Category Archives: Everyone

Generation Robot – Terri Favro

by Myrna Posted on August 2, 2018

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Generation Robot
A Century of Science Fiction, Fact, and Speculation
Terri Favro

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: February 6, 2018

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Seller: Perseus Books, LLC


Generation Robot covers a century of science fiction, fact and, speculation—from the 1950 publication of Isaac Asimov’s seminal robot masterpiece, I, Robot, to the 2050 Singularity when artificial and human intelligence are predicted to merge. Beginning with a childhood informed by pop-culture robots in movies, in comic books, and on TV in the 1960s to adulthood where the possibilities of self-driving cars and virtual reality are daily conversation, Terri Favro offers a unique perspective on how our relationship with robotics and futuristic technologies has shifted over time. Peppered with pop-culture fun-facts about Superman’s kryptonite, the human-machine relationships in the cult TV show Firefly, and the sexual and moral implications of the film Ex Machina, Generation Robot explores how the techno-triumphs and resulting anxieties of reality bleed into the fantasies of our collective culture. Clever and accessible, Generation Robot isn’t just for the serious, scientific reader—it’s for everyone interested in robotics and technology since their science-fiction origins. By looking back at the future she once imagined, analyzing the plugged-in present, and speculating on what is on the horizon, Terri Favro allows readers the chance to consider what was, what is, and what could be. This is a captivating book that looks at the pop-culture of our society to explain how the world works—now and tomorrow.

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Generation Robot – Terri Favro

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The New York Times and the super-wicked problem of climate change

by reubenjuj516 Posted on August 2, 2018

This weekend, the New York Times’ print subscribers will get something kind of crazy in the mail: A 66-page magazine with only a single article — and it’s on climate change. The long-form piece, written by Nathaniel Rich and titled “Losing Earth,” is online now and makes for fascinating, if sometimes depressing, reading. Between 1979 and 1989, Rich writes, humanity almost solved the problem of global warming.

The piece follows climate scientist James Hansen and environmental lobbyist Rafe Pomerance as they try to get pretty much anyone — politicians, the media, energy companies — to engage and act on the issue of climate change. But while they managed to move global warming onto the public stage, the opportunity for binding international action came and went with the 1989 U.N. climate conference in the Netherlands. The U.S. delegation, led by a recalcitrant Reagan appointee, balked when faced with an actual agreement.

“Why didn’t we act?” Rich asks, almost plaintively, in his prologue. He argues that the primary barriers to inaction today — widespread climate denial and propagandizing by far-right groups and fossil fuel companies — had not emerged by the mid-1980s. “Almost nothing stood in our way — except ourselves,” he writes.

Rich has already come under fire for this perspective. Many writers have complained that he is letting fossil fuel companies and Republicans off the hook. But is it true? Is human nature itself to blame for inaction?

A fair number of scholars agree — to a point. For a long time, climate change has been called a “wicked problem” or even a “super-wicked problem” by behavioral economists and policy experts. As political scientist Steve Rayner has written, climate change has no simple solution, no silver bullet. It is scientifically complex and comes with deep uncertainties about the future. It cuts across boundaries, both disciplinary and national. Its worst effects will occur in the future, not in the here and now. And it requires large-scale, systemic changes to society.

Unfortunately, humans suck at dealing with wicked problems, like poverty and nuclear weapons. Economist Richard Thaler’s work shows that we are only rational some of the time; and, when we are rational, we’re also pretty selfish. We think about ourselves more than others, and we think about the present more than future generations. “We worry about the future,” Rich writes. “But how much, exactly? The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little.”

This idea — that the long timescale of climate change has made it difficult for us to act on it — is the theoretical underpinning of “Losing Earth.” It’s no one’s fault that we didn’t act in the 1980s. But at the same time it’s everyone’s fault.

Rich isn’t wrong that the timescale makes a difference, and that humans struggle with an issue as global and complex as climate change. But his sweeping vision of human nature at times takes on a tinge of inevitability. It reminds me, in a way, of Garrett Hardin’s 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons” — another dark theory on collective irrationality. Hardin argued that, as a species, we would always tend towards overuse of shared resources and overpopulation. His thesis was hugely influential, and continues to be a staple in environmental research.

