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Microsoft Is Luring Fossil-Fuel Companies With AI

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Friday, September 13, 2024

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.Today, The Atlantic published a new investigation by contributing writer Karen Hao detailing Microsoft’s recent engagements with the oil and gas industries. Although the tech giant has spoken of the potential for AI to remake our world for the better and stave off climate change, behind the scenes, it has sought to market the technology to fossil-fuel companies to aid in drilling, among other applications. Karen spoke with 15 current and former Microsoft employees and read through hundreds of internal documents for her report.Fundamentally, this is a story about tension—between two points of view within Microsoft, and between the supposed promise of a technology and its actual uses in the here and now. Sustainability advocates within Microsoft have clashed with leadership over its pursuit of this business. And although Microsoft has maintained that AI could be used to make fossil-fuel companies more efficient, thereby making their work more sustainable, critics aren’t so sure. “The idea that AI’s climate benefits will outpace its environmental costs is largely speculative,” Karen writes, “especially given that generative-AI tools are themselves tremendously resource-hungry. Within the next six years, the data centers required to develop and run the kinds of next-generation AI models that Microsoft is investing in may use more power than all of India. They will be cooled by millions upon millions of gallons of water. All the while, scientists agree, the world will get warmer, its climate more extreme.” Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic: Sources: Getty. Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AIBy Karen Hao Microsoft executives have been thinking lately about the end of the world. In a white paper published late last year, Brad Smith, the company’s vice chair and president, and Melanie Nakagawa, its chief sustainability officer, described a “planetary crisis” that AI could help solve. Imagine an AI-assisted tool that helps reduce food waste, to name one example from the document, or some future technology that could “expedite decarbonization” by using AI to invent new designs for green tech. But as Microsoft attempts to buoy its reputation as an AI leader in climate innovation, the company is also selling its AI to fossil-fuel companies. Hundreds of pages of internal documents I’ve obtained, plus interviews I’ve conducted over the past year with 15 current and former employees and executives, show that the tech giant has sought to market the technology to companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron as a powerful tool for finding and developing new oil and gas reserves and maximizing their production—all while publicly committing to dramatically reduce emissions. Read the full article.What to Read Next OpenAI’s big reset: “With its new model, the company wants you to think ChatGPT is human,” Matteo Wong writes. Also by Matteo: The real AI threat starts when the polls close. “Whichever candidate loses in November will have an easy scapegoat,” he writes. P.S.Last week, I went viral on X and Threads after using generative AI to replace every icon on my phone’s home screen with a bespoke image of Kermit the Frog. I wrote about the experience—and what it reveals about AI—for The Atlantic.— Damon

Karen Hao reports on the hypocrisy of the tech giant.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Today, The Atlantic published a new investigation by contributing writer Karen Hao detailing Microsoft’s recent engagements with the oil and gas industries. Although the tech giant has spoken of the potential for AI to remake our world for the better and stave off climate change, behind the scenes, it has sought to market the technology to fossil-fuel companies to aid in drilling, among other applications. Karen spoke with 15 current and former Microsoft employees and read through hundreds of internal documents for her report.

Fundamentally, this is a story about tension—between two points of view within Microsoft, and between the supposed promise of a technology and its actual uses in the here and now. Sustainability advocates within Microsoft have clashed with leadership over its pursuit of this business. And although Microsoft has maintained that AI could be used to make fossil-fuel companies more efficient, thereby making their work more sustainable, critics aren’t so sure. “The idea that AI’s climate benefits will outpace its environmental costs is largely speculative,” Karen writes, “especially given that generative-AI tools are themselves tremendously resource-hungry. Within the next six years, the data centers required to develop and run the kinds of next-generation AI models that Microsoft is investing in may use more power than all of India. They will be cooled by millions upon millions of gallons of water. All the while, scientists agree, the world will get warmer, its climate more extreme.”

Illustration of an oil rig with a mouse cursor overlaid. — Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic: Sources: Getty.

Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI

By Karen Hao

Microsoft executives have been thinking lately about the end of the world. In a white paper published late last year, Brad Smith, the company’s vice chair and president, and Melanie Nakagawa, its chief sustainability officer, described a “planetary crisis” that AI could help solve. Imagine an AI-assisted tool that helps reduce food waste, to name one example from the document, or some future technology that could “expedite decarbonization” by using AI to invent new designs for green tech.

But as Microsoft attempts to buoy its reputation as an AI leader in climate innovation, the company is also selling its AI to fossil-fuel companies. Hundreds of pages of internal documents I’ve obtained, plus interviews I’ve conducted over the past year with 15 current and former employees and executives, show that the tech giant has sought to market the technology to companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron as a powerful tool for finding and developing new oil and gas reserves and maximizing their production—all while publicly committing to dramatically reduce emissions.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

OpenAI’s big reset: “With its new model, the company wants you to think ChatGPT is human,” Matteo Wong writes.
Also by Matteo: The real AI threat starts when the polls close. “Whichever candidate loses in November will have an easy scapegoat,” he writes.

P.S.

Last week, I went viral on X and Threads after using generative AI to replace every icon on my phone’s home screen with a bespoke image of Kermit the Frog. I wrote about the experience—and what it reveals about AI—for The Atlantic.

— Damon

Read the full story here.

