Month: July 2021

Lobbyists and trade groups for big tech companies and equipment manufacturers have long argued that giving consumers more access to the tools required to fix products, whether a smartphone or a car, poses safety and security risks. The debate has gotten especially heated as more products become internet-connected, adding a software element to repairs that in the past might have just required swapping parts.

The links to news reports in the White House’s fact sheet that back up its claims of stymied competition specifically point to the issues around cell phone repair, but the language of the order itself urges the FTC to broaden the right to repair by restricting “tech and other” companies from discouraging DIY tinkering. Such language indicates that the FTC’s regulatory target will be much bigger than the device in your pocket.

In an emailed response to the executive order, a spokesperson from John Deere claims the company “leads our industry in providing repair tools, spare parts, information guides, training videos and manuals needed to work on our machines.” But the spokesperson also says that while less than two percent of tractor repairs require a software update, the company still does not support the right to modify embedded software “due to risks associated with the safe operation of the equipment.”

Turn of the Screw

Proctor, of US PIRG, notes that it could still be awhile before the FTC starts enforcing new repair laws, saying that the rule-making process is “not always an expeditious one.” He cites as an example the FTC’s finalization of a rule around “Made in the USA” labels that are falsely applied to products not manufactured in the US. (Congress first enacted legislation around “Made in the USA” claims back in 1994, but for years there was bipartisan consensus that this kind of fraud shouldn’t be subject to tough penalties. Just last week, the FTC codified the rules in such a way that violators would be penalized.)

“Right to Repair is even more complex than that case, and if this is just a directive towards rule-making, it might kick off another long process,” Proctor says. “Still, I’m hopeful that this is a mechanism that gets us to where we need to go a little faster.”

Sheehan from iFixit is more optimistic that the FTC might act quickly around Right to Repair, partly because the agency recently introduced a series of changes designed to streamline rule-making procedures—and partly because the order is coming directly from the White House. “Obviously we want the agency to move quickly on this, and pressure from the Biden administration does make that more possible,” Sheehan says.

A spokeswoman for the FTC declined to comment directly on the matter, instead pointing towards the White House’s statement and the report that the Commission already released in May.

In that report, the FTC concluded that products have, in fact, become harder to fix and maintain, and that “repair restrictions have … steered consumers into manufacturers’ repair networks to replace products before the end of their useful lives.” The FTC also noted that repair restrictions may also “place a greater financial burden on communities of color and lower-income Americans.”

But the FTC also warned in the May report that Right to Repair is a complicated issue, and that expanding consumers’ repair options, whether through industry initiatives or through legislation, “raises numerous issues that will warrant examination.”

Ultimately, the Right to Repair fight will likely still continue at the state level, and advocates plan to continue to lobby Congress for changes as well.

“I think, depending on the scope of the FTC rules, this may not be a substitute for what Congress can do and what states can do,” Sheehan says. As many as 25 states have considered Right to Repair legislation this year, but that, of course, doesn’t mean the bills in those states will be signed into law. A few states have what Sheehan calls “repair-related laws,” including California, Rhode Island, and Indiana. Right now, Massachusetts is the only state with an official Right to Repair law for automobiles, which won the vote by a large margin in 2012 and again in 2020, despite vocal opposition from a coalition of big automakers.

“Whatever rule the FTC passes, it will be up to the FTC to enforce,” Sheehan says. “Whereas state legislation can be enforced by state attorneys general, and occasionally they have more leeway or more resources to focus on these things than the FTC might in the context of all its other many priorities.”

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The blistering heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest last month would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of climate change, scientists say. In fact, it was nearly impossible even with it.

That’s according to a new study from World Weather Attribution, a climate research initiative that investigates the influence of climate change on individual weather events.

“We’ve never seen a jump in record temperature like the one in this heat wave, as far as I can remember,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and co-leader at World Weather Attribution, in a briefing yesterday.