The thing is: Hardin was wrong. Forty years after his paper debuted in Science, economist Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing that communities around the world do successfully manage and share resources — even over many generations. They do it through cooperation, communication, and small-scale local institutions. She was famous for showing that environmental problems can be solved from the bottom-up.

And that’s what Rich misses, in his otherwise fascinating and in-depth piece for the Times. It’s hard to say what would have happened if the United States had signed the 1989 agreement. As Robinson Meyer notes in the Atlantic: “There are too many counterfactuals to consider.”

But climate change, as a super-wicked problem lasting generations, could never have been “solved” in one fell swoop. The decade of climate action that Rich traces is only a small window into a fairly high level of decision-making: climate policy at the federal level. And, according to experts like Rayner, wicked problems need to also be addressed at the levels of states, cities, and provinces — not just by governments and nation-states.

The good news: That’s already happening. States, municipalities, neighborhoods, and community groups are already working to address climate change to the best of their ability. Many have redoubled their efforts in the Trump era. In 2006, Rayner predicted that states would file lawsuits against the federal government — 12 years later, climate lawsuits are common, and are even brought by children.

So did we really “lose Earth” in 1989? Of course not. But it is a sobering reminder of how much work we have left. “Human nature has brought us to this place,” Rich writes. “Perhaps human nature will one day bring us through.”

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The New York Times and the super-wicked problem of climate change

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Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

by LakeishU32 Posted on August 1, 2018

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Subtract out the conspiracists and the willfully ignorant and the argument marshaled by skeptics against global warming, roughly restated, assumes that scientists vastly overstate the consequences of pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Uncertainties in their calculations, the skeptics say, make it impossible to determine with confidence how bad the future was going to be. The sour irony of that muttonheaded resistance to data is that, after four decades of being wrong, those people are almost right.

As of July 31, more than 25,000 firefighters are committed to 140 wildfires across the United States — over a million acres aflame. Eight people are dead in California, tens of thousands evacuated, smoke and pyroclastic clouds are visible from space. And all any fire scientist knows for sure is, it only gets worse from here. How much worse? Where? For whom? Experience can’t tell them. The scientists actually are uncertain.

Scientists who help policymakers plan for the future used to make an assumption. They called it stationarity, and the idea was that the extremes of environmental systems — rainfall, river levels, hurricane strength, wildfire damage — obeyed prior constraints. The past was prologue. Climate change has turned that assumption to ash. The fires burning across the western United States (and in Europe) prove that “stationarity is dead,” as a team of researchers (controversially) wrote in the journal Science a decade ago. They were talking about water; now it’s true for fire.

“We can no longer use the observed past as a guide. There’s no stable system that generates a measurable probability of events to use the past record to plan for the future,” says LeRoy Westerling, a management professor who studies wildfires at UC Merced. “Now we have to use physics and complex interactions to project how things could change.”

Wildfires were always part of a complex system. Climate change — carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases raising the overall temperature of the planet — added to the complexity. The implications of that will play out for millennia. “On top of that is interaction between the climate system, the ecosystem, and how we manage our land use,” Westerling says. “That intersection is very complex, and even more difficult to predict. When I say there’s no new normal, I mean it. The climate will be changing with probably an accelerating pace for the rest of the lives of everyone who is alive today.”

That’s not to say there’s nothing more to learn or do. To the contrary, more data on fire behavior will help researchers build models of what might happen. They’ll look at how best to handle “fuel management,” or the removal of flammable plant matter desiccated by climate change-powered heat waves and drought. More research will help with how to build less flammable buildings, and to identify places where buildings maybe shouldn’t be in the first place. Of course, that all presumes policymakers will listen and act. They haven’t yet. “People talk about ‘resilience,’ they talk about ‘hardening,’” Westerling says. “But we’ve been talking about climate change and risks like wildfire for decades now and haven’t made a whole lot of headway outside of the scientific and management communities.”

It’s true. At least two decades ago — perhaps as long as a century — fire researchers were warning that increasing atmospheric CO2 would mean bigger wildfires. History confirmed at least the latter hypothesis; using data like fire scars and tree ring sizes, researchers have shown that before Europeans came to North America, fires were relatively frequent but relatively small, and indigenous people like the Pueblo used lots of wood for fuel and small-diameter trees for construction. When the Spaniards arrived, spreading disease and forcing people out of their villages, the population crashed by perhaps as much as 90 percent and the forests went back to their natural fire pattern — less frequent, low intensity, and widespread. By the late 19th century, the land changed to livestock grazing and its users had no tolerance for fire at all.

