Capable of traveling more than five times the speed of sound, new generations of missile systems are being designed for speed, stealth, and surprise.
According to Reuters and AFP, the United States tested an advanced hypersonic missile system last week that will “offer next-generation capability” to the US military, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said on Monday. The test flight comes just a few months after Russia tested a similar missile.
The US missile system, called a “Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept” (HAWC), a co-development of DARPA and the U.S. Air Force, successfully separated from the launching plane, presumably a B-52 and, a few seconds later, fired its scramjet engine and accelerated to a cruising speed faster than Mach 5.
The US missile system was developed by the aerospace and defense giants Raytheon Technologies and Northrop Grumman. The test was the first of this weapon’s class since 2013, the Pentagon said.
A network of health care providers pocketed millions of dollars selling hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and online consultations, according to hacked data provided to The Intercept. The data show that vast sums of money are being extracted from people concerned about or suffering from Covid-19 but resistant to vaccinations or other recommendations of public health authorities.
America’s Frontline Doctors, a right-wing group founded last year to promote pro-Trump doctors during the coronavirus pandemic, is working in tandem with a small network of health care companies to sow distrust in the Covid-19 vaccine, dupe tens of thousands of people into seeking ineffective treatments for the disease, and then sell consultations and millions of dollars’ worth of those medications. The data indicate patients spent at least $15 million — and potentially much more — on consultations and medications combined.
The Intercept has obtained hundreds of thousands of records from two companies, CadenceHealth.us and Ravkoo, revealing just how the lucrative operation works. America’s Frontline Doctors, or AFLDS, has been spreading highly politicized misinformation about Covid-19 since the summer of 2020 and refers its many followers to its telemedicine partner SpeakWithAnMD.com, which uses Cadence Health as a platform. People who sign up then pay $90 for a phone consultation with “AFLDS-trained physicians” who prescribe treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to prevent and treat Covid-19. The drugs are delivered by Ravkoo, a service that works with local pharmacies to ship drugs to patients’ doors. Of course, that’s if patients ever get the consultation; many customers told Time they never received the call after paying.
The data from the Cadence Health and Ravkoo sites was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous hacker who said the sites were “hilariously easy” to hack, despite promises of patient privacy. It was corroborated by comparing it to publicly available information. The Intercept is not publishing any individual patient data and has taken steps to secure the data. After The Intercept reached out, Cadence Health’s Roque Espinal-Valdez said he shut the platform down, not wanting any part in profiting off of Covid-19 “quackery.”
America’s Frontline Doctors, which debuted in the summer of 2020, has close ties to a network of right-wing efforts to undermine public health during the pandemic, including the Tea Party Patriots. AFLDS’s founder, physician Simone Gold, was arrested and charged after the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. She and other doctors have appeared in widely shared videos arguing that the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin — which are primarily used to treat malaria in humans and parasitic worms in livestock, respectively — are effective treatments for Covid-19, despite warnings from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against using them.
The extremely partisan group also misleads people about Covid-19 vaccines, which they refer to as “experimental biological agents,” and against public health measures like vaccine mandates, masking, social distancing, and restrictions on businesses. In a video titled “The Truth About Covid-19 Vaccines,” which has received over 1.3 million views, Gold falsely argues that Covid-19 is not very deadly and that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus itself. Over 690,000 Americans so far have died from the virus, and unvaccinated people now make up 99 percent of recent Covid-19 deaths.
“Misinformation can be really powerful to swindle people into buying products.”
“Misinformation can be really powerful to swindle people into buying products,” Dr. Kolina Koltai, who researches vaccine misinformation in digital communities at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, told The Intercept. “America’s Frontline Doctors are able to scale this up massively.”
The hacked data includes information on 281,000 patients created in the Cadence Health database between July 16 and September 12, 2021 — 90 percent of whom were referred from America’s Frontline Doctors. In just those two months, patients paid an estimated $6.7 million for consultations. The data also includes notes from patients’ phone consultations, which sometimes include medical histories and prescription information.
Roque Espinal, Cadence Health’s CEO, told The Intercept that he was unaware of the scheme and that Cadence Health simply provided a telehealth platform for SpeakWithAnMD.com, its patients, and physicians. “I’m totally flabbergasted. I had to look up exactly who these people were,” he said. “I’m fully vaccinated. My children are fully vaccinated. I’m trying to make heads and tails of this right now.” After talking with The Intercept on Monday, Espinal said he terminated service with SpeakWithAnMD. He added, “I don’t want to be associated with any crap like that. None of that quackery that’s going on.” SpeakWithAnMD’s telemedicine platform, which relies on Cadence Health, is currently down.
“[SpeakWithAnMD] is not part of the anti-vax movement and we do not oppose vaccinations,” Jim Flinn, a public relations agent working for the site’s parent company, Encore Telemedicine, told The Intercept.
“American Frontline Doctor’s [sic] take these issues very seriously,” Thomas Gennaro, a lawyer for America’s Frontline Doctors, told The Intercept in a statement. “For AFLDS, positive patient-physician outcomes and confidentiality is critical. We understand that the information from this was reported to the FBI, and AFLDS launched a third-party audit and are responding to this issue with the utmost attention.”
The hacker also provided records of 340,000 prescriptions that Ravkoo has filled between November 3, 2020, and September 11, 2021 — amounting to an estimated $8.5 million in drug costs.Forty-six percent of the prescriptions are for hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, and another 30 percent are for zinc or azithromycin, two other ineffective medications that the SpeakWithAnMD physicians, who America’s Frontline Doctors claims it trains, prescribe in their Covid-19 consultations.
“We take data breaches very seriously,” Ravkoo CEO Alpesh Patel told The Intercept. Patel claims that Ravkoo stopped doing business with SpeakWithAnMD and AFLDS at the end of August because “the volume over there went up crazy, and we didn’t feel comfortable. And we don’t have that much capacity to fill that many prescriptions.” The hacked data shows that they filled hundreds more prescriptions for AFLDS in the first weeks of September. “That might be refills or prescriptions that got stuck and we had to fill it,” Patel claimed.
The WHO recommends against taking hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 because it’s ineffective and can have negative side effects. Cardiologists warn that hydroxychloroquine taken with azithromycin, a combination that former President Donald Trump publicly supported, increases the risk of dangerous irregular heartbeats that could be fatal. The CDC advised people not to take ivermectin, saying that it can cause “severe illness.” The Food and Drug Administration issued similar warnings and tweeted, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” with a link to an article explaining that taking it for Covid-19 can cause extreme health issues.
At least one of the prescribers is aware that medical experts recommend against using these drugs to prevent or treat Covid-19 but prescribed them anyway, according to patient records. One physician included this disclaimer in their consultation notes with several patients: “I, [physician’s name], have a complete understanding of the recent release from the WHO, FDA, CDC, and NIH on March 5th, 2021 as it pertains to the use and prescribing of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. I understand that these two medications have been deemed ‘Highly Not Recommended’ by the for-mentioned [sic] medical governing bodies but are not illegal to prescribe. … I have explained that I will not be held legally or medically responsible for an adverse reaction by this patient should they choose to take them and have explained they will not be able to hold me medically neglectful, pursue any form of malpractice, nor any criminal and civilly [sic] suits.”
Beginning last week, the intake form began showing a similar disclaimer to all patients. “As a potential patient, I acknowledge and understand that the Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin have been deemed ‘Highly Not Recommended’ by the WHO, FDA, CDC, and NIH,” the disclaimer says. “Should a patient choose to not disclose their proper medical history, the clinician cannot be held liable nor can any medical license in any state be reviewed or held accountable.” Patients must check a box that says “I understand” to continue.
“In facilitating the doctor/patient relationship, our MD’s are fully licensed and operate within the rules and regulations of the medical profession,” Flinn, the spokesperson for SpeakWithAnMD’s parent company, said. “If a TeleMD in the Speak program decides any FDA medication is appropriate, then the MD can prescribe an FDA-approved medication off-label for any medical condition the TeleMD considers appropriate.”
Chart: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
“Extremely Pro-Trump” Doctors
The foundation for America’s Frontline Doctors was laid in a May 11, 2020, conference call between a senior staffer in Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican activist group CNP Action. They reportedly discussed finding “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to go on TV and defend Trump’s plan to rapidly reopen the economy despite the more cautious safety guidance coming from the CDC.
Then, on June 24 of last year, Gold started an Arizona nonprofit called the Free Speech Foundation with a million-dollar annual budget and fiscal sponsorship from the Tea Party Patriots Foundation. America’s Frontline Doctors, which is a project of this nonprofit, launched on July 27, 2020. Gold, who NPR confirmed is a licensed physician in California, along with other doctors in white lab coats, held a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court building where they falsely claimed that a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc could “cure” Covid-19. Another of the group’s doctors who spoke outside the court was Stella Immanuel, who called the use of masks unnecessary, and quickly earned viral fame when it was revealed that she had previously claimed that the uterine disorder endometriosis is caused by sex with demons that takes place in dreams. The event was livestreamed on Breitbart, and videos of it were viewed millions of times on social media after being shared on Twitter by then-President Trump before tech companies took them down for violating rules against pandemic misinformation. More recently, the group has been promoting ivermectin as a miracle cure for Covid-19.
“[America’s Frontline Doctors] are really good at manipulating science to seem like the vaccine is not safe, or is not tested, or is not necessary, which is why they’ve been particularly impactful in the last year plus,” Koltai said.
But it wasn’t until early 2021, when over 345,000 Americans had already died from the pandemic, that America’s Frontline Doctors started to advertise $90 telehealth consultations to receive prescriptions for alternative treatments to Covid-19 on its site.
On January 3, Gold told a packed, maskless church audience in Tampa, Florida, that America’s Frontline Doctors made “hydroxychloroquine available for the entire nation by going to our website.” A video of the lecture, “The Truth About the Covid-19 Vaccine,” has been viewed 1.3 million times on the video-hosting site Rumble after being removed from YouTube. “Then you can consult with a telemedicine doctor. And whether you have Covid, or you don’t have Covid, or you’re just worried about getting Covid, you can get yourself a prescription and they mail it to you.” She added, “The big fight wasn’t the virus, it was the fear.”
Simultaneously, America’s Frontline Doctors began referring its followers for telemedicine appointments. Its website leads prospective customers through a series of preliminary questions before directing them to SpeakWithAnMD.com. “Find out how to obtain prescription medication for COVID-19 with our AFLDS-trained physicians in three easy steps,” it reads, before a prominent “Get Medication” button.
AFLDS reaches its audience through a variety of social media platforms. Gold, the group’s founder, has more than 340,000 Twitter followers, and she regularly posts anti-vaccine content, such as this video of podcaster Joe Rogan falsely claiming that ivermectin and other drugs that have been shown to be ineffective at treating Covid-19 has cured him of the virus.
Popular American comedian, podcaster, and UFC commentator @joerogan announces he has COVID-19, credits ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, azithromycin and other medicine for his quick recovery.
“A wonderful heartfelt TY to modern medicine for pulling me out of this so quickly.” pic.twitter.com/6LfuqSXSEa
On Saturday, Gold started an account on Gab, a social media site popular with right-wing extremists, and she already has more than 36,000 followers who have posted thousands of comments on her page. AFLDS’s Facebook page has 112,00 followers, its Telegram channel has 184,00 subscribers, and 28,000 people are subscribed to the group’s channel on Rumble.
Their anti-vaccine propaganda also shows up in religious email newsletters, like this one from a group called Bridge Connection Ministries, which contains a plug for AFLDS that asks, “Have you been exposed to COVID by someone who was recently VAXXED?”
Bridge Connection Ministries newsletter.
Screenshot: The Intercept
Cadence Health
The two months’ worth of patient records that The Intercept has access to show that AFLDS referred over 255,000 people to speak with physicians in order to get Covid-19 treatments. Of those people, 72,000 paid $90 for phone consultations, and many of those had follow-up consultations costing $59.99 each. The hacked data from Cadence Health does not include payment data itself, but doing the math, in just that two-month period, patients appear to have paid more than $6.7 million for phone consultations alone. This data does not include all of the $90 phone consultations from January to July, when SpeakWithAnMD appears to have hosted the intake forms for $90 telemedicine consultations directly, according to archived versions of the site. The telemedicine site appears to be billing patients directly and not their insurance companies.
Espinal claims that Cadence Health didn’t collect credit card payments and that the $90 charges for telehealth were made using SpeakWithAnMD’s payment processor. Espinal told The Intercept he charged SpeakWithAnMD a total of $17,500 for using its platform and that SpeakWithAnMD was his first and only customer.
After The Intercept reached out to the companies for comment on Monday, SpeakWithAnMD’s parent company, Encore Telemedicine, had an emergency meeting with lawyers from AFLDS, according to Espinal, who briefly attended the meeting via Zoom. “There were 16 different attorneys,” he told The Intercept, though Gold was not present. According to Espinal, he told the lawyers, “I’m ending my contract with you guys immediately,” and then left. Afterward, he took down Cadence Health’s service, preventing SpeakWithAnMD from operating.
