Working for Peace on Earth and Peace with Earth since 1952
Should AI Be Abolished?
For multiple reasons
That's what podcaster Bill Weinberg advocates in his latest audio.
The New York Times has a piece "A.I.’s Insatiable Appetite for Energy" which shows that A.I. like that other technological "marvel" Bitcoin is an immense energy hog. "it’s often leading to an uptick in planet-warming emissions, and there’s no end in sight." says the piece. Later the author David Gelles writes, "One peer-reviewed study suggested A.I. could make up 0.5 percent of worldwide electricity use by 2027, or roughly what Argentina uses in a year. Analysts at Wells Fargo suggested that U.S. electricity demand could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven in part to A.I." He wrote "Google’s emissions last year were 48 percent higher than in 2019, largely because of data centers," this from a company that claimed it would get to net zero by 2030. One result is that the coal-burning electric power plants in West Virginia that were slated to be retired are going to be keep pouring global warming gases into the air in order to power data centers in Virginia.
Oh but the amazing things that AI will create will more than make up for the extra energy load, blah, blah, blah. Thus say Bill Gates and the other AI flacks.
More details about AI's massive electrical needs are in this detailed, but readable, article in Scientific American. It says, "In the worst-case scenario, if we decide we’re going to do everything on AI, then every data center is going to experience effectively a 10-fold increase in energy consumption."
Then there's last year's concern that AI could abolish humanity. See at least the very creepy video at the start of this June '23 New York Times article. The article notes a letter written by hundreds of people well-known in the field of artificial intelligence that said, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the one-sentence statement said.
It was no joke. They put the danger on the scale of pandemics and nuclear war. And nothing much has been done in response. We go whistling past the graveyard.
Note to speak of deep-fakes, ultra-plagiarism and the rest that makes all the internet suspect.
The problem is capitalism. In that chaotic system if something seems like it will make someone a lot of money it will be tried by lots and lots of people. Safety be damned.
Unions supporting the Sept 17, 2023 climate March
For multiple reasons
The UFT is Endorsing the Big Climate March set for September 17 in New York City
Hope Your Union Will, Too
The 100,000 strong United Federation of Teachers of New York City (AFT) has endorsed the big climate march and rally set for September 17 before the United Nations. The world is in a pretty desperate situation. For all the “green” talk, the amount of greenhouse gases in the air keeps on rising.
The effects are coming sooner than expected, a fire-storm on an island (Maui), a huge increase in the fires in the Canadian forests, heat domes stretching from one coast to the other, one hundred degree ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida.
The good done when billions of dollars are spent out to help the climate have been neutralized by a flood of new permits for fossil fuel drilling. The Biden Administration in its first two years gave out more oil and gas drilling permits than did Trump.
Our real hope is for masses of people to go into the streets to demand a halt to the march to climate catastrophe.
See the first list of unions supporting the rally here along with full reasons for their actions. As you’ll see on the page you post to logistics@labor4sustainability.comto tell the organizers that your union is supporting the effort.
Tickets for a bus to the rally from Hartford are being organized here
More about the national effort on this site.
Framework for opinion pieces and letters
For multiple reasons
Find out to whom to send the op-ed pieces. For instance for the Hearst papers in CT you can send to letters@nhregister.com and direct them to Editorial Page Editor Hugh Bailey.
Keep the pieces short, say no more than 700 words.
Try to include something personal, how climate collapse is affecting you, something you’ve actually seen, etc.
If you reference a fact that is not common knowledge, insert a link to an article about the subject
When you send in your opinion piece add your full name, street address and phone number. That’s for them to call you to confirm that you actually wrote the article.
Some Points You May Want to Make
Climate Collapse is Accelerating (See David Wallace-Wells on that)
We only Have a few years to drastically cut back greenhouse gas emissions (till 2030)
The COP 27 climate conference in Egypt was a failure. That’s why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is convening a “UN Climate Ambition Summit” to get world leaders to phase-out fossil fuel.
We absolutely do not trust these leaders to do the right thing so we need to gather in the tens of thousands to put pressure on them. That’s why were marching to the U.N. This site is organizing the overall event: https://www.endfossilfuels.us/
There are solutions, but corporate interests are sabotaging efforts to make the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Some things that should be done:
Stop all exploration for fossil fuels.
