have been successfully performed from cell cultures in a lab, “in animals it's very unknown and so they're looking at that now to see how the jellyfish does it and what we might be able to learn from it,” Berwald says.

This article is based on an interview on PRI’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow

New Interior ruling threatens to undo protections of migratory birds

0
0

Seventeen former Department of Interior officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations have written a letter protesting a new DOI ruling that exempts industry from punishment for causing negligent deaths of birds. The ruling may also violate the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada and other nations.

Paul Schmidt, a former Fish and Wildlife official who served administrations from President Jimmy Carter through President Barack Obama, organized the group letter. “The original purpose [of the agreement] was to establish a continental approach to managing and conserving migratory birds,” Schmidt explains. “It began with a treaty with Canada in 1916, when folks realized that migratory birds don't recognize political boundaries and that there needed to be cooperation throughout the lifecycle of a migratory bird in order for there to be good management of that population.”

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) focused mainly on the hunting and killing of birds for their feathers and other trophies, but in modern times it has been used in different ways. During the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989 and the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in 2010, each of which killed thousands of birds, the MBTA was used in a punitive manner to fine the companies and contractors associated with the disaster.

The oil companies didn’t much like this interpretation of the law. Now they have found an ally in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and have successfully pushed to narrow the interpretation. Schmidt and his allies are pushing back.

“The 17 signatories to our letter, [going] back to the Nixon administration, are objecting to this narrow view, in which someone is violating the law only if they intentionally and purposefully killed or took that bird,” he explains. Zinke’s interpretation, Schmidt says, would no longer allow the act to be used as a tool in conservation, as it has been for decades, to help prevent such things as oil spills, mass electrocutions on electric wires and power lines, or deaths in wind turbines and oil pits.

Oil pits are, in fact, a good example of how the MBTA was used successfully to protect birds. The process of developing oil and bringing it to the surface creates waste pits, which become an attraction to birds flying overhead, Schmidt explains. The birds obviously can’t recognize that the pit contains toxic material; they see a watering hole and fly down to it. Then they die from chemical exposure.

“It was recognized that this was a fairly significant problem, particularly in some parts of the [American] West 20 years ago,” Schmidt says. “So, technologies were developed whereby you put a netting over that oil in order to keep the birds from committing suicide, if you will, inside an oil pit.”

Schmidt notes that the MBTA has no civil suit provision that allows citizens to bring a case against the government for not enforcing the law, unlike the Endangered Species Act, which does have a provision that allows organizations or individuals to take issue through the courts.

Canada, Mexico or other nations who are parties to the Migratory Bird Treaty might have standing to bring a complaint, however. “I understand that the Canadians are considering exchanging a diplomatic note with the United States expressing their concerns,” Schmidt says. “It was just a few years ago, when I was serving in the US Fish and Wildlife Service, that we exchanged diplomatic notes relative to the Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada affirming both countries’ interpretation.”

“It’s ironic,” he concludes, “that now Canada would have to come back to us and express concern or objection for a brand new interpretation that violates that diplomatic note, which was exchanged between our State Department and the Foreign Affairs Office in Canada.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

Nature-based preschools, where children spend most of their day outside, are a growing trend in the United States

0
0

Starting preschool at age three is a predictor of success as an adult. If that experience includes plenty of structured play outside, it could also instill a lifelong awareness and appreciation of the natural environment.

Studies show that kids who learn outdoors have better academic results, including higher scores on standardized tests, while they learn to love the outdoors and have fun. Nature-based preschools have been popular in Europe for decades, especially in Germany and Scandinavia. They are a relatively new idea in the US but are becoming more common. A recent survey by Natural Start Alliance found there are more than 250 nature-based preschools across the US, two-thirds more than last year. 

Advocate Richard Louv says that increase is good news for kids. “There is a new body of evidence out there that really shows a connection, at least, between spending more time in nature and being healthier, happier and maybe even smarter,” Louv says.

Louv has written nine books about children and nature and he co-founded the Children and Nature Network. In his book, "Last Child in the Woods," Louv coined the term ‘nature deficit disorder.’ While this is not an actual medical diagnosis, Louv points out that the last decade or two, during which children spent less and less time outside, coincides with a rise in childhood obesity.

Louv says simply sitting in a classroom all day can be a problem for kids.

“Just about everybody now knows that sitting is the new smoking,” he explains. “It produces many of the same diseases or symptoms as cigarettes. Many people have standing desks and all of that, and yet our children are still sitting in the schoolroom, aren’t they? And we’re cutting recess. This goes against decades of research that shows physical activity stimulates cognitive functioning. It improves physical health. It makes better students — and yet we’re ignoring that research.”

Louv worries that weather events like hurricanes and the mounting evidence of climate change could cause kids to view nature as threatening instead of welcoming. He says it’s important for kids to develop a personal relationship with nature while they’re young. “It’s very hard to protect something if you don’t learn to love it,” he says. “It’s impossible to learn to love it if you’ve never experienced it.”

Nature-based preschools seek to help kids develop a personal relationship with the outdoors. This type of preschool isn’t an option for many kids, but there are things parents can do with their children to foster a love of nature. Read a book outside. Turn over rocks and see what’s living there. Richard Louv suggests a belly hike: Get down on your belly in the backyard and have a close look at all that lives between the blades of grass.

All these things will give children a sense of the diversity and wonder of the natural world and their place in it.