“So in the late 20th and early 21st century, with these hot droughts, fires are ripping now with a severity and ferocity that’s unprecedented,” says Tom Swetnam, a dendrochronologist who did a lot of that tree-ring work. A fire in the Jemez Mountains Swetnam studies burned 40,000 acres in 12 hours, a “horizontal roll vortex fire” that had two wind-driven counter-rotating vortices of flame. “That thing left a canopy hole with no trees over 30,000 acres. A giant hole with no trees,” he says. “There’s no archaeological evidence of that happening in at least 500 years.”

Swetnam actually lives in a fire-prone landscape in New Mexico — right in the proverbial wildland-urban interface, as he says. He knows it’s more dangerous than ever. “It’s sad. It’s worrying. Many of us have been predicting that we were going to see these kinds of events if the temperature continued to rise,” Swetnam says. “We’re seeing our scariest predictions coming true.”

Fire researchers have been hollering about the potential consequences for fires of climate change combined with land use for at least as long as hurricane and flood researchers have been doing the same. It hasn’t kept people from building houses on the Houston floodplain and constructing poorly-planned levees along the Mississippi, and it hasn’t kept people from building houses up next to forests and letting undergrowth and small trees clump together — all while temperatures rise.

“Some of the fires are unusual, but the reason it seems more unusual is that there are people around to see it — fire whorls, large vortices, there are plenty of examples of those,” says Mark Finney, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service. “But some things are changing.” Drought and temperature are worse. Sprawl is worse. “The worst fires haven’t happened yet,” Finney says. “The Sierra Nevada is primed for this kind of thing, and those kinds of fires would be truly unprecedented for those kinds of ecosystems in the past thousands of years.”

So what happens next? The Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine forests of the west burn, and then don’t come back? They convert to grassland? That hasn’t happened in thousands of years where the Giant Sequoia grow. So … install sprinklers in Sequoia National Forest? “I’m only the latest generation to be frustrated,” Finney says. “At least two, maybe three generations before me experienced exactly the same frustration.” Nobody listened to them, either. And now the latest generation isn’t really sure what’s going to happen next.

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Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

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7 Old-School Hacks to Help You Stay Cool all Summer

by MandyLienhop Posted on July 10, 2018

Whether it’s Chinese medicine or your great grandmother, those who came before us (and before A/C) had some powerful techniques to help them stay cool when the temps started to rise.

‘So what, we all have air conditioning now?!’ you may be saying.

Well, hold on. Not everyone has regular access to A/C or even loves using it. For some, it can worsen dryness and allergies, plus most units are incredibly noisy. And?it’s not so great for the environment.

Sometimes, it’s preferable?to cool off the old-school ways. So whether you have an air conditioner?or not, here are some tried-and-true traditional techniques to help you make it through the hottest, stickiest part of the summer.

1. Eat watermelon and aloe vera.

In Ayurvedic tradition, watermelon and aloe are cooling foods, which means they help to release heat from the body. Munch on watermelon and mint salads when you’re looking for a refreshing, hydrating snack or try this?refreshing Aloe Vera Detox Drink recipe.

2. Close and open windows strategically.

Whatever you do, do not open your windows in hot weather. In fact, you should even close your blinds during really hot days to keep your house cool and shaded.

If the outdoor temperature?cools down at night, open up all the windows to allow for some refreshing?airflow. Batten the hatches again in the morning.

Repeat daily.

3. Try this analog fan hack. ???

Long before air conditioning, people used to place bowls filled with ice in front of fans. As the fan blows, it picks up the cool air surrounding the ice and circulates it around the room.

Not only is this an environmentally friendly way to mimic A/C, but it is really effective. Enjoy this?blissfully cool breeze on the most muggy, sticky, stagnant summer days.

4. Sleep with damp cotton sheets.

This may sound weird and pretty uncomfortable, but in a sweltering evening, it can be a sleep-saver.

Use a spray bottle to spritz your cotton sheet with water so that it is slightly damp. The idea is, as you sleep, the damp sheet actively draws heat away from your body, keeping you cool and snoozing soundly.