The heat wave, which swept through Oregon, Washington state and western Canada in the final days of June, sent temperatures skyrocketing throughout the Pacific Northwest (Climatewire, June 28).

Seattle hit an all-time high at 108 degrees. Portland also broke a record at 116 degrees. And the tiny village of Lytton, in British Columbia, made international headlines when local temperatures soared to an eye-popping 121 degrees. Just days later, the village was all but consumed by a devastating wildfire.

Throughout the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the heat. Experts say many more additional fatalities are likely yet to be reported.

The new study, completed over the course of just 10 days, set out to quantify exactly how remarkable the event was. It concludes that the heat wave would have been, at the very least, 150 times less likely in a world without climate change—but potentially far more rare than that. The exact amount was difficult to quantify with models, in part because this event was so far outside the typical range.

“Basically, without climate change, this event would not have happened,” said Friederike Otto, associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and a co-leader at World Weather Attribution.

In fact, the event hardly seemed possible even in today’s warming world.

Statistically speaking, there are upper limits to the kinds of temperatures scientists expect during heat waves. Those limits depend on the local climate, historical warming rates and the levels of extreme heat that have been observed in the past.

When the research team evaluated the Pacific Northwest heat wave using a standard statistical model—which uses past observations as a kind of benchmark for what should be possible—the model suggested that it should not have been able to happen at all.

“The temperatures broke way above this upper bound,” van Oldenborgh said. “Our standard methods of evaluation didn’t work.”

The researchers ended up having to adjust their model, essentially forcing it to include the recent extreme temperatures in its historical record. Afterward, the model suggested that the heat wave was probably at least a 1-in-1,000-year event.

That number is highly uncertain, van Oldenborgh cautioned; it could be even more rare. The main takeaway is that the heat wave was outside the realm of anything the Pacific Northwest—and, in fact, much of the world—has ever experienced.

The team has several theories about how this event became so extreme, although more research will be needed to say for sure.

Drought could have made it worse than it otherwise would have been. Or changes in the flow of the jet stream, possibly influenced by climate change, might have played a role. It’s possible that the perfect storm of climate conditions simply lined up and allowed a highly unusual event to occur.

It’s also possible that the region has now “crossed a threshold” in which these kinds of events might become not only possible, but much more common, van Oldenborgh added. Climate change doesn’t always proceed in a linear fashion. The system can experience “‘jumps’ that make this type of heat more likely once you pass a certain threshold,” he said.

If that’s the case, these kinds of ultra-extreme heat waves could be in store more often than climate models currently predict—and they could start popping up in other unexpected places around the globe.

For now, it’s unclear what to expect. The team plans to delve further into the causes behind this event in the coming months.

“Everybody is really worried about the implications of these events,” van Oldenborgh said. “This is something nobody saw coming, nobody thought possible. We feel we do not understand heat waves as well as we thought we did.”

‘How climate change kills us’

A better understanding of the future—and better predictions about heat waves in the coming years—can save lives. As it is, many communities across the country and around the world may be underprepared for what’s to come.

Households in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, tend to have lower access to air conditioning than warmer parts of the country. That makes extreme heat waves even more dangerous when they occur.

“From the public health side, the most important point is almost all of the deaths are preventable,” said Kristie Ebi, an expert on global warming and public health at the University of Washington, at yesterday’s briefing. “People don’t need to die in heat waves.”

Climate models nearly unanimously project that heat waves will become more frequent and more intense as the world continues to warm, even if scientists are still unpacking the limits of those extremes. That means it’s essential for communities to develop emergency plans for extreme heat events and increase public awareness about the dangers, Ebi said.

Heat already kills more people in the U.S. than any other weather event, claiming hundreds of lives each year.

And attribution studies suggest that climate change is increasing the severity of heat waves more strongly than hurricanes, droughts or any other weather event. Its influence on extreme heat is “orders of magnitude” higher, Otto pointed out.