This article is based on a story that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

What's fueling Britain's offshore wind revolution? Technology, subsidies and an old fishing hub.

0
0

There are a lot of reminders of the past in the northern English city of Hull. Defunct deep-sea trawlers and cavernous warehouses recall the city’s history as the hub of England’s fishing industry.

Today, though, Hull is also a vision of the future — a factory churning out massive wind turbine blades, each the size of a giant sequoia tree, and built almost entirely by hand out of balsa wood, fiberglass and gleaming white paint.

The German company Siemens recently set up shop here to supply the growing fleet of wind farms off the coast of the UK.

The blades are massive and, the company says, built to last.

“It’s a phenomenal piece of engineering, really, when you think about it,” says Barry Denness, Siemens’s director of port operations in Hull. "It’s in service for 25 years in the North Sea, not the most hospitable of conditions. Hence the reason why they’re 30 tons."

Outside the factory, dozens of freshly milled blades are laid out in rows, waiting to be shipped out to sea and mounted on turbine towers sprouting up in places like the Hornsea wind farm — a new project 24 miles off the coast that is on track to become the biggest offshore wind farm in the world when it’s finished in 2020. A second phase will single-handedly double the amount of electricity generated by offshore wind in this region, and a third phase on the drawing board would make its total capacity bigger than any coal plant in the UK.

Taken together, the size of the project is eye-popping. But energy analysts are more excited about another figure: the cost — far cheaper than almost anyone imagined possible.

Offshore wind has been notoriously expensive, but when the bids came in to build Hornsea in September, the results stunned energy analysts. 

Siemens' wind turbine blades are manufactured from balsa wood and sheathed in fiberglass.

Siemens's wind turbine blades are manufactured from balsa wood and sheathed in fiberglass.

Credit:

Chris Bentley/PRI

“We had an unofficial and very internal sweepstake" on guessing the price, says Emma Pinchbeck, executive director of the industry group RenewableUK. "One person got close but not that close, and at the time they made the bet, all of us thought it was crazy.”

The winning bidder promised to sell the electricity for 57.50 pounds (about $80) per megawatt — half of what the government agreed to pay for a controversial new nuclear power plant last year, and less than half the price of offshore wind just two years ago.

Pinchbeck says that kind of price drop is almost unprecedented.

“It’s unlike anything we have ever seen in energy infrastructure. You have to go to telecoms or the digital sector to find the equivalent,” she says.

“This is a low-carbon technology," Pinchbeck says. "But more importantly, it’s a really cheap way now of generating energy.”

Pinchbeck says the price drop is due to a combination of technological leaps and a clever system for administering energy subsidies that are intended to spur the development of low-carbon sources. Rather than just give flat-rate subsidies to new power plants, companies compete to build new capacity at the lowest possible level of subsidy for any given technology, whether it be traditional fossil fuel-based power plants, established renewables like solar and onshore wind, or less established technologies like offshore wind.

“The difference between the average price that comes out of the auction and the market price is the bit that the government pays,” says Pinchbeck.

And to land the winning bids, she says, companies are making big investments in large-scale operations to drive down costs.

That's paying off with plummeting prices that are bringing the cost of offshore wind power much closer to electricity from wind turbines on land and even rivaling the projected cost from new, natural gas-fired power plants.

RelatedEurope’s investment in offshore wind is paying off — for the US

The industry got there much faster than expected, but that kind of price drop was always the goal in the UK.

“Government is giving out those signals that offshore wind has a future,” says Benj Sykes, head of asset management and UK country manager at the Danish firm formerly known as DONG Energy, now called Ørsted. They're the world's biggest developer of offshore wind and the ones building the Hornsea wind farm off the coast of Hull.

What Sykes calls “signals” are actually those government subsidies. The UK’s been pouring money into the renewable energy business for years in hopes of mainstreaming the techologies. 

Energy from offshore wind has long been notoriously expensive, especially compared to wind farms on land, but if the prices could come down, the UK would be an ideal place for offshore wind, thanks to an abundance of strong, consistent winds blowing in relatively shallow waters offshore.

Hence the subsidies.

"No one’s going to invest in manufacturing just for one or two projects,” says Sykes.

But with many big projects backed by government subsidies, industry dove in.

Now, says Sykes, “what we need to do ... is to build on the success. We need to drive bigger volumes into the market.”

Outside the Siemens warehouse in Hull, turbine towers wait to be fitted with blades.

Outside the Siemens warehouse in Hull, turbine towers wait to be fitted with blades.

Credit:

Chris Bentley/PRI

And energy analysts say the benefits of these public and private investments could reverberate beyond the UK, as the cost breakthroughs made here filter out to other countries.

Patrick Phelan, chair of the industry association East of England Energy Group, says the US is poised for a similar boom in offshore wind, and that British companies will help guide it, just as Danish and German companies rushed to develop England’s industry after pioneering the technology in their domestic markets.

There are critics of the subsidies, of course. They argue the offshore wind industry in the UK has become too dependent on government support, and that the current flurry of wind projects shows government subsidies aren't needed anymore. There is also concern about the possible impact of the turbines on marine ecosystems and the fishing industry.

But many people in Hull are certain of the future they’re building.

Outside the Siemens warehouse, Barry Denness gazes up at a row of skyscraper-sized towers on the docks nearby, waiting to get fitted with finished turbine blades.