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Concerned about your data use? Here is the carbon footprint of an average day of emails, WhatsApps and more

Vast datacentres are being built worldwide, amid growing concerns about the environmental costs. So should we all be considering a data diet – if not complete digital sobriety?Nearly 20 years ago, the British mathematician Clive Humby coined a snappy phrase that has turned into a platitude: “data is the new oil”. He wasn’t wrong. We have an insatiable appetite for data, we can’t stop generating it, and, just like oil, it’s turning out to be bad news for the environment.So the Guardian set me a challenge: to try to give a sense of how much data an average person uses in a day, and what the carbon footprint of normal online activity might be. To do that, I tried to tot up the sorts of things I and millions of others do every day, and how that tracks back through the melange of messaging services, social networks, applications and tools, to the datacentres that keep our digital lives going. Continue reading...

Nearly 20 years ago, the British mathematician Clive Humby coined a snappy phrase that has turned into a platitude: “data is the new oil”. He wasn’t wrong. We have an insatiable appetite for data, we can’t stop generating it, and, just like oil, it’s turning out to be bad news for the environment.So the Guardian set me a challenge: to try to give a sense of how much data an average person uses in a day, and what the carbon footprint of normal online activity might be. To do that, I tried to tot up the sorts of things I and millions of others do every day, and how that tracks back through the melange of messaging services, social networks, applications and tools, to the datacentres that keep our digital lives going.My own carbon tally gets off to a bad start, and it is not even my fault. The email from my editor asking me to try to quantify quite how much data a single person uses in a day is itself contributing to my footprint. If the editor took 10 minutes to write the email – likely, given it was quite detailed – and it took me three minutes to read, and if it was sent from a laptop and received on one, then we have generated 17g of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions already, according to estimates by Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre, and the author of How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.My frantic emails to people asking to speak to them for this story pump out more carbon at a prodigious rate. And though 17g of CO2 is insignificant compared with the 384.2m tonnes of net emissions the UK as a whole is responsible for each year, it all adds up.All those emails and videos and games don’t just appear on our screens by magic. Everything we do digitally involves the vast transfer of data through the internet from one place to another, brokered through datacentres. Datacentres are vast premises full of computer servers that store data. The idea behind them is to reduce what the data industry calls “latency”, the time between you typing in a web address or clicking on an app button, and the content you are requesting being delivered to you. Everything on the internet, every link you click, every video you watch, is physically stored in a datacentre somewhere.Digital sprawl … datacentres and industrial complexes in Medemblik, the Netherlands. Photograph: Merten Snijders/Getty ImagesDatacentres are big business, and vast numbers of them are being built around the world. In the UK, Amazon has just announced plans to invest £8bn over the next five years building new datacentres and maintaining those it already has, “supporting 14,000 jobs annually”. That comes on top of £3bn already spent in the UK by Amazon’s cloud computing arm since 2020. Google is spending $1bn on a new centre at a 133,500 sq metre (33-acre) site in Hertfordshire, and at the end of last year Microsoft committed to £2.5bn of investment in the next three years, more than doubling its datacentre footprint in this country.The reason for this is simple: demand is increasing at alarming rates. Americans used 100tn megabytes of wireless data in 2023, a record-breaking increase of 36% on the previous year – that’s enough to download Candy Crush Saga 265bn times.It is a lot of data, and a lot of energy is required to serve that data to us, plus a lot of water to keep all those servers cool. In fact, Ireland, the Netherlands and Singapore are so worried about the energy impact of datacentres that they have imposed moratoria on new developments. When Google announced its environmental impact earlier this year, it revealed its own greenhouse gas emissions had risen 48% in the last five years, and 13% in the last 12 months, largely driven by increased datacentre demand to service its AI needs. Now big tech companies have come up with another solution to try to solve the looming energy crisis: their own nuclear power plants. Microsoft has struck a deal to recommission the Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania, Google recently announced plans to build six or seven new small reactors to meet its anticipated energy needs. There’s no way round it: a steady stream of environmental harm is coming from our everyday actions – activities that we often don’t think about in relation to the target of limiting global heating to below 1.5C.“You will run into this pretty much anywhere during the day,” says Alex de Vries, who researches the carbon footprint of our day-to-day lives at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “Digital applications are so deeply embedded in our lives nowadays, it’s really hard to avoid. The thing is, when you’re using them, it’s not like you have something popping up in the screen telling you, like: ‘Hey, be aware, this activity has this carbon footprint.’”Ethernet and power cables plugged into the back of a computer server machine at a datacentre. Photograph: Ellen Isaacs/AlamyDe Vries also runs the Digiconomist website, which tries to track – where possible – the environmental impact of these things. That “where possible” is an important caveat. “It’s incredibly hard to figure out that information,” says de Vries.In the absence of reliable figures from the companies themselves, educated guesses are often all we can rely on. Case in point: estimates of the proportion of world energy use that the internet makes up range from 3.7% to 10%, depending on who is counting. One estimate by Zero Waste Scotland suggests all our online activity generates an average of 8.62kg of CO2 a week (about 448kg a year), or about 30 miles in an average-sized petrol car. But a German estimate (which also includes the emissions created by the production digital devices themselves) says we expend around twice that, roughly 850kg a year.People struggle with two key problems when trying to wrap their heads around their data usage and resultant carbon