The hacked data from Cadence Health gives insight into the patients themselves. Of those 72,000 patients in that two-month period, 58 percent were female, 38 percent were male, and 4 percent chose not to answer the question. While people of all ages sought consultations with AFLDS’s health care providers, people in their 50s and 60s were more likely to engage than other age groups. According to data provided by the CDC, Covid-19 patients aged 50 to 64 are four times more likely to be hospitalized and 30 times more likely to die than people aged 18 to 29. Covid-19 patients aged 65 to 74 are five times more likely to be hospitalized and 90 times more likely to die.
People in every state in the county, as well as Washington, D.C., sought the unproven Covid-19 treatments. 8,600 people in California paid $90 for telehealth consultations, as did another 8,000 in Florida and 7,400 in Texas. More than 1,000 people in each of an additional 21 states consulted health care providers through the service. The only states that contained less than 100 patients were Delaware and Vermont. Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Jacksonville all had over 300 patients.
This map, based on the hacked data, shows how many people sought unproven Covid-19 treatments from each cities, for cities that have at least 10 users.
Ravkoo
Ravkoo filled its first prescription from AFLDS just 10 days after Gold’s “The Truth About the Covid-19 Vaccine” speech, on January 13, for hydroxychloroquine. In the data for the prescription, “AMERICAS FRONT LINE DOCTORS – ENCORE” is listed under the “remarks” field.
In the hacked data, each of the 340,000 prescriptions filled by Ravkoo between November 3, 2020, and September 11, 2021, lists a price. Adding up the prices of each type of medication shows that the online pharmacy apparently charged people a total of $4.7 million for ivermectin, $2.4 million for azithromycin, $1.2 million for hydroxychloroquine, $175,000 for zinc, and $52,000 for vitamin C. It appears that the vast majority of these medicines were paid for out-of-pocket rather than through insurance. Only $500 of these medicine sales were paid by insurance providers. Patel told The Intercept that Ravkoo doesn’t take a cut of prescription sales and that they run a platform that delivers prescriptions to local pharmacies — “Just like Uber,” he said — but didn’t answer follow-up questions about Ravkoo’s business model.
The Better Business Bureau warns that there are “current alerts” for Ravkoo, where the pharmacy has one out of five stars. Customers describe the pharmacy ignoring calls and emails about prescriptions for Covid-19 medicine from AFLDS.
On September 2, the pharmacy responded to complaints to the Better Business Bureau, saying, “We are no longer affiliated with AFLD [sic] or speakwithanmd.com. We are working diligently to resolve this issue.” Yet the hacked data includes 268 prescriptions that mention AFLDS between September 2 and September 11, the date Ravkoo was hacked.
Chart: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
When asked why the vast majority of prescriptions filled by Ravkoo appear to be for unproven Covid-19 treatments, Patel explained, “We don’t control who sends us business. Let’s put it that way. We don’t have formal contracts with particular companies. Patients can send us business.” Ravkoo could “find pharmacies for our patients who can pull ivermectin and get them at a lower cost. So patients are talking to each other, and that’s how that business might have — how America’s Frontline might have got to know us and started sending us business.”
Patel also claimed that he “got a threatening letter from one of the doctors saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t fill that prescription I’m gonna sue you.’ So pharmacists are put in a really tough position here.”
“Hilariously Easy” to Hack
“The whole online and telemedicine space is a bit of a Wild West because of the way the pandemic forced everyone to deal with telehealth right away,” Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept.
The websites involved in this telemedicine operation were all built during the pandemic to take advantage of this Wild West. Certificate transparency records, which list which SSL certificates are created and when, show that the domain speakwithanmd.com was first set up in March last year, ravkoo.com was first set up in September last year, and cadencehealth.us was first set up in February of this year.
While the pandemic popularized telehealth, “patients still had to go to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription, and that’s where we came up with the idea to make a prescription delivery platform offering free nationwide same-day delivery,” Patel said while describing his motivation for starting the company.
The hacker told The Intercept that Cadence Health and Ravkoo were “hilariously easy” to hack. The websites of both companies had broken access controls, one of the most common mistakes in web application security.
The Cadence Health website only validated user input on the client side, not the server side, according to the hacker. This means that when a user accesses the telemedicine site the normal way, by loading the site in their browser, they can only access their own data, but if they write a program that tries to access other data on the server, the server will respond with that data. The hacker simply asked the server for all patient data.
Cadence Health’s website describes itself as the “most secure PCI & HIPAA-compliant VirtualCare Platform.” “Our website is still in development,” Espinal told The Intercept. “We don’t even have content. This was not supposed to be live.”
The Ravkoo website had a “hidden admin panel that every user can log in to and view all the data,” according to the hacker. Using this admin panel, the hacker was able to exfiltrate all of the online pharmacy’s prescription data. The vulnerability in Ravkoo’s website also appears to be fixed, according to the hacker, who reached back out to The Intercept after checking.
“It’s quite possible that [the companies] violated HIPAA by having such weak security,” Tien said. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a federal law that requires health care providers to protect sensitive “patient health information” from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge. The current security rule defined by HIPAA requires providers to “implement technical policies and procedures that allow only authorized persons to access electronic protected health information.”
HIPAA also defines a breach notification rule that requires health care providers to “notify affected individuals following the discovery of a breach” within two months of discovering the breach. Providers must individually notify affected patients by first-class mail or email, and if they have outdated contact information for enough patients, they’re required to post a public notice on their website or “in major print or broadcast media where the affected individuals likely reside.” If the breach affected more than 500 people, like the Cadence Health and Ravkoo breaches do, they are also required to “provide notice to prominent media outlets” serving the jurisdiction where the patients live.
While HIPAA rules have been loosened during the pandemic to accommodate telemedicine, health care providers are still required to protect sensitive patient health information that they collect.
The companies were left pointing fingers at each other. Espinal, Cadence Health’s CEO, told The Intercept that the patient database is hosted in Encore Telemedicine’s Amazon Web Services account and that his company does not have access to this data. Flinn, the public relations agent working for Encore, insists that the database is in Cadence’s AWS account, not in Encore’s.
“Following the money is a really important thing,” Koltai, of Center for an Informed Public, said.
We know how to decarbonize energy production with renewable fuels and land transportation with electric vehicles. Blueprints for greening shipping and aircraft are being drawn up. But what about the big industrial processes? They look set to become decarbonization holdouts — the last and hardest CO2 emissions that we must eliminate if we are to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. In particular, how are we to green the three biggest globally-vital heavy industries: steel, cement, and ammonia, which together emit around a fifth of anthropogenic CO2?
Our modern urban environments are largely constructed from concrete — which is made from cement — and steel. Most of our food is grown through the application of fertilizer made from ammonia. These most ubiquitous industrial materials are produced at huge expense of energy and carbon dioxide emissions.
Their staid industries have prospered for over a century using largely unchanged manufacturing processes. But the urgent need to produce green ammonia, steel, and cement is starting to shake them up. Research is providing new options for fundamental changes to chemical processes. And in recent weeks, leading players have announced major initiatives in each of these three crunch industries.
Two emerging technologies are advertising themselves as the “solutions” to decarbonizing problem industries. One is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which aims to capture stack CO2 emissions and bury them in geological structures such as old oilfields or salt mines. The other is “green hydrogen,” made by splitting water using renewable energy. Some see green hydrogen as the dream fuel of the future, powering everything from planes and power stations to homes and heavy industry.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in June that “clean hydrogen is a game changer,” because it “will help decarbonize high-polluting heavy-duty and industrial sectors.”
But both technologies face technical criticism and accusations of hype. CCS is accused of being designed more to prolong the future of fossil-fuel industries than to decarbonize the world’s economy. And even green hydrogen, which is essentially a conveyor of renewable energy, seems pointless for applications where the renewable energy can be used directly — by plugging in electric vehicles, for instance.
Yet each may have a role in certain industries, industry analysts say. “Primary steel and ammonia production are sensible entry points for green hydrogen,” Falko Ueckerdt of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research told Yale Environment 360. Hydrogen is very efficient at fueling high-temperature industrial processes, for instance, so green hydrogen could sometimes be the real deal for heavy industries that currently require fossil fuels as part of the process (steel), already use hydrogen (fertilizer), or need the high temperatures hydrogen is good at producing (cement).
Let’s take each of these industries. What do they need to decarbonize?
Steel manufacture is currently responsible for 11 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Most production starts by burning coal with iron ore in a blast furnace. The coal generates heat but is part of the chemical process in the furnace. It strips oxygen from the ore to make pure iron, known as pig iron, which is turned into steel in an electric arc furnace. But the waste product — from combining carbon in the coal with the oxygen in the ore — is large quantities of carbon dioxide. The entire process emits an average 2.2 tons of CO2 for every ton of steel.
So what can be done to reduce these emissions?
Concrete being poured last October at the site of the Winthrop Center, a skyscraper under construction in Boston.
DAVID L. RYAN/THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES
More efficient use and recycling of the product should always be the first avenue pursued. Recycling avoids the blast-furnace stage, with its heavy emissions. The scrap is fed into an electric arc furnace, which typically produces only 0.3 tons of CO2 for every ton of steel. Emissions could be reduced further by switching away from fossil fuels to produce the electricity. But the potential gains from recycling are limited, according to analysts. Around 85 percent of discarded steel is already collected for recycling. But steel’s long in-service life means that this recycled scrap still makes up only around a third of total steel production, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Widespread adoption of CCS could potentially further reduce emissions. But bigger gains may arise from abandoning the blast furnace altogether. The main alternative approach for making pig iron is to run a huge direct electric current through the ore. This process, known as electrolysis, is how bauxite ore is turned into aluminum. The energy demands are huge, but without the need for coal as part of the process itself, that energy could come from a low-carbon source, such as green hydrogen. So green hydrogen is seen as vital to green steel.
This hydrogen route is currently being tried in Europe, under state subsidies, by both ArcelorMittal, the world’s second-largest steel manufacturer, and in a project announced earlier this month in the Netherlands by India-owned Tata Steel.
It could catch on. An attractive approach would be to make the hydrogen on the same site as the steel. It represents a “huge opportunity” for Australia, which has both big iron ore mines and plentiful solar energy, according to Jessica Allen and Tony Honeyands of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, “It would boost our exports, help offset inevitable job losses in the fossil fuel industry, and go a long way to tackling climate change,” they argued in a recent blog post.
The manufacture of ammonia fertilizer has been one of the fastest-growing industries worldwide over the past half-century. It was the bedrock of the agricultural green revolution of the late 20th century and today nourishes the crops that feed 40 percent of the world’s population. Fertilizer is by far the main use of the 176 million tons of ammonia produced annually.
Ammonia is made using the Haber-Bosch process, invented by German chemist Fritz Haber in 1908. It won him a Nobel Prize a decade later. The process is in two stages. First it manufactures hydrogen, usually from natural gas; then it synthesizes the hydrogen with atmospheric nitrogen. To do this requires breaking the tight bonds that hold together molecules of nitrogen in the air, and that requires high pressures and temperatures of around 500 degrees C.
Both hydrogen production and ammonia synthesis are energy-intensive. The entire process, carried out in giant industrial plants, emits roughly two tons of CO2 for every ton of ammonia and is responsible for around 2 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Fertilizers are one of the most wastefully used of all high-carbon products. Less than half of what is poured onto fields gets anywhere near roots — a proportion that has been falling in recent years, according to Xin Zhang, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland. This not only causes unnecessary CO2 emissions, but also floods the natural environment with nitrogen — creating algal blooms in rivers and dead zones in the oceans, and damaging biodiversity almost everywhere. So using fertilizer more efficiently should be a high priority.
But beyond that, both stages of the fertilizer production process need to be decarbonized. The first stage, making hydrogen, should be the most achievable. In April this year, the world’s largest ammonia manufacturer, CF Industries, announced plans to “green” part of the hydrogen production at its largest production complex, in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. It is installing German-made equipment to make hydrogen by splitting water, using renewable energy.
Decarbonizing the second stage, ammonia synthesis, requires a major improvement on — or replacement of — the existing process. Justin Hargreaves at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, says catalysts are key to the process. They are necessary to break the strong bond of the nitrogen molecule so the element can combine with hydrogen.
A tractor sprays fertilizer on a wheat field in North Yorkshire, England.
STEVE ALLEN TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
The Haber-Bosch process uses an iron catalyst. But ever since its invention, the game has been on to find something that works efficiently at lower temperatures and pressures. “Tackling low-temperature ammonia synthesis is one of those holy grails of chemistry,” says Levi Thompson, a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan. But the chemical necessary to achieve this has so far eluded researchers.
“Nature does it,” Hargreaves told e360. “Nitrogen fixation by bacteria in plant roots happens under ambient conditions, with no high temperatures or pressures. But rates of production are too slow to be practical for large-scale production.” The hope is that the right catalyst could change that. “It is a big prize, if we could do it,” Hargreaves said.
Plenty of industrialists are in the game. A Japanese company, JGC, has a trial plant at Fukushima combining solar energy to make green hydrogen using a new ruthenium catalyst that it has developed for ammonia synthesis. The company claims to have cut the pressure needed for manufacture by three-quarters. Another Japanese team, headed by Hideo Hosono at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, is championing a lanthanum-cobalt catalyst. He claims it cuts the temperature required to 400 degrees C.