“Heat waves [are] how climate change kills us today,” she said. “I think this is how climate change manifests most strongly.”

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2021. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

Virgin Orbit is gearing up for a third launch this year — and an even busier 2022.

The company aced its second spaceflight in less than six months last Wednesday (June 30), lofting seven small satellites to orbit on a mission named “Tubular Bells: Part 1,” after the first track on the first album ever released by Virgin Group founder Richard Branson‘s Virgin Records.

Virgin Orbit is still analyzing the data from “Tubular Bells: Part 1.” But the early returns suggest that the flight was completely nominal, keeping the company on track for one more flight this year, likely in the fall, Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart told Space.com. 

In photos: Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket for satellite missions

If all goes well with that third flight, the company aims to launch six missions in 2022 and boost the cadence significantly again the following year.

“As we go through next year, we will be hitting the gas, in our production team primarily, just to get some more rate, and ramping up to at least double that [launch rate] in ’23,” Hart said.

Virgin Orbit uses a 70-foot-long (21 meters) rocket known as LauncherOne, which is capable of lofting 1,100 lbs. (500 kilograms) of payload to Earth orbit. LauncherOne lifts off beneath the wing of a carrier plane known as Cosmic Girl, which drops the rocket after reaching a predetermined location and altitude.

This air-launch system provides flexibility, efficiency and responsiveness that has helped Virgin Orbit carve out a place in the competitive small-launch market, company representatives have said. (Fellow Virgin Group company Virgin Galactic, which is gearing up to launch Branson and several other people on a milestone suborbital flight this weekend, also uses an air-launch system.) 

Both of Virgin Orbit’s successful spaceflights to date have lifted off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in southern California. But the company will expand its geographic portfolio soon; it plans to launch missions from both Guam and England next year, Hart said. 

In addition, Brazil recently selected Virgin Orbit to fly from Alcântara Launch Center, on the country’s northern coast. The company is also in serious discussions to lift off from Japan, Australia and “half a dozen other countries,” Hart said. “It’s really an exciting time.”

Over the longer haul, he added, Virgin Orbit aims to have multiple 747 carrier planes stationed at various spots around the world. Such an expanded infrastructure would enable even higher launch rates, which is something that Virgin Orbit wants to achieve.

“We would like to be launching every week, or more,” Hart said. 

Virgin Orbit also plans to evolve and upgrade its launch system, allowing the delivery of payloads to higher Earth orbits, the moon and other planets, he added. In fact, a few years ago, the company formed a consortium with Poland-based satellite company SatRevolution (two of whose Earth-observing satellites went up on “Tubular Bells: Part 1”) and researchers from multiple Polish universities, with the goal of launching a cubesat mission to Mars in the next few years.

“We want to be part of the space economy, and we want to be an accelerator, to help this transformation that’s going on take place,” Hart said.

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

The western United States is experiencing its worst drought this century, threatening to kill crops, spark wildfires and harm public health as hot and dry conditions are expected to continue this month.

More than 93% of the land in seven Western states is in drought conditions, and nearly 59% of the area is experiencing extreme or exceptional drought—the two worst conditions—according to the latest figures released by the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Both figures are the highest this century for the area that covers all of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and most of Utah.

Before this year, the record for the amount of Western land in extreme or exceptional drought was 43%, set in September 2003.

The conditions have led to fire and fishing restrictions across the West and have prompted wildfire alerts. The National Interagency Fire Center is warning that the intensifying drought across the West is creating significant wildfire risk over the next three months from California to the Northwest and across the northern Plains.

“Last year, we had a lot of wildfire and a lot of smoke. It would be very surprising if that did not happen again this year,” Douglas Kluck, NOAA’s director of regional climate services in Kansas City, said in a virtual presentation last week.

Agriculture Department reports show that several crops, including wheat, sunflowers and barley, are threatened by the extensive drought, which is concentrated in the West but is also affecting areas as far east as the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa.