impact, says De Vries. One: everything is digital, and therefore not tangible. “If you’re holding a pen and a piece of paper, you can get some idea of what might be necessary to make this product,” he says. “But if you’re using a digital application, what’s really going into that to make all of that happen? A lot of people simply will have no clue what that looks like.”The other issue is that the tech companies are really good at making things work. “You probably don’t even know what is in [an application],” says De Vries. You press the button, and the Netflix series starts.Companies such as Netflix are disarmingly honest about their data usage: if you keep your video quality on “low”, you use a paltry 300MB an hour of data on a streaming service such as Netflix. If you want to watch things in HD, though, you ramp up to 3GB an hour when looking at the most detailed scenes. If you are a movie connoisseur, your 4K streaming uses up to 7GB an hour.But while few would argue we should spend less time in front of streaming services, the environmental impact of all that binge-watching appears to be comparatively low. A 2020 analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that watching an hour of Netflix was equivalent to boiling a kettle once: about 36g of CO2.There are other variables to take into account, though: the energy consumption of the device you are watching on, for example (Netflix says 70% of its viewers use televisions, which are more energy-hungry than mobile phones); or how the electricity you are using is generated (nuclear or wind is less carbon-emitting than coal or gas).If you want to gossip about the latest episode with your friends, that also comes with an environmental toll. The average WhatsApp group chat uses 2.35kg of CO2 a week, Zero Waste Scotland calculated. (To blunt the impact slightly, rely more on emojis – which are stored locally on your device – than reaction gifs, which have to be downloaded afresh from datacentres.) Listening to music online also comes at an environmental cost, although it is estimated that you can stream music for five hours before you will emit more CO2 – 288g – than is involved in making a CD in a case. Like many tech companies, Spotify has committed to reaching net zero emissions, in its case, by 2030.Construction work is continuing in Slough, Berkshire, on two huge datacentres for the Yondr Group, a developer, owner and operator of datacentres. Photograph: Maureen McLean/AlamyBig tech companies buy carbon credits and offsets to try to mitigate the impact of their activity, but it’s often seen as a poor attempt at atonement for the environmental impact they cause. There are also questions about the extent to which firms’ reported datacentre emissions are capturing the whole picture. A recent Guardian analysis found that real emissions between 2020 and 2022 from datacentres owned by the four big tech companies, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, were likely to be 662% higher than officially reported.The tech industry’s warm embrace of generative AI has complicated things even further. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. Type certain searches into Google and you will be given an “AI overview”, as Google calls them, which summarises key information from the results the search engine finds and presents it in a simple set of bullet points, alongside associated links. And you can’t turn it off. “AI Overviews are a core Google Search feature,” the company says.“Generative AI hasn’t necessarily added very many new use cases,” says Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at AI company Hugging Face. “It’s adding more compute and more environmental impacts to existing use cases.” The problem is that we don’t fully know how much. “None of the corporates, and none of the proprietary models, have published any numbers,” she says. De Vries’s research suggests that AI-powered search results use 10 times the power that non-AI searches do.All this is before you get into the conscious use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude chatbot – where you are going to their websites or opening their apps, and taking part. Here, we are also in the dark about how much data, and therefore how much energy and water, generative AI uses. The best information we have is from informed third-party estimates: training GPT-3, a precursor to the current model, used an estimated 5.4m litres of water, according to one academic study, and produced as much CO2 as would be generated by flying between New York and San Francisco 550 times.I recently published a book on AI and as part of that, I have been touring and giving talks about AI’s impact on our world. In my favourite set of slides that I present there is a party trick. To highlight concerns around copyright in generative AI, I ask ChatGPT’s image generator, Dall-E, to produce a depiction of whichever place I’m in, in the style of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.The gimmick always gets a laugh and serves its purpose: it shows how often the AI system has seen that painting by the ability to mimic its brushstrokes. But I always feel guilty. Because each time I do that, whether in Chipping Campden or Vilnius, I’m using data. About halfway through my book tour, I started adding a couple of slides immediately afterwards on the environmental impact of AI.So besides stopping generating bootleg Van Goghs, what should those of us conscious about our environmental footprint do? Luccioni advocates for “digital sobriety”: being mindful about how we use AI. “You don’t need to be using these new AI tools for everything,” she says. “There are applications that are useful, but there’s a lot of cases where you really don’t need them.” The same approach holds true for everything digital: think twice, text once.High scoring? Playing video games at home. Photograph: matrixnis/Getty ImagesYour data dietEstimating how much data your daily activities use is an art not a science, but here are best estimates of how much you are gobbling up online. Listening to a podcast: 20-100MB an hour Watching Netflix: 3GB an hour at HD quality Online shopping: Consider the data size of any images you browse, which can be big, before even thinking of the environmental impact of your delivery WhatsApp text message: 1-5KB a message, on average WhatsApp voice call: 400KB-1MB a minute WhatsApp video call: 2.5-15MB a minute Average pre-AI Google search: 500KB for a text-based search Average post-AI Google search: No one knows … Sending an email: Depends on the size of the message, but about 75KB on average Sending an email with photo attachment: As above, plus the size of the attachment Downloading an album on Spotify: Depends on your audio quality, but around 72MB for an hour-long album Playing a game of Fortnite: Between 45 and 100MB an hour

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Convincing CA voters on ballot props