Some foresee future processes that ditch the conventional Haber-Bosch process entirely. In June, Doug MacFarlane and colleagues at Monash University in Australia, announced success in developing an electrochemical process for breaking the nitrogen bonds that could produce ammonia at room temperatures. They say the key was the addition of phosphonium salt, which dramatically speeded up reactions.
The third carbon dinosaur — and potentially the most difficult to reform — is Portland cement, so named because it resembles a building stone quarried on Portland, a peninsula in southern England. It was invented in 1824 by an English stonemason called Joseph Aspdin. The manufacturing process mixes chalk or limestone (calcium carbonate) with clay and cooks the mix in a kiln at 1450 degrees C, triggering chemical changes that create a hard solid, called clinker, which is combined with gypsum to make cement. The cement is then mixed with aggregates and water to create concrete.
The high temperatures in the kiln require a lot of energy, typically gained from burning fossil fuels that emit CO2. In addition, when the calcium carbonate is converted in the kiln, the main by-product is yet more carbon dioxide. When the kiln fuel is coal, kilns emit around one ton of CO2 for every ton of cement manufactured.
Every year more than 4 billion tons of Portland cement are produced worldwide, more than half a ton for every inhabitant on the planet. It makes our world of dams, roads, bridges, tower blocks, sea walls, and parking lots. And it is responsible for around 8 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
How to change this? While most of the world’s steel gets recycled, very little of its concrete does. Buildings could be designed to be taken apart again and their components used again. But few are. When wrecking-ball teams arrive, little of the rubble they create finds any future use, other than landfill or as aggregate. That needs to change, says Brian Norton of the Dublin Institute of Technology. “Buildings … should be designed to be easily disassembled at the end of their use.” Or we could use other construction materials, such as sustainably sourced timber.
But what of the cement production process itself?
If the coal in the kiln were replaced by green hydrogen, that could cut overall CO2 emissions — but only by about a third. So something needs to be done to get rid of the CO2 generated by the production process.
One means is CCS to capture the CO2 emissions. The IEA, in a recent report on pathways to net-zero, saw CCS contributing up to 55 percent of potential emissions reductions in the industry by 2050. Another way is to find industrial uses for the CO2. Earlier this month, French cement producer Vicat announced plans to divert 40 percent of the CO2 from its kiln at Montalieu-Vercieu near Lyon to manufacture methanol to fuel new containers ships being built by the world’s largest shipping line, Maersk.
Cement factories in China along the Yangtze River.
TIM GRAHAM / GETTY IMAGES
But there are also decarbonizing options for changing the raw materials of the cement production process. The IEA says that potentially as much as half the clinker in cement could be replaced with other materials, ranging from raw limestone to fly ash from power stations, discarded tires, and domestic refuse.
More radically, German researchers in a study published last month suggested that at least half of the limestone in the kiln could be replaced by alumina-rich clay, known as Balterra clay, that often overlies geological reserves of bauxite, the raw material of aluminum. Herbert Pollmann of the Martin-Luther-University in Germany says this calcium sulphoaluminate cement both avoids the CO2 emissions from firing calcium carbonate and cuts firing temperatures from 1450 degrees C to 1250 degrees C. “Our method not only releases less CO2 during the chemical conversion, but also when heating the rotary kilns,” Pollmann says, potentially reducing overall emissions by two-thirds.
Another potential solution, invented 20 years ago by Australian industrial chemist John Harrison, replaces limestone with a similar rock, magnesium carbonate, often known as magnesite, found in the mineral magnetite and in mixtures with calcium carbonate such as rocks known as dolomite, which roast at much lower temperatures, around 650 degrees C, so requiring only half the energy. But Harrison says magnesium carbonate’s biggest benefit is the ability of the resulting concrete to absorb atmospheric CO2 while in use.
This “carbonation” carries on as long as the material is exposed to the air, potentially recapturing all the CO2 released when it was made. Thus, he says, structures made of his “eco-cement” could act rather like a tree — constantly taking up CO2.
Regular cement also carbonates, but Harrison says his version continues much longer. This contention was challenged five years ago when a study suggested carbonation of conventional cement was greater than generally realized. Unnoticed by climate scientists, the study found, “existing cement stocks worldwide absorb approximately one billion tons of atmospheric CO2 each year.”
Still, Michael Taylor of the London-based Mineral Products Association believes Harrison’s invention has potential value. Its main problem, he suggests, may be the notorious conservatism of the cement industry. Initial costs for new formulations are high, and providing the durability of the finished product could take decades. “Innovators … experience this conservatism as a considerable barrier, and may believe it has been raised simply to frustrate their objectives,” Taylor says.
It is a familiar problem. But, as with steel and ammonia, political pressure for greener processes could change that.
Nature and technology have always overlapped in your work.
For me, nature and technology stand for hope, and for a movement onwards to the future. I’ve always been like that. I think it has to do with being brought up in Iceland. Even though it’s a capital in Europe, right now I’m outside my house, and I am literally walking on the beach. It’s a lot of space! I remember the first time when I was really into technology was going to the dentist. I was in this hippie school where everything was very wooden and real. Then it was a dentist’s office, and I was like, “Wow. This is the future!” He put all these things in my mouth, and I was like, “Okay, the future is here, this is where shit happens.”
I think it’s also some sort of instinct, just knowing that if there is to be hope, we have to unite technology and nature. You have to make them coexist, and they have to be able to work together. I mean, it has to happen, if we’re going to survive. Maybe I’m being a bit limited, but the older I get, I realize better and better how I’m formed by my origins and where I’m from. But somehow it’s easier for me to imagine that happening in a natural situation—like me talking on a phone on the beach to you now from a capital in Europe. You have technology, or GarageBand in your iPhone and record a tune on top of a mountain.
This has always been the ideal hopeful marriage for me. I’ve more or less always been into this—every album, I was like, okay, now I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. Then it always goes back to the same thing. Ever since I was a teenager in punk bands, and whatever, it’s been pretty persistent.
People think I’m really, really good with technology. Actually, it’s the other way around. I’m really rubbish.
When we were doing the tour of the album Volta, we had touchscreens. This was before iPads. Whenever there’s new technology, one of my favorite things—a sort of murder mystery thing—is to figure out, “Oh, what’s this for?” A lot of things are rubbish, but there’s always one thing where it’s like, “Oh, technology finally caught up with us, and now it can map out this very natural function in me.” It makes life easier. People think I’m really, really good with technology. Actually, it’s the other way around. I’m really rubbish. When an iPad comes along, it makes technology usable for me.
When I did Biophilia, I was so excited about finally mapping out how I feel about education and how I feel about musicology, because when I was a kid in music school, it was almost offensive, how I was forced to study music, or resonance, or timbre, or scales—everything from a normal book, and sit and read something for hours. If it’s being seen and heard, it was something that needed to be felt and become visceral and physical. For me to do Biophilia, I rented this house on the beach, and we were there programming all the basic things in musicology, like rhythm and chords and melody and so on.
It was very obvious somehow that the touchscreen was basically a 3D book. You can see that now. How it’s mostly used, it’s great for schools, and especially things like physics or math or music, or things that have to be 3D. It’s the same thing. It makes sense for me to go back to this, because it’s sort of like first you discover the tool, then it’s like meeting a new friend, and then you can try and figure where the magic happens, where the most potential is to grow. It’s that heat point, and that feeling of entering the unknown, that really excites me.
How did you get interested in virtual reality?
I’ve got a close collaboration with Andrew Huang, who I’ve done several videos with now. My interest in virtual reality came from that. When I was commissioned by MoMA to do the “Black Lake” video, we were going to do it in 360. Trying to squeeze into MoMA was a very exciting project for me. I think the shape of that song is influenced a bit by the fact that I was going to have it presented in a room, and I was thinking that people would walk in and out all day. It was this song that could loop forever.
So, we were first going to film it in 360, and it was going to be in a 360 dome inside MoMA. Then that wasn’t possible for functional reasons, so we ended up doing it on two screens, which was actually perfect: I found a poetic reason for that because the song was written in a dark crevice in the middle of the night in Japan, so it was that claustrophobic feeling of being in a tiny canyon. [laughs] We set it up like that, and then just had crazy subs massaging you. That was that one piece.
For me, the interest in virtual reality has been a gradual development. It’s been the opposite of Biophilia, where I basically cut everything off and created this space, went to a foreign island, and decided to make all these plants grow simultaneously; the technology, the programming, the music writing, the lyric writing. When we released it, it was ready on all the levels. But Vulnicura was almost the opposite, where the album was written really quickly, and then it leaked, which suited its character. It was like, okay, it’s this kind of beast. Thinking about it now, the leak influenced us in a good way, because my team kind of went, “Oh, okay, it’s one day at a time. There’s no master plan… fuck that.” So we had to be very reactionary and work with what we had.
You just have to go with the flow, and go totally with your gut. If it feels right, it’s right. If not, then just go off the map. You lost your map, so just go off it.
Like, when we were filming “Black Lake” in Iceland, we happened to have a camera with us that was 360 that this company had lent us. We were going to film “Black Lake” with it, and then me and Andrew looked at each other one evening and said, “How about we do ‘Stonemilker’ tomorrow?” That was the spontaneous sibling of “Black Lake.” It couldn’t have happened that spontaneously if there hadn’t been a year of difficult effort put into the “Black Lake” one. They coexist somehow.
It’s been like that ever since. Next thing, we asked Jesse Kanda to do “Mouth Mantra.” I was at a place in my life where the only plan was that there is no plan. You just have to go with the flow, and go totally with your gut. If it feels right, it’s right. If not, then, you know, just go off the map. You lost your map, so just go off it.
We are up to six videos now with eight different people. And, one thing with VR that you learn very quickly: VR isn’t just VR. 360 is completely different from VR, and then it’s like do you show it in a dome, or do you show it in the glasses? We almost just decided, me and James Merry, my co-creative visual director. I was actually just with him, and talking about stuff for three hours. It’s really a challenge for both of us. What we decided to do while this technology is still in the making—and it’s still being discovered, but people don’t know what it is—is to just use this search as an element. How do you hang a song on the wall?
Each video almost has been done with different technology, different themes, different directors, different problem-solving, everything. Everything has been, similar to Biophilia, has been done like an exchange across people. It’s been really fun.
Does the “Mouth Mantra” video go back to your early interest in dentistry?
No, it does not. [laughs] I should say yes. I should be really clever and say yes there, but I have to credit Jesse. That’s his idea.
VR is still being developed. A year ago, you’d have to wear some kind of huge helmet, and it keeps getting refined. Like you say, it’s this thing that hasn’t quite been figured out entirely. It hasn’t entirely congealed.
Yeah, it’s exciting. I love the feeling of entering the unknown. You have to allow yourself a lot of mistakes, and then when you get it right, it’s so rewarding. I love the spirit. I love hanging out with those tech nerds and having ridiculous conversations. I’ve actually been talking to this company now who are doing these crazy sonic things—because, of course, it’s sonic, too. You can walk around and hear different sections of the song, so maybe you have different things in different songs. Like, how you experience sound in 360?
I was talking to a friend about it the other day. It’s almost like every time there is a new something, like for example, when film came out, or theater—that was a very long time ago—or a CD, or the LP, it’s really fun to try to define it. For me, VR’s quite Wagnerian or something. It’s almost like I’m sitting there, and thinking, “Oh my god, how are they going to solve this for three hours, just looking at one stage?” People are interested. It’s such a different struggle than 2D or a concert. It’s literally the same kind of problem with VR, where you have the camera in the middle, and you can look all around you, and all the events, and kind of how you place everything. I think it’s just really exciting. Riddles to solve. It’s a privilege to be a part of figuring it out.
Björk Recommends:
Mirrors by Mala (electronic music influenced by the Andes mountains)
Long August sunsets on my beach in Iceland with bonfire dinners!
Bicycling fast on the beach with all your playlists on shuffle really loud early in the mornings, and then really reading into it for the rest of the day which songs come on—like DJ tarot or something.
Do you see VR as something that removes you from the natural world or do you see it as something that folds into reality?
I think it’s both. I think it’s binary, and I think that’s almost the point. If you try to escape one thing and just do one or the other, you’re always going to end up at the same point. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it sort of eats its own tail. It’s always going to be that question, for sure, but I’m sure that was the same question people had with everybody on trains reading books or commuting or whatever. It’s always going to be, are they here with us in the train, or are they somewhere else in their book? I don’t think this is any different. There are obviously different challenges with this, though.
I heard somebody say that he watched some crazy game, for like eight hours a day, that had the wrong physics in it—like all the distances to the mountains or whatever didn’t add up. So, what happened after a few days, is first he would get seasick when he was in the machine, and then he would actually get used to it. Then when he would take the machine off him, he would get seasick. He had to put it back on to not throw up. That’s obviously very scary. Then with anything, you have to work out things like the soul and humanity, and what’s good for you, and not be lazy. These good old ethics can come back. To not get addicted.
Do you feel like with the Björk Digital that opens in the fall is something that you have more control of than your MoMA show? Do you feel like it’s complementary?