Denness is the son of a trawlerman, so he remembers when Hull was a hub for deep-sea fishing. Those days are gone, he says, but the wind industry means the port is busier than it has been in years. And he thinks it's going to stay that way, at least for a while.

“This facility’s... here for 15 years to serve the industry over the long-term," Denness says. "And our next project is already in the pipeline, it’ll be even bigger still.”

And what's happening here could have an impact far beyond this old port city.

Reporting for this story was supported by the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

Offshore wind projects breathe life into struggling UK ports

0
0

Every weekday at 7 a.m. seafood wholesalers crowd into a warehouse on the docks in Grimsby, in northern England, to bid on yellow plastic tubs full of haddock, cod and plaice, touching and sometimes sniffing the product before they place their bids.

On one recent morning, the market auctioned off some 400 boxes, or about 20 tons of fish. That’s a slow day here, so the auction was over in about half an hour.

“We’ll just about break even today,” said Martyn Boyers, a former seafood wholesaler who now runs the fish market and the Grimsby port. So, Boyers said, as forklifts arrived to cart away the tubs of fish to their buyers. “In typical British style, it’s cup of tea time now.”

Related: What's fueling Britain's offshore wind revolution? Technology, subsidies and an old fishing hub.

Not so many fish, a long tea break — it’s a familiar routine here these days. Grimsby and nearby Hull used to be home to one of the largest fishing fleets in the world. But that changed starting in the 1950s. A territorial row with Iceland over the cod-rich waters north of Scotland decimated the UK’s deep-sea fishing industry, and the area never recovered. It still has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.

A fish auction underway at the Port of Grimsby.
Fish auctions at the Port of Grimsby are often brief affairs these days. The local industry never recovered from a steep decline decades ago. But the offshore wind industry is now bringing thousands of new jobs to the region.
Credit:

Chris Bentley/PRI

So when Boyers and others here got a pitch to turn Grimsby into a maintenance hub for some new offshore wind farms planned nearby, they listened. Sort of.

“I didn’t know anything about renewables. I wasn’t fully conversant. And to be truthful it sounded a load of rubbish,” Boyers said. “It was one of those things that we went into thinking, ‘OK let’s give it a go,’ and it’s turned out to be very good for us.”

That was about 10 years ago. Today the waters off Grimsby are home to seven wind farms generating enough electricity for more than a million homes.

It’s part of an unprecedented boom in offshore wind power in the UK, driven by a government effort to drive down the price of the technology and cut the country’s climate pollution.

Today offshore wind provides just over 5 percent of the country’s electricity, but that’s on track to quadruple by 2030, largely thanks to one massive facility under construction about 60 miles off the coast here that’s slated to be the biggest offshore wind farm in the world.

And the boom is having big ripple effects in and around Grimsby.

Just down the street from the fish market, the Danish firm Ørsted is building a massive new facility to support the construction of the wind farm. Ørsted is the world’s biggest offshore wind developer, and its work here is transforming Grimsby’s derelict Royal Dock — so named when Prince Albert laid the first stone here in 1849 — into a new hub for offshore wind energy.   

It’s a dramatic change. Until recently, says Emma Toulson, the area was full of abandoned buildings and collapsing wharfs. Toulson grew up in the area and recently took a job managing community relations for Ørsted. She says by next year, the company will have poured more than $8 billion into the region, between wind farm construction and work revamping the Royal Dock.

“It’s breathed new life back into the port,” she says, “which arguably was a bit difficult to see before wind came.”

Ørsted is promising 2,000 jobs during construction, 200 full-time jobs after that, and hundreds more slots for contractors to service the new wind farms. That would make Grimsby the world’s largest maintenance and operations hub for offshore wind farms.

Historic structures at the Port of Grimsby, including the Grimsby Dock Tower in the background.

The 1852 Grimsby Dock Tower is a reminder of the port's past glories. The tallest structures in the region now are offshore wind turbine towers, standing 30 stories high

Credit:

Chris Bentley/PRI

Across the Humber River, the regional capital of Hull is seeing a similar boom. It’s where engineers can be found sanding massive turbine blades in a warehouse on the waterfront.

“These are big units,” says Barry Denness, the director of port operations for the German company Siemens, which set up shop here last year.

It’s no exaggeration. Each blade weighs 30 tons and is nearly 250 feet long, the size of a commercial airplane, and they’re made almost entirely by hand. So far Siemens has hired nearly 1,000 people at the new factory.

When they’re done, the blades get stacked up outside, waiting to be paired with one of the 30-story high turbine towers lined up along the river and sent out to sea. The towers are so big that they dwarf every building in Hull. You can see them from the city center, like a new skyline at the old port, and a symbol of the area’s rebirth.

“The Hull area has struggled over the last 20 years,” Denness says. “But over the last five years I think there’s been a bit of a renaissance. I think it’s put us on the map as a place where you can do business.”

Crew Transfer Vessels (CTVs) ferry wind energy technicians out to offshore wind farms from the Port of Grimsby.

Crew Transfer Vessels (CTVs) ferry wind energy technicians out to offshore wind farms from the Port of Grimsby. The new offshore wind farms near here require daily maintenance, which has allowed the port to replace some lost business from a long decline in commercial fishing.

Credit:

Chris Bentley/PRI

Of course, the history of this region has taught locals to be wary about the future. Grimsby’s docks were built to ship coal, then came fishing — both industries that rose and fell. And there are concerns that the offshore wind boom won’t last either, especially as Britain’s planned split from the European Union threatens to complicate things for foreign companies like Ørsted.