“We have huge concerns up in the northern Plains. Conditions are not good,” Dennis Todey, director of USDA’s Midwest Climate Hub, said during the presentation.

The Drought Monitor said drought-stricken ranchers are selling their cattle because of a lack of feed and poor forage conditions.

At least eight national forests in the West have imposed fire restrictions. Fishing restrictions have been imposed on many rivers because of low flows and warm waters.

Although drought conditions have been exacerbated by recent record temperatures in the West, Kluck said the current drought has been developing since the spring of 2020.

“This has been a very slow-developing drought … that we’ve been talking about since last year,” Kluck said. “Some can date it back to last spring. The super-hot temperatures aren’t helping much.”

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2021. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

Tencent Games has rolled out a new initiative in China that forces players to submit to a digital face scan to verify they aren’t minors. This is the company’s effort to comply with the Chinese government in its bid to curb video game addiction among minors.

The software makes use of AI to determine if players are attempting to trick the system, forcing players offline if they either fail or reject the request for the scan. This applies to all Tencent’s games between the hours of 10 PM and 8 AM. The use of AI will allow the system to detect players using tricks to circumvent the check, while continually learning from fraudulent attempts that were successful.

The measure, called “Midnight Patrol,” is another system that Tencent has implemented since Chinese authorities drafted a bill of requirements aimed at curbing video game addiction among Chinese minors. This included the requirement to have games use real names for account creation, so that play time and spending could be monitored and restricted for players under the age of 18. These requirements were put in place after gaming-related incidents sparked the authorities’ interest, according to Sixth Tone.

Tencent is the largest publisher for games in China, accounting for 55% of gaming market share in the first-half of 2020. It also produces the country’s most popular mobile game, Honor of Kings (a MOBA inspired by League of Legends), which was the highest-grossing mobile game in 2019 and 2020. It was the game called out specifically by Chen Lina, an accounting executive in eastern Jiangsu Province, who praised the new facial-scanning technology.

Tencent is a big player internationally, too. The company owns Riot Games, makers of League of Legends and Valorant, as well as Klei, the creators of Don’t Starve. It also holds stakes in numerous development studios, with investments into Remedy Games, Dontnod, and Bohemia in 2021 alone. It’s also not the only company clamping down on minors and video games, with Minecraft receiving an above-18 age restriction in South Korea.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

Africans have long been told that our agriculture is backward and should be abandoned for a 21st-century version of the Green Revolution that enabled India to feed itself. Western science and technology, in the form of seeds modified by science and technology, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, petroleum-fueled machinery and artificial irrigation were key to that miracle, we are informed, and we too need to tread that path.

A primary proponent of this view is the Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS), founded in 2014 to “depolarize the charged debate” around genetically modified (GM) seeds. With $22 million in funding thus far from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the CAS in fact consistently defends GM seeds, arguing that they are healthy, productive and environmentally friendly, while attacking agroecology as economically and socially regressive.

In contrast, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), which represents more than 200 million farmers, fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, women, consumers and others across all but five African countries, holds that agroecology is what our continent needs. Small-scale, ecofriendly cultivation methods using indigenous knowledge and inputs and cutting-edge science increase the variety, nutritive value and quantity of foods produced on farms while stabilizing rural economies, promoting gender equity and protecting biodiversity.

This mission has put our alliance, the largest social movement in Africa, at odds with the CAS and by extension the Gates Foundation. And they are winning. On June 17, 2021, GRAIN, a small nonprofit organization based in Barcelona, Spain, tracking the foundation’s grant from 2003 to 2020, reported that, the foundation has granted 6 billion USD, 5 billion of which was supposed to serve Africa.  More worrisome, the CAS, which characterizes AFSA’s interpretation of agroecology as “restrictive” and worse, has succeeded in undermining support for the paradigm among Africa’s scientists and political leaders. Those of us at AFSA, in contrast, see our version of agroecology as liberating—based on farmers’ rights to choose seeds and methods of cultivation, and free of corporate interference and control.   

