Tag Archives: gizmodo

Amazon accused of abandoning 100 percent renewable energy goal

by IndiraRxm3 Posted on April 9, 2019

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

Amazon has been accused of abandoning a much-publicized goal of running its data centers on 100 percent renewable energy — instead focusing its attention on winning business from the oil and gas industry.

According to a Greenpeace report released earlier this year, some of Amazon’s most important data centers in Virginia, where the company has committed to building its second HQ, are powered by only 12 percent renewable energy. Across the company as a whole, Amazon reached 50 percent renewable usage in 2018, and has not issued any updates since.

This week, a report from the tech news site Gizmodo suggested one reason for the slowdown was Amazon’s increasing focus on bringing on board large oil and gas companies as Amazon Web Service customers.

The figures represent slow progress towards the goal, first announced in 2014, to power the entire company using renewables, and have led some to accuse Amazon of abandoning the goal entirely.

Alongside the organization’s report, Greenpeace’s Elizabeth Jardim said: “Despite Amazon’s public commitment to renewable energy, the world’s largest cloud computing company is hoping no one will notice that it’s still powering its corner of the internet with dirty energy.

“Unless Amazon and other cloud giants in Virginia change course, our growing use of the internet could lead to more pipelines, more pollution and more problems for our climate.”

Gizmodo’s report cited Andrew Jassy, the AWS chief executive, who told an oil and gas conference in Houston last month: “A lot of the things that we have built and released recently have been very much informed by conversations with our oil and gas customers and partners.”

Gizmodo contrasted his statement with another, reported in December, from the AWS executive Peter DeSantis, who “told colleagues inside the company that renewable energy projects are too costly and don’t help it win business.”

Amazon’s renewables record is in stark contrast to some of its competitors, most notably Google, which reported success in reaching 100 percent renewables use in 2017. “Our engineers have spent years perfecting Google’s data centers, making them 50 percent more energy-efficient than the industry average,” the company’s head of technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, said at the time.

“But we still need a lot of energy to process trillions of Google searches every year, play more than 400 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute and power the products and services that our users depend on. That’s why we began purchasing renewable energy – to reduce our carbon footprint and address climate change. But it also makes business sense.”

A year later, Apple declared its “retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries” were powered by 100 percent clean energy. Facebook has committed to do the same by 2020.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Amazon accused of abandoning 100 percent renewable energy goal

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4 surprising facts about the judge behind California’s climate change trial.

by LesleeLkdf Posted on March 21, 2018

On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments about a California law that tries to clarify the facts that women receive about their reproductive rights. The accuracy of that information becomes increasingly important as environmental disasters — which are growing more, uh, disastrous — endanger women more than men. Women can be better prepared by having full control of their reproductive decisions.

Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations, often masquerading as medical clinics, that attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions. California’s Reproductive FACT Act, passed in 2016, requires reproductive health clinics and CPCs to post notices advising their clients that the state provides free or low-cost family planning, prenatal care, and abortion; and that CPCs publicize that they are not licensed to practice medicine.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization representing the centers suing the state of California, claims that the requirements of the Reproductive FACT Act are unconstitutional because they require CPCs to “promote messages that violate their convictions,” Bloomberg reports. The state of California argues that information provided by medical professionals is publicly regulated, and that women who depend on public medical care and are unaware of their options should not be provided with confusing information.

Last February, a Gizmodo-Damn Joan investigation found that women seeking abortion clinics on Google — because, let’s be real, that’s how a lot of us find medical care — could be easily led to CPCs instead, as Google Maps does not distinguish them from real medical clinics.

We’ll be watching this case.

Source:

4 surprising facts about the judge behind California’s climate change trial.

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After Supreme Court ruling, Flint residents will finally see officials in court.

by GastonWheelwrig Posted on March 20, 2018

On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments about a California law that tries to clarify the facts that women receive about their reproductive rights. The accuracy of that information becomes increasingly important as environmental disasters — which are growing more, uh, disastrous — endanger women more than men. Women can be better prepared by having full control of their reproductive decisions.

Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations, often masquerading as medical clinics, that attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions. California’s Reproductive FACT Act, passed in 2016, requires reproductive health clinics and CPCs to post notices advising their clients that the state provides free or low-cost family planning, prenatal care, and abortion; and that CPCs publicize that they are not licensed to practice medicine.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization representing the centers suing the state of California, claims that the requirements of the Reproductive FACT Act are unconstitutional because they require CPCs to “promote messages that violate their convictions,” Bloomberg reports. The state of California argues that information provided by medical professionals is publicly regulated, and that women who depend on public medical care and are unaware of their options should not be provided with confusing information.

Last February, a Gizmodo-Damn Joan investigation found that women seeking abortion clinics on Google — because, let’s be real, that’s how a lot of us find medical care — could be easily led to CPCs instead, as Google Maps does not distinguish them from real medical clinics.

We’ll be watching this case.

Read the article:  

After Supreme Court ruling, Flint residents will finally see officials in court.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Crown, FF, G & F, GE, InsideClimate News, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on After Supreme Court ruling, Flint residents will finally see officials in court.