“We are in a global supply chain. It’s really important to us in terms of free movement of goods,” says Pauline Wade, director of international trade at the regional chamber of commerce. “If there is a significant change there, then that means extra cost, extra documentation, and perhaps hassle as well.”

Martin Boyers has his own concerns about the future of offshore wind. He watches a parade of boats carrying turbine technicians out to sea from a control tower overlooking the harbor lock. The hundreds of turbines off the coast of Grimsby need constant maintenance, and will for the foreseeable future.

But Boyers knows that Grimsby can’t count on its luck to last forever. After all, no one foresaw the demise of the fishing industry, and the wind business is changing fast.

“So who knows?” Boyers says. “They might even outgrow Grimsby and they might not come here at all. They might change the system.”

If that happens, Boyers says, Grimsby might have to fall back on the business that built it.

“People still eat fish,” he says. “Even if renewables comes and goes, they’ll still be eating fish.”

Maybe. Climate change is putting even more pressure on many fisheries that were already shrinking. But the whole point of offshore wind is to switch to energy sources that do less harm to the climate than fossil fuels.

And for now, at least, Grimsby finds itself in the right place at the right time, for the first time in as long as most people here can remember.

RelatedEurope’s investment in offshore wind is paying off — for the US

Chris Bentley’s reporting was supported by the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

Europe’s investment in offshore wind is paying off — for the US

0
0

For years, a large-scale offshore wind industry in the US seemed like it was always somewhere off over the horizon.  

But with the price of offshore wind power dropping quickly in Europe and the UK, policymakers in the US are increasingly looking at it as a viable option to meet renewable energy goals.    

Right now, there’s only one offshore wind farm off the coast of the US. The small, five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm started operating off the coast of Rhode Island in December 2016.

But that small pilot project may soon get some company. More than 25 additional projects are being planned in the US, largely off the coast of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. That includes two projects in Maryland that have already won purchasing agreements from the state, and proposed projects off of Long Island, New Jersey and North Carolina that are in the proposal and permitting phases.

It’s likely that some of those 25 proposed projects won’t ever get built, but even so, offshore wind appears close to a tipping point in the US.

Price drops in the UK make offshore wind look more attractive in the US

Cost is the single biggest reason for the growing momentum behind offshore wind in the US, according to the University of Delaware's Stephanie McClellan.

"Unless there was a large enough market in Europe that pulled to the market these innovations and these cost reductions, we would not be even be having this conversation today about offshore wind in the United States,” McClellan said.

McClellan has been advocating for the development of offshore wind projects off the coast of the US since 2014 as head of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind.

For years, she said she would walk into meetings in governor’s offices and state legislators and hear the same question.

"'What is the cost of offshore wind? Is the price going to come down?'” McClellan said. “And then the next question would be, 'well how much is it going to come down?' Up and down the east coast, every state that I've worked with, either governor's offices or legislators, that's the question."

Policymakers in the US have historically looked to offshore wind prices in Europe, which has a quarter-century head-start in the industry and boasts 94 wind farms. And in recent years, prices there have been dropping fast.

Related: What's fueling Britain's offshore wind revolution? Technology, subsidies and an old fishing hub.

Over the past two years, fueled by government subsidies and a guaranteed market for the renewable energy, the cost of offshore wind power has dropped by more than half in the UK, which is leading its European neighbors in new offshore wind installations.

Prices have come down faster than almost anyone expected, largely due to technology improvements, increased competition and the lower cost of capital. Today’s turbines can generate about twice as much energy as those installed even a few years ago and the cost of borrowing money to finance offshore wind projects has dropped as those investments are seen as less risky.

Plummeting costs of offshore wind make it an increasingly attractive option for leaders of coastal states that have set ambitious renewable energy goals and have to find sources for all that carbon-free energy.  

"[Prices in Europe] certainly has been a key part of what New York State has been watching,” said Alicia Barton, president and CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Last month, New York unveiled its plan to source 2,400 megawatts of energy from offshore wind by 2030, enough to power 1.2 million homes.

“The cost of offshore wind declining rapidly in recent years certainly has been part of the reason New York has felt comfortable making the case that offshore wind is a valuable resource as part of our mix of renewable energy,” Barton said.

Barton says New York also looked to Europe when developing its own plan to stimulate a home-grown offshore wind industry.

Related: Offshore wind projects breathe life into struggling UK ports

“The feedback from market participants, developers who are active in European markets, for example, is pretty consistent. You need to send market-sized signals in order to drive … long-term investment,” Barton said.

New York isn’t alone in hoping that providing a guaranteed market for offshore wind energy will spur private investment.  

Maryland has committed to subsidizing two wind farms off that state's coast, and both Rhode Island and Massachusetts have passed laws requiring utilities to commit to buying offshore wind.

Technological improvements already translating to savings in the US

The US offshore industry is still in its infancy, but two data points suggest that the price drops seen in the UK are already translating to savings here in the US.

Electricity generated by the Block Island wind project off of Rhode Island will cost roughly $300 per megawatt hour over the life of the project. Last May, the state of Maryland issued contracts to two offshore wind projects that will start generating power as early as 2021 at $132 per megawatt hour. That’s a big drop, but even with those savings, offshore wind still wouldn’t be able to compete on cost with natural gas-fired power plants, solar, or even on-shore wind coming online in the same time period, according to current energy price projections.  