In the political world, there has been a lot of discussion lately about newspaper endorsements — or non-endorsements — and whether they matter for voters. They don’t for those who pick candidates based on party. But can they influence voters on ballot propositions? CalMatters politics intern Jenna Peterson looks at where California’s six leading newspaper […]

An attendee browses through a voter guide at an event co-hosted by CalMatters and India Currents at Shosha Restaurant in Sunnyvale on Oct. 25, 2024. Photo by Manuel Orbegozo for CalMatters In the political world, there has been a lot of discussion lately about newspaper endorsements — or non-endorsements — and whether they matter for voters. They don’t for those who pick candidates based on party. But can they influence voters on ballot propositions? CalMatters politics intern Jenna Peterson looks at where California’s six leading newspaper editorial boards landed on the 10 propositions on the November ballot. The editorial boards all supported Prop. 3 to enshrine same-sex marriage in the state constitution, and opposed Prop. 33 to enable local governments to expand rent control. Two boards stood alone on two measures: The Southern California News Group was the only one to endorse Prop. 34, which targets a sponsor of rent control measures, while the Sacramento Bee was the lone supporter of Prop. 35 to lock in revenue from a health care plan tax for Medi-Cal patients. Read more about this election’s newspaper endorsements (including our handy chart) in Jenna’s story. In other election news: Prop. 6: The constitutional amendment to limit forced prison labor is flailing in the polls and supporters are running out of time. So they’re pulling out all the stops with a series of events featuring different groups of backers: On Tuesday criminal justice reform advocates, local elected officials and Democratic Assemblymember Liz Ortega of Hayward rallied in Oakland to focus on Prop. 6’s potential impact on rehabilitation and the Latino community. And in Los Angeles today, women, including U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, plan to discuss how the measure will help female inmates. Ballot titles: Every election, there are complaints that the proposition titles are too slanted or just too confusing. But the 10 on California’s ballot are slightly less complicated than the national average, according to a “readability” study from Ballotpedia. California’s props are written at a college reading level, while the average is one grade level higher. And Prop. 32, to increase the minimum wage, had one of the three shortest titles of 159 ballot measures in 41 states. In case you were wondering, the ballot measure with the highest grade level is a $25 million bond issue in Maine and the lowest is a Florida constitutional amendment for the right to hunt and fish. Mail ballots: The U.S. Postal Service is out with a statement that says it’s confident that extra measures will guarantee that ballots arrive in time, and that the performance this year will be at least equal to 2020, when 98% were delivered within three days and 99.7% within five days. Still, the postal service is urging voters to mail ballots before Election Day and at least a week before they’re due in election offices. Reminder: In California, ballots that are postmarked by Nov. 5 and arrive by Nov. 12 will still be counted. The Secretary of State’s office said Tuesday that more than 5 million California voters have signed up to track their ballots. VotingMatters: CalMatters has a new local lookup tool to find out what you’ll be voting on for the November election. We’re also hosting a series of public events across California. The next ones are today at the Belmont and East Palo Alto libraries. Sign up here. There are more ways to read our Voter Guide, including fully translated versions in Chinese and in Korean, as well as in Spanish. Learn about the propositions on TikTok and Instagram. And keep up with CalMatters coverage by signing up for 2024 election emails. Focus on Inland Empire: Each Wednesday, CalMatters Inland Empire reporter Deborah Brennan surveys the big stories from that part of California. Read her newsletter and sign up here to receive it. Other Stories You Should Know GOP plays the wealth card State Sen. Brian Jones at a Senate Appropriations Committee session at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Sept. 1, 2023. Photo by Rahul Lal for CalMatters In their latest attempt to stop a potential gas price hike, Republican legislators are calling out the apparent wealth of members and leaders of the California Air Resources Board. On Nov. 8 the board — 12 of 16 members appointed by the governor — is poised to vote on proposed updates to California’s low-carbon fuel standards, which seek to reduce transportation emissions and air pollution, but will also likely lead to an increase in gas prices. Citing information from publicly available economic interest statements, which elected officials and public employees are required to submit, GOP state Senate leader Brian Jones of San Diego said Tuesday that 10 