If you’re not into damp bedding, you could try?popping your dry cotton sheets and pajamas into the freezer to give them a deep chill before you snuggle in at bedtime.

5. Take a cold shower.

Sometimes the issue isn’t your room. Sometimes the issue is you. Releasing?the excess heat in your body can make your time spent in a room sans air conditioning much more tolerable.

Spend five minutes under some cool water, and you’ll come out the other side feeling enlightened and relaxed!

6. Stop using your stove during the day.

If you can use a grill, go for it. Otherwise, either do all your cooking in the morning, well before the heat of the day, or opt for a slow cooker or Instant Pot, which don’t put off much heat.

And whatever you do, don’t even think about turning on your oven!

7. Put a cold pack on your pulse points. ?

Your wrists, ankles, groin, and neck are all prime areas for temperature biohacking. These are locations where the skin is thin, and large blood vessels are relatively close to the skin.

By putting an ice pack on these points, you’re effectively cooling down your blood and letting that coolness flow through your entire body. It’s like internal air conditioning!

Air conditioning isn’t the be-all end-all of summer. People have survived for millennia in the heat without A/C. With a few tried and true techniques, you can, too.

Related on Care2

8 Vegan Foods that Support a Frisky Sex Life
5 Essential Tips for Turning a Bad Mood Around in a Jiffy
IKEA is Upping its Sustainability Game

Images via Thinkstock.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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7 Old-School Hacks to Help You Stay Cool all Summer

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How Often Should You Clean Your Couch Fabric?

by VirgieKong Posted on July 9, 2018

Everyone’s living room couch needs a good cleaning every now and then, but this is doubly true if you have pets that like to lounge on your furniture. Our couches often weather a lot, from spills and pet hair to everyday wear and tear. If it’s been a while since you last cleaned your couch upholstery, you might be wondering if it’s time for a good clean.

Why You Need to Clean Your Couch Fabric

It’s important to clean your couch fabric every so often because, just as your clothes do, your couch is liable to pick up a variety of contaminants. Food, dirt, dust and grime can get trapped in the?woven threads?of your sofa, leading them to harbor microbes and bacteria. In addition to looking unsightly, a dirty couch can smell and can even spread the growth of bacteria in your home.

How Often to Clean

So, how often should you clean your couch??TODAY recommends doing a deep clean at least once a year. You can, of course, go to a professional, but many professional upholstery cleaners use toxic cleaning products that fans of natural alternatives probably wouldn’t like.

Instead, I recommend vacuuming your couch once a week and cleaning the fabric itself at least every two weeks, if not more often. Because you’ll be using more natural methods, it’s important to stay on top of your cleaning schedule.

Tips and Tricks

When you go to clean your sofa fabric, here’s what to do:

First, remove any washable fabric and throw it into the washing machine with your regular laundry detergent. Important: ONLY DO THIS if your couch fabric is machine washable. This should be clearly designated on the tag.
Next, any parts that can’t be washed in your machine or taken off of the couch should first be vacuumed, then cleaned. Running a vacuum cleaner over your fabric will pick up most?pet hair and food particles. Be sure to vacuum under cushions and between pillows. If you have any lingering odors, sprinkle some backing soda over the couch and allow it to sit for at least a few hours before vacuuming it up.
Finally, it’s time to wipe down the fabric itself. As long as your sofa’s upholstery tag doesn’t say that it needs to stay completely dry, you’re good to go ahead and use a clean sponge to wipe it down.

Related Articles:

My Hunt for a Chemical-Free Couch
Top 10 Eco-Friendly Ways to Clean the House
Are Green Cleaning Products Really Safe?

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How Often Should You Clean Your Couch Fabric?

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Is Seattle’s straw ban a green gateway drug or just peak slactivism?

by MelisaBlaubaum Posted on July 5, 2018

Suddenly, everyone and their mother is against plastic straws. (Including my mother — she’s been living plastic-free since long before it was cool.) This week, Seattle joined the ranks of cities taking a stand against plastic pollution by banning plastic straws and utensils. If patrons at restaurants, grocery stores, and cafeterias want disposable items, they’ll have to ask — and they’ll get recyclable or compostable versions.

It’s good timing. In the past year, everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Tom Brady has turned against straws, following a depressing plastic-filled conclusion to Blue Planet II and a viral video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck up its nose.