Industry insiders will be watching closely to see if, and how much, prices fall this April as Massachusetts utilities award offshore wind contracts to companies vying to build projects there.  

Another wild card in the future of US offshore wind is public opinion. A wind farm off of Cape Cod that might have been the first in US waters was canceled after a prolonged fight with powerful local residents.

Polls in coastal states show relatively high approval ratings for offshore wind. And technological improvements to offshore wind turbines that allow them to be sited farther off the coast may help limit opposition from residents worried about turbines ruining their ocean views. Both the embattled Cape Wind project and the current Block Island project are located five miles offshore, while the proposed projects farthest along in the planning process in the US would be built at least 10 miles away. 

But some of those newer projects still face opposition, notably a project off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland, that local leaders worry will ruin beach views, and it's too soon to tell if the waters off of the US will ever be dotted with as many wind farms as the waters off of Europe. 


The UK's offshore wind boom is great for the climate. But what about the fish?

0
0

On the deck of the Razorbill, docked in the English port of Ramsgate, Steve Barratt runs thousands of feet of nets through a squeaky pulley, getting ready for another long night of fishing in the North Sea.

It’s a time-worn routine for him, but it has its rewards. As they whiz by, he snags a fish still stuck in one of the nets from the night before and tosses it to the side.

“That’s a Dover sole,” he says. “So that’ll be my dinner later!”

Barratt will head out this night in search of more sole and other fish and on his way, he’ll pass right through a relatively new feature on the water here — the Thanet Wind Farm, 100 turbines visible from shore that have been spinning since 2010.

Related: Europe’s investment in offshore wind is paying off — for the US

But he won’t stop and set his nets there.

“For some reason — I don’t know if it’s the sound, the humming, the motors — I don’t know what it is, but the fish are not in the wind farm,” he says. “It’s virtually barren apart from a few whelks and a few lobsters.”

English port of Ramsgate harbor.

The English port of Ramsgate harbor.

Credit:

Chris Bentley/PRI

Barratt says the area used to be a prime fishing ground. Now he says he’ll have to steam for three hours to get a good catch, almost all the way to the Netherlands.

Barratt is not fond of the wind farm and he’s not alone.

“You think to yourself it’ll never happen and then reality kicks in and it does,” says John Nichols, a retired fisherman and chair of the Thanet Fishermen’s Association. “And here we are with a wind farm that we don’t particularly want. If we had a choice as a fishing industry we would say no to it even today, but it’s there and we have to learn to live with it."

Fishing here has never been an easy business, but Nichols says it’s getting tougher. The size of the fishing fleet in Thanet is just half of what it was 25 years ago.

It’s not just the Thanet wind farm, Nichols says, or the others popping up around here as part of the British boom in offshore wind energy. The sea in this part of England is also getting crowded with other things as well, like undersea cables connecting the U.K. and Europe.

Related: What's fueling Britain's offshore wind revolution? Technology, subsidies and an old fishing hub.

Then there are the effects of climate change.

“We’re also seeing a massive increase in water temperature here,” says Nichols, “and we’re not seeing the hard northeasterly and easterly winds that we used to see.”

Both of those changes could be affecting fish habitat here. Still, Nichols believes the wind farms are part of the problem.

“Even if we did have a real hard easterly breeze now, it wouldn’t filter through like it used to because of all the turbines,” he says. “They act as a breakwater at sea.”

Fishermen say that’s altered the seafloor and the tides, subtle changes that they fear are helping drive fish away.

But it’s difficult to verify what fishermen say they’re seeing here because there’s been almost no research done on fish populations in the area, before or after the wind turbines were built.

"The problem is that no proper studies were done on the commercial fishing taking place prior to the construction of [the Thanet wind farm] and certainly no studies have been specifically done on the Thames Estuary sites since construction,” says Merlin Jackson, a longtime Thanet fisherman who also acts a government liaison to fishermen in the region.

"We also have to bear in mind here that the fishing has changed over the last 15 years due to multiple factors,” Jackson says, “and it is difficult to see which one to blame."

Fisheries experts elsewhere in England have come to similar conclusions.

Fisherman Steve Barratt aboard his boat Razorbill in the Ramsgate harbor.

Fisherman Steve Barratt aboard his boat Razorbill in the Ramsgate harbor.

Credit:

Chris Bentley/PRI

"Perhaps the biggest problem with how wind farms are [built] here is that there is generally no meaningful collection of baseline … data before construction starts,” says Mike Cohen, a marine biologist and chairman of the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations.

But where those kinds of studies have been done, scientists say the impacts have been minor.

“In most cases, it’s been short-term,” says Helen Bailey, a professor at the University of Maryland who has studied the effects of other offshore wind farms in the U.K. and elsewhere.

Bailey says the biggest impacts are during construction.

“The process that has been of most concern is the pile driving, which is when they hammer the foundation of the turbine to the seafloor to secure it in place,” says Bailey. “That emits very, very loud sounds, and sounds travel very far underwater.”

Bailey says technologies to deaden those sounds don’t seem to help much. But she says marine creatures tend to come back just a few days after construction ends, and that in some cases, they even appear to thrive around the new turbines.

“They now had examples where they actually saw seals feeding at the turbine sites, so these seem to be acting presumably like artificial reefs and actually attracting them to the area,” Bailey says.

Jackson and Cohen agree that some marine species do seem to thrive around the wind farms, but not necessarily the ones attractive to commercial fishermen.