Through its Global Leadership Fellows Program, the CAS has trained 112 fellows to date, nearly two thirds recruited from Africa and many of them from countries where the biotech industry has been seeking regulatory approvals for GMOs: Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Ghana. In these critical battleground countries, CAS graduates work in media and government to argue that African governments should institute investment-friendly policies to help import the technologies that will rescue the continent’s farmers from their anachronistic traditions.

Hunger in Africa derives from a single factor, CAS fellows argue: crop yields are relatively low. The reason is, first, that seeds bred and shared by farmers are unproductive, in their opinion; these should be replaced by GMOs. Second, African farmers do not use enough agrochemicals, a deficit that also needs remedy. And third, African farmers cultivate a multitude of crops to feed their families; if instead they focus on growing commodity crops for pan-African and global markets, they will get far better yields while addressing their nutrition and health concerns.

Fortified by linkages with another organization funded by the Gates Foundation, the Open Forum on Agriculture Biotechnology (OFAB), CAS fellows end up narrowing the democratic space for discussion of food systems in African countries. Opposing points of view are irrational, unscientific and harmful, they often insist. OFAB is an offshoot of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, which was born in 2001 out of negotiations to promote GM seeds in Africa between the Rockefeller Foundation and corporations including Monsanto, Dupont, Pioneer and Syngenta. To our minds, these and other connections suggest that the Gates Foundation’s resources help further the interests of multinational corporations interested in opening our markets for agrochemicals, synthetic fertilizers and genetically engineered seeds more than they assist farmers.

In Uganda, for example, the CAS has recruited journalists and key government individuals working on agriculture, science and technology to the cause of promoting GM seeds. Fellows write disparaging articles on agroecology, describing it as a “dead end,” and promote biotechnology-based solutions in its stead. In Nigeria, Alliance fellows work closely with OFAB’s Nigeria Chapter, the National Biotechnology Development Agency, the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations and the Nigerian Institute of Management to advocate for biotechnology, often characterizing it as the only scientific option.

The truth is, India’s Green Revolution never was the runaway success it was advertised to be, as ongoing protests by the country’s farmers underscore. And in Africa as well, the promises of prosperity through resource-intensive, commercialized agriculture have failed to materialize, according to data on the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) compiled by the Tufts Global Development and Environment Institute. AGRA was launched in 2006 by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation with the stated objective of increasing investment in Africa to reduce poverty and hunger. An analysis of the AGRA data by African and German civil society groups noted that, after 14 years of existence and over a billion dollars of investment, there is no evidence of an increase in income of small-scale producers and no significant enhancement of productivity in the countries that AGRA serves. Instead, the number of undernourished people increased by 31 percent, adverse environmental impacts appear to be considerable and crop diversity has declined.

These civil society groups called on donor and African governments to instead shift their support to programs that help small-scale food producers develop climate-resilient and ecologically sustainable farming practices. Similarly, a September 2020 report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization recommends “promoting local food productions and short supply chains and a greater degree of self-sufficiency” in order to make food systems more resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We welcome investment in agriculture on our continent, but we seek it in a form that is democratic and responsive to the people at the heart of agriculture, not as a top-down force that ends up concentrating power and profit into the hands of a small number of multinational companies. While describing how GM seeds and other technology would solve hunger in African countries, Bill Gates claimed that “it’s a sovereign decision. No one makes that for them.” But the massive resources of the Gates Foundation, which he co-chairs, have had an outsized influence on African scientists and policymakers, with the result that food systems on our continent are becoming ever more market-oriented and corporate-controlled.

This transformation has immense adverse implications for the nutrition, health, environment, culture and right to food of Africans. We ask that Gates let the continent’s food producers and consumers chart our own paths toward sustainable and healthy farming practices and diets.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American