But we have to ask — under the threat of severe climate change, extreme weather, ocean acidification, and all the other plastic pollution in our waters, why has America become obsessed with something as small as plastic straws?

“I think it’s a way for people to feel that they have some agency over the problem of ocean plastics,” says Kara Lavender Law, researcher and professor at the Sea Education Association. “These are things that we have easy alternatives for.”

Compared to seemingly insurmountable problems like climate change, which can be tough (but not impossible!) to tackle on the individual level, straws look — well, easy. Despite the fact that these little pieces of plastic account for only, by one estimate, 0.03 percent of plastic waste, activists believe that starting with straws will encourage people to look at other disposable items in their lives.

“I can remember the moment when I looked around at my immediate surroundings and saw for the first time how much of it was plastic,” Law says. Straws, she argues, are a kind of gateway drug into environmentalism and a lower-waste life.

Psychologist Robert Gifford calls this the “foot in the door” technique. “Banning straws is about as important as spitting in the wind,” he told me. “But a lot of social psychology research says that if you get people to say yes to a small request, they are more likely to accede to more serious requests.”

It has certainly been that way for my mom, who started with plastic straws and now brings home whole chickens from the grocery store in a giant glass jar to avoid packaging waste. But aiming at a tiny target like straws could also have negative effects on environmental action.

Researchers have previously found that when people recycle, they feel entitled to use more resources and produce more waste. This effect is called “moral licensing,” where doing one good thing — like forgoing a straw — gives you the mental permission to do negative things later.

“We hear people say ‘I recycle so I’m done,’” says Gifford. “And of course, we know that recycling is a good thing but it’s not the solution.”

If straws go the way of recycling, then we might see a public willing to get rid of straws but unwilling to take any of the (slightly harder) actions to reduce plastic waste more significantly. Or even worse, a public unwilling to address the larger, and more abstract, problems of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

“I’ve never seen a straw floating in the ocean,” says John Bruno, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He worries that when environmentalists focus on small things like straws, the public and the media lose sight of the real dangers — ocean acidification and warming.

It’s an age-old environmental debate, between those who think the key to progress is individual action and those who think only collective political will (and aiming at the big stuff) can save us. In the meantime, try to avoid straws. If you’re in Seattle, you don’t have a choice anyway.

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Is Seattle’s straw ban a green gateway drug or just peak slactivism?

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Trump’s new tariffs could make America suck again for coal miners

by MargeneNeudorf Posted on June 28, 2018

One of President Trump’s new policies is making America less great for the very people he promised to make it great for: coal miners and fossil fuel executives.

Back in March, Trump decided to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports — 25 percent on the former, 10 percent on the latter. To no one’s surprise, the two industries in question are pretty overjoyed. You know who’s less enthused? Almost everyone else — particularly U.S. coal miners, who say the levies are dousing China’s appetite for American coal with a bucket of lukewarm water.

And coal isn’t the only sector steeling itself against a trade fallout. Trump’s zeal to boost production in steel country is backfiring on the fossil fuel industry, just as people predicted. Let’s take a closer look:

At the 2018 World Gas Conference on Monday, the CEOs of the biggest oil giants in the world, ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods and Chevron’s Michael Wirth, said the tariffs will likely slow oil and gas growth — right smack in the middle of a pretty historic shale oil and gas boom. The tariffs “run the risk of making [energy] projects less competitive,” Woods said. That’s because the tariffs raise the costs of materials for new pipelines and liquified natural gas facilities.
Last year, Trump and China’s president, Xi Jinping, agreed to build something called the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub — a multi-billion dollar project composed of an enormous network of pipelines, gas processing facilities, and below-ground storage. If built, the hub would sprawl from Pennsylvania all the way to Kentucky, and it would be the biggest infrastructure project in Appalachia to date. But Trump’s new tariffs, and a possible ensuing trade war, have put the project in jeopardy because they could cost China billions of additional dollars.
America’s coal industry isn’t doing so hot domestically, but coal exports are going through something of a boom right now. Guess what Beijing just put on a list of U.S. products that could get hit with Chinese tariffs, thanks to Trump’s dedication to aluminum and steel? Yep — coal. The tariffs also put a major deal between a big Chinese coal importer and two U.S.-based companies on the rocks. The deal concerned 1 million tons of coal exports per year.