I probably would never have done a MoMA show if it was my choice. I was very flattered to be offered it, actually. Klaus [Beisenbach] offered it to me many times. I turned it down until I said yes. It was a really educating experience for me, and I know it was done from his behalf with all the good intentions. I learned more about my universe. There are certain things that work for me and certain things that don’t work. What I really liked was, for example, premiering “Stonemilker” at PS1. That’s more the continuity of the music video, and a natural universe for me that I’ve been in since I was a teenager. It made me discover, also, that I like this one-on-one that you have when you listen to music with headphones, or an album, in your house and read the lyrics. That one-on-one journey you go through, that narrative of music. It’s different than 20th century visual arts.
I probably would never have done a MoMA show if it was my choice … I turned it down until I said yes.
I’m not criticizing it for a second. I just think it’s there’s a reason why people go to concert halls and sit there for an hour and a half, and it’s a good idea. It works. In a way, VR’s a better suited stage for this kind of universe than the white cube, or this sort of 20th century museum. “Black Lake” works in a museum; it’s as white cube-y as I’d go. That was the piece that I probably put most of my work into. I think the VR exhibition is what I would’ve done if I hadn’t done MoMA. Finding a roof for the VR videos—while people still don’t have headsets at home—in a punk warehouse-y setting. And it is true, in this way, technology really has enabled women to work outside the already formed hierarchical systems.
Maybe the fashion element, too. I care about it, but I don’t care half about it as much as I care about the music and the visuals. I mean, that’s where my heart is. Also, life is short, and I need to just do new things, just do the stuff I’m doing now, and not a retrospective. If other people are interested in that, I’m really flattered, but I have to stay focused on the stuff I’m doing now. What I also discovered, actually, was how much Biophilia has grown since then. It happened first for three years in Reykjavik schools, and now it’s just done two years in Scandinavian schools and Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
When we do the exhibitions, we call it ‘Björk Digital’ because people can come with headphones and the iPad, and they have the instruments there, and they can try them, and they can play them all day. We are setting up a situation focused on interaction. It’s not coming into a room and looking at paintings on the wall or acquiring visual art. It’s different. It’s more about people coming and trying Biophilia; it’s interactive. Then they go and try all the VR videos.
We try to make it as immersive as possible. In Australia, there were 60 VRs, and people were there holding hands and crying. I mean, they would hang out in the Biophilia room forever. It’s kind of more about the last two pieces I did, and I tried to make them most immersive. People can come and experience that. Making basically a stage or a place where people can do that, and the interactive part—with good headphones, of course. [laughs]
We adjust every time, and it’s always about who wants to work with us. For example, the Tokyo show was really different to the Australia show. The Australia show was part of a festival, so it was a million and a half people that walked through it. Tokyo was in the Museum of Technology, where they have all the robots and that, and where we actually had Biophilia three years ago. The same teachers were there three years ago, so they had history with the teaching part of it, the educational part. Yeah. They were really different kinds of shows. The “Black Lake” room was not in Tokyo.
It’s just one day at a time, and we don’t really have a big plan. It’s about interest. The only other idea I’d like to say is that we try to add one new video in every place. The place commissions one piece. We would premiere “Family” in Montreal. Then we’ll just see how long it lasts. It’s almost like having your own traveling circus, and you can DJ. Invite your friends over. I’m playing with the idea that when my next album is ready, that that could be my venue or something, that it is a bit of a family circus.
You’ve been doing marathon DJ sets after these events.
I’ve been DJing with friends, yes. There’s a crazy amount of effort we put into preparing the sets and everything is so fun. It’s a lot of passion there. Why not share it? For me, if I was really going to go throw away the map and be sincere about where my personal pulse is ticking at this particular moment, that sort of made sense, because that’s what I’m doing.
I think because it’s so immersive, the Biophilia educational thing and all the VR, it didn’t make sense that I would then do a gig. Then it’s like more me. But if I’m sharing my love for music, and everybody else’s music, it made much more sense. It’s more about the passion for music than looking at me. And there literally is some strange energy that happens when you play all your favorite songs back to back, and put it on top volume. It actually is energy being released. I love other people’s music. I like to just jump up and down with excitement for some songs, and it’s got nothing to do with me… it’s like a break from myself. It reminds you why you’re doing it all.
In this way, technology really has enabled women to work outside the already formed hierarchical systems.
Saying that, there’s an exception to the rule, as always. I did a gig in London, so that contradicts everything I said. We hadn’t played London yet, and London for me is just such a mushy place. It’s like the city that helped me become the musician I am, and fully formed. It’s my other home, especially my musical home. It was only voice and strings—an attempt to put a spotlight on my arrangements. I already released a string album, without the beats. I’ve put quite a lot of work into this string album where there are sort of slightly different versions of things, and we got instrumentalists, viola organista from Poland. I hadn’t ever done a gig with only strings, so I thought, “Okay, maybe this makes sense to do it there. I can invite all my London mates over.” It sort of added up like that.
I just improvise, like we do. It actually doesn’t take that much energy to do those exhibitions. Most of my time, I’m spending just writing music. That’s also one thing great about these kind of exhibitions. When I stopped touring a year ago, I just turned straight to writing new happy songs. That’s sort of the land I’m living in most of the time. It works really well together. They don’t fight. It’s two different parts of your person, or something.
As countries around the world firm up their commitments to cut carbon emissions, many are turning to an emerging solution with an uncertain future: hydrogen gas. This lesser-known fuel has been called the “Swiss Army knife” of climate solutions. It has the potential to replace fossil fuels in industrial processes, transportation, buildings, and power plants, and does not emit any greenhouse gases when it’s burned.
But this idea of an emissions-free hydrogen-fueled world is a long way off. Currently, hydrogen is primarily used by oil refineries and in the production of fertilizer. Today, 99 percent of the world’s supply of hydrogen is made from natural gas and coal, producing annual emissions on par with those of the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined, according to the International Energy Agency.
Scaling up cleaner ways to produce hydrogen and new ways to use it will require significant investments in research and development, and likely subsidies or a price on carbon to make it competitive with fossil fuels. The Biden administration is starting down this path, with a goal to cut the cost of clean hydrogen by 80 percent by 2030. The bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate in early August allocates $8 billion to create four “clean hydrogen hubs” that would demonstrate its production and use in four different applications.
But with the clock ticking to prevent climate impacts from getting worse, experts are debating whether chasing after clean hydrogen for every possible use is wise. Some climate advocates are worried that it risks taking attention and resources away from technologies that are already available and could cut emissions more quickly. For example, natural gas utilities say they eventually want to deliver clean hydrogen to people’s homes to power their heaters and stoves, but electric heating and cooking appliances that can be powered by renewable electricity are already on the market now.
“We’re really rooting for hydrogen to work,” said Sasan Saadat, a senior research and policy analyst at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice. “But we don’t want to be wasting this resource in ways just to ensure there’s a longer life for the business model of combustion-based energy incumbents.” Saadat is one of the authors of a recent report that distinguishes between the most promising, “least-regrets” ways to use clean hydrogen, and areas where policymakers should forget hydrogen and pursue other solutions.
It’s a complicated debate that turns more on politics, money, and time than it does on technology. None of the experts Grist spoke with disagreed that there’s a stronger case for using hydrogen to decarbonize some activities than others. But several said it was too early to rule out its widespread potential.
“It is reasonable to ask how people should spend taxpayer money in the most productive way,” said Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “But at the same time, we’re trying to do something so unprecedented and difficult that I think it is premature to amputate emerging ideas and options.”
To wrestle with these arguments, it’s important to understand clean hydrogen’s central challenge. Unlike fossil fuels, it cannot be dug out of the earth. We have to make it. And no matter how it’s made, energy is lost in the process.
Unlike the hydrogen produced with natural gas or coal today, so-called “green hydrogen” is made by zapping a water molecule with renewable electricity, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen. With existing technology, this results in a loss of 20 to 40 percent of the initial energy. That loss jacks up the price of green hydrogen, making it harder for it to compete with other sources of energy. It also means that relying on green hydrogen requires building a lot more wind and solar power than we might otherwise have to. Wind and solar projects already face challenges overcoming community opposition, and some countries have limited land availability to support renewables.
An electrolysis plant in Wesseling, Germany called Refhyne began producing hydrogen in July. Shell, which operates the plant, says the electricity used comes from renewable sources.
INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images
Another possibility is to add carbon capture technology to existing, natural gas–based hydrogen production to make so-called “blue hydrogen.” But this method requires additional energy to run the carbon capture and storage machinery. The potential climate benefits of blue hydrogen are also diminished, if not erased, by the fact that the natural gas system is rife with leaks that send the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere. Those leaks would have to be greatly reduced for the emissions math on blue hydrogen to equal “clean.”
So the biggest constraint on what we use clean hydrogen for is supply. But as hard as it will be to produce cleaner varieties of hydrogen, virtually all experts agree that it is necessary for at least one reason: fertilizer. “Our demand for fertilizer isn’t gonna go away,” said Rebecca Dell, the director of the industry program at the Climateworks Foundation, a philanthropic group that supports climate solutions. “We need to move that to a clean process in the future, and there isn’t really a substitute process.”
Beyond fertilizer, there’s rough consensus that clean hydrogen is a strong contender to cut emissions from many of the “hard to decarbonize” parts of the economy — activities that cannot easily be powered by clean electricity. These include long-haul trucking, shipping, aviation, and steelmaking. Hydrogen company Air Liquide, which produces both fossil fuel–based and renewable energy–based hydrogen, told Grist that producing it at scale for these uses “will then allow nascent segments to emerge and thrive.”
“Looking at end-uses one by one without considering the entire system would not allow each and any of them to benefit from one another,” spokesperson David Asselin said.
The Hybrit pilot plant in Lulea, Sweden has started producing lower-carbon steel using green hydrogen.
Åsa Bäcklin / HYBRIT
But Sara Gersen, a lawyer for Earthjustice and co-author of the organization’s recent report on the potential for hydrogen technology, said she sees a disconnect between these more clear-cut cases for clean hydrogen and the ones the fossil fuel industry is lobbying for, like burning it in power plants.
“Utilities and project proponents are trying to get approval for new fossil gas plants under the guise of, ‘oh, maybe one day, this could be converted at some unknown cost to operate on green hydrogen,’” she said. The report mentions Danskammer, an upstate New York energy company that has proposed building a new natural gas–fired power plant and argued that it is in line with climate goals because the plant will be capable of burning a blend of clean hydrogen and natural gas, which would lower emissions, and could eventually be converted to run fully on hydrogen. Entergy Texas, an electric utility, recently made a similar proposal.
“We want policymakers to shut that down and say, ‘No, you need to take advantage of the clean energy solutions that are available today,’” said Gersen. Danskammer did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
A key argument from hydrogen’s proponents is that it can make use of existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and in some cases utilities are repurposing existing power plants to use hydrogen. In Utah, an old coal plant is being retrofitted to run on a blend of natural gas and clean hydrogen, with a goal of eventually using 100 percent clean hydrogen. New York State is testing blending at an existing natural gas plant in Long Island.
But blending hydrogen with natural gas is unlikely to significantly reduce carbon emissions in the nearterm. Jack Brouwer, director of the Advanced Power and Energy Program at the University of California, Irvine, where he conducts research on a broad range of hydrogen applications, told Grist that commercially available power plant technology can currently burn a blend of up to 30 percent hydrogen gas and 70 percent methane. According to a peer-reviewed study from 2019, a 30-percent hydrogen blend would only reduce the emissions from burning natural gas by about 12 percent.
Gas utilities are also proposing blending hydrogen into the natural gas delivered to homes and buildings. But much of the pipeline system in the U.S. is unable to carry more than about 20 percent hydrogen, if that much, because it damages the pipes. Higher loads of hydrogen would require utilities to replace their pipelines with different materials, likely passing those costs on to customers. Customers would also need to either modify their current appliances or buy new ones.
Expected emission reductions of blending hydrogen with natural gas. The calculations are based on a formula
Earthjustice
For Brouwer, blending green hydrogen into the natural gas system, whether for power plants or homes, is still very much worth doing — not so much for the greenhouse gas benefits, but to create a new market for solar and wind power. Right now, California has a problem where prices for solar energy are getting very low in the middle of the day, at peak generation, which is discouraging the development of more solar in the state. If California set a green hydrogen blending mandate, for example, it would create more demand, since renewable energy is needed to make green hydrogen. But Brouwer said that blending clean hydrogen with natural gas is only a stepping stone. “The gas system has to be either eliminated or completely decarbonized,” he said.
Critics of hydrogen have another concern that has nothing to do with efficiency or economics or even climate change. While burning hydrogen in a power plant or furnace doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, it does emit nitrogen oxides, a pollutant that is harmful to human health. “We have this opportunity as we’re decarbonizing our economy to finally address the deep environmental injustices of burning fuel in power plants in communities that don’t benefit from the costs of low energy, but do bear the health costs of its pollution,” said Saadat.
However, Saadat and Gersen do believe clean hydrogen could be useful to the electricity grid via a different solution: Hydrogen fuel cells. Fuel cells generate electricity through a chemical reaction rather than combustion, and do not produce pollution. They are much smaller systems than power plants, and could be hooked up to the grid in an array, similar to grid-scale battery projects.