Surprise! Cutting emissions doesn’t just help polar bears, it saves people, too.

by AltaSowers Posted on March 20, 2018

On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments about a California law that tries to clarify the facts that women receive about their reproductive rights. The accuracy of that information becomes increasingly important as environmental disasters — which are growing more, uh, disastrous — endanger women more than men. Women can be better prepared by having full control of their reproductive decisions.

Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations, often masquerading as medical clinics, that attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions. California’s Reproductive FACT Act, passed in 2016, requires reproductive health clinics and CPCs to post notices advising their clients that the state provides free or low-cost family planning, prenatal care, and abortion; and that CPCs publicize that they are not licensed to practice medicine.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization representing the centers suing the state of California, claims that the requirements of the Reproductive FACT Act are unconstitutional because they require CPCs to “promote messages that violate their convictions,” Bloomberg reports. The state of California argues that information provided by medical professionals is publicly regulated, and that women who depend on public medical care and are unaware of their options should not be provided with confusing information.

Last February, a Gizmodo-Damn Joan investigation found that women seeking abortion clinics on Google — because, let’s be real, that’s how a lot of us find medical care — could be easily led to CPCs instead, as Google Maps does not distinguish them from real medical clinics.

We’ll be watching this case.

See the original article here: 

Surprise! Cutting emissions doesn’t just help polar bears, it saves people, too.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Crown, FF, G & F, GE, InsideClimate News, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Surprise! Cutting emissions doesn’t just help polar bears, it saves people, too.

Cynthia Nixon is campaigning on fixing New York’s broke-ass subway.

by DaniellSpringer Posted on March 20, 2018

On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments about a California law that tries to clarify the facts that women receive about their reproductive rights. The accuracy of that information becomes increasingly important as environmental disasters — which are growing more, uh, disastrous — endanger women more than men. Women can be better prepared by having full control of their reproductive decisions.

Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations, often masquerading as medical clinics, that attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions. California’s Reproductive FACT Act, passed in 2016, requires reproductive health clinics and CPCs to post notices advising their clients that the state provides free or low-cost family planning, prenatal care, and abortion; and that CPCs publicize that they are not licensed to practice medicine.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization representing the centers suing the state of California, claims that the requirements of the Reproductive FACT Act are unconstitutional because they require CPCs to “promote messages that violate their convictions,” Bloomberg reports. The state of California argues that information provided by medical professionals is publicly regulated, and that women who depend on public medical care and are unaware of their options should not be provided with confusing information.

Last February, a Gizmodo-Damn Joan investigation found that women seeking abortion clinics on Google — because, let’s be real, that’s how a lot of us find medical care — could be easily led to CPCs instead, as Google Maps does not distinguish them from real medical clinics.

We’ll be watching this case.

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Cynthia Nixon is campaigning on fixing New York’s broke-ass subway.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Crown, FF, G & F, GE, InsideClimate News, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cynthia Nixon is campaigning on fixing New York’s broke-ass subway.

Hackers Just Brought the Internet to Its Knees—And No One Knows Why

by kelliemclendon Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

A number of websites—including Twitter, Netflix, and PayPal—were disrupted today by an early morning cyberattack against a key company responsible for routing internet traffic. The company, Dyn, has been posting a series of updates throughout the day, claiming that it came under multiple Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. A DDoS attack floods a website or server with traffic from multiple sources, slowing the targeted site or shutting it down altogether.

In this case, the target was Dyn, a major provider of Domain Name Servers (DNS), which allow internet traffic to get routed properly. (Gizmodo has an excellent breakdown of how DNS servers work, and why an attack on a major provider of them would impact so many sites at once.) The attack started at about 7:10 a.m. on the East Coast of the United States, and the company was initially able to restore service. But later in the morning a second and more widespread attack ensued, and service disruption might have spread to Western Europe, according to Reuters.

Today’s attack is being investigated by the US government as a “criminal act,” Reuters reports, and it could be just the latest in what the Department of Homeland Security has characterized as increasingly powerful DDoS attacks. In an October 14 message posted on the DHS Computer Emergency Readiness Team page, the agency warned of “increased risks” of massive DDoS attacks because of poorly secured internet-connected devices such as cameras and home routers. “Recently, Internet of Things devices have been used to create large-scale botnets—networks of devices infected with self-propogating malware—that can execute rippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks,” the warning read.

Although it’s unclear who is behind the attack, in an early Friday evening tweet, WikiLeaks told its supporters:

By the way, here’s what a DDoS attack looks like when it’s visualized (via Gizmodo):

Link – 

Hackers Just Brought the Internet to Its Knees—And No One Knows Why

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Nobody knows if climate change sunk these islands or not

by WillisBrenner1 Posted on May 10, 2016

Nobody knows if climate change sunk these islands or not

By on May 10, 2016Share

If you’ve been paying attention to environmental news over the past 24 hours — and you’ve ended up on Grist, so we have to assume that’s the case — you’ll have noticed that five Pacific islands have apparently disappeared into the sea.