But like her colleagues in the UK, Bailey cautions that there haven’t been enough long-term studies done, and scientists don’t know what cumulative effects might result as more offshore wind farms are built.

For now, though, if some marine creatures are learning to adapt, some fishermen here are too.

“I’ve got used to it,” says Jason Parrott, who used to fish for Dover sole out of Ramsgate with his wife, Dawn. Parrott still works on the sea here, but he’s got a new job ferrying maintenance technicians out to service the wind turbines.

Dawn and Jason Parrott standing next to each other.

Dawn and Jason Parrott used to fish for a living. Now Jason is employed by a wind energy company to run technicians out to offshore wind farms. The pay's good and stability is better than being a fisherman, but he says he misses the thrill.

Credit:

Chris Bentley/PRI

“If you ask me whether I love it, I couldn’t answer that, not like I used to love the fishing,” Parrott says. “But it pays the bills and it’s enjoyable.”

Related: Offshore wind projects breathe life into struggling UK ports

There’s a certain unique thrill to commercial fishing, says Dawn Parrott.

“You’re just there on your own, you haven’t got a clue what’s coming up in the net,” she says. “Every day’s different, every day.”

Piloting a wind farm service boat just doesn’t have the same appeal.

Others here have taken advantage of a fund set up to compensate for lost fishing days because of construction at sea.

The Thanet Fishermen’s Association spent some of that money on a marine fueling pump.

“We’re like a service station on the motorway,” says Tom Brown, a retired fisherman. Ironically, he says the biggest customers are those maintenance boats for the wind farms.

“They’ll come in here overnight, fill up with fuel and away they go again,” he says, “So the fishermen get a little payment from the wind farms.”

For his part, Steve Barratt in Ramsgate is sticking it out with just fishing, and trying to take all the changes here in stride.

“I mean if somebody said to me 20 years ago, over half of these fishing boats are going to be gone and there’s going to 15 or 20 big catamarans servicing wind farms off here, I’d have said, ‘yeah alright,’ and laughed,” he says. “And look what’s happened.”

Barratt’s nearing retirement age and says he sees the future closing in on the few inshore fishermen left in the U.K. But he says no matter how many wind farms they put up around here, he’ll keep steaming the Razorbill through them to find fish, for as long as he can.

RelatedEurope’s investment in offshore wind is paying off — for the US

This reporting was supported by the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

What can AI learn from non-Western philosophies?

0
0

As autonomous and intelligent systems become more and more ubiquitous and sophisticated, developers and users face an important question: How do we ensure that when these technologies are in a position to make a decision, they make the right decision — the ethically right decision?

It's a complicated question. And there’s not one single right answer. 

But there is one thing that people who work in the budding field of AI ethics seem to agree on.

"I think there is a domination of Western philosophy, so to speak, in AI ethics," said Dr. Pak-Hang Wong, who studies Philosophy of Technology and Ethics at the University of Hamburg, in Germany. "By that I mean, when we look at AI ethics, most likely they are appealing to values ... in the Western philosophical traditions, such as value of freedom, autonomy and so on."

Wong is among a group of researchers trying to widen that scope, by looking at how non-Western value systems — including Confucianism, Buddhism and Ubuntu — can influence how autonomous and intelligent designs are developed and how they operate.

The work is part of a larger effort by engineering association IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), which released the researchers' recommendations in its latest “Ethically Aligned Design” report. As part of the effort to create a set of ethical standards that consider non-Western value systems and ethical traditions, the organization has also solicited feedback from people around the world and is looking to incorporate those comments into upcoming versions of the report. 

"We're not providing black-and-white answers," said Jared Bielby, who heads the Classical Ethics committee tasked with some of this work. "We're providing standards as a starting place. And then from there, it may be a matter of each tradition, each culture, different governments, establishing their own creation based on the standards that we are providing."

You can help celebrate the Year of the Bird by finding ways, large and small, to protect them

0
0

National Geographic, the National Audubon Society and other conservation groups have declared 2018 the Year of The Bird to celebrate the centennial of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

To help kick off the celebration, novelist and National Geographic writer Jonathan Franzen wrote a cover story, Why Birds Matter, for the magazine’s January issue. Franzen says a walk in New York City’s Central Park opened his eyes to the pleasures of birdwatching.

He had walked in Central Park nearly every day for years and thought he knew it like the back of his hand, he says. Then a couple of friends stuck binoculars in his hand, walked through the park with him and started pointing out all the birds he had never noticed before. The next four hours was a series of “Are you kidding me?” moments, Franzen says.

“We saw maybe 60, 70 species of birds in one afternoon,” he explains. “It was a brilliant May weekend and all the birds were coming through. I had the sense I hadn't had since high school, when I realized what people were talking about when they talked about sex — like, ‘Oh, now I get it.’ There was this huge hidden dimension to the world that was suddenly visible to me, and all I had to do to find out more about it was to go out by myself with binoculars.”

In his National Geographic article, Franzen makes many cases for why birds matter. First, they are indicators of the health of natural ecosystems. “If you go to an area that once was full of birds and you can't find any birds, it probably means there's something very wrong with the ecosystem,” he says. Birds also excel at rodent and insect control and they are great pollinators and seed distributors, Franzen adds.

But perhaps an argument even stronger than being vital to the world’s ecosystems, Franzen says, is that birds are “a singular instance of nature.”