Gniewomir Flis, the hydrogen project manager at the Berlin-based think tank Agora Energiewende, said fuel cells are unlikely to be an option for at least a decade because at this point they are much more expensive than traditional combustion-based power plant technology. He also noted that the companies that build power plant technology are working to lower nitrogen oxide emissions, and that the industry has said it can solve this issue within the decade.
Whether for power plants or fuel cells, hydrogen can be stored underground in large quantities, much like natural gas, so many see it as a key tool to provide clean, long-duration backup electricity during seasons when there is less sun and wind to power the grid.
Perhaps the most controversial potential use for hydrogen is re-making our pipeline system to deliver it into homes and buildings. Flis called the idea of burning 100 percent hydrogen in buildings a “politically unpalatable solution.” By his analysis, since low-carbon hydrogen is so expensive, it would either mean handing enormous subsidies to utilities or raising customers’ rates by at least five times. Flis also estimates that in Europe, installing an electric heat pump would save a customer about $23,000 to $35,000 over the next 25 years compared to installing a hydrogen boiler.
Others, however, look at the challenge of fully electrifying buildings — and more or less forcing gas utilities to shutter — and find that politically unpalatable. “Yes, electric heating is much more efficient, but we need to consider the reality of abandoning massive infrastructure in place,” said Steve Griffiths, the senior vice president of research and development at Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates, in an email.
Apartments in the neighborhood of Bergedorf in Hamburg, Germany that were selected for hydrogen blending tests in 2020.
Daniel Bockwoldt/picture alliance via Getty Images
Griffiths stressed that many other reports have looked at the future of clean hydrogen and come to similar conclusions as Earthjustice. But he argued that these analyses lack context. “Techno-economic factors alone are not what will make hydrogen a key fuel for energy transitions,” he said, writing that social, cultural, and political factors also help or hinder energy system changes. Griffiths was the lead author of a recent review paper on hydrogen that took into account these other factors.
Michael Liebreich, an independent energy analyst and advisor, said home heating is the “frontline in the hydrogen culture wars.” “There’s enormously heavy lobbying for hydrogen in heating,” he said, “because it would use the gas distribution network, and that’s a very expensive asset we built over many, many decades, and the companies who own it don’t want to walk away.”
In the U.K., where Liebreich lives, gas utilities have been promoting a full switch to hydrogen since at least 2016, when an industry-sponsored study found that the gas network in the city of Leeds could be converted to carry low-carbon hydrogen to homes at minimal cost to customers. By 2023, a heavily subsidized pilot program in a neighborhood in Scotland will be the first to deliver 100 percent green hydrogen to a network of about 300 homes. Participants will receive free appliances, and their gas bills will not go up for the duration of the pilot, which is set to run through 2027.
In the U.S., gas utilities in New York, Massachusetts, California, and other states have said that clean hydrogen could be part of a low-carbon fuel mix they could deliver to customers in the future to meet climate goals. They are banking on public acceptance of clean hydrogen and other lower-carbon gases, like biogas, for survival. “We don’t make money on molecules,” Jonathan Peress, the senior director of business strategy and energy policy at SoCalGas, a California gas utility, told Grist. “We make money by providing a transportation and delivery service to our customers.” SoCalGas is engaged in several partnerships to ramp up the use of hydrogen, including an initiative to make Los Angeles a hub for affordable green hydrogen. The company has proposed blending hydrogen into its gas network, but its application to the California Public Utilities Commission was dismissed in July for being incomplete.
Liebreich, who has famously ranked the potential uses of clean hydrogen into a “ladder” based on which he thinks are most likely to succeed, doesn’t see much of a future for hydrogen in buildings. But he also doesn’t see a problem with governments spending some money to support these kinds of trials because a lot of learning will come out of it. “We’ll just come to some point when they’ll say, ‘We have tried to build 67,000 homes heated by hydrogen, we now have a much better understanding of the economics — it makes no sense at all,’” he said. “Or, ‘It makes sense only in these very small numbers of niches.’”
But for Gersen and Saadat, who have watched as companies like SoCalGas have fought policies that would speed up the switch to all-electric buildings, there’s simply no time to wait around and see whether clean hydrogen will work out.
“We are really eager to make sure that the vague promise that hydrogen might be available as a decarbonization technology in the future doesn’t derail the urgent investments that we need today,” said Gersen.
These kinds of trade-offs are difficult to suss out. There’s no guarantee that the $2 billion or so the U.S. might spend on a residential heating “clean hydrogen hub” would otherwise go to electrification or any other climate solution. Or that it’s possible to get a bill passed in Washington, D.C. right now that doesn’t involve throwing some bones to the fossil fuel industry.
But storms, droughts, wildfires, and other impacts of climate change are already intensifying. Carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere, and the emissions we can avoid today and over the next 10 years may be worth a lot more — in terms of lives lost, communities displaced, damages from natural disasters — than a breakthrough solution to cut emissions in 2030.
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
According to Associated Press, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer is stepping down from the social media company, taking on a part-time role while longtime executive Andrew Bosworth will replace him next year.
Schroepfer, known as “Schrep,” has been on Facebook for 13 years and is a close friend of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He called his decision difficult “because of how much I love Facebook and how excited I am about the future we are building together” but added that his new role will let him focus on personal and philanthropic efforts while staying connected to Facebook.
Bosworth, known as “Boz,” is another longtime Facebook exec and a close friend of Zuckerberg’s. He has most recently been in charge of Facebook’s augmented reality and virtual reality efforts, as well as hardware products such as Oculus and Portal, Facebook’s video calling gadget.
“As our next CTO, Boz will continue leading Facebook Reality Labs and overseeing our work in augmented reality, virtual reality and more, and as part of this transition a few other groups will join Boz’s team as well,” Zuckerberg wrote in a memo to Facebook staff that was posted online. “This is all foundational to our broader efforts helping to build the metaverse, and I’m excited about the future of this work under Boz’s leadership.”
According to BBC, the technology giant made passwordless accounts available for business users of its products in March. And that system is now being made available to all Microsoft or Windows users. It said, “nearly 100% of our employees” were already using the new, more secure system for their corporate accounts.
If passwordless login is enabled, users re-logging into a Microsoft account will be asked to give their fingerprint, or other secure unlock, on their mobile phone. And this is far more secure than using passwords, which can be guessed or stolen, according to Microsoft.
Windows users will still be able to use quick-login features such as a Pin code, though. Some rare exceptions will still need passwords, such as Office 2010, Xbox 360 consoles, and Windows 8.1 or earlier machines.
If access to the authenticator app is lost backup options can be used, including, Windows Hello facial recognition, which requires a compatible laptop or special camera, physical security key, which must be used on the device logging in, and Short Message Service (SMS) or email codes
Microsoft says security-conscious users who have two-factor authentication set up will need to have access to two different recovery methods.
Prof Alan Woodward, part of a research team investigating passwordless authentication, at the University of Surrey, called it “quite a bold step from Microsoft”.
This isn’t just logging into PCs, it’s logging into online services as well, Prof Woodward said.
The new passwordless feature greets users with a box saying: “A passwordless account reduces the risk of phishing and password attacks.”
And once the feature is set up, a confirmation tells users: “You have increased the security of your account and improved your sign-in experience by removing your password”.
Microsoft laid out its reasons for the new system in a series of blog posts.
Security vice-president Vasu Jakkal wrote: “Passwords are incredibly inconvenient to create, remember, and manage across all the accounts in our lives. We are expected to create complex and unique passwords, remember them, and change them frequently – but nobody likes doing that.”
*Military Industrial Complex, or Lawrence Wilkerson’s, Military Industrial Congressional Complex*
You get a story on the supposed Havana Syndrome, and then you also get the concept of mass psychogenic illness (you know, it’s all in your head, buster, those heart palpitations, the sweats, the throbbing veins, after getting mRNA “vaccinated”) explained, and, well, no huge outrage on these weapons of mass destruction created by USA, Israel, UK, France other shit-holes. None. Yes, of course, China and Russia, they have their directed energy weapons, their lasers, their rail guns.
As a collective, we just take it up the rear end daily, a thousand times, with these illustrations of the perversion of the inventors (scientists) and the CEOs and their armies of Eichmanns and then their armies of wrench turners and computer motherboard makers to help build these tools of oppression and murder. .
Get this one here:
The United Kingdom deployed an American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), in essence, a sound cannon, during the London 2012 Olympics. Products like LRAD represent a shift from military to domestic usage of directed energy weapons, Dawson noted, explaining:
DEW manufacturers seem to be developing more hand-held versions of what was industrial-scale military weaponry. So they are transitioning from something that was the size of a truck used in Afghanistan or Iraq and turning it into something more like a taser that can be held by a police officer. In fact, the Taser Corporation, as well as other manufacturers of crowd-control weaponry, are listed in the WikiLeaks files as being manufacturers of directed energy weapons.”
LRADs are used at airports to deter wildlife from runways. But they are also commonly used by law enforcement against protestors, such as at Occupy Oakland, the George Floyd protests, and at the 2017 Women’s March.
[An EU police officer deploys an LRAD near a popular refugee crossing point on the Greek – Turkish border, May 21, 2021. Giannis Papanikos | AP]
LRAD focuses a piercing and unbearable noise at those at whom it is pointed, leaving targets dizzy and suffering headaches. It is undoubtedly effective, but also poses a risk to human health. The National Institutes of Health advises that permanent hearing loss can begin when exposed to sounds of more than 85 dB. Yet police LRADs are capable of producing sounds of higher than 150 dB. There are serious concerns that the LRAD will be used liberally and illegally to disperse peaceful demonstrations. This is already happening: in 2017, the city of New York was forced to pay $748,000 to Black Lives Matter protestors targeted with LRAD. The NYPD suspended its use.
So, look at the thug, with earplugs and fake mask on, while using a weapon turned on refugees. Now if this is not a picture of the Great White Sadistic Race, then, I can’t begin to help you, kind reader.
So, from illegal and unethical and monstrous weapons against we the people, to the power of the Food and Drug Administration’s prostitutes in the employ of Big Pharma and Big Med:
Yep, emergency use authorization to approve the universal jabbing of hundreds of bottles of boosters on the wall, that FDA is something else —
Resveratrol, a plant-derived polyphenol found in grapes, could be eliminated in supplement form like pyridoxamine (B6) was a number of years ago due to an FDA back-channel that lets Big Pharma turn supplements into drugs. If Big Pharma asks the FDA to remove resveratrol, the agency’s job of eliminating these supplements is made much easier if it gets the “mandatory filing” requirement that it wants. We need to fight for major changes in the law and to block this “mandatory list” from ever passing to protect our access to important supplements.
Resveratrol has been available as a supplement for years. But we know from FDA documents that the agency rejected a “new supplement” notification for resveratrol, stating that resveratrol doesn’t meet the legal definition of a supplement because a drug company started investigating it as a drug in 2001, and the agency has no evidence that resveratrol was sold as a supplement before that date. This means that the drug company could, at any time, petition the FDA to remove resveratrol supplements from the market. This is what happened to pyridoxamine, a form of B6, and it still isn’t available as a supplement even though no drug ever came to market; it could also happen to CBD and l-glutamine.
So, imagine, all those supplements, all those proven natural elements to keep us out of the medical system. Out of the death chambers of doctors’ offices and mass murder hospitals. You know, this FDA and CDC and NIH group of liars, or in some camps, poison delivery villains:
Rumble — Expert Testimony provided by Dr. Christina Parks, Ph.D, to the Michigan House of Representatives in hearing on HB 4471. This is an unedited screen recording. This science of viruses, what they can and cannot do, and that is a huge discussion point, though I see this doctor talking to glazed eyes in the Michigan House — Eight minutes to get illuminated so please, watch. This absurdity, using boosters of those mRNA jabs to stop the Delta Variant? Makes zero sense. Listen, watch, and enlighten yourself.
If there are no national leaders, folks with bully pulpits, with media stages, to really drill down on the absurdity of this country, these trillions lost/stolen of our tax dollars, then the cascading number of stories will continue to come out with no umph, no fanfare, no repercussions.
The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.
“Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.
It’s the CIA (and assassinations) Stupid!
And so, we get back to the USA, CIA, all those nefarious mutants from the UK, Israel, et al. I was almost five when Dag Hammarskjoild was murdered (1961). This documentary goes around the evidence, gets into the ugly reality of MI6 and CIA and apartheid whites wanting to eradicate the Blacks in, well, Black Africa. Lo and behold, the documentary that looks into the UN chief’s murder exposes another reality — a clandestine group using fake medical doctors and fake clinics to inoculate Blacks (poor, of course) with HIV, to help spread the deadly virus.
Former President Harry Truman told reporters two days after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961 that the U.N. secretary-general “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”
The mystery of the second U.N. secretary-general’s death festered until the 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by British researcher Susan Williams, who uncovered new evidence that pointed to the likelihood that U.S., British and South African intelligence had a hand in his death in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, today’s Zambia. He was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga’s separatist war from the Congo.
Williams’ findings led to an independent commission that called on the U.N. to reopen its 1962 probe in the killing, which ended with an open verdict. “The possibility … the plane was … forced into descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry,” the commission concluded.
All roads lead to hell, when it comes to USA, Israel, UK, EU and Canada. Exterminate all the Brutes!