Well, there you have it. Who woulda thunk Trump would be the person to get in the way of his own dumb plan?

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Trump’s new tariffs could make America suck again for coal miners

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A ferry that runs on hydrogen fuel cells is coming to San Francisco

by OlivaTownson Posted on June 25, 2018

After Tom Escher took over his family’s century-old ferry company in 1997, he wanted to buy a zero-emissions vessel that could whisk tourists around San Francisco without spewing harmful pollutants. Escher, who is 71, said he worried about the health of his four grandchildren and the environment they’d live in.

“Our boats were getting greener, and we were cleaning up, but I said, ‘Are we doing the best we can?’” Escher recalled.

A few years ago, he began searching in earnest for a fossil fuel-free ship, but he quickly hit a wall. Even as battery-powered cars and rooftop solar panels proliferated on land, the maritime industry had been slow to embrace clean energy at sea.

An innovative ferry project could soon change that.

On Monday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced a $3 million grant to help build a hydrogen fuel cell ferry. Once built, it would be be the first of its kind in the United States, and the first commercial hydrogen fuel cell ferry in the world.

The planned vessel, named Water-Go-Round, would carry 84 passengers and stretch 70 feet long. Construction is expected to start early this fall in Alameda, California, and the vessel is slated to hit the water a year later.

The project is one of myriad efforts by cities in the U.S. and globally to clean up their passenger ships. While ferries contribute a relatively small slice of total maritime air pollution and carbon emissions, they typically operate around densely populated areas, where emissions are known to pose the biggest health threats.

Ferries, tug boats, and other harbor craft can be particularly dirty because they often use the same inefficient engines for decades, said Christina Wolfe, who manages the Environmental Defense Fund’s air quality program for ports. “They’re old, high-horsepower, and high-usage, and that just makes a recipe for very high emissions,” she said of ferry engines.

Some local officials are considering more straightforward solutions, like installing efficient Tier 4 diesel engines or adding onshore electricity supplies, so boats can turn off their engines while at port. Other places are taking a more ambitious tack: In rural Alabama, the Gee’s Bend Ferry operators are replacing John Deere engines with a battery-electric propulsion system, which will make it the first zero-emissions ferry of its kind in the United States. A ferry in Skagit County, Washington, may soon follow suit.

The Water-Go-Round hydrogen ferry is also representative of a larger push by the global shipping industry to clean up dirty fuel-burning ships. In April, the International Maritime Organization adopted a landmark deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ships, a policy that will require a massive uptake of zero-emissions vessels.

Passenger ships are often first to deploy cutting-edge ship technologies because they consume far less fuel and power than ocean-going vessels. Ferries typically keep close to shore, making it easier to recharge batteries or refill hydrogen tanks. And ferry operators face strong public pressure to clean up because they carry throngs of passengers who — unlike lifeless box containers — inhale the diesel fumes, hear the growling engines, and see the noxious black plumes rising from exhaust funnels.

A boat like Water-Go-Round won’t have such concerns.

Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. Unlike diesel engines, they don’t emit any carbon dioxide or health-threatening pollutants — only a little heat and water vapor. “I’m going to drink the exhaust,” pledged Escher, who is investing in the new ferry, in addition to operating it.

Hydrogen itself isn’t always “zero-emissions.” The most common methods for producing hydrogen today require fossil fuels — and thus result in some greenhouse gases. But more facilities are starting to produce “green” hydrogen with renewable electricity or biogas.

The idea to build Water-Go-Round came from an extensive 2016 study by Sandia National Labs. Researchers established that a high-speed passenger ferry powered by hydrogen fuel cells was feasible from a technical, regulatory, and economic perspective. Around two dozen early ship projects already deploy the technology, primarily in Europe.

Joseph Pratt, who co-authored the Sandia study, is now the CEO of Golden Gate Zero Emission Marine, one of several partners in the CARB grant project.

“We’re at the point where we’ve studied it enough, we’ve figured out how you can do it,” Pratt said from San Francisco. “Now we just have to do it.”

The ferry Zalophus cruises beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco Bay.Red and White Fleet

The plan is for Escher’s company, Red and White Fleet, to operate the vessel for the first three months — and eventually buy it to add to its fleet. Meanwhile, scientists at Sandia and CARB are expected to collect data on the ship’s operations, performance, and maintenance.