of the 14 voting members are “considerably wealthier than the average Californian,” and that the board’s executive officer, Steve Cliff, “is a millionaire.” Jones added that Gov. Gavin Newsom and board members can easily afford gas should prices rise. Jones, in a press release: “Should we really be surprised they look down on the struggling middle class and working poor? Their ‘we know what’s best for you’ attitude is infuriating for hardworking Californians who are already scraping by just to fill their tanks at current prices, let alone after this new hike.” A spokesperson for the resource board told CalMatters that six board members aren’t compensated by the state and two receive less than $60,000 per year. The board also issued a statement arguing that its mission focuses on “environmental injustices in overburdened communities.” The statement: “The amended proposal is estimated to save Californians by increasing options for consumers while protecting public health and saving residents $5 billion in health costs by reducing the impacts of pollution.” And in case you’re wondering: Jones’ $147,446 annual salary as a legislative leader is about $52,000 more than the median household income in California. His own economic interest form also indicates Jones received between $1,000 to $10,000 last year in income as a partner of an interior decorating business. Look up other legislators on the Fair Political Practices Commission’s site. Are workers safe from bird flu? Raul (Che) Pedroza Cedillo milks cows at Frank Konyn Dairy Inc. in Escondido on April 16, 2020. Photo by Ariana Drehsler, AFP via Getty Images Two years since bird flu hit California poultry farms, the virus’ new target, cattle, poses a threat to dairy farmers and workers, writes CalMatters health reporter Kristen Hwang. Since August, there have been 178 confirmed bird flu cases at California dairies. In Tulare County, the nation’s biggest milk producer, the state’s first human cases were reported in early October. To date, California has reported 16 human cases of bird flu — nearly all of the country’s cattle-to-human transmissions. So far, no workers have been hospitalized; they have reported flu-like symptoms and pink eye. Local health departments and farms have distributed more than 1 million pieces of personal protective equipment. But worker advocates say California isn’t doing enough to protect dairy workers. Only 39 people have been tested for the bird flu strain infecting cattle, according to the state’s public health department. One other wrinkle: A spokesperson for the United Farm Workers union said workers often avoid testing because they can’t afford the 10-day isolation period with no pay if they are positive. Learn more about how bird flu is impacting dairy farms in Kristen’s story. In other health news: Attorney General Rob Bonta has reached a temporary agreement with a Catholic hospital in Eureka that allegedly refused to provide an emergency abortion, Kristen reports. Providence St. Joseph Hospital agrees to comply with a state law banning hospitals from denying emergency care. And lastly: Community land trusts Laurel Lamont, the founder of the housing organization Upward Community, in front of the apartment complex where she resides in Temecula on Oct. 11, 2024. Photo by Kristian Carreon for CalMatters Community land trusts are mushrooming across California as a way to preserve affordable housing, despite a state fund not getting a dime out the door. Find out about a program in Temecula from CalMatters Inland Empire reporter Deborah Brennan. California Voices CalMatters columnist Dan Walters: The California Air Resources Board’s vote on low-carbon fuel rules is going to be highly contentious given the complexities, uncertainties and anxieties surrounding gas prices. Two views on California biofuel rules: The state must proceed with the rule changes — otherwise dairy farmers could leave the state, writes Sal Rodriguez, a dairy farm manager in Fresno County. The proposed changes will burden drivers and subsidize questionable types of fuel, writes Danny Cullenward, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. Other things worth your time: Some stories may require a subscription to read. Californians head to NV and AZ to knock on doors for Harris // Los Angeles Times Newsom announces $830M in homelessness spending — with strings // KQED Crush of spending in CA, NY is political penance for Democrats // Politico Billionaire VC unloads on Musk and Trump at SF tech conference // The San Francisco Standard LA County wants to crack down on corruption. Is it worth $21M? // Los Angeles Times Egging incident haunts CA state Assembly candidate // Politico USAA raises home insurance rates for 265,000 Californians // San Francisco Chronicle World’s largest wildlife crossing spans CA freeway // Los Angeles Times Tech companies trim hundreds more Bay Area jobs, yet layoff pace slows // The Mercury News SF mayoral hopeful Lurie turns family fortune into political gold // The San Francisco Standard Feds to spend $42M to buy out Palos Verdes landslide homes // Los Angeles Times