“I wanted to push the boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking and find a freedom to tell this story by any means necessary.” Director Raoul Peck sits down to discuss the creative intentions behind documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes.
“at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror– a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”
A Michigan State Police contract, obtained by The Intercept, sheds new light on the growing use of little-known surveillance software that helps law enforcement agencies and corporations watch people’s social media and other website activity.
The software, put out by a Wyoming company called ShadowDragon, allows police to suck in data from social media and other internet sources, including Amazon, dating apps, and the dark web, so they can identify persons of interest and map out their networks during investigations. By providing powerful searches of more than 120 different online platforms and a decade’s worth of archives, the company claims to speed up profiling work from months to minutes. ShadowDragon even claims its software can automatically adjust its monitoring and help predict violence and unrest. Michigan police acquired the software through a contract with another obscure online policing company named Kaseware for an “MSP Enterprise Criminal Intelligence System.”
The inner workings of the product are generally not known to the public. The contract, and materials published by the companies online, allow a deeper explanation of how this surveillance works, provided below.
ShadowDragon has kept a low profile but has law enforcement customers well beyond Michigan. It was purchased twice by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the last two years, documents show, and was reportedly acquired by the Massachusetts State Police and other police departments within the state.
Michigan officials appear to be keeping their contract and the identities of ShadowDragon and Microsoft from the public. The Michigan.gov website does not make the contract available; it instead offers an email address at which to request the document “due to the sensitive nature of this contract.” And the contract it eventually provides has been heavily redacted: The copy given to David Goldberg, a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit had all mentions of ShadowDragon software and Microsoft Azure blacked out. What’s more, Goldberg had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the contract. When the state website did offer the contract, it was unredacted, and I downloaded it before it was withdrawn.
Last year, The Intercept published several articles detailing how a social media analytics firm called Dataminr relayed tweets about the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests to police. The same year, I detailed at The Intercept how Kaseware’s partner Microsoft helps police surveil and patrol communities through its own offerings and a network of partnerships.
This new revelation about the Michigan contract raises questions about what digital surveillance capabilities other police departments and law enforcement agencies in the U.S. might be quietly acquiring. And it comes at a time when previously known government social media surveillance is under fire from civil rights and liberties advocates like MediaJustice and the American Civil Liberties Union. It also raises the specter of further abuses in Michigan, where the FBI has been profiling Muslim communities and so-called Black Identity Extremists. In 2015, it was revealed that for years, the state police agency was using cell site simulators to spy on mobile phones without disclosing it to the public.
“They endanger Black and marginalized communities.”
“Social media surveillance technologies, such as the software acquired by Michigan State Police, are often introduced under the false premise that they are public safety and accountability tools. In reality, they endanger Black and marginalized communities,” Arisha Hatch, vice president and chief of campaigns at civil rights nonprofit Color of Change, wrote in an email.
Michigan State Police spokesperson Shanon Banner said in an email that “the investigative tools available to us as part of this contract are only used in conjunction with criminal investigations, following all state and federal laws.” The founder of ShadowDragon, Daniel Clemens, wrote that the company provides only information that is publicly available and does not “build products with predictive capabilities.”
A Shadowy Industry
Kaseware and ShadowDragon are part of a shadowy industry of software firms that exploit what they call “open source intelligence,” or OSINT: the trails of information that people leave on the internet. Clients include intelligence agencies, government, police, corporations, and even schools.
Kaseware, which is partnered to ShadowDragon and Microsoft, provides a platform for activities that support OSINT and other elements of digital policing, like data storage, management, and analysis. Its capabilities range from storing evidence to predictive policing. By contrast, the two ShadowDragon products acquired by the Michigan State Police are more narrowly tailored for the surveillance of people using social media, apps, and websites on the internet. They run on the Kaseware platform.
To understand how Kaseware and ShadowDragon work together, let us consider each in turn, starting with ShadowDragon.
Screenshot: The Intercept
ShadowDragon: Social Media Surveillance
The Michigan State Police purchased two of ShadowDragon’s OSINT intelligence tools to run on the Kaseware platform: SocialNet and OIMonitor.
SocialNet was invented by cybersecurity consulting firm Packet Ninjas in 2009. Clemens, Packet Ninja’s founder and CEO, went on to start ShadowDragon as a sister company in 2016, licensing the cyber intelligence and investigative tools developed by Packet Ninjas over the prior decade.
At the time of SocialNet’s creation, investigators were left to search social media networks for clues manually. If a person made a public post on Twitter or Facebook, for example, an investigator was free to look online, but they had to personally log onto and search one social network at a time, post by post, for people who might be suspects and for their friends and other associates.
“What used to take us two months in a background check or an investigation is now taking between five to 15 minutes.”
Alerted to this problem by a friend from Pretoria, South Africa-based Paterva, makers of the Maltego OSINT platform, Clemens decided to build SocialNet. As he put it in an interview, “the idea [behind SocialNet] was, let’s throw a net out into all of the social media platforms, the social media universe, and see what we get back.” Clemens has claimed in a company video that “when the FBI started using [SocialNet], they did an evaluation” and concluded “what used to take us two months in a background check or an investigation is now taking between five to 15 minutes.”
Today, SocialNet says it pulls data from more than 120 social media networks, websites, and platforms, as well as from the dark web, data dumps, and RSS feeds. A full list of sources isn’t available, but a company promotional video and listing at the Maltego website gives an indication of which websites fall into their surveillance net:
The video also shows “public and local” IP addresses as a source of data for SocialNet.
SocialNet searches for information that is publicly available across these websites and pulls it in when there is a match. But it is difficult to know with precision which data it pulls. In the promotional video, some categories of information appear, such as BlackPlanet users; Busted! mugshots; Bing search results; Amazon comments, products, users, and wishlists; and so on. Clemens said the company has “crawlers that scrape information from the public websites. Nothing proprietary or private is provided to us by the platform companies.”
On its website, ShadowDragon also claims to conduct “chat protocol monitoring (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.)” as well as “dialog protocol monitoring (IRC, etc.).” For these services, it’s also unclear exactly what kinds of information can be pulled or how it’s done. Clemens said they don’t intercept any private chats, and they can confirm whether a specific phone number has a WhatsApp account if the user’s privacy settings allow it.
In a March 2019 blog post, Clemens referenced an “integration into monitoring Telegram,” which, along with WhatsApp, had become “a go-to when there are disruptions.” He also claimed to have added “some interesting OSINT capabilities in our SocialNet platform for more hardened and encrypted/secure communication protocols. (Please ping us on this).” Although Telegram has said its instant messages are “heavily encrypted,” it also offers widely available groups and channels.
Clemens said the company is able to monitor chat platforms like Telegram through public sources of information, which reveal, for example, “if you respond to a public thread of Twitter or public Telegram group.” He added, “We don’t evade any encryption implementations because we’re not interested in weakening the technical security for other platforms.” Clemens declined to elaborate on what “capabilities” SocialNet has “for more hardened and encrypted/secure communication protocols.”
In fact, ShadowDragon seems to strive toward total information awareness. In an interview about investigations, Clemens has stated, “I want to know everything about the suspect: Where do they get their coffee, where do they get their gas, where’s their electric bill, who’s their mom, who’s their dad?”
The precise inner workings of SocialNet are off limits to the public, as it is expensive software that is sold at the discretion of the company. Nevertheless, some online resources give an indication of how it works.
“I want to know everything about the suspect: Where do they get their coffee, where do they get their gas, where’s their electric bill, who’s their mom, who’s their dad?”
With its surveillance net cast across the internet, SocialNet can be used to perform investigations on persons and networks of interest, according to publicly available marketing materials. Investigators can run search queries for names, email addresses, phone numbers, aliases, or other information to begin to identify persons of interest, determine their physical location, ascertain their “lifestyles,” and analyze their broader networks (such as friends and friends of friends).
The materials also show how SocialNet organizes information for the analyst, visually mapping social network graphs and suggesting links between persons of interest and their networks. Timelines can be created to help sort out evidence and piece together clues into a broader picture of what the investigator is trying to uncover. Physical locations can be uncovered or inferred.
An online tutorial from 2011 depicts an investigator using SocialNet to hunt down possible targets by cross-referencing their company domain names with their email addresses, then finding a friend who two targets might have in common. The demonstration suggests that the investigator might want to “social engineer” — or trick — the mutual friend into speaking to the targets.
The other ShadowDragon tool purchased by the Michigan State Police, OIMonitor, sends alerts in response to the sort of data captured by SocialNet, a company engineer says in an online video.
Other company materials say OIMonitor can go further, helping to detect potential crime before it happens and performing other advanced feats. One video explains OIMonitor can “automate and customize monitoring parameters.” In another video, a ShadowDragon representative provides an example of a corporation looking to protect its physical venue or executives. The corporation would “build out an entire dossier of attack patterns, of things people say that’s bad or something threatening,” and OIMonitor “just alerts them when it sees the criteria that they’ve set and that they have experience recognizing as a problem.”
Clemens told me that “customers come to us for the ability to identify and analyze previous patterns of behavior and relationships using only public information. We disagree with predictive policing and so we don’t build products with predictive capabilities or even suggestions.” Yet their own website says, in the description for the “Predicting Violence” video, “Clever security teams use OIMonitor to find indicators of unrest and violence before they start. Because riots don’t start in a vacuum; there are always indicators.” It’s also unclear if information pulled from ShadowDragon may be pooled with other data and used by clients for predictive policing on other systems (Clemens declined to comment on that).
Hatch raised an alarm about the civil rights implications of ShadowDragon’s software, stating, “It could be used to incorrectly identify Black people as criminal suspects and out social justice activists who wish to remain anonymous for fear of being harassed by police and white nationalists.”
“It could be used to incorrectly identify Black people as criminal suspects and out social justice activists.”
ShadowDragon also appears to be hoarding information that users and platforms wanted to delete. OIMonitor provides clients with access to ShadowDragon’s private “historical archive from 2011 to today,” and it saves monitoring results in case the data disappears from the web, according to one company video.
In a case example given by the company, running the phone number of a suspect through the ShadowDragon software “popped up with an old Foursquare account” he had logged into at his mother’s house 10 years ago. After looking for the suspect for a month, the investigators were able to find him the following day.
In addition to police, ShadowDragon services corporate clients, and it can be potentially used for worker surveillance. In a blog post, the company advertised the ability to use OIMonitor for employee background checks by employers. Clemens declined to respond to questions about using ShadowDragon for worker surveillance.
Kaseware: An End-to-End Investigative Platform
Compared with ShadowDragon, Kaseware, the other software company contracting with Michigan State Police, is more sweeping in scope, handling more aspects of police work and venturing into the controversial realm of algorithmic crime fighting.
In 2009, Kaseware’s founders were working at the FBI, where, the company says, they transformed its 1980s mainframe system into an award winning, modern, web-enabled platform called Sentinel. Soon thereafter, some of the designers of Sentinel left the FBI to build Kaseware, based out of Denver and launched in 2016 as a cloud “software as a service” product for government and corporations.
Kaseware is a centralized online platform where law enforcement authorities, intelligence agencies, and corporations can dump their surveillance data. Once on the platform, the surveillance can be monitored, mapped, and otherwise analyzed using tools built specifically for Kaseware. The company touts the system’s speed and ability to integrate diverse sources of information for command-and-control centers, saying it handles investigations and security monitoring in an “end-to-end” way: from the ingestion of raw surveillance at one end to the conclusion of an investigation at the other. Its diverse set of capabilities are similar to Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System.
Kaseware claims to streamline a wide range of law enforcement drudgery: generating reports, managing workloads, facilitating video conferences, and querying information from the controversial federal records clearinghouse National Crime Information Center. A redacted portion of the MSP contract says it can “integrate with FBI eGuardian system via file exchange.” The eGuardian system allows the FBI to collect and share Suspicious Activity Reports, or SAR, from different agencies across the United States. As the ACLU notes, the system gives law enforcement officials broad discretion to collect information about commonplace activities and to store it in criminal intelligence files without evidence of wrongdoing.
A cornerstone Kaseware feature is its ability to ingest and analyze massive amounts of data. Files, records, logs, disc images, and evidence are pulled into the platform, which can also handle evidence from “recordings, body cameras, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and other sources.” The company claims it can help hunt down a perpetrator’s physical location.
Screenshot: The Intercept
Kaseware marketing materials say its platform ingests zip codes, addresses, GPS coordinates, geotags, satellite imagery, and data from internet-connected devices, correlating it with “socioeconomic trends and environmental events to create layered maps” to reveal “illegal activity” and — crucially, for civil rights advocates — conduct “predictive policing.”
Predictive policing, or the use of statistics that quantifies past crimes to predict future ones, has been heavily criticized by legal scholars and activists on grounds that the systems generate discrimination and harm. Two scholars tested the PredPol predictive policing software for Oakland, California, and found its software would target Black people at twice the rate as white people. This is because Black people are overrepresented in Oakland’s drug crime databases, leading to disproportionate policing of low-income communities and communities of color.
The Michigan State Police told me, “We do not use the predictive policing function of the Kaseware platform.” However, it is worth noting the capability is there, and the software has been sold to other clients who may be making use of it.