The $3 million CARB grant is part of California’s larger $20 million investment in zero-emissions off-road demonstration projects. The funding comes from revenues raised by the state’s cap-and-trade program. Water-Go-Round’s partners have committed another $2.5 million to help launch the vessel.

The planned ferry would carry onboard storage tanks with enough hydrogen to last about two days before a truck refuels them at port. Lithium-ion batteries and electric motors will round out the ship’s power system. Pratt said the goal is to use green hydrogen supplies when possible.

Marine fuel cells face several hurdles to wider adoption. The technology is still relatively expensive, and shipbuilders and maritime officials in many places may be less familiar with hydrogen than, say, batteries. If successful, a project like Water-Go-Round could nevertheless drive interest in fuel cells and hydrogen — particularly where officials or companies are seeking to curb maritime pollution, said Alan Lloyd, the former secretary of California’s Environmental Protection Agency.

“People are going to want to follow that lead,” said Lloyd, a senior research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute.

A similar narrative is already playing out with battery-powered ferries, after Norway launched a fully electric car ferry in 2015.

Dan Berentson, the director of public works in Skagit County, in northwest Washington, said his team is closely following developments in Scandinavia, where more electric ferries are expected to ply the fjords. Skagit County officials are now hoping to build their own electric boat to replace their county’s clunky 39-year-old ferry. If all goes to plan, it could launch in 2020.

“Our hope is that the industry will embrace this,” Berentson said.

Maria Gallucci is the 2017-2018 Energy Journalism Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

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A ferry that runs on hydrogen fuel cells is coming to San Francisco

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‘He’s a political prisoner’: Standing Rock activists face years in jail

by MuhammadStillman Posted on June 23, 2018

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Standing Rock saved Little Feather’s life. Then the U.S. government took it from him.

Little Feather was one of thousands of Native Americans who traveled to North Dakota in 2016 to fight the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. The 45-year-old member of the Chumash Nation was battling drug addiction at the time, said his wife, Leoyla Cowboy. But the “water protector” movement gave him a sense of purpose, a renewed connection to indigenous elders, and sobriety.

But last year as the oil pipeline began operations, authorities jailed him and charged him with felonies stemming from his involvement in the demonstrations. Little Feather’s case and the prosecution of hundreds of others is part of what activists say is an aggressive campaign by U.S. law enforcement to suppress indigenous and environmental movements, using drawn-out criminal cases and lengthy prison sentences.

“He has been taken from us, and it’s a huge void in our lives,” Cowboy, 44, told the Guardian in a recent interview after Little Feather, also known as Michael Giron, was sentenced to three years. “He is a political prisoner … We were protecting our land. It’s something we have to do, and we’re going to be met with this violence from these agencies, from the federal government, from the state.”

As Red Fawn Fallis prepares for her sentencing next week in the movement’s most high-profile prosecution, activists are speaking out about the toll the cases have taken — continuing to drag on and tear apart families — all as Standing Rock has almost entirely disappeared from headlines.

After Donald Trump took office and ordered expedited approval of the $3.7 billion pipeline last January, the crackdown on activists escalated. The cases stemmed from clashes with police in late 2016 when thousands gathered at Oceti Sakowin and other campsites by the pipeline, facing a highly militarized operation, brutal shows of force, mass arrests and widely condemned jail conditions.

Under Trump, who has had financial ties with the pipeline company, the U.S. Department of Justice has pressed forward with six cases against Native Americans. North Dakota prosecutors meanwhile have pursued more than 800 state cases against people at Standing Rock, including 165 still pending, according to the Water Protector Legal Collective, a legal support team.

“They needed these convictions to make examples of people,” said Rattler, another federal defendant who, like Little Feather, agreed to a plea deal. “We got their attention, and they are scared of us.”

Rattler, a Lakota Oglala man, and Little Feather were each charged with two felonies — civil disorder and use of fire to commit a felony — related to a standoff on Oct. 27, 2016, when police deployed pepper spray and armored vehicles in response to a roadblock set up by activists. More than 140 people were arrested.

The arson charges related to the fact that “several fires were set by unidentified protesters” to thwart police, as prosecutors wrote in one court filing.