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What to Do With SF’s Great Highway? Here’s the Skinny on Prop. K.

San Francisco voters will decide this year whether to authorize the Great Highway to go car-free, and maybe become a park. The post What to Do With SF’s Great Highway? Here’s the Skinny on Prop. K. appeared first on Bay Nature.

Proposition K would start a process that could, about a year later, permanently close a large section of San Francisco’s Great Highway to car traffic so that the city could later turn it into a park. The measure would not fund the design or creation of the park. The measure would affect a section of roadway called the Upper Great Highway, a 2-mile stretch along Ocean Beach on the city’s western edge, from Lincoln Way to Sloat Boulevard. Proposition K marks the latest chapter in a saga that began early in the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, the Board of Supervisors closed the Upper Great Highway to vehicle traffic so that residents could walk and bike there while social distancing, to slow the disease’s spread — a move that was widely popular. In 2022, the board approved a pilot project that kept the street closed to cars on weekends but open to them during weekdays. The pilot project is set to end at the close of 2025, at which point the board would decide whether to change the road’s use. If passed, Proposition K would decide the Upper Great Highway’s fate instead. Listen to a summary of what this ballot measure would do. Support Five San Francisco supervisors co-sponsored Proposition K’s placement on the ballot: Myrna Melgar, Dean Preston, Rafael Mandelman, Matt Dorsey and Joel Engardio, who has been the most vocal of the measure’s advocates. Engardio represents the Sunset District, which contains the Upper Great Highway. Proposition K is a “once-in-a-century opportunity” to transform the road into an iconic oceanside park that could bring the Sunset to life, Engardio has said. Proponents say that the highway’s pilot project has been a success, drawing an average of 4,000 visitors per weekend day. Making the road a permanent park could boost business opportunities, reduce automobile pollution in the area and create more safe space for pedestrians and cyclists to enjoy the beach, they say. The park would also increase coastal access for people with mobility challenges, such as wheelchair users and those with physical disabilities. Proposition K has secured support from prominent political figures, including Mayor London Breed, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, state Sen. Scott Wiener, BART Board director Janice Li and former District 1 Supervisor Eric Mar. Friends of Great Highway Park, a group that hosts events and activities on the roadway during weekends, has advocated loudly for the proposition. Other supporters include a diverse array of organizations focused on urban planning, environmentalism and local politics, like Livable City, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Sierra Club, SPUR, the San Francisco Democratic Party, San Francisco YIMBY and GrowSF. Opposition Since the proposition’s announcement, it has divided residents on San Francisco’s west side. Opponents expressed frustration that Engardio did not consult them before deciding to place it on the ballot. They argue that it’s unfair for voters citywide to decide their neighborhood’s future. Opponents say the Upper Great Highway is vital for north-south travel, and permanently closing it to vehicles could worsen traffic and divert it into residential areas, as well as lengthen commutes — a recent study by the city’s transportation agency found a minor potential impact on commutes. Some merchants worry that these inconveniences would discourage long-time customers from continuing to patronize them. District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan represents the Richmond District, home to many Great Highway commuters in the city’s northwest. She opposes the ballot measure, arguing that it’s too extreme; she has proposed converting only half the road into recreational space and keeping the rest of it open to cars. Some prominent local groups representing Chinese and other Asian American residents oppose Proposition K, including the Edwin M. Lee Asian Pacific Democratic Club, Chinese American Democratic Club and Chinatown Merchants United Association of San Francisco. Aaron Peskin, Board of Supervisors president and a mayoral candidate, also opposes Proposition K, calling it divisive and an “unfunded mandate.” Mayoral candidates Daniel Lurie and Mark Farrell oppose Proposition K, too. Other detractors include Open The Great Highway, a group formed to oppose the road’s closure, and several neighborhood groups, including Planning Association for the Richmond, Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods and Neighborhoods United SF. What it would do Proposition K would not immediately and permanently close the Upper Great Highway to cars and transform it into a park. Instead, the measure’s passage would begin a long bureaucratic process, involving numerous local and state government agencies, that would lead to that outcome. Because the measure would not create funding for the park, officials would have to find a way to pay for it. If voters passed Proposition K, then the San Francisco Planning Department would propose changes to the land-use rules governing the Upper Great Highway so that it could become a park. The Board of Supervisors would publicly review that proposal, and residents and concerned citizens could attend hearings and offer comment. The board would likely approve the proposal, as rejecting it could be seen as “not implementing the will of the voters,” said Jonathan Goldberg, legislative aide to Supervisor Engardio. That would be “unheard of,” he added, and could expose the city to risk of lawsuit. To proceed, the city would also need approval from state regulators. At that point — possibly 10 months to a year after Proposition K’s passage, at the soonest — the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department could start designing the new park, a process that might take several years, Goldberg said. In the meantime, the department could apply to close the road to vehicle traffic permanently, so that it could be used entirely for recreation. The Recreation and Parks Department did not respond to requests for comment about its role in implementing Proposition K. Cost The San Francisco Controller’s Office analyzed what it would cost City Hall to manage the Upper Great Highway after permanently closing it to car traffic — a scenario that Proposition K’s passage would enable, but not immediately bring about. The office’s analysis did not include the costs associated with obtaining regulatory approval for the closure. It also omitted design and construction costs for a new park. By closing the Upper Great Highway to car traffic, the city would save an estimated $1.5 million in one-time infrastructure expenses, Deputy Controller ChiaYu Ma wrote in the office’s analysis. That factors in $4.3 million that the city would avoid spending on canceled road construction and traffic signal replacements, offset by $860,000 to $2.7 million in new costs for traffic calming measures and traffic lights to divert vehicles from the Upper Great Highway to alternative routes. Keeping the road closed to cars may cause increased expenses for trash collection and other operations, Ma said. But overall, the city would save $350,000 to $700,000 each year in reduced road and traffic light maintenance, as well as sand removal. Campaign finance As of Oct. 7, the “Yes on K” campaign committee had raised $608,553, according to data from the San Francisco Ethics Commission. Much of that money has come from leaders in tech and finance, including $350,000 from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; $75,000 from Emmett Shear, a partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator; $50,000 from Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, a public blockchain platform developer; and $49,900 from the Benjamin Spero, managing director of Spectrum Equity, an investment firm. The “No on K” campaign committee had raised $110,645. Matt Boschetto, a candidate in the District 7 supervisor race, created the committee. By a quirk of election laws, the measure-focused committee lacks the per-person $500 contribution limit that applies to committees focused on getting candidates into office. Boschetto cannot legally use the funds from “No on K” for his supervisorial campaign. Boschetto’s father, Michael Boschetto, had contributed $50,000 to “No on K,” while the Boschetto Family Partnership added $10,000 and Matt Boschetto himself gave $5,000. Anti-Proposition K group Open the Great Highway is the target of an ethics complaint, which alleges that it fundraised without first registering as a political action committee. History and context Proposition K is highly controversial. Both supporters and opponents have contested how it is presented to voters, from its title on the ballot to its official financial analysis. It has been the focus of numerous political demonstrations and media roundtables, and candidates in many supervisorial races have invoked the issue in their campaigns. In 2022, San Franciscans considered a ballot measure that would have ended the Upper Great Highway pilot program and allowed cars back on the road seven days a week, as well as let cars resume driving on John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the measure, with 65.11% voting against it. Closing the Upper Great Highway could leave the city’s Chinese American community feeling isolated, said Supervisor Chan at a recent debate on Proposition K, hosted by local radio station KALW. Chan, the only Asian American on the Board of Supervisors, said that Chinese residents frequently use the thoroughfare to travel between the Richmond and Sunset districts, both of which have historically served as cultural hubs for the community. But, of all drivers who take the Upper Great Highway, just 5% use it to commute between those districts, according to a 2021 study of pre-pandemic traffic data. Most drivers use it to get to the South Bay, the study found. The section of road south of the Upper Great Highway, which is called the Great Highway Extension and connects the Sunset District to Daly City, has already been slated for closure due to coastal erosion. The Upper Great Highway faces a moderate risk of erosion, with its southern portion particularly affected. Votes needed to pass Proposition K requires a simple majority of “yes” votes to pass.

