It's a Hot One - Climate, AI, Epoch Times, and Trump
Climate
There is a saying among climate scientists; rather than describing each record-breaking day or month as the hottest, it is most likely the coldest day a child born after the nineties will experience for decades, or even centuries.
With that in mind, this week, we learned the planet has marked a full year of back-to-back monthly heat records:
It was also the 11th consecutive month where the global average temperature was at least 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. If that trend continues, it would mean the world is passing a major climate change milestone.
At what point is steadily rising temperature just, you know, the norm? We’ve spent the last year blowing by the target of the Paris Agreement, with no clear indication how fast or for how long the warming will continue. The UN is calling this a ‘climate abyss’, and surveys of climate scientists around the globe a predict temperature rise over 2.5 degrees.
Rising global temperatures will have an outsized impact on populations in some areas - lower income nations in Africa, Central America, and Asia could produce millions of climate refugees. India, the world’s most populous country, struggling with massive wealth inequality, just notched its hottest temperature ever recorded.
Here in America - source of a wildly disproportionate amount of global carbon emissions over the last hundred years - the climate crisis is increasingly impacting a country largely in denial about it. Flooding is creating domestic climate refugees, as coastlines recede and residents can’t afford to rebuild after inevitable flooding.
There are signs the American insurance market as its currently structured may collapse entirely as severe weather renders huge swaths of the country high risk. Financiers still believe they can trade their way out of reality, but propping up insurance companies for financial gains can only last for so long when each storm season has the potential to be catastrophic, exacerbated by our boiling of the oceans. Nor are hurricanes the only threat, as inland tornadoes and superstorms become more common.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of a forthcoming climate apocalypse, the fossil fuel industry continues with business as usual. Oil giants are consolidating, splashing tens of billions in pursuit of new oil fields. They leverage secret international courts to extract billions from countries who dare oppose their rapacious extraction, and use lobbyists and political power to oppose expansion of green energy.
But! Despite the fact we’ve already set in motion a global climate crisis that may take decades or centuries to unfold, causing untold human misery and biome destruction…there is a little bit of good news? Maybe?
A recent projection indicates that global CO2 emissions may have peaked last year, and could be on their way down:
Thanks to the rapid build-out of wind and solar power plants, particularly in China, global emissions from the power sector are set to decline this year. Last year, the amount of renewable energy capacity added globally jumped by almost 50 percent, according to the International Energy Agency.
The authors are careful to note that it could take decades even if we executed a complete one-eighty and governments and industry made decarbonization a top priority, which there’s little to indicate will happen as long as fossil fuel companies continue to reap windfall profits. But, some environmentalists and climate scientists are optimistic, which is something.
Elsewhere, companies developing strategies to combat emissions are showing promise:
The next generation of industrial plants to filter CO2 out of the air is on the way, and it’s getting closer to overcoming some of the biggest challenges of using this technology to fight climate change. Climeworks, one of the first startups to develop this tech, unveiled its Generation 3 plant today. It’s supposed to use half as much energy as older designs and slash costs in half, too.
Government and private sector investments are making progress towards systems to more effectively remove CO2 from the atmosphere even as global demand for fossil fuels looks set to peak and decline.
It won’t be nearly enough for the folks in India or along Florida’s coastlines, but it’s a rare bit of good news in a world that often feels immune to such things.
AI
One industry hellbent on counteracting any climate gains is AI. It aims to produce a network of chatbots, each consuming a city’s worth of electricity so people can learn to make pizza with glue.
AI remains universally unpopular, and so dysfunctional that some of its biggest proponents have had to scale back their ambitions. Obviously, this hasn’t stopped other firms from pushing ahead with plans to integrate AI into every device we are forced to interact with on a daily basis, despite precisely no one asking for it.
Despite this, things are not looking great for the AI industry, which may soon find itself in unfamiliar territory. Tech companies have run roughshod over our privacy, laws, and humanity for so long we’re used to them getting whatever they want from pliant politicians and governments.
But! A growing number of people from within the industry are speaking out against AI misbehavior. Late last year, the EU passed regulations which could limit access to a major global market. AI companies are facing a growing number of legal challenges from celebrities, publishers, news companies, and others, and unlike their entrenched peers in Big Tech, the industry doesn’t have decades of lobbying to shield it from liability.
Now, the DoJ and FTC are looking into both AI firms and their puppet masters - companies like NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon may face scrutiny for how they’ve fought for control over fledgling AI startups.
Will any of this throw cold water on the AI hype cycle? One has to imagine that if the number of dollars being spent on technology falls behind the number allocated for legal bills, investors may get the message. Either way, it is nice to see a budding tech frenzy that is not being enabled by lawmakers, because it may contain the infection, rather than allowing it to spread uncontrolled.
Epoch Times
It has been a minute since we talked about the Epoch Times, a hard right conspiracy-mongering publication that, for many years, spent millions on Facebook and Google pushing a right-wing agenda. The network of sites is run by the Falun Gong, an anti-Communist Chinese organization.
It is all very weird in a way that you’d expect a rich conservative cult leader spending millions in ‘donations’ pushing propaganda on social media to be. Despite a Facebook advertising ban in 2018 (they were one of the platform’s biggest advertisers for years) Google and others allowed the Epoch Times to operate openly since then, enthusiastically spreading election denial and other conspiracies in support of Trump.