If the men were convicted, they faced a mandatory minimum of 10 years. Activists argued the charges were excessive, and some thought the men would prevail in a courtroom, especially considering reporting by the Intercept, which uncovered how a private security firm had used military-style counter-terrorism methods to target and infiltrate the protests.

But the defendants and their attorneys ultimately had concerns about the risks of a trial. One survey of jury-eligible locals found that 82 percent to 94 percent had prejudged protesters as guilty or were biased against them.

“Having a fair trial in Bismarck was going to be impossible,” said Rattler, 45, whose legal name is Michael Markus. “If you go to court in North Dakota, you are going to get convicted.”

Wasté Win Young, a Standing Rock member who is still facing trespassing and rioting charges in North Dakota court, said she was now regularly targeted and racially profiled by locals and police in the area.

“It’s just surreal still living here,” she said, noting that the fossil fuel industry had a lot of influence in the area and that there was heavy local bias against the demonstrations. “They feel like their security, their well-being was threatened by the so-called violent protesters, which was not the case at all.”

Still, Young said she was not afraid to go to court: “I stood my ground and it was in honor of my ancestors and to protect their way of life.”

Red Fawn Fallis was originally accused of shooting at law enforcement, facing a potential life sentence. The case moved forward even after it was reported that a paid informant for the FBI had developed a romantic relationship with her during the protests and was the owner of the gun she allegedly fired. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charge in exchange for her pleading to lesser offenses, and on Monday, she is expected to receive a seven-year prison sentence.

The U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Rattler, who is expected to get three years in prison, said the pending case meant he was restricted from freely traveling to indigenous ceremonies and other events.

“That’s been going on for hundreds of years — the federal government telling indigenous people where they can and can’t go,” said Ollie, Rattler’s partner who requested not to use her full name. “They do it just because they can.”

Sandra Freeman, Rattler’s attorney, said it had been difficult coming to terms with the reality of his plea agreement: “He is someone who is a really gentle, non-violent person who has accepted significant, significant time in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.”

Despite everything, Rattler said he was glad he was involved in the movement and wanted to eventually continue the work: “I have no regrets about what I did.”

After Little Feather’s personal transformation at the Standing Rock camps, Cowboy said she was eager to start their lives together: “I have been praying for a person like Little Feather all my life.”

But her husband has been incarcerated since last March when police pulled them over and arrested him while the newlyweds were traveling to an indigenous march in Washington D.C.

With sentencing over, there was some relief in knowing he would eventually come home, Cowboy said. But she also recognized that there would be lasting consequences.

While she was inspired to see the momentum from Standing Rock spread to other fights, she said, it sometimes felt like those still suffering from the North Dakota movement had been left behind. “They are forgetting that we are still here.”

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‘He’s a political prisoner’: Standing Rock activists face years in jail

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The EPA thinks its hurricane response was so great it ordered special coins for everyone

by WilliamJROJ Posted on June 23, 2018

Welcome to today’s episode of Trump’s America, in which the Mr. Burns of the EPA spent $8,522.50 on some fancy coins to celebrate the way his agency handled last year’s hurricane and wildfire seasons. Excellent.

Here’s the sitch: The EPA contracted with a company called “Lapel Pins Plus” so that it can give its employees commemorative “challenge coins.” The agency ordered 1,750 special little coins with special little display cases to congratulate employees for “PROTECTING HUMAN HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT ALL ACROSS AMERICA.” (That’s written on the coins, OK? It’s very cool and chill.)

The EPA clearly hadn’t been reading the news about Puerto Rico when it ordered the coins. We still don’t know exactly how many people in the U.S. territory died because of Hurricane Maria, but a Harvard study estimates it was around 5,000 or more. Some towns still don’t have power, and it’s been nine months since the storm hit. Residents are struggling with an unprecedented mental health crisis.

And as for the other hurricanes last year: When Harvey and Irma struck, Pruitt kept busy by disparaging discussions about climate change — that is, when he wasn’t giving interviews to right-wing media and attempting to roll back even more regulations. The EPA was slow to respond to Hurricane Harvey, leaving residents exposed to pollution.

Does all of this sound like a job well done to you?

Pruitt seems to think so — or maybe he just really, really wants special coins. He tried to get some last year, but they were never ordered.

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The EPA thinks its hurricane response was so great it ordered special coins for everyone

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