Stop investing in useless schemes like carbon capture and clean coal.
Stop construction/expansion of oil/gas wells
Ration use of fossil fuels.
Drastically cut back on the land used for animal agriculture
Rewild enormously.
Have governments stop using gas-powered equipment for lawncare
Let governments show how much greenhouse gases are released by the military for each military operation or training exercise.
Time to Ban Heavily Polluting small gas engines
For multiple reasons
January 2022 A number of people concerned with this issue in CT met on zoom. If you're interested contact office@pepeace.org
1/20/22 We're losing ground. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were 17.4% below 2005 levels in 2021, up from 22.2% below 2005 levels in 2020 (UN scientists tell us we MUST CUT emissions by 50% by the year 2030.)
12/2/21 PEP sent a letter about this to each member of the CT legislature.
12/2/21 Article on this issue by PEP Administrator Stanley Heller published in Hearst papers today.
see our archive of articles in the next panel below
Archive of Articles about Polluting small gas engines
Multiple Problems
Global Warming Gases
This highly technical EPA report of 2015 says that small gas engines cause 4% of US CO2 emissions (see page 7). That sounds small at first hearing , but considering we're in a life and death battle to curb CO2 it means this effort has an important greenhouse gas dimension.
Health Effects of Exhausts
COVID and California's Ban - New Haven Register Jan. 14, 2022 - " To wit, there’s an ongoing study at Harvard University illustrating how one cubic millimeter rise of PM 2.5 corresponds to an 8% rise in COVID-19 deaths "
Very good article from 2017 "Noisy, But That's Not All" which has a lot about the effects on the workers from noise and fumes.
Dangers to Lawncare Workers - " Perhaps most worrisome, the gas engines release high concentrations of microscopic ultrafine particles, as recently confirmed in tests commissioned by FairWarning. "
The Future of Leafblowers - James Fallows - 2019 - The Atlantic - "As time went on, the earplugs-plus-headphones protection rig became standard writing gear. That was because the use of gas-powered leaf blowers in my Washington, D.C., neighborhood evolved from a few hours a week during the leafiest stretch of autumn to most days of the week, most weeks of the year,"
According an article in The Hill, "Gas-powered equipment with small off-road engines produce a similar amount of smog-causing pollution as light-duty passenger cars create in California, according to the Times, which is why lawmakers are working to curb emissions that come from those tools.
Small engines in California Fact Sheet One hour use of a lawn mower makes as much smog forming chemicals as driving a 2017 auto 300 miles
2017 Yale Medical school professor calls for leaf blower ban “Thirty minutes of leaf blowing stirs up 5 pounds of this material and this includes viruses, pesticides, herbicides, pollen.”
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/california-bill-takes-aim-scourge-gas-powered-leaf-blowers
"A CARB (California Air Resources Board) exposure study found that operators of gas-powered devices could “potentially double their current cancer risk from carcinogens emitted by gas equipment.”
Washington Post "How Bad are Leaf Blowers?" 2103 "More important, about 30 percent of the fuel the engine uses fails to undergo complete combustion; as a result, the engine emits a number of air pollutants."
Back in 2011 the auto site Edmunds reported, "The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a[ Ford-150] Raptor." One reason is that an auto or truck has a catalytic converter and other things to lower pollution while a lawn mower or leaf blower has none.
An older EPA technical report with some interesting things about string trimmers.
Noise
From 2014 Dangers of Leaf Blowers. "Gas-powered leaf blowers can emit noise that’s above 90 decibels"
Harvard Study note lawnmower sound can be at the level of a jackhammer
Do We Have to Gather all the Fallen Leaves?
First let's Kill Off All the Leaf Blowers - New York Times October 25, 2021
Turn Off the Blower and Let the Leaves Be - Jason Munshi-South
Lawn History [Grassy lawns were an invention of 17th century aristocrats. Before that meadows were for sheep and goats.] In the future we'll have to redefine our ideas of gardening and go back to sensibly using hand rakes, and growing less grass. And we desperately need to rewild land to lock in carbon.