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Government

Land Use

Rallying around graduate student parents

From helping new parents to coordinating play dates and sharing information, MIT students who are parents are there for one another.

Last month, the MIT Office of Graduate Education celebrated National Student Parent Month with features on four MIT graduate student parents. These students’ professional backgrounds, experiences, and years at MIT highlight aspects of diversity in our student parent population.Diana Grass is one of MIT’s most involved graduate student parents. Grass is a third-year PhD student in medical engineering and medical physics in the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, and the mother of two children. As co-founder and co-president of MIT’s Graduate First Generation and Low-Income student group (GFLI@MIT), Grass is a strong advocate for first-generation grad students and student parents.Fifth-year civil and environmental engineering PhD student Fabio Castro is a new father. Prior to MIT, he was an engineer and logistics manager at an energy firm in Brazil, and volunteered with Doctors without Borders in South Sudan. He and his wife, Amanda, welcomed their daughter, Sofia, last fall.First-year MIT Sloan MBA student Elizabeth Doherty shared her experience as a career changer and mother of two young children. Doherty began her career as a lower elementary school teacher, working in both public and private schools. After switching gears to work as a senior digital learning specialist at Bain & Co., she recognized the importance of company culture, which led her to pursue a master’s degree in business administration.Matthew Webb is working on his second MIT degree as a second-year PhD student in the Center for Transportation and Logistics. He shared the ways in which his grad student experience is different now as a father of three, than when he was a master’s student in the Operations Research program without children.All four student parents came from different professional backgrounds and departments, but one theme was consistent in all their stories: the support of the MIT families community. From pitching in to help new parents to coordinating play dates and sharing information, MIT’s student parents are there for one another.For Doherty, family-friendliness was a top priority when she selected an MBA program. MIT stood out to her because of the family housing, the on-campus childcare, and the opportunities to meet other student families. Doherty felt affirmed in her decision to attend MIT when she enrolled and the MIT Sloan School of Management reached out with a welcoming note and a gift. “It highlighted how thoughtful MIT has been about creating a strong infrastructure for student parents,” she says.Grass points to the importance her family placed on moving into an on-campus residence, as her family lacked community in their previous off-campus home. This move to MIT’s campus added convenience to the family’s daily routine, and helped them meet other student families.Before returning to MIT for his PhD, Webb was unaware of the support offered to graduate student families. He was pleasantly surprised to discover the Office of Graduate Education’s resources and programming for families through an email his first semester. His wife Rachel and their three children also take advantage of the activities hosted by MIT Spouses and Partners Connect while Webb goes to class. Some favorites have included ice cream and bubble tea outings, “crafternoons,” and going on a tour of Fenway Park.Castro remembers how his family housing neighbors showed up for him and his family when they needed it most. In anticipation of their first child’s birth, Castro and his wife, Amanda, arranged for Amanda’s parents to come to Cambridge to help them in the early weeks as first-time parents. When these plans unexpectedly fell through, their community in Westgate stepped up. For weeks, other MIT families came by to teach them how to care for their newborn, and dropped off meals at their door.He was touched by these gestures — the support was a huge benefit of choosing to live on campus, and something that would not have happened had he lived in an off-campus apartment. “It’s something I’ll never forget,” Castro says.

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Culture

Education

Power-Thirsty AI Turns to Mothballed Nuclear Plants. Is That Safe?

As Microsoft strikes a deal to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island to power AI, nuclear specialists weigh in on the unprecedented process