Kaseware also touts its access to open source intelligence across its marketing literature. Its platform utilizes OSINT tools like ShadowDragon “to instantly search hundreds of open web, dark web, deep web and social media sources to access crucial data on cybercriminals’ names, keywords, emails, aliases, phones numbers and more.” Clients “can also import social media information for forensic analysis alongside other case details, including photos, followers, likes, friends and post connections.”
It’s unclear if Kaseware has special access to information or services with the companies listed in the way that Dataminr, for example, is provided access to Twitter’s “firehose,” a database of every public tweet from the moment it was posted. Twitter’s senior director of global public policy strategy, Nick Pickles, told me in an email that “we’re not able to disclose details of our commercial agreements,” but it is “safe to say that” Kaseware is “on our radar.” Another Twitter spokesperson, Katie Rosborough, did not answer questions about Kaseware or ShadowDragon, saying only that Twitter’s public programming interface is not available for law enforcement purposes. Partners like Dataminr historically have not used that interface.
Contracts and Deployments
The Michigan State Police contract redacts every mention of ShadowDragon, SocialNet, OIMonitor, and Microsoft Azure in the contract shared with the public. David Goldberg’s FOIA request was “partially denied” citing exemptions to the act to protect “trade secrets, or financial or proprietary information”; to “protect the security or safety of persons or property, or the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of information systems”; and to protect “the identity of a person who may become a victim of a cybersecurity incident as a result of the disclosure of identifying that person” or that person’s “cybersecurity-related practices.”
As I reported at The Intercept, through its Public Safety and Justice division, Microsoft provides an extensive array of services to police forces across the world via its own products and that of partners (like Kaseware), who typically operate on the Azure Cloud. Microsoft services the U.S. and Israeli militaries with its HoloLens augmented reality goggles. Its carceral solutions include its own Digital Prison Management Solution based on its Domain Awareness System surveillance platform built with the New York Police Department years ago. Together with its partners, Microsoft’s products and services extend across the carceral pipeline, from juvenile detention and pretrial through prison and parole.
Kaseware’s Mark Dodge, a former Naval intelligence and CIA officer, helped develop Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System for the NYPD.
Kaseware’s Chief Business Officer Mark Dodge, a former Naval intelligence and CIA officer, told me in interviews prior to this year that before working at Kaseware, he had worked at Accenture, where he helped develop Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System for the NYPD. He said he also did work for Singapore, which runs the Microsoft DAS, and “a couple others,” including in London. Dodge then had a brief stint with Microsoft partner Axon, the industry leader in Taser stun guns and body cameras — illustrating how circles in the intelligence, police, and corporate surveillance industry intersect.
The length of the MSP contract is five years, from January 31, 2020, to January 31, 2025. The Kaseware license costs $340,000 annually, while SocialNet and OIMonitor cost $39,000 each, bringing the package to $418,000 per year, or $2,090,000 over five years. The state of Michigan redacted the contract values of ShadowDragon features. The MSP opted for a two-day training session at $3,000, which ShadowDragon says constitutes a “big deep dive on threat assessment and sentiment analysis.”
The total cost of the MSP contract is $3,293,000.
The sum paid to Microsoft for its Azure Government Cloud services is bundled into the “Licensing & Support Services” portion of the contract, and there is no indication how much of that money Microsoft receives.
Because most of their contracts are not made public or difficult to access, it’s hard to discern how pervasive Kaseware and ShadowDragon are in the world.
The first ShadowDragon contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was awarded to IT firm C & C International Computers & Consultants, Inc. on July 16, 2020, at a cost of $289,500. The second was for a contract awarded to cybersecurity firm Panamerica Computers on August 31, 2021 at a cost of $602,056. Both were for the use of SocialNet.
ShadowDragon’s SocialNet, OIMonitor, and malware investigation product MalNet is also being deployed by IT firm ALTEN Calsoft Labs and Cloudly in Asia — “especially India” — as “solutions for industries such as Government, Banking, Financial Services, Healthcare and many other verticals.” ALTEN is headquartered in Bangalore, India, and has offices in the U.S., Europe, and Singapore. Cloudly is a cybersecurity, intelligence, and surveillance firm based in Silicon Valley.
With offices in the U.S. and Denmark, ShadowDragon claims a market presence in “North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.”
When asked about potential human rights abuses by clients, Clemens said the company vets “all in-bound requests for our products to ensure they’re not used to conduct human rights violations.”
Dodge, in the interviews predating this story, told me Kaseware had about 30 customers as of June 2020 but does not disclose most of them. The Winslow, Arizona, Police Department rolled out a Kaseware Computer Aided Dispatch and Records Management System in 2018, and the Wickenburg, Arizona, Police Department was at least considering it.
Kaseware states its platform “is now used by police departments around the world, Fortune 100 Companies, and many international non-profit organizations.”
Kaseware did not respond to a request for comments for this article.
Human Rights: A World of All-Seeing Public Surveillance
With Kaseware and ShadowDragon, we live in a world where the public’s online behavior can be monitored across the internet and accessed at the click of a button to determine who we are, who we know, what our “lifestyle” is like, where we are located, and more.
These capabilities fundamentally change police powers, said Eric Williams, managing attorney at the Detroit Justice Center’s Economic Equity Practice: “It is qualitatively different when you go from the police being able to check information” a little at a time “to artificial intelligence being able to analyze everything that you’ve done online.”
The potential for discriminatory applications is enormous. Williams noted that searches made by big data tools are “inevitably biased against people of color, poor people” and the like. He said that activists from Black Lives Matter, unions, and the #MeToo movement may be targeted by these technologies, “depending on who is in charge of them.”
“This presents the scary possibility of law enforcement of our daily lives that would be unimaginable until recently.”
Phil Mayor, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, said of ShadowDragon, “mapping of the relationships between people risks suspicion by association” and “is likely to entrench systemic racism and is a threat to everyone’s privacy. … This presents the scary possibility of law enforcement of our daily lives that would be unimaginable until recently.”
There is virtually no transparency behind what Kaseware and ShadowDragon do, or how the Michigan State Police and other clients might be using their products, where they are deployed, for what purpose, and who gets access. Likewise for how these tools impact activists, the poor, and marginalized communities, who are disproportionately the targets of police surveillance.
“It’s deeply concerning that this kind of technology is being purchased and used by law enforcement without public discussion,” Mayor told me. “Before engaging in new forms of surveillance of citizens, law enforcement should be coming to the polity and asking what we expect in terms of our privacy rather than making those decisions for us.”
Williams echoed this, stating, “It is problematic that public money is being spent on surveillance, of a particularly intrusive type, and the public is unaware of it.” Even if the police want to keep their surveillance methods hidden, “the public has a right to know, and should know, given the lack of laws we have governing a lot of electronic surveillance.”
In the U.S., as many as 70 percent of police forces use social media to gather intelligence and monitor the public. Yet the law does little to constrain these kinds of tools and practices.
“There’s not a lot of regulations on this,” Williams said, “and we can’t begin to have a discussion on how it should be regulated if we’re not aware that it’s happening.” He added that he favors a ban on the technology, given its opaque deployment and intrusive nature.
Dragnet social media surveillance needs to be urgently addressed by lawmakers, who should step in and ban this attack on civil rights and liberties immediately.
The shortage of computer chips globally has severely damaged the production of automotive electronics and other industries. The 27-nation European Union has drafted a plan called the Chips Act to protect its member countries’ industries to become self-sufficient in the production of block semiconductors.
While addressing the EU Parliament, President Ursula von der Leyen called it a matter of life and death. The EU has taken this step after Washington approved a project called Chips for America.
According to the head of European Industry Commission that EU’s initiatives will include research, productivity and global cooperation. EIC also advised the bloc countries to set up a chips fund, but procuring precious metals for chips manufacturing from other parts of the world is a big challenge.
If you are an avid user of stickers in WhatsApp, the messenger app has a new update right for you. WhatsApp is developing a new feature, for a future update, that allows converting your images to stickers. The update will be made available for desktop users of the messaging app.
It is a very easy task to make stickers on WhatsApp on mobile devices as there are several apps available to help you convert your images from the gallery into small stickers. WhatsApp is working to make the process even smoother by developing a solution for the desktop version.
Photo Courtesy: WABetaInfo
WhatsApp will roll out the new version up to 2.2137.3 for the desktop client as announced via WABetaInfo. The new update for desktop WhatsApp users will make things easy for them. When this functionality is made available by WhatsApp, a new sticker icon will appear next to the caption bar. The image will be provided as a sticker if you choose it.
Photo Courtesy: WABetaInfo
The feature is still under construction, according to the WABetaInfo website. With a single click of this tool, the complete cutting and transmitting process is removed and the file is converted to the ideal size sticker.
This feature allows to quickly create a sticker from an image, without using any third-party app. The feature will also be rolled out for mobile phone users but it will take a little more time.
According to Reuters, Tesla, which assembles vehicles for the Chinese market in Shanghai, has been under scrutiny in China this year over its storage and handling of customer data.
Cars are being fitted with an ever-increasing array of sensors and cameras to assist drivers but the data such equipment generates has also raised questions about privacy and security.
Electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc. will work with global regulators to ensure data security, Chief Executive Elon Musk told an industry event in China on Friday.
“With the rapid growth of autonomous driving technologies, data security of vehicles is drawing more public concerns than ever before,” Musk told the World New Energy Vehicle Congress on the southern Chinese island of Hainan via video link.
This story is part of the series Getting to Zero: Decarbonizing Cascadia, which explores the path to low-carbon energy for British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. This project is produced in partnership with InvestigateWest and other media outlets and is supported in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
“We don’t live in the Methow anymore,” says Gina McCoy. “We live in Mordor.”
By the last week of July, there were fires burning on both sides of the Methow River. Air quality was bad enough to make the national news. In better times, Central Washington’s Methow Valley is a destination for world-class climbing, hiking and skiing. It’s remote. It’s beautiful. But like much of the West, it’s increasingly aflame.
On Aug. 20, for the first time, Gina and her husband, Tom McCoy, fired up a machine they believe offers the best chance to reduce catastrophic wildfires in their valley — while simultaneously combating climate change, improving air quality and providing local jobs that help keep the forests healthy.
Through C6 Forest to Farm, a nonprofit they founded last year, the McCoys plan to accelerate forest restoration by creating a local market for the small-diameter trees that are a symptom of unhealthy forests and fuel for giant fires. They’ll make biochar, a form of charcoal, from trees cut down during forest thinning. In doing so, the couple hopes to reduce emissions created by raging wildfires and the burning of slash piles.
The machine that was recently delivered to the McCoys from the University of California, Merced is a pyrolyzer, which creates biochar from organic matter. Technology for making charcoal is one of the oldest known to humans. Historically, it consisted of digging a hole and burning wood in it. In technical terms, the method by which the McCoys plan to create charcoal is called pyrolysis: heating wood chips or sawdust in a low-oxygen environment to 750–1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Pyrolyzing wood releases about half the emissions of open burning; the other half of the carbon is stored in the resulting biochar.
C6 Forest to Farm board member Bret Richmond checks a gauge on the
nonprofit’s new pyrolyzer near Winthrop, Washington. The pyrolyzer creates biochar, a form of charcoal that can sequester carbon and serve as a soil additive for agriculture. This small-scale unit was provided by the University of California Merced to help the Methow-based group jump-start local applications for biochar.
Tim Matsui / InvestigateWest
Some large-scale pyrolysis methods require industrial-size facilities, but the research machine in the Methow is comparatively small: It fits on the back of a 5-by-5-foot trailer and now resides in a defunct 22-acre gravel pit owned by Okanogan County and is a short walk from the McCoys’ home. The McCoys plan on hosting regular public demonstrations soon. Their goals for this year are to make biochar from a slash pile left by a state restoration project, and from a 10-foot-high pile of woody debris that’s occupied the gravel pit since it was collected by the county during routine road-clearing operations.
Research suggests biochar can persist in soil for hundreds of years. This makes it a potential tool in the fight against climate change, especially when made from materials like thinned trees or agricultural debris that, if burned, release stored carbon into the atmosphere. Biochar gained recognition in the early 2000s when scientists published findings about charcoal that was purposefully created by Indigenous people of the Amazon region to incorporate into their soil. The soil, which researchers called terra preta,or “black gold,” held large amounts of carbon that contributed to the richness of nutrients and plant life.
In the decades since that study, many would-be biochar entrepreneurs have tried and failed to stay afloat in what remains an undeveloped market. But new uses for biochar and new ways of funding carbon storage are now emerging.
After years of wildfires at their doorstep, the McCoys decided to devote themselves to creating a product that could help finance forest restoration as well as carbon storage. Their ultimate dream is to build a multimillion-dollar processing plant that will turn thousands of tons of woody material into biochar each year. This spring, the Washington Legislature took a chance on their pilot project by granting them $160,000 in state funds, to be paid out over the next two years.
“These are the types of things that the state should give a nudge of support to,” says Sen. Brad Hawkins, who submitted the project for funding from the Legislature. This is especially true, he says, considering how many millions of dollars the state already has spent fighting wildfires.
The goal: forest restoration
In the couple’s backyard, in the shade of a hoop house, Gina crunches a stalk of homegrown dill. Tom points across the valley to a neighbor’s property where they watched a fire start in 2014, a fire that eventually consumed 11 homes. There are three routes in and out of the valley, and that year, fires temporarily closed all three. They say many neighbors have begun leaving the area during the summer fire season.