“They have been world-dominating creatures for 65 million years,” he says. “They are this brilliant adaptation of the original dinosaurs. They are feathered, flying dinosaurs that managed to escape the big extinction event 65 million years ago and populate the entire world, and even now they are more widespread than any other kind of creature, including human beings. They're out in the middle of the most remote ocean, they're in the driest desert, they're in Antarctica in winter. If you care about the natural world that we came out of, you ought to respect these creatures that were the great thing that happened before human beings came along.”

Now, in the 21st century, one of the biggest threat to birds, and to wildlife in general, is loss and fragmentation of habitat, Franzen points out. But, shockingly, he says, the number one threat after habitat loss is outdoor cats. “The reliable scientific estimates of the toll on North American birds — just US birds in a single year — is phenomenal. It's on the order of one to three billion birds every year being taken by feral and free-running cats.”

Another worry is collisions with human-made structures, which are difficult to eliminate but can be mitigated. The toll is particularly high in cities with skyscrapers whose lights attract birds. Some good initiatives are in the works to get cities to black out their tall buildings during critical migration times, Franzen says.

The third major threat appears to be agriculture and pesticides. Franzen says it’s worrisome that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has not followed through on banning a class of pesticides that numerous studies have shown to be harmful to birds and insects. “There's been a tremendous decline in birds that depend on open land — grassland birds and things like whippoorwills that feed on insects above open fields — with the pesticides being the likely culprit for those declines,” he says.

RelatedTrump's EPA chief pushes 'cooperative federalism' for food and farming

So, during this Year of the Bird, what can the average person do to help protect them?

“In a way, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do something,” Franzen says. “If all you do is pick up trash or help build predator-proof fences down at the local Audubon reserve or help remove invasive plants from a wetland or contribute to some of the organizations that have the resources to do larger-scale conservation work, that's a great thing.”

“In a very practical way,” he adds, “you can write your representative right now and say, ‘Don't mess with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act,’ which is under threat in the current Congress and by the Department of Interior, which wants to basically defang that law and make it okay to kill birds without having to pay any consequences.”

“The worst thing is to just ignore it,” he advises, “because once you pay attention, you might fall in love, and once you fall in love, then you have to do something.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

With the US pursuing fossil fuels, alternative, renewable forms of energy could be an even bigger boon to China

0
0

For years, China has been associated with dirty, smog-filled air — so much so that it has become custom for some hotels to give guests complementary masks. Recently, though, the country has started making large strides to clear the air.

While President Donald Trump's administration has moved to cut the US government’s clean energy budgets by up to 70 percent, China has been steadily moving in the opposite direction by exploring alternatives, including an increase in electric cars and installing more wind power facilities than the other top three wind leaders combined (the US, Germany and India). The Chinese have even built the world’s largest floating solar farm west of Shanghai on a lake that used to be the site of a coal mine.

“They have declared a war on air pollution and they've committed China to peaking their carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 or sooner,” says Denise Mauzerall, a professor of environmental engineering and international affairs at Princeton University. “In fact, if you look at the CO2 emissions from China over the last few years they've actually been fairly constant. They grew extraordinarily fast over the previous decade or so and surpassed the United States as the largest emitter in 2006, but they're flat now.”

Mauzerall recently returned from a trip to China. She says that she overheard a lot of discussion about whether the country has already peaked on its CO2 emissions or if there will be further increases as the economy continues to grow.

She spent the majority of her time in Beijing, the capital city that has gained notoriety for a lack of visibility due to polluted air, mostly from coal plants. She noticed a “huge improvement” in quality of the air.

“I've been in China starting back as far as 1990 and in the previous 10 years, and I've been there, the air pollution has been so bad that you could often not see across the street clearly and two blocks away would be blurred out by the air pollution,” she says. “This trip ... you could easily see 10 miles. You could see the mountains that I had never been able to see from downtown before."

Mauzerall says there are several possible factors for the better air quality. Those include the government reducing the use of coal in small stoves used for heating in residential areas and stricter emissions standards for vehicles and power plants. Mother Nature has also been helping out with a steady stream of clean air coming off the Arctic down from Siberia as opposed to the more traditional delivery of dirty air from southern China.

The Chinese already buy more new vehicles than Americans do, which is why tailpipe exhaust still accounts for a large percentage of pollution in the major urban areas. Yet the country has made a large commitment to electric vehicles, says Fred Beach, assistant director for energy policy at the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Beach has visited several Chinese automakers over the years to keep tabs on their collective direction.

“I think they realize they need to electrify transportation to help mitigate their pollution problem going forward and somewhat like solar [photovoltaic panels],” Beach says. “I think they want to kind of own that market space. As the world in general goes that way I think they want to get ahead of the curve and be one of the leading suppliers globally and for themselves.”

The overall target for automakers in China is to have a million electric vehicles produced by this year and seven million by 2025, says Mauzerall, who adds that she saw a surge in charging stations throughout the country on her most recent visit, most of which could be used with a cell phone app.

The Trump administration recently placed a 30 percent tariff on solar panels manufactured in China. A few years ago, when panels were more cost-intensive, this would have been a bigger issue. As it stands now, the current price of panels takes the market back to the prices of 2016, Mauzerall says.

“The perspective over there is that the world is their market and they're there looking outwards right now and they say that the US is less important to them than we might think it might be and that they'll be fine,” she says.