America's Killer Lawns - Margaret Renkl, NYT 2020 " The global insect die-off is so precipitous that, if the trend continues, there will be no insects left a hundred years from now. That’s a problem for more than the bugs themselves: Insects are responsible for pollinating roughly 75 percent of all flowering plants "
Meet an Ecologist Who Works for God -and Against Lawns - NYT
Campaigns
Get governors, college presidents, Board of Education and the like to stop using gas-powered machines on the land they control. Click here for ideas.
The Successful Campaign in DC - Leafblowers banned as of 1/1/22 James Fallows " Noise, they have come to understand, is the secondhand smoke of this era."
California is moving fast to ban the use of small gas engines. It will start banning the sale as soon as 2024. In Palm Springs gas powered leaf blowers were outlawed in 2019
The text of the new California law
Petition in New Haven to get rid of Leaf Blowers
In Palm Springs gas powered leaf blowers were outlawed in 2019
Excuses
CT Post 10/16/21 Why CT is NOT looking to imitate the California law
Tweet a Message to Gov Lamont no matter where you live
The quickest way to send CT's Governor a message is to send him a tweet or to retweet something @govnedlamont Add in the tweet the handle of his environmental commissioner Katie Dykes by including @KScharfDykes The message is "Don't Allow the Gas Plant to Be Built" (see articles below if you don't know about this issue.)
Or go to Katie Dykes twitter feed @KScharfDykes and reply to any of her recent tweets. Add one of the memes from the twitter feed @ctclimate. Add @ctclimate @pepeace to your tweet so we can see if we're having an effect with our appeals.
Again you don't have to live in CT to do this. The world has only one atmosphere. If we keep flooding it with greenhouse gases the effects will be felt in Houston, Shanghai, Capetown and everywhere else.
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Stop Another Fracked Gas Plant in CT
Stopping the "shovel ready" Killing plant is an absolute priority. It seems every day we get worse and worse news about climate chaos. 2020 started with catastrophic bushfires in Australia. Southern Florida in mid-April had temperatures they only have in the hottest days of July.
The business community and CT politicians patted themselves on the back at the end of July 2019 for opening a natural gas power plant in Bridgeport that is to replace a coal-burning plant. The governor said we’re going to have “clean burning fuel for the next 40 years”. Unfortunately, that’s completely false.
It’s not “clean” and there’s no way that Bridgeport plant will run for 40 years. “Clean” gives the idea that emissions from the plant are harmless. True, a gas plant won’t bathe the immediate neighborhood in mercury, sulfur and coal dust pollutants, but there’s more to consider.
One dangerous gas will be coming out the Bridgeport power plant five times more than currently. It’s the global warming gas CO2. Over the years 2016-2018 the EPA says an average or 295, 000 short tons of the gas came out of the Bridgeport coal plant each year. However the new natural gas plant will send out 1.6 million tons a year! This on top of the gas the Towantic Energy Center in Oxford, CT that started belching out CO2 in 2018.
While the U.N. scientists are giving a doomsday warning that we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, Bridgeport’s will increase its contribution by 5 times.
Up in the rural northeast of CT the movers and shakers and planning to build an even worse plant in Killingly. The town which already hosts the Lakeville Road Generating Company which poured 2.3 million tons of CO2 into the air in 2018 is slated to allow a company to break ground on another plant which will send another 2 million tons of CO2 into the air.
By the way the term “natural gas” is misleading. All the fossil fuels come from nature. Natural gas is almost entirely the substance called methane, CH4, and methane has an interesting property. It’s a much worse global warming gas than CO2. Over a hundred years its 25 times worse. The problem is we don’t have 100 years. We have to go to zero on global warming gas emissions by 2050. In the short run methane traps heat 84 times as does carbon dioxide.
Yes, you say, but the plants are burning the methane, not releasing it into the air and burning methane produces less CO2 than burning coal or oil. Correct, but there’s another problem. The methane that leaks into the air during the production and transport process. An article in the Wall Street Journal 8/8/19 tells us “2.3% of the natural gas produced in the U.S. escapes directly into the atmosphere due in part to leaky equipment or intentional discharges”. It’s the equivalent of burning 355 billion poundsof coal!