Quartz: “Five Pacific islands have been drowned by climate change, and more are sinking fast”

Gizmodo: “Because of climate change, five Pacific islands have vanished”

The Guardian: “Five Pacific islands lost to rising seas as climate change hits”

You get the picture. But here’s one more, also from The Guardian: “Headlines ‘exaggerated’ climate link to sinking of Pacific islands.” Ruh-roh.

According to The Guardian’s Karl Mathiesen, some writers didn’t bother to check in with the study’s authors to make sure their reporting accurately captured the research. The headlines in particular went overboard. When Mathiesen contacted lead author Simon Albert, he said he’d have preferred “slightly more moderate titles that focus on sea-level rise being the driver rather than simply ‘climate change.’”

“The major misunderstanding stems from the conflation of sea-level rise with climate change,” writes Mathiesen. “As a scientifically robust and potentially destructive articulation of climate change, sea-level rise has become almost synonymous with the warming of the planet.”

The focus on climate change could be confusing to readers, since sea-level rise has been a factor for the islands in question because of a shift in trade winds. Global warming is indeed a cause of rising seas. But for these islands, trade wind changes can also be attributed to natural climate cycles, and more research is needed to understand the relative contributions of each factor.

The flub demonstrates the importance of accurate environmental reporting. When journalists get it wrong, it’s only more fuel for science deniers’ favorite accusation that climate-change rhetoric is alarmist.

Climate Feedback, a climate journalism watchdog, recently launched a crowdfunding campaign with the aim of beefing up their fact-checking capacity. With any luck, efforts like these will help ensure reporters get the nuances right.

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Nobody knows if climate change sunk these islands or not

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Could one of these robots save you in a climate disaster?

by JMTJaniceuq Posted on June 5, 2015

Circuit Du Soleil

Could one of these robots save you in a climate disaster?

By on 5 Jun 2015 4:12 pmcommentsShare

We spend a lot of time worrying about how robots are out to get us. I get it — it’s good to be ready for the worst. But while we wait for the singularity, we could put these invulnerable machines to use helping us weak humans cope with disasters both natural and un-.

On June 5 and 6, entrants from academia and industry are trying in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. You can watch livestreams of mechanical men taking on a series of challenges as their human overlords (for now) look on in sweaty, nerdy anticipation.

From Gizmodo:

Twenty-four teams from around the world (about half from the U.S.) have built robots that must complete a number of tasks. The course is set up to simulate a disaster scenario not unlike the Fukushima nuclear disaster that occurred in Japan in 2011.

The ‘bots have to perform a series of tasks including: driving a vehicle, locating and closing a valve, getting through a wall and up a set of stairs, and a “surprise task” that we hope involves learning how to love. They must be controlled wirelessly, and for a portion of the challenge they must be fully autonomous (“look, Ma! No controller!”). Here’s more from the Washington Post:

If you’ve read about a cool robot during the course of the past few years, chances are pretty good that it was being groomed for these challenges. The winning team will receive $2 million from DARPA, with the first two runner-ups receiving $1 million and $500,000, respectively.

You hear that, R2? Save the world, make bank — and may the best robot win.

Source:
Everything You Need to Know About Today’s DARPA Robotics Challenge

, Gizmodo.

Live: Watch robots battle it out in the DARPA challenge

, Washington Post.

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Could one of these robots save you in a climate disaster?

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Chipotle Says It’s Getting Rid of GMOs. Here’s the Problem.

by JonathaPFX Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Chipotle announced this week that it will stop serving food made with genetically modified organisms. The company wants you to think the decision is “another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” apparently because GMOs are regarded with at best suspicion and at worst total revulsion by lots of Americans.

There’s data to support that notion: A Pew poll released earlier this year found that less than 40 percent of Americans think GMOs are safe to eat.

Here’s the thing, though: GMOs are totally safe to eat. Eighty-eight percent of the scientists in that same poll agreed. As longtime environmentalist Mark Lynas pointed out in the New York Times recently, the level of scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs is comparable to the scientific consensus on climate change, which is to say that the disagreement camp is a rapidly diminishing minority. Lynas also made the equally valid point that so-called “improved” seeds have a pretty remarkable track record in improving crop yields in developing countries, which translates to a direct win for local economies and food security. (Although there is evidence that widespread GMO use can lead to an increased reliance on pesticides.)

But there’s an even more important reason why Chipotle’s announcement is little more than self-congratulatory PR, even if you think that GMOs are the devil. As former MoJo-er Sarah Zhang pointed out at Gizmodo:

For the past couple of years, Chipotle has been getting its suppliers to get rid of GM corn and soybean. Today’s “GMO-free” announcement comes as Chipotle has switched over to non-GMO corn and soybean oil, but it still serves chicken and pork from animals raised on GMO feed. (Its beef comes from pasture-fed cows.) A good chunk of the GM corn and soybeans grown in America actually goes to feed livestock, so a truly principled stance against GMOs should cut out meat from GM-fed animals, too.

The same caveat applies to soda, which is also made mostly from corn.

Original article – 

Chipotle Says It’s Getting Rid of GMOs. Here’s the Problem.

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