Microsoft announced on 20 September that it had struck a 20-year deal to purchase energy from a dormant nuclear power plant that will be brought back online. And not just any plant: Three Mile Island, the facility in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, that was the site of the worst-ever nuclear accident on US soil when a partial meltdown of one of its reactors occurred in 1979.The move, which symbolizes technology giants’ need to power their growing artificial-intelligence (AI) efforts, raises questions over how shuttered nuclear plants can be restarted safely — not least because Three Mile Island isn’t the only plant being brought out of retirement.Palisades Nuclear Plant, an 805-megawatt facility in Covert, Michigan, was shut down in May 2022. But the energy company that owns it, Holtec International, based in Jupiter, Florida, plans to reopen it. This reversal in the facility’s fortunes has been bolstered by a US$1.5-billion conditional loan commitment from the US Department of Energy (DoE), which sees nuclear plants — a source of low-carbon electricity — as a way of helping the country to meet its ambitious climate goals. The Palisades plant is on track to reopen in late 2025.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.“It’s the first time something like this has been attempted, that we’re aware of, worldwide,” says Jason Kozal, director of the reactor safety division at a regional office of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Naperville, Illinois, and the co-chair of a regulatory panel overseeing the restart of Palisades.Here, Nature talks to nuclear specialists about what it will take to restart these plants and whether more are on the way as the world’s demand for AI grows.A change in fortunesSince 2012, more than a dozen nuclear plants have been shut down in the United States, in some cases as a result of unfavourable economics. Less cost-effective plants — such as those with only a single working reactor — struggled to remain profitable in states with deregulated electricity markets and widely varying prices. Three Mile Island, owned by the utility company Constellation Energy in Baltimore, Maryland, is a prime example. Today, 54 US plants remain in operation, running a total of 94 reactors.Nuclear energy, which accounts for about 9% of the world’s electricity, has seen some resurgence internationally, but is also competing with other energy sources, including renewables. After the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Japan suspended operations at all of its 48 remaining nuclear plants, but these are gradually being brought back online, in part to cut dependence on gas imports. By contrast, Germany announced a phase-out of its nuclear plants in 2011, and shut down its last three in 2023.In the United States, nuclear energy’s fortunes might be turning as technology companies race to build enormous, energy-gobbling data centres to support their AI systems and other applications while somehow fulfilling their climate pledges. Microsoft, for instance, has committed to being carbon negative by 2030.“It’s further confirmation of the value of nuclear, and, if the deal is right — if the price is right — then it makes business sense, as well,” says Jacopo Buongiorno, the director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.A new startThis isn’t the first time that the United States has brought a powered-down reactor back online. In 1985, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility company, took the reactors at its Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Athens, Alabama, offline. After years of refurbishment, they were brought back online, with the final reactor restarted in 2007.The cases of Palisades and Three Mile Island are different, however. When those plants closed, their then-owners made legal statements that the facilities would be shut down, even though their operating licenses were still active. Three Mile Island, which will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center under the proposed restart, shut down its single remaining functional reactor in 2019.Because the plants were slated for shutdown and safety checks were therefore stopped, regulators and companies must now navigate a complex licensing, oversight and environmental-assessment process to reverse the plants’ decommissioning.Safety checks will be needed to ensure, among other things, that the plants can operate securely once uranium fuel rods have been replaced in their reactors. When these plants were decommissioned, their radioactive fuel was removed and stored, so the facilities no longer needed to adhere to many exacting technical specifications, says Jamie Pelton, also a co-chair of the Palisades restart panel, and a deputy director at the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in Rockville, Maryland.It will be no small feat to reinstate those safety regulations: to meet the standards, infrastructure will need to be inspected carefully. According to Buongiorno, any metallic components in the plants that have corroded since the shutdowns, including wires and cables used in instrumentation and controls, will need to be replaced.The plants’ turbine generators, which make electricity from the steam produced as the plants’ fuel rods heat up water, will also get a close look. After sitting dormant for years, a turbine could develop defects within its shaft or corrosion along its blades that would require refurbishment. In the case of Palisades, the NRC announced on 18 September that the plant’s steam generators would need further testing and repair, following inspections conducted by Holtec.Nuclear’s prospectsAs the plants near their restart dates, their operators will also have to contend with a challenge faced by even fully operational plants: the need to source fresh nuclear fuel. US nuclear utility companies have long counted on the international market to buy much of the necessary raw yellowcake uranium and the services that separate and enrich uranium-235, the isotope used in nuclear reactors’ fuel rods. Russia has been a major international supplier of these services, even after the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, because US and European sanctions have not targeted nuclear fuel. But to minimize its reliance on Russia, the United States is building up its own supply chain, with the DoE offering $3.4 billion to buy domestically enriched uranium.There probably won’t be too many other restarts of mothballed nuclear plants in the United States, however, even as demand for low-carbon electricity grows. Not every US plant that has been shut down is necessarily in good enough condition to be easily refurbished — and the idea of reopening some of those would meet with too much resistance. As an example, Buongiorno points to New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, which was closed in 2021. The plant’s proximity to New York City had long provoked criticism from nuclear-safety advocates.But that doesn’t mean that all of these sites will remain unused. One option is to build advanced reactors — including large reactors with upgraded safety features and small modular reactors with innovative designs — on sites where old nuclear plants once stood, to take advantage of existing transmission lines and infrastructure. “We might see interest in the US in building more of these large reactors, whether that’s fuelled by data centres or some other applications,” Buongiorno adds. “Utilities and customers are exploring this at the moment.”This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 30, 2024.

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Wake Up People!

Environmental activists have been camping in Sodros for more than four months with the purpose of stopping the trees from being cut down. In the past few days Chinese company CRBC workers have been showing up at the site accompanied by the police and gendarmerie forces. The activists have been requesting to see the permits and the documentation for the work they are planning to conduct from the CRBC workers. The CRBC workers haven’t shown any of the permits. Also, the work has begun without a construction board being clearly visible, which is mandatory by law.

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The Custodians of the Andean Gold

In the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, more than 3 800 meters above sea level, live alpaca and vicunia breeders. Quechua and Aymara families protect their animals live off of the sale of the animals’ fiber. Gold mining is another activity that predates the Conquest and is widespread among families living in the border area between Peru and Bolivia. The difficult compatibility on the same territory of these two production activities increases the need for environmental protection and workers' rights. It has become indispensable to support producers so that this activity does not disappear with the migration of native peoples, abandoning traditions and animals.

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