So natural gas plants pollute directly by producing CO2 and indirectly by getting their fuel from a system that leaks methane enormously. There’s also a much lesser effect of the warming of waterthe 50,000 to 400,000 gallons of water the Killingly plant will use a day for cooling steam.
The fossil fuel companies are doing everything to keep us ignorant, but at some point there’s going to be a traumatic catastrophe. Then warming and its many, many effects will become so obvious to all but the most criminally deluded that there will be a last-ditch effort to stop it. All the methane burning plants will be seized and dismantled brick by brick. And this will come long before 40 years from now.
And get this. CT doesn’t need the Killingly plant to produce electricity for CT needs. We’re getting more efficient. We’re using more solar. So the juice is all going out of state.
Explosions
Another thing about methane that should be mentioned is that sometimes it blows up. In 2018, dozens of houses exploded in Massachusetts in the Merrimack Valley. Gas had to be shut off to more than 8,000 homes. In 2010 in California, a pipeline, exploded killing eight. In that same year, Connecticut had its own fatalities from a natural gas explosion in Middletown that killed eight. Add to that the cancers and other bad health effects by other chemicals released in production and burning of natural gas.
The Community Benefits Programs
Why do communities accept new natural gas plants? Several reasons. Neighborhoods are frantic to lower asthma and cancer rates. Then there is fear, the companies threaten to just shut down the coal plants forcing the cities or towns involved to lose millions in tax payments. They warn their donations to local churches and charities will stop.
Then there’s the illusion of jobs. In Bridgeport climate activists fighting the coal plant had to deal with unions who were afraid of job loss. It is a real concern. We talked about the state creating program of guaranteed jobs for anyone from the coal plant losing work. The unions brushed that aside. So what happened in the end? The company went to gas and bragged that it cut permanent jobs from hundreds to dozens. Actually, dozens is a stretch. The plant’s own website says the number of permanent jobs will be 20. And we haven’t heard that the company or the state is guaranteeing any of the displaced workers a job.
We also have to mention community benefits programs. In Bridgeport and Killingly the companies involved dangled these goodies to locals and in both cases got the neighborhood or town leaders on board. In Bridgeport it included a construction union apprenticeship training program and $2 million to be divided up in grants to the city and non-profits, a mess of pottage like the one in the bible story. After two years city clergy were having second thoughts. Only 15 people had graduated from the apprenticeship programs and less than 50 city residents had been involved in the construction of the gas plant. No one had seen any of the two million. Politicians in Killingly had opposed a second plant in their town, but objections evaporated after their own benefits agreement. Supposedly they’re getting $5 million and the same 20 magnificent permanent jobs for the town.
Bridgeport and Killingly get a benefits package, the human race gets an “Impediments Package”. We get another weight of millions of tons of global warming gases to hang round our necks as we race to stop the momentum of fossil-fuel-capitalism some time before we fall over the tipping points. Please, stop the Killingly methane plant.
Unions Worldwide Supporting the Climate Strike
Many unions came out in support of the youth actions earlier this year. Some have issued statements in relation to the September call, and others continue to debate how to respond. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) came out in supportof the “Fridays for Future” protests in March 2019, and is listed as an official “international partner” for the upcoming September strikes. Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and New Zealand are organizing support for the action.
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Demand Climate Action in the $Trillion Bailout
It may be our last chance
We know from Naomi Klein and her work on "Disaster Capitalism" that capitalists see disasters as "opportunities" to exploit panic and completely remake society for the benefit of the very rich.
Now we're in another disaster in part due to globalization that demands we get things cheaper, cheaper overseas AND the oil war between the Saudi and Russian oligarchs. Congress is getting ready to borrow a couple trillion dollars to bring things back to "normal", a normal that is racing to climate catastrophe.
Let's say hold on for a day or so and make sure we don't give a nickel to banks unless they contract in writing not to fund a single fossil fuel project 2) No money for oil companies until they agree in writing to stop all fossil fuel exploration 3) No money for airline corporations until they cap their emissions at 2020 levels. This is the minimum. We actually must go much, much farther.
You know we have less than a decade for radical change to avoid climate catastrophe. This is our "opportunity". When will we get another one?
Bill McKibben wrote about this in "The New Yorker"
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