April 23, 2022

Weekend Reads: Meta's AI Sustainable Tech Strategy; Tackling the Carbon Impact of Shipping

It's the weekend! Kick back and catch up with these must-read articles from around the web.

Renewables are growing — but a backlog of projects is holding up a greener grid (Grist) From where Joe Rand stands, there’s good news and there’s bad news about renewable energy development in the United States — and it’s hard to tell which is more significant. Rand is a senior scientific engineering associate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he studies almost every facet of renewable energy, from policy and costs to public acceptance and other barriers to deployment.

How to save the planet from the largest vehicles on Earth (Vox) Last year, the world’s largest container ship set sail. The gargantuan Ever Ace, owned by Taiwanese firm Evergreen Marine, is 1,312 feet long, 206 feet wide, and can fit 23,992 20-foot shipping containers. Imagine the Empire State Building tipped over on its side and scooting along at 25 miles per hour, and you’ll get an idea of the scale. Of course, moving an enormous vehicle like this demands a massive power plant: a towering 11-cylinder two-stroke engine yielding 95,000 horsepower. The stroke of its pistons is almost 12 feet. And like most cargo ships, it runs on one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet.

How Meta is using AI to focus on more sustainable technology (SiliconANGLE) Meta Platforms Inc., formerly Facebook, which has been working to use machine learning technologies to combat climate change and increase the efficiency of industrial systems, today outlined a number of approaches it’s taking using artificial intelligence to tackle these issues and develop elegant engineering solutions. The Open Catalyst Project represents one of these initiatives, a partnership between Meta AI and Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Chemical Engineering, which helps bring together artificial intelligence researchers to design new ML models to predict new chemical reactions for energy storage.

When We Lean Into Clean Energy, Rural America Thrives (USDA) When rural communities lean into clean energy, the path to economic prosperity is clear. Cleaner power options like solar and electric provide new market opportunities for producers and small businesses. They reduce energy costs for consumers and supports good-paying jobs in rural America. USDA Rural Development programs have demonstrated strong success in the fight against climate change while helping to lower energy costs and increase efficiency for people across the nation.

61% of People Believe Bots Will Succeed Where Humans Have Failed with Corporate Sustainability (Oracle) People around the world are demanding more progress on sustainability and social efforts and are looking to businesses to step up,  according to a new study by Oracle and Pamela Rucker, CIO Advisor, Instructor for Harvard Professional Development. The "No Planet B" study surveyed more than 11,000 consumers and business leaders across 15 countries and found that people are fed up with the lack of progress society is making towards sustainability and social initiatives, want businesses to turn talk into action, and believe technology can help businesses succeed where people have failed.

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