Beach points out the irony that Americans can still get a 30 percent tax credit on solar panel installations.

Not all of China’s new energy plans are being hailed by the outside world. The country is one of few with active plans to build new nuclear power plants — in spite of concerns of radioactive waste and possible national security issues. The decision to ultimately follow through on those plans will be made from the highest level of government in the next couple of months, Mauzerall says.

“There are certainly people there who see nuclear as a clean-air pollution and CO2-free form of electricity despite its drawbacks,” she says.

Compared to the Trump administration’s plans to try to bolster the fossil fuels industry, China’s emphasis on promoting alternative and renewable forms of energy falls in line with the majority of the other world leaders, Beach says.

“They understand the value of research and development and a lot of the money for that often does come from the government as opposed to the private sector,” he says. “So I would say at the moment if I had to characterize the [US and China] I'd say they got it right. We're about to perhaps get it wrong."

Adds Mauzerall: “I fear that the plans to cut funding for renewable energy research and development is a major disadvantage to long-term prospects in the US because China will move in and we will be left behind."

This article is based on an interview on PRI’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow.

Recent discovery on Strava heat map points out the ease of leaking data through social media platforms

0
0

In early November, Strava — a technology company that can track athletic activity for its users through its website and app — released an article on Medium that proudly announced its first major global “heat map” that the company had released since 2015.

The article contains a list of astounding numbers including a billion activities, three trillion latitude/longitude points, 13 trillion rasterized pixels, 10 terabytes of raw input data and 17 billion miles covered.

Then an Australian college student, Nathan Ruser, pointed out on Twitter that he was able to make out the location of several undisclosed US bases in the Middle East. That one tweet sent the internet — and the US government — into a tailspin, while raising questions over the power that data points (such as geotagging on social media apps) can have to draw inferences about users’ private worlds.

It turns out there is a big difference between what data we think we are emitting into the digital universe and what actually is collected with each post, picture or GPS data point, says Gavin Sheridan, the CEO co-founder of Vizlegal and an open-source intelligence specialist.

People will usually — whether it's a Google satellite image or a Strava map — zoom in on places that they're familiar with, so they look at where they live and they look at places that they've run themselves and they'll see what other people are doing,” Sheridan says. “But the problem with that is essentially that they publish it for the whole world.”

Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says the biggest issue is not knowing what data points will be used in conjunction with one another by a third party.

"I think this is a really interesting case that shows we're all to blame and nobody is to blame because it's very hard to predict what any piece of data will be revealed — not on its own but when it's joined with all sorts of other data,” Tufekci says.

There could be reasonable use cases for sending out that data, such as learning about a new running or biking trail, she says, but other inadvertent revelations (such as the location of a military base) could have unattended consequences.

“It shows more than what anybody bargained for,” Tufekci says of the combined data points being collected from social media and tracking software.

The technology companies themselves also did not know what they were getting into as the advancements in algorithms and artificial intelligence continue to be released into the digital ethos.

"This is our problem: Our privacy protections depend on this alleged informed consent, but the companies are in no position to inform us because they don't know what the data is going to be doing out in the world,” Tufekci says. “So we're not in any position to consent to what we cannot comprehend is going to happen.”

Sheridan often gives the particular example of employees taking geotagged selfies and posting them on their first day at a new job, a common practice. Many social media platforms run on data sets called an application programming interface (API). Those knowledgeable in the field of APIs, like Sheridan, can extract information about all of the users who are posting the photos — and even glean intelligence about the behavior of that particular company at the moment, all from a single image.

"I could look through who they follow and who follows them and look at the interconnectedness of your social graph and figure out something about that person and about who they are and about what their interested in, about how old they are, without that person necessarily believing that the information is possible to be derived from what they shared,” Sheridan says. “They're not necessarily understanding what they think might be relatively inane or innocuous information can be extrapolated.”

This type of ability only touches on the surface about what some machines can infer using certain algorithms, Tufekci says. She and her team have published research about how artificial intelligence, with Facebook likes alone, can reliably infer about a user’s race, gender, sexual orientation — and more obscure information, including a person’s likelihood for substance abuse or to be in a state of depression.

“When you put your data out in the world, it's not just the data you're putting out,” she says. “You're letting machine intelligence and algorithms churn through it and figure things out about you.”

At the moment, most of those algorithms are being run for the sake of being able to directly target consumers based on their needs and to get users to click on sites. The purpose of such technology is starting to expand, though, into deep vetting of possible employees by some companies in which they gather data on the likelihood of someone, for instance, being prone to unionizing, getting pregnant or having illnesses or other serious health issues.

“I think this is a moment in which there has to be a real good reason for data to be stored just because we don't have a handle on what's going on,” Tufekci says.

Both Tufekci and Sheridan believe there are safer ways to collect data from users while still providing levels of protection of individual identification through encryption.

“The problem is at the moment Silicon Valley is basically minting money with the current collect-everything-and-do-whatever-you-want model,” Tufekci says, “so they're not really incentivized to provide us with these services.”

Adds Sheridan: "It's like we're in year zero of social media where we think it's been around for a long time but actually we're at the very start. And I think one thing is how do we interrogate the platforms that we're using to oblige them perhaps to tell those what they know about us. … I think that‘s the [big] question for the next five years is how will the platforms be proactive about telling us what they are doing in real time, not just retrospectively.”

This article is based on an interview on PRI's Science Friday with Ira Flatow.

Viewing all 3123 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images