climate change - CybAI news

25 Oct

A High-Profile Geneticist Is Launching a Fusion-Power Moonshot

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsclean energy, climate change, energy, plaintext, silicon valley, startups

Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless accolades include a MacArthur “genius” grant and 14 honorary doctorates. When Joe Biden became president, he tapped Lander to be his science adviser and the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lander lost the job because of charges that he bullied subordinates, but he went on to head a nonprofit organization called Science for America.So what is he doing running a Silicon…

05 Oct

Hurricane Helene Destroyed Roads. Here’s How to Rebuild—and Flood-Proof Them for Next Time

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsClimate, climate change, environment, hurricanes, infrastructure

Typically, Muench says, the solution isn’t something too complicated: Just build infrastructure higher. But engineers can’t build roads and bridges to survive every disaster, which would lead to expensive, overbuilt projects that would “take generations to finish,” says Muench.‘Rice Krispie’ RoadsWhen engineers are rebuilding roads from scratch, they have also started to use different materials to account for the possibility of lots of water arriving really quickly. In the past decade, road builders have increasingly installed more permeable, “spongy” roads.Pervious concrete, unlike regular concrete, usually excludes sand from the typical “gravel, sand, cement, water” recipe. It also has a lower…

26 Sep

Is AI More Sustainable if You Generate it Underwater?

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, climate change, energy, environment, gadget lab podcast, podcasts

AI data centers are so hot right now. Each time generative AI services churn through their large language models to make a chatbot answer one of your questions, it takes a great deal of processing power to sift through all that data. Doing so can use massive amounts of energy, which means the proliferation of AI is raising questions about how sustainable this tech actually is and how it affects the ecosystems around it. Some companies think they have a solution: running those data centers underwater, where they can use the surrounding seawater to cool and better control the temperature…

16 Aug

Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsClimate, climate change, donald trump, electric vehicles, elon musk, plaintext, tesla, X

WIRED has been writing about Elon Musk—he of the electric cars, space rockets, tunnel-boring machines, implantable brain interfaces, Mars mission, and internet shitposting—for a long time. He’s always been unpredictable. And yet the most shocking part of his two-hour interview with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, broadcast live on X earlier this week, may just have been what Musk didn’t say.It happened around the 50-minute mark, during a very Trumpian discussion of gas and electricity prices. They were up nationally, Trump said, but “when that comes down and [sic] we’re going to drill, baby, drill.”The siren song of the oil…

13 Aug

UK Plans Grid Links to Speed Floating Offshore Wind Farms

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsclimate change, Decarbonization, design, ESG Concerns, Government, regulation, renewable energy, Technology, United Kingdom, Wind Energy

The UK’s electricity system operator has designed a plan to connect three proposed floating offshore wind farms with the grid, as the country’s decarbonization drive picks up speed.National Grid ESO has planned the links for 4.5 gigawatts of floating offshore wind in the Celtic Sea, an area of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Wales and southwest England. The connections have been designed before seabed leasing takes place for the wind farms, which will generate enough power to supply 4 million homes. Source link lol

10 Jul

Environmental groups accuse Amazon of ‘distorting the truth’ in latest clean-energy claim

stp2y0 CommentsNewsamazon, climate change, environment, news, renewable energy, sustainability, tomorrow

On Wednesday, Amazon claimed that it reached its goal of sourcing all its power from clean energy sources in the past year. If taken at face value, the announcement would mean it hit the milestone seven years ahead of schedule, which would be a monumental achievement. But environmental experts speaking to The New York Times, including a group of concerned Amazon employees, warn that the company is “misleading the public by distorting the truth.”The company’s claim of achieving 100 percent clean electricity is based in part on billion-dollar investments in over 500 solar and wind initiatives. The company’s logic is…

17 Jun

Banks Are Finally Realizing What Climate Change Will Do to Housing

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbanks, business, climate change, environment, housing, science

Clean energy firms are reaping the rewards of this emerging shift. Aira, a Swedish firm that carries out heat pump installations, recently announced that it had struck a deal valued at €200 million ($214 million) for loan commitments from the bank BNP Paribas. This will allow Aira customers in Germany to pay for their heat pumps in installments.“Banks and financial institutions have a huge responsibility to accelerate the energy transition,” says Eirik Winter, BNP Paribas’ CEO in the Nordic region. That the financing arrangement could also boost property values is a “positive side effect,” he adds.Home renovations and energy retrofits…