A reasonable question to ask would be - where does the Epoch Times get its money? It has claimed for years that it has millions of subscribers to its print edition, though the numbers are impossible to verify and hard to believe.
Well! This week it was revealed that the Epoch Times is, in fact, a giant illegal money laundering operation:
The chief financial officer of conservative global news outlet The Epoch Times has been arrested and charged with leading a yearslong scheme to launder at least $67 million in illicit funds, federal prosecutors said Monday.
The scheme — which involved cryptocurrency, tens of thousands of prepaid debit cards, fraudulently obtained unemployment insurance benefits and stolen personal information — fueled a massive increase in The Epoch Times’ reported annual revenue, prosecutors alleged.
Huh, how about that. For years, the Epoch Times bought criminal proceeds at a discount in exchange for cryptocurrency, and then funneled that money into the Times itself:
Prosecutors allege the scheme by Guan and his co-conspirators caused the company’s revenue to jump from “approximately $15 million to approximately $62 million” between 2019 and 2020.
According to the indictment, one thing the ‘Make Money Online team’ at the Times did was to purchase thousands of prepaid debit cards with their crime bucks and use those to simulate thousands of subscriptions to the publication, in a weak attempt to disguise the source of funds. They did not do a particularly good job, setting off multiple bank alerts due to team members spamming thousands of fake applications from their work computers.
It is worth noting that the Epoch Times is not named in the indictment, and continues to enjoy nonprofit status despite being the clear recipient of tens of millions’ in illegal funds. It does seem a little cynical to arrest the guy who orchestrated a global criminal fraud scheme on behalf of his employer and not, like, implicate said employer in the scheme, but I suppose we’ll soon see, as the Times itself would say, how deep the conspiracy goes.
Trump
It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when members of a political party are openly threatening a criminal court judge prior to the sentencing of a defendant found guilty by a jury of his peers.
It is also not encouraging when members of the defendant’s political party are calling for manufactured criminal indictments against their opponents in response to said conviction.
American politics has been a dark, unpleasant place for a long time, and it is entering a new, darker phase now as an openly authoritarian party is running on a platform of legal retribution.
Fortunately, this is not a politics blog, and we can spare a moment to enjoy the (historic?) unanimous conviction of our dipshit ex-President for one of his dumbest crimes. We can leave the endless hand-wringing and horse race analysis to the pundit class, who have five short months to work themselves into a frenzy fantasizing about a (convicted) criminal back in the White House.
Trump was impossibly guilty, moldering in his defendant’s chair as witness after witness described his dull, goonish schemes in lurid detail. Every legal commentator spent the trial floating fabulist theories of sympathetic jurors or legal technicalities, but our criminal system is designed to be boring. No secret MAGA mole was going to infiltrate its halls and drop a surprise jury nullification.
Had he not caught the car and become president, Trump and his sweat-stained crew of cheap suits would have remained in the shallow swamp of Old Manhattan intrigue, when Spy magazine and the Page Six were the only forms of public accountability for paying a porn star to pretend you’re attractive.
Instead, Trump’s stupidest plot of the many he undertook before, during, and after his time as president got him a new title for the trophy wall - convicted felon.
The judges and courts involved in his many other criminal trials are doing their level best to protect him from far more serious charges of espionage, sedition, and the like, but it is fitting that the world’s most overwrought business caricature got got for paying off a sex worker and lying about it.
Short Cons
NYT - “In a filing last week, attorneys for Mr. Giuliani said that one of the former New York City mayor’s companies, Giuliani Communications, receives about $16,300 per month in income from his internet show “America’s Mayor Live.” Mr. Giuliani’s attorney said that money comes “mainly” from the Sept. 11 charity, the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation.”
Fortune - “According to the indictment, the duo claimed to offer virtual currency mining rights to customers for a fee, but in reality they were relying on sham invoices, fabricated documents, and a crypto mining capacity of less than 1% of what they told customers.”
AP - “A juror was dismissed Monday after reporting that a woman dropped a bag of $120,000 in cash at her home and offered her more money if she would vote to acquit seven people charged with stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic.”
Insider - “On this day, the circumstances were anything but usual. The motion, filed months earlier, had just been updated with a shocking allegation: Jones was in a "romantic relationship" with attorney Elizabeth Freeman, his former clerk and then a lawyer at Jackson Walker, a Texas firm that often appeared before Jones and Isgur in the Southern District of Texas bankruptcy court, where the pair of judges handled the most high-profile cases.”
Verge - “Rand Fishkin, who worked in SEO for more than a decade, says a source shared 2,500 pages of documents with him with the hopes that reporting on the leak would counter the “lies” that Google employees had shared about how the search algorithm works. The documents outline Google’s search API and break down what information is available to employees, according to Fishkin.”
NYT - “Polling shows that public support for unions is the highest it has been in decades. But labor experts said structural forces would make it hard for labor groups to increase their membership, which is the lowest it has been as a percentage of the total work force in decades. Unions also face stiff opposition from many employers and conservative political leaders.”
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