Gina McCoy, a Methow Valley resident and cofounder of the nonprofit C6 Forest to Farm, blames decades of fire suppression for the area’s increasingly frequent and uncontrollable fires. “The federal government kind of owns this problem,”; says McCoy. “Their land management is fundamentally what is the huge threat to this entire community.”
Tim Matsui / InvestigateWest
Climate change has contributed to the problem, drying out vegetation and making it more flammable. But a 100 years of fire suppression wildly overstocked the forest with unhealthy trees. After catastrophic fires in the inland West burned 3 million acres and killed 87 people in 1910, the U.S. Forest Service adopted a policy of putting out every spark. By 1935, the agency had implemented the “10 o’clock” rule, stipulating that any observed fire had to be extinguished by 10 the following morning.
Between natural lightning strikes and intentional burns ignited by Indigenous people, dry forests in an area like the Methow Valley historically endured low-intensity fires every 7–15 years. These fires cleared the underbrush and younger trees, making the Methow of olden days look like parkland, with stately ponderosa pines spaced far enough apart to let in sunlight.
The consensus among scientists is that trees in the Methow Valley need to be removed much faster than is now being done. State and federal governments are enthusiastic about doing this — at least on paper. They call this “forest health treatment,” which typically involves leaving bigger trees standing while cutting and piling up the smaller ones into slash piles that are burned in the winter. But the rate of this thinning depends on government funding, and although agencies no longer follow the 10 o’clock rule, a ballooning portion of agency budgets are still directed toward firefighting, leaving little left over for restoration.
“I’ve become really impatient about the pace and scale of those [forest health] treatments,” says Susan Prichard, a Methow Valley resident and fire ecologist at the University of Washington. “A good portion of that work is being done by wildfires themselves.”
Prichard is a lead author of a set ofthreearticles released in August in the scientific journal Ecological Applications. In a review of literature on the subject of wildfire management, dozens of collaborating scientists affirmed that forests need to be thinned, and that low-intensity fires need to be reintroduced in prescribed burns.
Of the watershed surrounding the Methow Valley, 84% is federally owned; you can’t drive far without being welcomed into one national forest or another. Another 5% is state owned. For the people who live on private property, decades of forest management practices, largely beyond their control, now threaten their livelihoods and property.
A January 2019 article in the Methow Valley News about the valley’s risk for fire damage spurred Gina to think about what they could do about it. The fact that she was sitting at home with two sprained ankles during ski season helped the thought process. She knew the density of the forests was the prevailing issue, so she ordered a textbook on biomass processing and started figuring out what could best help their area.
Instead of starting a business by looking at the landscape and asking what it could do for them, the McCoys began by asking what they could do for the land. It was natural for them to take this approach: Both had long careers in landscape ecology and were used to thinking about problems on a watershed scale. They met in the 1980s, when Gina went to work for the Yakama Nation a month after Tom did. He was a wildlife manager; she was a watershed manager. Her last job before retirement was as a fluvial engineer for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and his was as the manager of the 34,600-acre Methow Wildlife Area. In that job, Tom saw firsthand what fire suppression had done to the landscape and how much thinning was required.
A forest site in North Central Washington that has had no known
thinning or burning treatment is shown at left. A site that was thinned and burned is shown at
right. Large, fire-resistant ponderosa pine trees dominate the treated area, with little flammable
ground debris such as shrubs and downed wood.
Courtesy Susan Prichard / University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences
The economic landscape
A major impediment to thinning is the low value of small-diameter trees in the commercial timber market. And the Methow Valley doesn’t have a mill. To be turned into a useful product, small trees need to be trucked to the nearest mill in Kettle Falls, about 150 miles away. Economically, the math doesn’t work. Loggers would spend about twice as much money harvesting and transporting timber as they would get from a mill.
This prevents forest restoration from occurring quickly, a point that the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) explicitly tried to address in its 20-Year Forest Health Strategic Plan. The agency hopes to stimulate private investment in new products made from forest-thinning by-products, and biochar projects are just one of several possibilities. For example, Vaagen Timbers, a mill in northeast Washington, is using remnants from thinning the Colville National Forest to create cross-laminated timber, which can replace steel and concrete in offices and apartments.
“The more opportunity there is to create value-added products from what is right now essentially a waste material, the more it’s going to improve conditions on the ground, reduce the risk of these catastrophic wildfires, and better prepare the forest for drought,” says Andrew Spaeth, a DNR environmental planner who helped write the 20-year plan.
A pile of logs cut during this summer’s fire suppression efforts lies beside a
Smokejumper training tower and an airfield hosting fire-fighting helicopters near Winthrop,
Washington. The logs came from trees harvested by crews cutting fire breaks to control the
Cedar Creek and Cub Creek 2 wildfires in the Methow Valley. Similarly small-diameter trees
could be thinned out of the forests to reduce the risk or severity of future fires.
Tim Matsui / InvestigateWest
Tom hopes to soon produce 6,000–7,500 tons of biochar per year, “a football field 20–30 feet deep.” The next step would be to determine how to utilize and sell the biochar.
After research on terra preta popularized it, many businesses leapt to market their own versions of biochar, with sales pitches that spoke glowingly of its ability to increase crop production. Biochar is still often sold as a soil amendment, and it can increase yields when added to some kinds of soil. But not all biochar is created equal. It can be made out of any organic compound, from rice to tires, and not all soils have equal use for it.
Margins for farmers are razor-thin, and many are hesitant to bet on an unproven product. Research is ongoing, but a 2019 report from Washington State University concluded that there’s economic justification for Pacific Northwest farmers to use biochar only with one type of crop —vegetables — unless they’re also paid to sequester carbon as biochar. At the national level, the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is running a three-year pilot program doing just that, paying farmers to use biochar as a soil supplement. States can opt into this program, but Washington has yet to do so.
The first wave of enthusiasm for biochar didn’t consider how different source materials would affect the outcome. Conversely, the McCoys want to create what they call “designed biochar,” charcoal made from the specific materials, primarily ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, and intended for specific purposes. They’re still hopeful about its potential as a soil supplement, and Tom says that if Washington were to opt into the NRCS pilot program, that money alone could cover most of their expenses.
For now, C6 is operating on funding from the Legislature and private donations, although it’s also exploring the state’s carbon offset program, born this year as part of cap-and-trade legislation. Carbon offsets give monetary value to the carbon-storing abilities of something like a forest and allow people to buy credits that support it. Sometimes individuals or companies voluntarily buy offsets, but in states with carbon regulations, large polluters often purchase offset credits to compensate for their own emissions.
C6 Forest to Farm board members monitor their small-scale research pyrolyzer near Winthrop, Washington, on Aug. 22, 2021. The system is designed to process slash piles like the one nearby – especially debris from forest thinning. Burning slash piles or leaving them to rot releases greenhouse gases, contributing to the droughts and rising temperatures that stoke megafires. In contrast, the pyrolyzer converts slash to biochar, a material that can enhance soils and simultaneously keep much of the wood’s carbon out of the atmosphere for decades or even centuries.
Tim Matsui / InvestigateWest
So far, offsets have had dubious success. A joint investigation by MIT Technology Review and ProPublica in April revealed that California’s offset program, on balance, may have added carbon to the atmosphere because of faulty methods used to account for the carbon stored in forests. Accurately calculating the carbon stored in soil is extremely complicated, and marketplaces that claim to measure it and sell credits are still fairly new. Still, some companies are trying to legitimize this process. Carbofex, a Finland-based company that creates biochar out of by-products from commercially managed European forests, uses it as a soil supplement or for water filtration, and sells offset credits on the Puro.earth marketplace. Washington legislators attempted to address concerns about offsets by making them a “bonus” when tallying lowered emissions. That is, companies can still purchase offsets, but unlike in California, offsets don’t eliminate requirements that polluters decarbonize their operations.
Regardless of whether they’re able to join an offset market, the McCoys are considering using the biochar for water filtration, as compost or potting mix, or in a new form of pavement that an Australian company is making from biomass. They’re exploring all avenues, agnostic about the exact use, hoping that within a year they’ll have products that at least pay for the cost of making them.
For the McCoys, biochar production is a way of dealing with the scale of the forest health problem in the short time they feel remains; that is, before another western megafire makes these questions moot. Research from the University of Washington suggests forests in the Sierra Nevada of California could, in an intense burst, burn for another decade or so, but then cease because there won’t be many trees left. The McCoys believe that this could happen in the Methow, too.
With the drought that’s settled over the inland West, it’s not likely that trees lost to wildfire will return anytime soon. Research from the University of Montana indicates many ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forests will no longer regenerate after fires as they once did, suggesting that mature trees in these forests are now essentially nonrenewable resources.
“If we can stop just one fire from becoming catastrophic, it will have been worth it,” Tom says.
He means it sentimentally, but also economically: The state spent $60 million fighting the
250,000-acre Carlton Complex fires of 2014 in the Methow Valley. Tom estimates that $60 million could run their biochar project for decades. As for effects on the climate, wildfires were the second-largest single source of carbon emissions in Washington in 2015, following only the transportation sector.
“The forest health treatments are expensive, but not compared to fire suppression, property damage and the cost to the climate,” Gina says.
The McCoys started their company as a nonprofit, an unorthodox decision for a venture dealing in industrial chemistry, and they clearly hope they can provide a model for others across the West to create local versions of the same thing.
“If the economy, the way we have it structured, does not value our forests or our climate, what good is that economy?” Gina asks. “Our profit is the valley we love.”
According to AFP, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying four space tourists blasted off Wednesday night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the first mission to orbit the globe with an all-civilian crew.
A huge fireball illuminated the sky as the rocket’s nine engines began to pull away from Earth at 8:02 pm (0002 GMT Thursday). Around 12 minutes later, the Dragon capsule separated from the rocket’s send stage as the crew entered orbit, while the re-usable first stage made it’s way back to Earth for a vertical landing on a sea barge.
“A few have gone before and many are about to follow,” said Jared Isaacman, the 38-year-old billionaire who chartered the flight.
The spaceship’s trajectory will take it to an altitude of 357 miles, which is deeper into space than the International Space Station (ISS). After spending, three days spinning around the planet, the four-person crew, all Americans, will splash down off the Florida coast.
“Congratulations #Inspiration4! Low-Earth orbit is now more accessible for more people to experience the wonders of space,” tweeted NASA administrator Bill Nelson ahead of the launch.
Congratulations #Inspiration4! Low-Earth orbit is now more accessible for more people to experience the wonders of space. We look forward to the future – one where @NASA is one of many customers in the commercial space market. Onward and upward!
Isaacman’s three crewmates were selected through a competition. Hayley Arceneaux, a pediatric cancer survivor, is a 29-year-old physician assistant. She will be the youngest American to go into orbit and the first person with a prosthesis, on a part of her femur. Chris Sembroski, 42, is a US Air Force veteran who now works as an aerospace data engineer. Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old geoscientist and educator, was almost selected to become an astronaut for NASA in 2009.
According to BBC, iPhone owners should beware of picking up bad vibrations from powerful motorbikes, as they may damage camera systems, Apple has said.
The technology giant published a new support document warning iPhone users that the cameras on their devices can be damaged by exposure to certain vibrational frequencies such as those generated by high-power motorcycle engines.
Engine vibrations can harm phones’ optical-image stabilization or closed-loop autofocus systems, it says. Owners of scooters and mopeds should also use “vibration-dampening mounts”.
On social media, several users have said their phones have been damaged after being attached to a motorcycle.
The affected systems are designed to improve picture quality by counteracting movement, vibrations, and the effects of gravity. But high-power or high-volume motorcycle engines generate “intense high-amplitude vibrations”, the support page says, which can be transmitted through the frame and handlebars.
“Direct exposure to high-amplitude vibrations within certain frequency ranges may degrade the performance of these systems and lead to reduced image quality for photos and videos,” it says.
The solution is to refrain from attaching iPhones to the bike in the first place, something is commonly done for navigation.
According to Gadgets360, Space appears to be the new frontier for tech entrepreneurs. After Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, it’s time for Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to join the league.
Wozniak on September 13 announced that he is setting up a private space company that is unlike the others. The new company will be called Privateer Space and its mission would be to keep space safe and accessible to all humankind.
Wozniak will be establishing the company with Ripcord co-founder Alex Fielding. Wozniak tweet a YouTube video explaining the vision of Privateer Space. The video begins with a strong message, “Together, we will go far.”
“We’ll look out for one another. Solve problems together. It isn’t a race; it isn’t a competition or a game. We are not one person, one company, one nation. We’re one planet. We’re explorers. We’re dreamers, risk-takers, engineers, stargazers. We are human and it’s up to us to do what is right and what is good. So here’s to taking care of what we have so that the next generation can be better, together,” the voiceover said.
The website of Privateer Space only says, “The sky is no longer the limit” and “We are in stealth mode.” It also says the company will be at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies conference in Hawaii that begins today, September 14. No more details about the company have been made available yet.
The company does plan to provide more details in private group sessions at the AMOS conference, presumably with potential investors, according to Space Explored.
